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Jayaprakash Narayan: Marxism, Democratic Socialism and Gandhism

Mahendra Prasad Singh and Himanshu Roy

Power which is a fundamental ingredient of politics and a ubiquitous social phenomenon evokes different responses from different political actors depending on their personal dispositions and cultural and historical milieus. Among these responses, the one that appears most desirable is represented by the attitude that Gandhi brought to bear on power and, for that matter, politics generally. Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979), a posthumous follower of the Mahatma, stands out as the most creative innovator of Gandhian politics, just as Jawaharlal Nehru seems to be the safest bridge between Gandhi and modern science and technology, and Acharya Vinoba Bhave, the most authentic link between Gandhism and normative traditional Hindu humanism.

JP, as he was popularly called, was described in a biographical sketch in 1963 as, ‘India’s foremost dissenter, critic, intellectual nonconformist and fighter of lost causes that never lose their following’.¹ That characterization remained valid until his death. His passionate quest for an ideological identity took him on a voyage from Marxism through democratic socialism to Gandhian socialism and in the process he creatively developed the socialist and Gandhian traditions of thought, grappling with some of the deepest problems of Indian democracy and contemporary civilization.² He was probably the most sophisticated advocate of a nonpartisan democracy and a Gandhian constitution for independent India.³ ‘No other Indian public figure’, wrote Girilal Jain on the morrow of JP’s death, ‘has sought to embody so many intellectual currents and cross-currents in himself as JP, not even the incomparably supple-minded Jawaharlal Nehru. JP was the mirror to 20th century India’.⁴

Marxism and Democratic Socialism

Essentially, JP’s entire philosophy and political praxis can be divided into two broad streams, namely, Democratic socialism and Sarvodaya. From the Leninist perspective his earliest stint in politics (1930s) is categorised as the Marxian phase but when it is put to rigorous scrutiny with the benefit of hindsight of history we do not find any fundamental difference between his Marxism and Democratic socialism. However, irrespective of change in nomenclature or in his philosophy that occurred in the 40 years of his political praxis there is a consistency in his outlook on one aspect, i.e., in his approach towards peasantry and in his thoughts about village life. His Marxism or Democratic socialism, besides, was not ahead of radical liberalism. In 1930s or in 40s when Leninism-Stalinism reigned supreme his outlook on economy and politics of India was treated as Marxism or socialism, but as history shows that the radical reforms he had proposed in 1936 or in 1940 for achieving socialism were already abandoned by Marx and Engels in the 19th century on the ground that they were no longer relevant since the development of capitalism had already incorporated them or made them redundant. Numerous prefaces to new editions of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ abundantly indicate towards this trend. Apart from it, ‘The Critique of the Gotha Programme’ and ‘The Peasant Question in France and Germany’ reveal the irrelevance of the demands of peasantry for the cause of socialism that French and German communists had thought to put forward as part of their programme. In the April Thesis, however, Lenin made a capitulation and brought the peasantry and their causes back into the socialist fold which Marx and Engels had criticised throughout their lives. The success of Lenin in Russia made his political programmes universal which was accepted as socialism. Lenin, nonetheless, accepted the fact that Russian economy was state monopoly capitalism, and that in the given Russian circumstances the best course for the success of the revolution was to co-opt the peasantry for it. He knew very well that land reforms and other such measures were the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, and in the absence of such fulfilment it had to be completed by the Communists. But the Communists in India accepted Lenin’s politico-economic programmes as the development of Marxism without deep critical analysis. JP’s Marxism was, more or less, the same though he never joined the CPI and differed with it on many issues. His realization of weaknesses in Lenin’s theory came later. His Marxism was essentially an ideology steeped in the Leninist paradigm that he had learnt at Madison, Wisconsin, in the U.S.A. in the company of Jewish and European-born students. It was an ideology of a radical youth leader of’ 1930s— 1940s who was searching for methods and objectives of freedom.

To understand his Marxism and socialism better let us analyse some of the programmes that he enunciated from the platform of the Congress Socialist Party (C.S.P.). In 1936, which forms part of his Marxian phase, in his Why Soaalism? the following objectives were delineated:⁵

• Transfer of all power to the producing masses
• Development of economic life of the country to be planned and controlled by the state
• Socialization of all key and principal industries, banks, insurance and public utilities, with a view to the progressive socialization of all means of production, distribution and exchange
• State monopoly of foreign trade
• Organization of cooperatives for production, distribution and credit in the unorganised sector of the economy
• Elimination of princes, landlords and all other classes of exploiters without compensation
• Redistribution of land to peasants
• Encouragement and promotion of cooperative farming by the state
• Liquidation of debts of peasants and workers
• Recognition of right to work or maintenance by the state
• Distribution of economic goods based on the principle of ‘to everyone according to his need and from everyone according to his capacity’
• Adult franchise on functional basis
• No support or discrimination to any religion by the state
• No recognition of any distinction based on caste and community and no discrimination between sexes.

In 1940, in the Draft Resolution for the Congress session at Ramgarh, he outlined another programme that has been called as his phase of Democratic socialism. These programmes were as follows:⁶

• Guarantee of full individual and civil liberty and religious cultural freedom
• Abolition of all distinction based on birth and privileges
• Guarantees of equal rights to all citizens
• The political and economic organization of the state to be based on the principles of social justice and economic freedom
• All large-scale production to be under collective ownership and control
• Political and economic organization of the state to be conducive to the satisfaction of the rational requirements of all members of the society, material satisfaction need not be the top and sole objective: State to aim at creating conditions for healthy living and the moral and intellectual development of individual
• State to endeavour to promote small-scale production carried on both individual or cooperative effort for the equal benefit of all concerned; and life of the villager should be recognised with a view to making them self-governing and self-sufficient and as large ameasure as possible

In 1946, in the article ‘My Picture of Socialism’, he again emphasised the following features:⁷

1. Cooperative farms run by village panchayats
2. Large-scale industries owned and managed by the community
3. Small-scale industries organised under producers’ cooperatives
4. State’s role to be limited and to be democratised.

A further perusal of the article leads us to the fact that cooperative farming was to be the first stage of socialist farming. The next stage was ‘the collective stage in which no individual proprietary rights in agricultural lands … are recognised and all lands pertaining to a village, or farming unit are owned and run by village collectives’.⁸ Secondly, all these cooperative and collectivization stages were to be brought about through persuasion and minimum force instead of whole-sale repression; and finally, the population thrown out of agriculture as a result of these reformative measures were to be accommodated ‘in industry, particularly industries subsidiary to farming’: As far as the large industries were concerned they were to be ‘owned and managed by the Federal or Provincial Governments’ with representatives of trade unions having ‘appropriate voice in the management from the lowest to the highest levels’. Small industries were to be ‘organised in to producers’ cooperatives who would own and manage their industries’. He further advocated a third type of industrial ownership ‘that is municipal or community ownership’ in which ‘the representative of the workers … would naturally have an adequate voice in their management’.⁹ He also advocated the development of cooperatives and community owned industries because he desired ‘to prevent the state from acquiring the sole monopoly in industry and employment’. Thus the three representative writings covering a period of over ten years provide us sufficient insights into his thought process in his socialist phase.

A comparative study of all these programmes elucidates one point starkly, i.e., there is no fundamental difference between the two phases of his political praxis called the Marxian phase and the Democratic socialist phase; rather there is a persistent consistency in his world outlook as well as in the methods of implementing the reforms. The abolition of the Zamindari system and application of land reforms, cooperative farming and collectivization, nationalization of industries, etc., had been his constant mantra. Similarly, demand for decentralization of power or opposition to the ‘dictatorship’ of the proletariat, espousal of peaceful, non-violent social transition and emphasis on community/peoples’ management of agriculture, industries, resources, etc., were his other hallmarks covering the spectrum of politics. Further, he consistently opposed the ‘socialist’ Russian model, maintained his ideological autonomy and learnt fast from the post-1924 history of Russia.

Apart from all these programmes and praxis, there is another side of his ideology. As said earlier, his approach towards peasantry was looked at from the Leninist prism. Though critical of Stalin’s approach towards the implementation of economic and political programmes, he never emerged out of the Leninistic-Stalinistic paradigm of Marxism, never read Marxism critically, independent of this paradigm and remained a prisoner of his time; and when he emerged out of this paradigm in the 1950’s it was with the rejection of Marxism itself, thus, throwing the baby with the bath water. Had he read Marx and Engels with an independent mind he would have found in them a thorough and consistent critique of peasantry, who treated peasantry as a section destined to be lost irrevocably, a section on whose tomb the proletariat emerges. The antithetical demands of the peasantry and proletariat, with one asking for private property and capital in land and the other asking for their abolition, made Marx and Engels take the side of the proletariat. It was not for nothing that Marx treated the peasantry as a ‘sack of potatoes’; rather, he was very much aware of the revolutionary role played by the English, French and German peasants. But what he differentiated between the revolutionary roles of the peasantry and the proletariat was the historic tasks they were destined to play. While one was the protagonist of the private property with his entire world outlook revolving around a patch of land, the other was the executioner of such kind of social relations and a votary of association of immediate producers; while one represented the past the other represented the future; while one produced Bonaparte, the other threw up Communards. But these fundamental differences were overlooked after Engel’s death and what remained intact was the abstract revolutionary role of the peasantry cut off from their nature and historic role. It was Lenin who capitulated on the face of opposition during October 1917 and compromised with the peasantry in contravention to Marx’s stand. Since then the peasant question became part of the socialist programme. Thus, what was once the task of the radical bourgeoisie became part of the socialist programme, and their protagonists became Marxists; what was Marxism became infantile disorder. JP’s Marxism and Democratic socialism was the part of that socialistic paradigm of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Gandhism

Jayaprakash Narayan was, in varying degrees, dissatisfied or disenchanted not only with the people’s democracies under Communist one-party systems and with some non-Western varieties of guided or basic democracies but also with liberal democracies of the West. His disillusionment with Marxism and Bolshevism followed, at the philosophical plane, from his questioning ‘if good ends could ever be achieved by bad means’¹⁰? and by his realization that ‘materialism as a philosophical outlook could not provide any basis for ethical conduct and any incentive for goodness’.¹¹

He was driven in the same major direction by his observations, on a more practical plane, of actual distortions revealing the immense political and economic corruptibility of Communism inherent in the unpredictability of revolutionary means (as the leader no longer remains in control of the revolutionary violence once let loose) and in the authoritarian one-party system. It offers state capitalism as a poor substitute for socialism made worse under the dictatorship of a new class of bureaucratic rulers.

All this led JP to the conclusion ‘(a) that in a society where it was possible for the people by democratic means to bring about social change it would he counter-revolutionary to resort to violence, and (b) that socialism could not exist, nor be created, in the absence of democratic freedoms’.¹²

Jayaprakash Narayan sympathised with attempts of some Third World leaders, following the post-war rapid collapse of Western-type democratic regimes, to experiment with next concepts of democracy presumably rooted more firmly in indigenous traditions and contemporary realities. ‘The setting up of the National Union in the U.A.R. and Basic Democracies in Pakistan’, he wrote, ‘is some little advance in the promised direction, but these countries are still far from being a democracy of any kind whatever’.¹³

JP seemed to be only less dissatisfied with the Western democracies which sought to combine political liberalism with capitalist economy and the welfare state: ‘There is no doubt that the developed and mature democracies of the West are not so top-heavy and devoid of the support of broad-based infrastructures of various kinds’.¹⁴ But as he sees it, the ‘Western democracy is little more than government by consent’ electorally obtained at one point in time and then in effect putting off popular participation until the next elections.¹⁵ Besides, European liberalism and socialism also fall short of ‘a socialist democracy’. In Britain, for instance, the ‘Welfare State, which is constantly under conservative fire, is a poor substitute for socialism, and that too seems to be in the danger of being converted into the ‘opportunity state’ of Mr. Macmillan’.¹⁶

Another twin trend in Western democracies that disturbed him was private corporatization and governmental bureaucratization, both leading to centralization: ‘with the growth of science and technology and complex economic system, government is becoming more and more the business of smaller and smaller numbers of people. With the consequent growing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of fewer people—whether they are private citizens of officers of the state-democracy would soon be just a matter of form rather than of substance’.¹⁷

The alternative offered by JP was Sarvodaya—a communitarian utopia promising genuinely participative democracy and real socialism. Socially, sarvodaya was to be based not on an exclusive dominant class or group but on an all-inclusive egalitarian commune of citizens.¹⁸ Politically, it sought to establish a truly decentralised democracy that went beyond the democratic elitism of the West and ensured what JP called Panchayati Raj or ‘Swaraj from below’.¹⁹ Economically, sarvodaya envisaged a thoroughly decentralised and voluntaristic economic order, going beyond state socialism and comprising, on the one hand, a network of many local and regional small-scale industries plus some large-scale central industries, and, on the other, a large number of communitarian farms collectively owned and managed by entire villages.²⁰

Structurally and territorially, the panchayati democracy under the Sarvodaya of JPs’ vision, would take an organic institutional form in which the Gram or Nagar Sabha (village or town/ mohalla assembly consisting of all adults therein) became the base from which sprung two systems of government going up to higher levels. The first of these was a three-tier local selfgovernment with the Gram Sabha indirectly and consensually electing the Panchayat Samitis (bloc assemblies) and the latter indirectly electing the Zila Parishads (district assemblies). The other set of legislative institutions stemming from the Gram/Nagar Sabha comprised of the Vidhan Sabha (state assembly) and Lok Sabha (national parliament) which were to be elected through a three-step process.

In the first step, each Gram Sabha in a Vidhan Sabha or a Lok Sabha constituency (as the case may be) would elect two delegates to a constituency electoral college called Electoral Council. The delegates were to be elected by a show of hand through repeated balloting and dropping at each ballot the candidate receiving the least vote in the previous ballot until only two names remain.

In the second step, the Electoral Council was convened to select and set up candidates for the constituency concerned. The candidates receiving not less than a minimum specified percentage—say 30 percent—of the Electoral Council votes would be designated candidates for direct mass election.

In the final step the name of candidates selected by the Electoral Council was to be sent out to different Gram Sabha within the constituency. Each Gram Sabha would then separately meet for directly electing the representative. The candidate carrying the majority of Gram Sabhas or alternatively, the majority of aggregated Gram Sabha votes, was declared elected.²¹ These governmental structures were to be based on ‘a thorough-going system of political as well as economic decentralization’²² that went far beyond the ‘federalism-with-a-strong-centre’ philosophy of the Constituent Assembly and the Indian Constitution.

There was little room for political party system as well as for the state in the Sarvodaya of JP’s vision: both worked against the free exercise of freedom and sovereignty by the people—the parties by fragmenting the community and by imposing themselves on the masses, and the state by assuming the monopoly of political power (e.g. the bourgeois state), and by threatening to add to it the monopoly of economic power (e.g., the socialist state). Parties were welcome only in their more universalistic reincarnation as voluntary associational groups in the service of the people.²³ As for the state, JP writes: ‘I was, and am not sure if the State would ever wither away completely. But I am sure it is one of the noblest goals of social endeavour to ensure that the power and functions and spheres of the state are reduced as far as possible’.²⁴

JP’s is thus a vision of a community of moral and civic citizens in active pursuit of ‘selfgovernment, self-management, mutual cooperation and sharing, equality, freedom, brotherhood’.²⁵ Voluntary actions, having its roots in the society and individuals constituting it, loomed larger in this reordering of political system and overshadowed the limited state and minimal government.

JP’s greater reliance on lokniti (politics of people) and lokshakti (power of people) in preference to rajniti (power politics) and rajshakti (state power) could also be observed in his behaviour as a political and social leader, In 1942, he came forward to lead a spontaneous mass upsurge at a time when the entire top leadership of the Indian National Congress was in jail. In 1954, he cut off his life-long association with party politics to join Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan (voluntary land donation for the landless) movement. In 1966–67, he stepped forward during the Bihar famine to lead the organization of a massive relief operation on a voluntarist basis largely outside the usual governmental frameworks.

During the Bihar Movement in the early and mid-1970’s he gave his blessings and leadership to another mass upsurge on the issue of corruption and authoritarianism largely outside the framework of the established party system.²⁶ It was during this movement that he put forward his ideas of a Gandhian sampurna kranti (total revolution), and brought to the fore issues relating to fundamental reforms in the electoral, administrative, economic, social, political, and educational systems of the country with greater salience and urgency than ever since independence.²⁷

JP joined this movement, nevertheless, to depend indirectly on pre-existing organizational networks in league with newer social and political forces within a framework of largely ad hoc inclusive structures such as Lok Sangharsha Samiti and Chhatra-Yuva Sangharsha Vahini. Apart from non-party students, the intelligentsia and the nondescript masses contagiously drawn into it, the movement tended to draw structural sustenance mainly from a divided Sarvodaya stream and the non-CPI opposition parties ranged against the ruling Congress.²⁸

This aspect of the movement, coupled with the fact that it came to be intercepted by the proclamation of internal Emergency, did not allow a long enough political socialization to yield a sizeable corps of young political recruits to make their impact felt on the post-Emergency politics. Even in Bihar where an identifiable small band of young recruits got elected to the Vidhan Sabha in 1977 it was lost in the maize of factional politics in the Janata Party along the lines of the major constituent parties forming the Janata agglomerate as well as along caste lines. This party that the advocate of nonpartisan politics ironically fathered and fostered led the spectacular electoral landslide in 1977 and managed to govern in New Delhi for three years, but did not even survive the terminally ailing JP except as a rump.

Nevertheless, the ideological legacy to the nation bequeathed by him will certainly be more durable and powerful than any organizational legacy could perhaps have been. JP’s creative experiments in Gandhian thought and politics had significance beyond India. As Nirmal Verma writes, ‘In his endeavour to transcend the deceptions and the iron laws of history he made each of us aware of the innermost laws of our own being. This moral dimension elevated ‘Total Revolution’ far above all the power-crazed revolutions of the 20^th century. J.P. in his last days was like a poet-revolutionary who had at long last found a form, a content and a living voice for that restless dream which had never ceased to stir within him’.²⁹