J.P.: India's Aging Revolutionary

If the agitation succeeds, it will engulf the whole nation within a year. This is a revolution. A total revolution.

--Jayaprakash Narayan, July 1974

When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi put the name of Jayaprakash Narayan, 72, at the head of her list of political opponents to be arrested two weeks ago, she must have been struck by the irony of the situation. "J.P.," as he is known to almost everyone in India, was the grand old man of Indian politics, a confidant of Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, and someone she had known since she was a child. In 1942, when she was imprisoned without trial for her efforts in the "Quit India" campaign to drive out the British, Narayan became a national hero--and one of the British Raj's most wanted criminals--for his sabotage work in the independence movement. Now Narayan was leading a grass-roots movement against corruption, a movement that seriously threatened Mrs. Gandhi's hold on her office and perhaps the stability of Indian society.

Critics see him as an irresponsible rabble-rouser out to destroy democratic government. To his admirers, he is the champion of the downtrodden, a political savior who has emerged from retirement to save them from what they see as despotic rule. The independent-minded son of a minor Bihar state official, Narayan at the age of 19 used a $600 wedding gift to set off alone to the U.S., where he studied at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin and became a convert to Communism. Returning to India, he became deeply involved with Gandhi and Nehru in the independence movement. Still, he was not an advocate of Gandhi's principles of nonviolence and organized a guerrilla force to disrupt rails and communications and foment strikes and riots.

Following independence in 1947, he grew increasingly disenchanted with party politics and even spurned offers by Nehru to join his Cabinet. Explained Narayan: "The party system, so it appeared to me, was seeking to reduce the people to the position of sheep whose only function was to choose periodically the shepherds who would look after their welfare."

Despite Narayan's criticism of government corruption, his movement offers no clear-cut program for social or economic reform. J.P. talks vaguely of "partyless democracy" and returning power to the villages. He urges his followers to engage in such tactics as gherao (laying siege) and dharna (sit-ins). But almost invariably his civil-disobedience campaigns have turned violent.

When rampaging students in Gujarat managed to bring down the state government, J.P. was impressed and decided to try to do the same thing in Bihar, his home state. The demonstrations led to riots, and Mrs. Gandhi appealed to J.P. to call them off. He refused. When Railways Minister Lalit Mishra was assassinated on a visit to Bihar last January, the Congress Party accused Narayan of unleashing a "cult of violence, intimidation and coercion."

What bothers many observers is J.P.'s concept of "defensible violence"--that violence is permissible to prevent a greater violence or injustice from occurring. This evoked old memories of his World War II sabotage work. In addition to many sincere followers, J.P.'s movement has attracted a wide spectrum of militant rightist and leftist opposition parties that have little in common but their dislike of Mrs. Gandhi. Yet despite the support of these dubious elements, Narayan's is essentially a one-man revolution held together by his remarkable personality. "The day J.P. dies, and he is a sick man," said a member of Parliament recently, "his total revolution will collapse totally."

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