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High drama unfolded in Lucknow on Wednesday on the birth anniversary of socialist leader Jayprakash Narayan as Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav climbed over the boundary wall of the Jai Prakash Narayan International Centre (JPNIC) in Lucknow and made his way to the premises after security officials denied him permission to enter citing security reasons. Akhilesh was there to pay tribute to Narayan, popularly known as JP, on his 122nd birth anniversary.
JP is still invoked across party lines for his role in mobilising students against the government of Indira Gandhi, which finally led to the imposition of Emergency on June 25, 1975. Leaders from across the political spectrum continue to pay tribute to JP, referred to as Loknayak (People’s Hero), trying to lay claim to his legacy 43 years after his death.
After unveiling a 15-foot statue of JP on his birth anniversary last year in his ancestral village of Sitab Diara in Saran district, Union Home Minister Amit Shah launched an attack on Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, a former ally, saying that those who claim to be the followers of JP had strayed from his path and were sitting with the Congress in their “lust for power.”
In response, Kumar replied, “The one whose name you people are taking, did he have any first-hand knowledge of what JP stood for? We had earned our spurs in the JP movement (of 1974). I do not want to attach any importance to those whose political career began just 20 years ago.”
The JP Movement and its legacy
JP was one of the founding members of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP). After Independence, the party split from the Congress and he went on to constitute the Socialist Party, which was merged with J B Kripalani’s Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party to form the Praja Socialist Party
While Nehru was keen on JP joining the Union government, he sought to distance himself from electoral politics, opting to focus on social causes instead. A Gandhian socialist, JP was disillusioned with political parties and called for communitarian democracy. Parties, he believed, were centralised and susceptible to moral and financial corruption.
Students in Gujarat began demonstrating in late 1973 in response to mounting mess bills. The protests became widespread in the state, with workers, teachers, and several other groups joining in and calling for a change in government. In that movement, JP saw an alternative route from electoral politics and recognised the power of students in helping him realise his ideas of a new politics, distinct from the one he had grown weary of.
The protests against corruption grew widespread and students of Bihar began their movement in March 1974. The students approached JP who left his self-imposed political exile and led the movement. At a rally in Patna on June 5 that year, he called for “Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution)”.
When Indira imposed Emergency, JP shifted his focus to opposing it and the Opposition parties looked to him for leadership. The Socialists were drawn to him ideologically while the RSS and its political front, the Jana Sangh, sought to return to the mainstream and were happy to be dissolved into the Janata Party that JP had formed. The veteran leader was the face of the mass movement against the Indira government and in 1977 the country got its non-Congress government as the Janata Party stormed to power.
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Several top politicians from Bihar were products of the JP movement, including Nitish, his predecessor Lalu Prasad of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), and former Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi of the BJP. Writing for The Indian Express in 2015, Nitish recalled how he was imprisoned in 1974 for participating in the JP movement in Bihar as well as during Emergency.
This explains the continuing appeal of JP, especially as the Opposition looks for inspiration from his movement while attempting to get together to take on the BJP’s electoral juggernaut in the Lok Sabha elections. Given the parallels between the dominance of the Congress back then — it had 352 MPs in the Lok Sabha — and the BJP now (302 MPs), it is not surprising that the Opposition has been invoking JP.
“The BJP is trying to weaken and divide the anti-BJP forces by raising the bogey of anti-Congressism. But we must all be clear. It is the BJP we must fight today, not the Congress. It is logical and natural that anti-Congressism should be replaced by anti-BJPism. We are not going to be defensive about joining hands with the Congress because the circumstances have changed,” Nitish wrote in the 2015 article and since then has been to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and back. But for the Opposition, what he spelt out back then remains the larger goal even now.
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