From Marx to Gandhi: JP’s political world
After flirting with Marxism, armed revolution, and socialism, JP’s search for a political alternative finally led him to Gandhism
The genesis of Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan’s passionate pursuit of freedom and an equitable and just order can be traced to the political and philosophical zeitgeist of his student years spent in the United States (US), beginning at the University of California, Berkeley and later at the University of Wisconsin.
His immersion in the minutiae of Marxist theory began with the reading of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto and an enormous body of theoretical work by Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky. JP was a prominent Marxist voice on the campus.
JP wore his Marxian revolutionary head on his sleeve when he returned to India in November 1929, but, for a while, allowed himself to be drawn into the maelstrom of the Gandhian struggle for freedom. Swerving from theoretical Marxism to a vision of socialism that seemed, at least initially, to complement that of Jawaharlal Nehru, he set out to address many of the blind spots in the Indian National Congress. At Nehru’s behest, he took charge of the newly-created department of labour research and tried to wean back trade unions that were drifting away from the Congress.
The early years of the 1930s saw JP building an extensive underground movement to ensure continuity in the Congress work in the wake of the countrywide arrests of its leaders. His solidarity with labour and peasant organisations and grassroots movements laid the foundation of a strong socialist nucleus within the Congress.
It was his arrest in 1932 that marked a turning point in JP’s political life. He was incarcerated in Nasik Central Jail, where a group of educated, progressive, young Congressmen who dreamt of a socialist revolution were also lodged: Achyut Patwardhan, Minoo Masani, Asoka Mehta, NG Gorey, Charles Mascarenhas, CK Narayanswamy and ML Dantwala.
The doctrinal differences between them were resolved through debates and discussions.
Their primary aim was to radicalise the Congress and keep it on a Marxist-Socialist path of social revolution. Their firebrand ideas, shared by other like-minded young leaders — notably Narendra Deva, Yusuf Meherally, Purshottam Trikamdas, Ram Manohar Lohia, Sampurnanand, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Sri Prakasa, KB Menon and Ganga Sharan Sinha — led to the foundation of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in 1934. JP, who played a leading role from the very beginning, was the CSP’s first general secretary.
JP saw the CSP as the Marxian Socialist vanguard of the Congress that would play an avant-garde revolutionary role. He was conscious that, in practice, this would include both a war of position and war of manoeuvre, requiring perhaps a more radical organisational form.
During the early years of CSP, JP remained a bitter critic of Mahatma Gandhi. He rejected Gandhi’s theory of trusteeship and described the Gandhian approach as a compound of timid economic analysis, good intention, and ineffective moralising. He even crossed swords with his feisty Gandhian wife, Prabhavati, on the role of khadi and charkha in resuscitating the villages of India and removing the grinding poverty of the masses.
Radicalised by his long spells in prison, JP’s political thinking took a dramatic turn in 1942 when he turned to a spikier version of Marxism-Leninism and built an underground network of armed revolutionaries called Azad Dasta. His brief flirtation with guerrilla insurgency ended with his arrest, but he continued to exhort his followers to prepare for the last offensive — the struggle for liberty, national unity and bread, organised by strengthening peasant and labour unions, volunteer corps, student and youth organisations, weaver cooperatives and other grassroots organisations.
By 1944–45, JP was beginning to examine Marxism through the lens of historical developments in the 20th century. The stories of trials and purges in Russia affected him deeply. He began to view the State as a coercive instrument that could be perverted to produce dystopian ends. His own experience with Indian Communists, who seemed to be working under the diktat of the Comintern, filled him with revulsion. He considered them to be Russia’s fifth columnists.
In the interregnum between Marx and
Gandhi came JP’s brief engagement with mutations of socialist thought. He began to use the term democratic socialism to describe his ideological position, distancing himself from mechanical, positivist elements in Marxism. The socialists separated from the Congress in March 1948. Even as JP critiqued Nehru bitterly for reneging on many of his socialist promisses, the Socialist Party, in historical disarray and in a veritable tailspin, split into the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) and Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP).
By the 1950s, JP had veered explicitly towards the use of Gandhism to enrich socialism. Gandhi’s critique of the modern State became central to the evolution of JP’s political thought and his revolutionary praxis was fully grounded in grassroots participatory democracy and Gandhian economics. He eventually found his ground zero in the Gandhian Bhoodan-Gramdan movement and, in a dramatic moment, at a Sarvodaya meeting in Bodh Gaya in April 1954, renounced power-politics altogether.
The revolutionary kernels of the term Total Revolution, that was greatly in vogue during JP’s 1974-75 movement, can be found in Gandhian Satyagraha, the non-violent mass action programme that focused on personal and social ethics and values of life as much as economic, political and social institutions and processes.
Towards the end of his life, all that remained of his dream of revolution were broken shards, and the death of promises.