Book review: Bimal Prasad and Sujata Prasad,The Dream of Revolution: A Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan

The book under review contains an introduction and ten chapters. Titling of chapters (in terms of information, evolution, years of making, parting, emergence, from and to, the sting, times) suggests the transversal characteristics in Jayaprakash Narayan. The transversal characteristics also have the core that gravitated his life and struggles for The Dream of Revolution. The book unravels his much-required core values. A slew of evaluations, analyses and writings on Jayaprakash Narayan has adopted a fragmentary approach towards him in the form of excessive focus only on a catchphrase ‘JP Movement’. This devalues his intellectual trajectory and seamless engagement with modern India’s substantive time and space.

The book aptly begins with the compendious quote of two conscience keepers of the modern world, Rosa Luxemburg and Eric Hobsbawm. For Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently’ (p. v). According to Hobsbawm, ‘We need a protest against forgetting’ (p. v). These two signposts adumbrate the trajectory of Jayaprakash Narayan in the book. The first point becomes exceptionally significant when it is read generically along with a particular context. Generically, freedom is quintessential for democracy and democratisation. This is true for him. The specific context is the Indian polity and Indian democracy. The undeniable value needs constant reminder and protraction. The book reminds us felicitously: ‘What irked Jayaprakash, in particular, was Pant’s repeated assertion that “opposition” was a Western concept, completely unsuited to India’ (p. 95).

The idea of not forgetting is crucial in the book concerning Jayaprakash. In the book, a web of multitudes are connected with the historical event. This historical event was an outcome of incessant catalysts. Historical events and catalysts are both intertwined and coterminous. The book laboriously unpacks the personal–political symmetry and his eventful childhood, significant Patna, exposure to the USA and an unending political voyage organised in pre-Independence India. The Dream of Revolution must be combined with aforesaid interventions.

There have been five significant ways, among other things, to discern Jayaprakash. First is related to his resources like Why Socialism, Prison Diary and Total Revolution. In addition, future society (Marx’s influence) and non-violent methods (Gandhi’s influence) have invited considerable attention. ¹ The second is acknowledging and evaluating his contribution in political theory on party-less democracy and total revolution ² . The third is democratisation by emphasising constitutional rights and democratic rights. He established the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights in 1976. After that, the thirst for debates gravitated around constitutional rights and socio-economic rights. ³ The fourth is evaluation in the context of ‘emergency per se’. ⁴ The fifth is his fierce debate with Vinoba Bhave concerning relations of the Gandhian movement with the state and nature of politics. ⁵

In this backdrop of five significant-ways-led analyses, it is pertinent to ask as to what this book adds concerning Jayaprakash Narayan. Put it differently, how does this book matter to studies on Jayaprakash, must be answered. The book under review adds five sui generis ways to explain and understand Jayaprakash. The first is a non-hagiographic yet normative standpoint. His making is not teleological or destinated but contributed by many factors. Historical events and catalysts are intertwined. His exposure to the texture of Bihar and normativity of universities in the USA, and irrepressible and irresistible reading of Marxist literature are vividly described. The touch of these backdrops never faded away from his life and struggle.

The second way is an outline of ‘multiverse political history’. The book’s real strength is bringing back the memory of political history to contemporary India, which had rich and contentious debates on Marxism, Socialism (as a founder of Congress Socialist Party), Gandhism, Centrism and the Indian Right. Ideas are not without people. A range of names and nuanced differences among them and convergences and divergences with Jayaprakash is subtly stated. His engagement with Gandhi during his Marxist/Socialist phase and his Gandhian outlook without altogether abandoning Marx per se, radical activities in India and Nepal before Independence, jail trajectory in pre and post-independent India, friendly closeness and oppositional difference with Nehru, a plurality of socialist groups in terms of organisations and strategies, his everlasting estrangement with the Congress conservatives, role before and after the emergency, and his impeccable association with the people of decentred spaces unravel capacious contour of modern India.

The third is the postulation of minority rights and communal harmony. Again, he was one of the few politicians who opined categorically in this regard. Amidst crises-prone Janata Government, ‘[h]e was pleased when the government announced the creation of a commission to provide institutional safeguards to minorities’ (p. 214). His presidential address to the Eleventh National Convention Against Communalism (New Delhi, 28–29 December 1968) warned against all forms of communalism writ large across communities and majoritarianism, which relied on the construal of nationalism in an immaculate binarism.

The fourth is a contribution towards a diachronic form of socialism. This position was not suo motu. It was based on his critique of liberalism/liberal democracy. ‘Jayaprakash rejected the Western model of parliamentary democracy on the grounds that it functioned as a democratic oligarchy’ (p. 129). He combined Marx’s method with Gandhi’s extension. ‘Marx and his materialist view of history remained pivotal to Jayaprakash’s thought even as his focus on democracy was unremitting. There could be no socialism without democracy, he wrote’ (p. 82). Concerning Gandhian extension, Bhoodan seems to be an apt example.

The fifth is his being a true internationalist. This is an analogous standpoint of Marxism/Gandhism. Finally, this book aptly narrates his engagement with Pakistan, China and Bangladesh. ‘In September 1962, he founded and chaired a body named India–Pakistan Conciliation Group…One of its major initiatives was leading a goodwill delegation to Pakistan in September 1964 headed by Jayaprakash’ (p. 136) along with others. Concerning China, ‘[a]n incurable romantic, Jayaprakash felt that India’s border issues with China could be settled through mediation’ (p. 139). ‘By May 1963, Jayaprakash was planning a friendship march from Delhi to Peking, confident that it would help overcome the hostility and hate’ (p. 140). He also organised ‘…an international conference on Bangladesh at Sapru House in New Delhi on 18 September [1971] [ which]…unequivocally recommended the recognition of Bangladesh by the governments of the world’ (p. 161).

This book renders stupendous service to scholarship concerning Jayaprakash. Sujata took over the task to complete the book after her father, Bimal Prasad’s demise. Bimal Prasad’s numerous publications have reflected his substantive and meaningful reading of modern India and his close association with Jayaprakash. In addition to aforesaid discussions, two crucial issues also need to be addressed. First, there were several theatres of democracy during the Emergency. Gujarat was one of them which needed a substantive epistemic evaluation for engendering the eventual politics. Second, Jayaprakash’s transition from ‘partyless’ to ‘organised politics’ as an alternative which gave much-needed legitimacy and success to ‘illiberal axioms-based polity’—in place of post-liberal, pre-liberal became significant— needs an answer for allaying criticism in this regard.

In the book ‘The death, a dream’ (chapter ten) is perhaps used in the immediate context of the collapse of the Janata experiments. However, his two legacies continue in contemporary India: many of his comrades of the Congress Socialist Party (1936) went on to shape the contour of Indian democracy by expanding the notion of grassroots democracy; several post-1976 movements championed the notion of constitutional and democratic rights. The book unravels ‘the perspectival legacy’, which contemporary India must engage with for an egalitarian posterity.