Bimal Prasad - The Dream of a Revolution: A Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan

Jayaprakash Narayan needs to be rescued from the condescension of posterity and a curious historical amnesia. He was a political force for nearly half a century. Self-effacing, yet so visible that he was known by his initials, JP. He was the face of the student revolution in 1974. It was high-energy politics, personal and political, very of the moment, mobilizing and energizing large groups of people and shaping the political discourse with its own nuances. Several student leaders cut their teeth in the tumult of the movement and became characters in a drama they never seriously auditioned for. It brought the romance of barricades back to our lives, and imbued our lived experience with something akin to what Raymond Williams has described as a new structure of feeling.

Jayaprakashs dream of revolution collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, but like many of my generation, I was caught in a swirl of admiration. I saw in him an embodiment of intellectual elegance at a time when politics was raw, angry and out of control. His vision of a society untethered from capitalism seemed to open up new possibilities. His ideas continue to echo in the waves of protests and civil unrest that sweep across the world, as they have during the 2010 anti-government protests that rocked countries in North Africa and the Middle East, in the Indignados protests in Spain, in the Occupy Wall Street and its sister movements for economic justice that spread to 951 cities in eighty-two countries and in the fires of social revolt in Latin America in 2019.

Jayaprakashs pursuit of freedom and an equitable and just order was the quintessential revolutionarys quest (the title of one of my father, Bimal Prasads books on his selected writings). His ideas were in a state of perpetual unrest, and the quest led him from Gandhi to Marx and then back again to Gandhi, never completely forsaking one for the other. In an entry in his 1975 book Prison Diary, Jayaprakash confessed that he was bitten by the bug of revolution when he was in high school. He studied the inner life of revolutions and revolutionary movements while reading for his masters at the University of Wisconsin. He devoured Marxs masterpiece on political economy, Das Kapital, that laid bare the exploitation at the heart of the capitalist mode of production. He also read The Communist Manifesto (more Engels than Marx), the Grundrisse and an enormous body of theoretical work by Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky, and soon became a prominent Marxist voice on the campus.

Socialism gained legitimacy, both as an idea and as political ambition, when Jayaprakash returned to India and threw in his lot with the Congress. No one could question his radical politics and his high-wire acts of dissent. His contagious confidence about the future of Marxian socialism led to the formation of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in 1934. Seeing the CSP as the vanguard of the nationalist left, he struggled to build socialism as a powerful countervailing political force within the Congress. He remained an anathema, a quintessential rebel frequently at odds with the very side he was supposed to represent. During this phase, he saw very little potential in Gandhism as a tool of political praxis. He considered it a dangerous doctrine that hushed up real issues, deceived the masses and facilitated continued domination by the upper classes. But he was also not particularly enamoured by the Bolshevik-style state socialism. He felt it was imperative to build a socialist movement within the framework of Marxist thought, of world history since Marxs death and Indias own political history, aware that there were multiple constructions of Marxism that needed contextualization.

Jayaprakash pioneered the idea of an independent left, unbeholden to the Comintern that was dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He took up the challenge of forging left unity, but the quibbles were far too many, and the odds were against him. Marxs aphorism about history repeating itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, stood on its head during Jayaprakashs engagement with the Communist Party of India (CPI), patterning itself as farce first, and then, tragedy. The farcical side emerged when the CPI started a venal campaign against the CSP, characterizing the latter as the left manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie and projecting itself as the only genuine Marxist party in India. If Jayaprakash felt let down by the CPIs intellectual turpitude, the horrors of Stalins debased version of Marxism compounded the sense of tragedy. Nothing, he felt, could historically justify what was happening in Russia.

Radicalized by his long spells in prison, Jayaprakashs political thinking took a dramatic turn in 1942 when he turned to a spikier version of MarxismLeninism and built an underground network of armed revolutionaries. The unpredictability and arbitrariness of his combative call to arms, that many in the Congress considered a misstep, was explained in a letter addressed to students with detailed blueprints on guerrilla strategy and tacticssomewhat like Che Guevaras