The JP phenomenon
On the evening of June 25, 1975, Jayaprakash Narayan (popularly known as JP), Morarji Desai, Raj Narain, Nanaji Deshmukh, Madan Lal Khurana, and several other political stalwarts addressed a mammoth crowd at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, calling on Indira Gandhi to resign. JP made a fiery speech, reciting Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s poem, “singhasan khaali karo / janata aati hai (surrender your throne, for the people are coming)”. JP exhorted the army and the police to not obey orders they considered illegal and unconstitutional. He also called on the nation to not pay taxes. The Emergency was declared hours after that and thousands, including JP, were arrested.
Sujata Prasad was at that meeting, a few years older than me, a teenager, and we were both swept away by the intoxication of the moment. Our parents were colleagues and we grew up in socialist families. But we shared more than just political orientation. It was upbringing and socialisation. I remember my mother commenting below her breath about an acquaintance who was boasting about the achievements of his progeny. “So vulgar, praising your own children” she sniffed. Dr Bimal Prasad, Sujata’s father and co-author, nodded in agreement. For several years, Sujata and I were inseparable, through thick and thin (and sick and sin). This is in the nature of a disclaimer.
That said, this is an outstanding book. It is odd that given JP’S place in India’s political history, there are so few scholarly works about him. Prof Bimal Prasad, a historian, had a unique vantage point: He was both a participant and an observer of politics, additionally armed with the intellectual tools of analysis. The scholarship was painstaking, intense and thorough. When he died, Sujata took it upon herself to take his work on JP forward. The result is a deep dive into JP’S life, the early years in the United States where he studied (about which very little is known), his intellectual debates and emotional struggles, his role in the launching of the Congress Socialist Party and later in dropping “Congress” from it, his spells in jail, including the daring escapes that later became a model for other socialists such as George Fernandes, and most important, his relationship with political power (raj satta).
JP never shied away from debate, even when it was with those he regarded as dear friends. The book records his differences with Gandhi: Influenced by his reading and exposure in the US, he concedes that he was not “very certain about Gandhiji’s stand on the vital issue of equality which captivated me as much as the ideal of freedom”. But he concedes Gandhiji “had his own conception of the social revolution and the means to achieve it”.
Though he had the greatest affection for Nehru, the two shared acerbic exchanges especially on praxis. The book records JP’S dismay when Nehru shifted home from 7 York Place to the palatial Flagstaff House on Delhi’s Teen Murti Marg, built as the official residence of the British Commander in Chief. “In a meeting with him in 1947, I asked Nehru if it behoved the Prime Minister of a poor country to live in a fabulous palace. I reminded him that on his return from a visit to the USSR, he had written in his book with obvious admiration that the great leader Lenin lived in a two-room small flat in the Kremlin. Nehru replied that the Russian Ambassador who had come to see him a few days ago had come in a magnificent limousine flanked by two equally grand cars. I protested that Russia was now a developed country and a big power but India was still in as early a stage of development as Lenin’s Russia…the consequences of that initial mistake can be seen in the ostentatious pomp and grandeur of our rulers, which mock at million of wretched dwellings in the name of the ‘dignity of the state’,” he writes.
His run-ins with Sardar Patel, whom he seemed to have disliked thoroughly, are worth investigating more deeply, especially as he held Patel, as home minister, responsible for Gandhiji’s assassination.
But of course, it was JP’S exchanges with Indira Gandhi that are most interesting. His letters to “Indu” are affectionate; to “Indiraji,” brusque to the point of rudeness. Indira deployed him freely on the issue of human rights violations and democracy for Bangladesh. But when it came to democracy in India, it was a different story.
The most moving chapter is the last one. It chronicles JP’S last days, his physical agony but also his intense loneliness when it became clear that the Janata Party experiment was unravelling. In Delhi, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram were fighting. In Bihar, the government headed by Ramsundar Das, installed by supporters of the JP movement, was firing on its own volunteers labelling them Naxalites. The book has his foster daughter Vibha reminiscing: “Dada (JP) made me sing a song from our revolutionary days. The song was ‘Jayaprakash ka bigul baja’. During the rendition, he put his head on the pillow and covered his eyes. The pillow was drenched with tears when we finished.”
At the end of the day, JP was a man, just a man. He married Prabhavati when she was 14, he, 18. Influenced by Gandhiji, Prabhavati took a vow of celibacy and informed JP of it by a letter. The book touches on his emotional tussles, something that Sujata mentions her father and co-author would not have agreed to include in the book if he had been alive.
Written with understated elegance, Sujata calls this book a requiem to her parents. It is much more than that. It is a window to an era.