A leader of students, masses

“He was a Marxist in his youth, a Socialist but anti‐Communist in middle age and a staunch pacifist in his later years. But he remained a revolutionary throughout his life and died as one”, The New York Times wrote on October 8, 1979, on the passing of Indian political activist and theorist Jayaprakash Narayan at the age of 76 years. Incidentally, he was born in the same month, on October 11, 1902.

Monikered ‘JP’ by student leaders for his call for ‘sampooran kranti’ — popularly called JP movement — and ‘Lok Nayak’ for being a leader of the masses, he endeared himself to people by his socialist philosophy, though his ideology and methodology evolved constantly. He owed his wide perspective to his stay in the US, where he worked in ranches, slaughterhouses, factories and mines and got to know the conditions of the working class.

There, he also got acquainted with socialist thought and writings of luminaries like Marx, Lenin, John Dewey and Leon Trotsky. In his book ‘Why Socialism’, he emphasised the need for adopting socialism in India to address inequality and injustice. He vehemently criticised the unequal distribution and concentration of wealth, as well as the disparities in rank, culture, and opportunity.

Born in Sitabdiara, then in Bengal Presidency under British rule, present-day Ballia district in Uttar Pradesh, JP’s father was a junior official in the Canal Department. JP excelled in academics and when he was nine, left the village to enroll in the collegiate school at Patna, where he came across some of Bihar's future leaders, like its first chief minister, Krishna Singh.

He got married at 18 to Prabhavati, who lived with Gandhi’s wife Kasturba at the ashram in Ahmedabad when JP was away in the US. On the call of the nationalist leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad for giving up English education, he left Patna college, just 20 days before his exam and joined Bihar Vidyapeeth, a college founded by Dr Rajendra Prasad. In 1922, JP sailed to California where he studied at Berkeley University.

When he returned to India in 1929, the Indian freedom struggle was at its peak and he joined the Indian National Congress. In 1932, he was jailed in Nasik for participating in the Civil Disobedience movement, where he came into contact with leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia and Achyut Patwardhan.

He was constantly in and out of jail. In 1939, he was imprisoned for his opposition to Indian participation in World War II. He made a dramatic escape and was again put behind bars in 1943. After his release in 1946, he tried to persuade Congress leaders to adopt a more militant policy against British rule, for which he even tried to bring about a rapprochement between Mahatma Gandhi and Subash Chandra Bose.

In the second general election held in 1957, when JP was not associated with any party, Narayan wrote an extraordinary letter to the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru, saying that even while he ran the government, he should “encourage the growth of an opposition” so as to “soundly lay the foundations of parliamentary democracy”.

After a long hiatus of an inactive political life dedicating his life to Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan Yajna movement, he bounced back into the political scene in 1974, as the torchbearer of the JP movement. He exhorted students to rise against corrupt political institutions and sought the closure of colleges and universities for a year, so students could rebuild the nation.

The movement later flowed into the anti-Emergency wave. The Allahabad High Court had declared Indira Gandhi's election to the Lok Sabha in 1971 void. She went to the Supreme Court and recommended President VV Giri to appoint AN Ray as a Chief Justice to get a favourable decision in the case. JP wrote to her, opposing the move. After declaration on the Emergency in June 1975, opposition political leaders, including JP, were arrested. His health suddenly deteriorated in jail due to kidney failure, making way for his release. After Indira revoked the Emergency in 1977, JP was successful in bringing all the non-Congress parties under a single umbrella, which led to the Janata Party forming the first-ever non-Congress government in the Centre in March 1977. As a tribute to this modern revolutionary, he was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1999.