Makers of Modern India

by Ramachandra Guha

  * * *

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Grass-Roots Socialist

  Jayaprakash Narayan

  Founded in 1934, the Congress Socialist Party had a formal existence until the Quit India movement of 1942. In this brief period it nurtured a group of men and women who went on to play pivotal roles in the politics and culture of independent India. However, the contributions of the socialists tend to be underplayed in Indian historiography, which has been dominated by schools owing allegiance to the official Congress movement and the communists respectively. The Congress has been in power for much of the period since Independence; whereas Marxism has been hegemonic within the academy. The one has offered patronage to scholars; the other, the seductions of an oppositional world view with global ramifications. The long-defunct Congress Socialists can offer neither; with the consequence that the brilliance and originality of their work and thought has had no trumpeters—within the community of professional historians, at any rate.

  This book has already paid tribute to two remarkable Congress Socialists—Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Rammanohar Lohia. We now turn to a third, Jayaprakash Narayan. Narayan was born in rural Bihar in 1902, into a family of Kayasths, scribes who had traditionally worked as officials, teachers and lawyers. Narayan’s own father worked in the state irrigation department. The boy studied in a village school and was then sent to Patna, where he matriculated with distinction in 1918.

  In 1920 Narayan married Prabhavati, daughter of a Gandhian, who had become a disciple of the Mahatma herself. When the non-cooperation movement started, he left college following its call, attracting the anger of his career-minded parents. However, the movement was called off after protesters set fire to a police station in the United Provinces in February 1922. Soon afterwards, Gandhi was jailed. The young Narayan was greatly disillusioned, since freedom had not come, as promised, within a year. At this stage, a friend in America suggested that he overcome his disappointment by going to study there.

  So in the summer of 1922 Narayan set out for the United States. He spent seven years in that country, studying successively at universities in California, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio. To make ends meet, he did a variety of odd jobs, cleaning grapes in a vineyard and washing dishes in a restaurant. This was his first experience of manual labour, which surely would never have come his way had he stayed behind in India. At the University of Wisconsin, then (as now) a centre of progressive thinking, he became a socialist. His studies confirmed his political orientation, since the subjects he specialized in were sociology and political science.

  In 1929 Narayan was awarded a master’s degree. He wanted to carry on for a PhD but, learning that his mother was seriously ill, chose to return home. As his biographers Allan and Wendy Scarfe write, ‘Jayaprakash returned from America to India convinced that the central problem of human society was inequality of wealth, property, rank, culture and opportunity.’

  On coming back to India Narayan was reunited with his wife. She was now part of Gandhi’s inner circle, which posed a particular problem—namely, that she had, at her master’s instance, taken a vow of celibacy. There were other reasons why Gandhi was not so appealing to Narayan. He saw him as an economic conservative and was attracted rather to the modernism and socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru. Under Nehru’s guidance, Narayan joined the Congress and urged the party to take a more active interest in the problems of industrial labour.

  Narayan was arrested in 1932 during the civil disobedience movement. In jail he came into contact with communists, whose worship of a foreign country (Russia) disgusted him. He sought with his friends to marry socialism with patriotism, an endeavour that resulted in the formation, when they were released from jail in 1934, of the Congress Socialist Party.

  Now known by the diminutive ‘JP’, Narayan was arrested again in 1941. In November 1942 he escaped from Hazaribagh Jail and went underground. From his various hiding places he issued a series of letters calling for a socialist rebellion. He travelled incognito all over north India, spent time in Nepal, and was finally detected and arrested in September 1944. Like his friend Rammanohar Lohia, he was dispatched to Lahore Fort, tortured, but released at the end of the Second World War, as part of a deal between the Congress and the government.

  In 1948, JP helped form the new Socialist Party. He served as the president of all-India unions of railway, postal and defence workers, thus being, in effect, the leader of more than a million men. After the Congress defeated all comers in the 1952 elections, Nehru called Narayan for talks to explore the possibility of the Socialists rejoining the Congress. The talks failed, but by this time JP was losing interest in party politics altogether. He had become increasingly attracted to the programmes of the Gandhian Vinoba Bhave, who was campaigning for rich landlords to donate, to the poor, excess land (bhoodan) and, where possible, entire villages (gramdan). Narayan was inspired to do a jivandan, namely, to offer his own life to the service of this social movement. He was also reconsidering his approach to Gandhi, who now appealed to him for his advocacy of village self-rule and his critique of greed and materialism in economic life.

  Through the 1950s, JP toured the villages of Bihar trying to get land for the landless. In the 1960s this activity was coupled with attempts to reconcile the people of India’s borderlands to the Indian Constitution. All through this period he kept in touch with politicians and politics, writing frequently to Jawaharlal Nehru, and, when she became prime minister in 1966, to his daughter Indira Gandhi. He also remained in contact with his old socialist friends who were in the Opposition.

  After two decades in social service, Narayan dramatically re-entered politics in 1974 to lead an all-India movement against the government of Indira Gandhi, which he (and his associates) held to be corrupt, authoritarian and indifferent to the needs of the poor. When a state of Emergency was declared in June 1975, Narayan was arrested along with other Opposition politicians. He was released after a few months owing to his ill-health (he had a serious diabetic condition), but remained unreconciled to the rule of Indira Gandhi. When elections were called in March 1977 he campaigned, despite his age and ill-health, for a now united Opposition. This new ‘Janata Party’ came to power with JP’s blessings, but its disintegration into rival factions deeply disheartened him. He died in October 1979.

  In the historiography of modern India, Jayaprakash Narayan is remembered chiefly for his heroic role in the 1942 Quit India movement and his leadership, thirty years later, of the ‘Indira, Quit’ movement. This is because protest and opposition have a certain glamour attached to them. It may be, however, that Narayan’s quiet, patient work at the grass roots shall be of more enduring significance. That is certainly the view of this writer, who has, for this anthology, disregarded his fiery and angry speeches of 1942 and 1974 in favour of his more reflective writings of the 1950s and 1960s.

  A Plea for Political Decentralization

  In 1959 Jayaprakash Narayan published a tract advocating an alternative political system for India, based on the revival and renewal of the village council, or panchayat. This system would invert the top-down model of parliamentary democracy by working from the base upwards. Narayan’s scheme was an elaboration of Gandhi’s idea of oceanic circles, outlined in Chapter Thirteen. Narayan’s proposals were ignored at the time, but in the 1990s a Constitutional amendment mandated the countrywide creation of a modified scheme of Panchayati Raj, or village self-government. The emphases in the excerpt that follows are the author’s.1

  … The foundation [of our polity] must be self-governing, self-sufficient, agro-industrial, urbo-rural, local communities. The highest political institution of the local community should be the General Assembly—the Gram Sabha—of which all the adults should be considered members. The selection of the Executive—the Panchayat—should be by general consensus of opinion in the Sabha. There should be no ‘candidates’, i.e., no one should ‘stand’ for any post. There should be clear-cut qualifications, as in ancient times, laid
down for all selective posts. No individual should hold the same post for more than a defined period of time. The panchayat should function through sub-committees, charged with different responsibilities. There should be no official or member appointed or nominated by the State government in the panchayat or its sub-committees.

  It may be questioned if there can ever be a general consensus of opinion amongst villagers who are divided into castes and factions and have conflicting interests. We have seen already how for thousands of years the villages of India elected their executive councils by general agreement. Those villages were by no means homogeneous and ideal communities. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that the experience of centuries can not be repeated again. We may also recall that the only alternative method of election of village councils or panchayats was that of drawing lots. There is nothing undemocratic in selection by lots … Therefore, I am emphatically of the view that the villages should be given an option to choose between the methods of selection by general agreement or by drawing lots or, alternatively, it might be provided that the villages first try the former method, and failing therein take recourse to the latter …

  The question may also be asked if the village panchayats, as they are today, would be able to function in the manner visualized above. There is no better way to teach the young except by giving them responsibility. In the same manner the only way to make the villages self-governing, self-reliant and self-sufficient is to throw upon them real responsibilities. There was a time when the Indian village republics were self-created, like the Swiss communes and their powers and functions were not given to them from above. But in the present conditions they have to be re-created by a deliberate and bold process of devolution and decentralization, if Indian democracy has to have a firm base and living reality. I believe that the responsibility given to the gram sabha and the panchayat should be in things that really do matter. For instance, it should be the responsibility of the gram sabha and its panchayat to ensure that no one in the village went without food, clothing and shelter; no child went without primary education; every one received primary medical care. The sabha and panchayat should see that the village became self-sufficient in the matter of food and clothing as soon as possible. Further, they should so plan that within five years, let us say, there was no unemployment in the village and every family reached a minimum standard of living. Self-government, to be real, should be about essential problems of life …

  The development of the rest of the polity need not wait till the villages and townships become real communities as visualized here. Our work must begin at all levels simultaneously, otherwise it will not succeed at any level.

  The next level of the political structure would obviously be that of the regional community. Here … the gram panchayats will have to be integrated into the Panchayat Samiti … [T]he nature and functions of the Samiti should be those of an autonomous self-governing community … the Samiti should have powers and obligations to do all that may be within its competence.

  There is one important point which I wish to emphasise in connection with the formation of the panchayat samiti. The samiti should be elected by the gram panchayats and not by their members. This at first might appear to be a distinction between six and half-a-dozen. But that is not so. We have here a major principle of communal life involved. It is the gram panchayat as a body that represents the village community and not its members. The panchayat samiti, in its turn, is a representative of the gram panchayats, and it is the latter that should be represented as such and not their members …

  [T]he political structure would rise storey by storey from the foundation. The next storey above the panchayat samiti would be that of the District Council (or whatever name be given to it), which will be formed by the integration of the panchayat samitis of the district—again the samitis, as such electing their representatives and not their members. The district councils, in their turn, should have all the powers and obligations necessary to do everything that may be within their competence.

  In a similar manner all the district councils of a State would come together to create the State Assembly. The State Assemblies, in like manner, would bring into being the Lok Sabha. Thus the political institution at each level is an integration of all the institutions at the lower level …

  My aim here is not to write a new Constitution for India. I have tried merely to discuss some underlying principles and to indicate the general pattern of the social and political organization. However, it may be useful to deal with a few points of detail by way of further clarification.

  First, let me take the question of the Executive at the different levels.

  At the Primary Community level the Panchayat is the executive: it might allot different executive functions to its individual members or to small committees.

  At the Regional Community level, the Panchayat Samiti is the executive body and it would function through committees.

  At the level of the District Community, the District Council would be the executive body, and it would also function through committees.

  At the level of the Provincial Community, the Pranta Sabha would appoint committees which would be the executive bodies, responsible to the Sabha.

  Likewise, at the level of the National Community, the Rashtra Sabha would appoint committees which would be the executive bodies, responsible to the Sabha.

  Who would exercise the legislative powers, it may be asked. According to my conception, each community has powers to make rules and laws in order to manage its internal affairs, provided they do not conflict with the interest of other communities at the same level and with the rules and laws laid down by the communities at higher levels. The higher communal bodies will legislate in their allotted spheres. Rules and laws may be passed by other communal bodies too, such as educational and economic associations.

  The committees should be small, workable bodies with powers to co-opt experts who would participate fully but without the right of vote.

  Each committee would have a chairman and a secretary, but, apart from performing the functions of their office, they would enjoy no special powers or privileges.

  Each committee would be directly responsible to the general body which would appoint it.

  In order to co-ordinate the work of the different committees, there would be a Co-ordinating Committee, constituted of one representative from each committee: the representative may be the chairman, secretary or any member of the committee concerned. The decisions of the Co-ordinating Committee would be binding on every other committee.

  Up to the district level, the co-ordinating committee would be the panchayat, the panchayat samiti and the district council, which would meet at fixed times.

  Every committee would have collective responsibility.

  The representative communal bodies would meet periodically, but the committees would be in perpetual session.

  Matter[s] of policy would be decided upon, on the motion of a committee or an individual member, by the representative bodies concerned. The committees would execute the policies.

  It should be clear from this that at the Provincial and National levels there would be no Ministers, Chief Ministers or Prime Minister as at present. As stated above, government would be conducted by committees of the representative bodies. The institution of Prime Minister and Chief Minister, which concentrates too much power into the hands of single individuals, is undemocratic and smacks of the gun-powder of totalitarianism. It further leads to such dangerous psychological developments as the ‘hero-cult’ or the ‘cult of the individual’.

  The President of the different representative communal bodies will have no administrative functions. But it would be his responsibility to see that the representative body of which he is president functions properly and according to the rules laid down. He would also have extraordinary emergency powers in case of the break-down of the democratic apparatus of the community concerned.

  The President of the Rashtra Sabha,
in addition to the powers mentioned in the last para, would also be the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and responsible to the Sabha for the defence of the Nation. He would be assisted by a committee for defence, of which he would be the chairman.

  In their task of administration the Committees would be assisted by paid Civil Servants. At each level the civil servants would be appointed by the corresponding Authority created for that purpose by the representative body concerned and on terms laid down by the latter. This will be a sovereign right of the communities: to appoint and dismiss its servants. At the level of the primary community the civil servant might be an honorary, part-time or full-time volunteer. Even at higher levels there might be honorary civil servants.

  It should be pointed out here that because of the decentralized pattern of the social, political and economic organization, the administration would not be top-heavy and far-removed from the people as at present.

  In the light of the above, it might be useful to turn for a moment to what is perhaps one of the most serious problems of the present day: the problem of bureaucracy and corruption. Some think that one solution of corruption is dictatorship. But even dictatorship is no solution of bureaucracy. To the contrary, we know that dictatorship breeds bureaucracy faster than other systems of government, and, in the bargain, makes it all-powerful.