Another India by Chandan Gowda

Author:Chandan Gowda [Gowda, Chandan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S India
Published: 2023-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN AND THE IDEA OF SAMPOORN KRANTI

Jayaprakash Narayan, the Gandhian socialist leader, raised his famous slogan, Sampoorn Kranti (Total Revolution), in a speech at a huge rally in Patna on June 5, 1974. The rally is said to have stretched for seven kilometres. Two weeks later, the “gist” of this speech delivered in Hindi appeared in English translation in Everyman’s, a weekly edited by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP).

Earlier in 1974, JP had accepted the leadership of the student movement in Bihar. He had initially wanted to work with the students as an advisor, but they had not listened to him. The high moral stature of the seventy-one-year-old JP, who had chosen to work, after India’s independence, as a social activist, outside electoral politics, had already convinced the students that he was their leader. Their choice proved wise. The JP Movement, as we now know it, found great support across India.

The translation of JP’s speech titled, Towards Total Revolution, which has retained its spontaneous, spoken form, offers a glimpse of his political passions. The electric appeal the speech must have had on the listeners can also be guessed.

At the very beginning JP clarifies that their struggle was not a “movement,” but “a total revolution” for which the protestors had “to make sacrifices, undergo suffering, face lathis and bullets, fill up jails.” Although the Patna rally sought the dissolution of the Bihar Assembly, the work required to “achieve that freedom for which thousands of the country’s youths made sacrifices,” was larger in scope, and needed more time.

JP summed up the situation facing them: “Educational institutions are corrupt. Thousands of youths face a bleak future. Unemployment goes on increasing. The poor get less and less work. Land ceiling laws are passed, but the number of landless people is increasing. Small farmers have lost their lands.” Although “a new programme for the future” was expected from him, he could only offer its “main points” now, which had emerged from his discussions with “students, intellectuals and colleagues.”

Before sharing the main points, JP dismissed the frequent accusations of communists that his student days in the United States of America had made him an agent of that capitalist country. He shared a stirring glimpse of his student life in USA: “In America I worked in mines, in factories and slaughter houses. I worked as a shoe shine boy and even cleaned commodes in hotels. During vacations, I worked and then three or more boys lived in a single room and we cooked our own food.”

Between 1922 and 1929, JP had moved between five universities in America. Financial hardship and shifts in intellectual interests were among the main reasons behind it. He studied science briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, before shifting to the study of chemical engineering at the University of Iowa. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studied sociology with leading scholars. Close involvements with radical student groups in Madison and the works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov, MN Roy and Rosa Luxembourg, among others, cultivated his passions for Marxism.

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