Union Home Minister Amit Shah unveiled a 15-foot statue of Jayaprakash Narayan or JP on his 120th birth anniversary on Tuesday (October 11), at the socialist icon’s birthplace, Sitab Diara village in Bihar’s Saran district.
Leaders from across the political spectrum paid tribute to the freedom fighter and anti-Emergency campaigner, issuing competing claims of being the true inheritors of Lok Narayan Jayaprakash Narayan, 43 years after his death.
Launching an attack at Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, a former NDA ally, Shah said on Tuesday that those who claim to be followers of JP have strayed from his path and are sitting with the Congress in their “lust for power.”
Kumar replied to Shah’s jibes on Wednesday, stating he took no notice of such insults. “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 JD(U) leader retorted
Who was Jayaprakash Narayan, what movement did he lead and who are the political leaders whose careers kick-started at the time? We explain.
Who was JP?
JP was born in 1902 in Bihar’s Sitab Diara, a village prone to frequent-flooding, after which his family moved to a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Balia district. He quit college to join the non-cooperation movement, before going to study at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx.
He returned to India in 1929 and joined the freedom struggle and the Indian National Congress, upon the invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru and drawn by a speech by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
JP would go onto become the founding members of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), but after independence took it out of the Congress and formed 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, JP sought to distance himself from electoral politics, opting to focus on social causes instead. He was disillusioned with political parties and called for communitarian democracy. Parties, he believed, were centralised and susceptible to moral and financial corruption.
The JP movement
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 the movement, calling for a change in government.
JP saw the youth of Gujarat that had been able to bring about political change as 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, he called for Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution).
Opposition to the Emergency
When Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency on June 25, 1975, JP shifted his focus to opposing authoritarian rule and opposition parties looked to him for leadership. The Socialists were naturally 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.
JP is celebrated for launching a popular, mass movement against the Indira Gandhi government, which led to the formation of the Janata Party government in the 1977 general election, the first non-Congress government in the country.
In order to rebuild politics and the state from the grassroots level, where real power would be with people’s movements, JP had to engage with the RSS and the Jana Sangh, despite disagreeing with them on many counts. During an address to a national conference in 1968, JP said that while every religious community had its own version of communalism, Hindu communalism was more pernicious than the others because “Hindu communalism can easily masquerade as Indian nationalism and denounce all opposition to it as being anti-national”.
“Some like the RSS might do it openly by identifying the Indian nation with Hindu Rashtra, others might do it more subtly,” he said. “But in every case, such identification is pregnant with national disintegration, because members of other communities can never accept the position of second class citizens. Such a situation, therefore, has in it the seeds of perpetual conflict and ultimate disruption.”
His protégés
The JP movement can also be credited with birthing some of the socialist political veterans of Bihar, who later went their separate ways.
Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s incumbent chief minister, is the only product of the JP Movement of 1974-75 who remains firmly in command. Writing for The Indian Express in 2015, Kumar said that he was imprisoned in 1974 for participating in the JP movement in Bihar, as well as during the Emergency years. His career in electoral politics began with the Janata Party led by Satyendra Narain Sinha. Kumar was first elected to the state assembly in 1985, before joining the NDA and earned his first stint as Bihar’s CM in 2000.
Former CM Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal first entered politics as a student leader in the 1970s. First serving as the general secretary of the Patna University Student’s Union (PUSU), he went on to become its president and served in the JP movement in Bihar. He was the youngest elected Lok Sabha MP as a Janta Dal candidate, before becoming the CM of the state in 1990. He was forced to resign in 1997 after corruption charges mounted against him in the fodder scam, after which he broke and formed his own political party, the RJD.
Jayaprakash Narayan (Express archive: R K Sharma) 
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