Call for ‘sampoorna kranti’ shook Indira govt: How a semi-retired Jayaprakash Narayan stirred student protests into a storm

The beginning

While the defining moment of this important chapter of Indian political history is JP’s “Sampoorna Kranti” call from Patna’s Gandhi Maidan on June 5, 1974, the seed of the movement was planted a few months earlier when, on March 18, students gheraoed the Bihar Assembly.

The protests against the then Congress-led state government of Abdul Ghafoor were over high college fees, bus fares, and alleged mismanagement of university administration. They came at a time of high poverty, challenges on the economic front, and allegations of corruption and nepotism against the Indira Gandhi government that had started mounting right after her win in 1971.

The late Sushil Kumar Modi, former Deputy CM and another product of the JP Movement, once told this correspondent, “Though it was a students’ movement, some young leaders such as me were backing it. When the 5-km protest march started from the Science College to the Vidhan Sabha, there were barely 30-odd people. But as we started walking, the crowd started building up spontaneously. When we reached Vidhan Sabha, there was a surging crowd of thousands of people. The government was caught unawares and the police had to open lathicharge.”

There were incidents of arson during the protest — the printing presses of two newspapers were torched — and three students were killed. As the situation looked to spiral out of control, some students and young leaders, including Modi and Shivanand Tiwari (later a Rajya Sabha MP), approached JP at his home in Patna’s Kadamkuan locality to request him to lead the movement. Though the veteran socialist had been away from active politics for over two decades, the month before, he had visited college students in Gujarat whose protests were triggered by mess fee hikes.

According to activist K N Govindacharya, the veteran leader was angry with the students over the violence, but calmed down when he was told that the miscreants were not from among them. According to Govindacharya, on April 8, JP addressed a meeting of students in Patna and placed a few conditions before them, including that they wouldn’t engage in any kind of violence. The students agreed and JP came to lead the movement.

By then, JP engaging with the students had alarmed Gandhi who, at a public meeting in Bhubaneswar on April 1, labelled him a “fascist” and accused him of walking on the path of “violence”.

At Gandhi Maidan on June 5, 1974

Then came the Gandhi Maidan meeting and the “Sampoorna Kranti” call in which JP demanded changes on all fronts, from the economic and social to the political. Recalling the meeting, former MLC and socialist litterateur Prem Kumar Mani told The Indian Express, “I was in the audience at Gandhi Maidan that had not seen such a crowd before that. There was no bridge over the Ganga in those days, and yet, people arrived using whatever means of transport they could find. JP, sitting in a chair, talked of ‘Sampoorna Kranti’, adding it was nothing but the ‘sapta kranti (seven revolutions framework)’ of Dr Rammanohar Lohia.”

JP also invoked Jawaharlal Nehru to drive home his point. “I am not going to use angry language. But what I am going to say will contain the ideas of a revolutionary. It will not be easy to act upon them. You will have to make sacrifices, undergo sufferings, face lathis and bullets, fill up jails.

Properties will be attached. Friends, this is a revolution, a total revolution. This is not a movement, not merely for the dissolution of the Assembly. We have to go far, very far. In the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, the people have still to travel many long miles to achieve that freedom for which thousands of the country’s youths made sacrifices, for which Sardar Bhagat Singh and his comrades, revolutionaries of Bengal, of Maharashtra, of the whole country were shot dead or were hanged to death. Millions of countrymen filled the jails again and again to attain freedom, but after 27 years of that freedom, the people are groaning. Hunger, soaring prices and corruption stalk everywhere. The people are being crushed under all sorts of injustice. Educational institutions are corrupt. Thousands of youths face a bleak future. Unemployment goes on increasing. The poor get less and less work.”

In their book The Dream of Revolution, Bimal Prasad and Sujata Prasad quote JP as saying, “Dissent is not just an intellectual luxury but a necessary catalytic agent to which society owes its progress, its revolution, and its technological and scientific advances. Without dissent, society would become stagnant and moribund.”

As the political situation continued to simmer, JP’s call for another public meeting in Patna on November 4 made Gandhi open a communication channel with him, and three days before the rally, the two met in Delhi. As per JP’s account, the meeting lasted 90 minutes, with Babu Jagjivan Ram, the Deputy PM, joining towards the end. While the PM requested him not to hold the rally, JP demanded the dismissal of the Ghafoor government and drew her attention to the mishandling of democratic institutions.

The talks broke down and as JP went ahead with the rally, the Centre deployed paramilitary forces in Patna. During a lathicharge, JP narrowly escaped injury when Jana Sangh leader Nanaji Deshmukh shielded him. This incident further angered the protesters. Following his failed attempt to bring about a reconciliation between JP and Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar, who later became PM, wrote in his weekly Young Indian, “JP is not fighting for political power; he cannot be defeated by deploying state power.”
Mani said JP, honoured with the moniker Lok Nayak (People’s Hero), had also tried to make a point against Gandhi when, in the latter half of 1974, he got her cousin Nayantara Sahgal, the daughter of Vijaylakshmi Pandit, to attend one of his public meetings.

‘We need to shake India’

The situation in Gujarat took a sharp turn starting in March 1975 after Morarji Desai undertook hunger strikes in support of the Nav Nirman movement of the students in Gujarat and calling for fresh elections in the state. Things came to a head on June 12, when the Allahabad High Court set aside Gandhi’s election from Rae Bareli in 1971, acting on a petition of socialist leader Raj Narain.

This led to JP intensifying the movement and he met the national committees of the Akali Dal, the Congress (Organisation), and the Lok Dal, all of whom called on Gandhi to resign as PM. The non-Congress and non-Left parties held a public meeting on June 23 at the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi, but JP could not attend it as his flight was diverted.

He, however, was not deterred and called another meeting at the same venue two days later. “Information had reached the Prime Minister that Jayaprakash Narayan was to hold a mammoth rally at the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi on June 25 at which he was going to ask the armed forces and the police to revolt and disobey orders, which they did not consider lawful,” Union Minister Ram Nath Thakur, the eldest son of forner Bihar CM Karpoori Thakur, told The Indian Express.

Gandhi’s biographer Pupul Jayakar has written that on being confronted with the escalating situation, the PM told her key advisor and West Bengal CM Siddhartha Shankar Ray, “Siddhartha, we cannot allow this. I want something done. I feel that India is like a baby and just as one should sometimes take a child and shake it. I feel we need to shake India.”

Within hours of Emergency being imposed on June 25, top Opposition leaders, including JP, Morarji Desai, Raj Narain, Chandra Shekhar, Piloo Mody, Ashok Mehta, and L K Advani, were jailed. So were the many young leaders who had stood with JP and were shaped in the cauldron of those turbulent times. Among them were Lalu, Nitish, Ram Vilas Paswan, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, Narendra Singh, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, and Jagdanand Singh.

“While Lalu Prasad and Sushil Kumar Modi had been at the forefront of the JP Movement, Nitish Kumar also joined it at a later stage. After Emergency was imposed, the movement got only bigger, even though most of the student leaders and Opposition politicians were arrested post-Emergency,” said Mani.

Recalling his memories of the JP Movement, RJD’s Shivanand Tiwari told The Indian Express, “When I had attended the March 18 protest outside the Assembly, I had no idea that this was the beginning of a movement that would make history. Fifty years down the line, we see how the movement yielded rich dividends, with socialists still holding the fort in Bihar.”