Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi,1966–74: Before the Rivalry

Abstract

When the Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) gave the clarion call of Total Revolution, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded heavy-handedly by imposing the Emergency in India in 1974–5. This all-encompassing duel has dominated politics and political scholarship since. Their domestic clash has established many analytical prisms for the contemporary public sphere in India, particularly personality politics versus people’s power, single party versus coalition grouping, electoral democracy versus authoritarian dictatorship, and student/youth movements versus generational status quo. Simultaneously, it has also highlighted their differences in a way that has served to bury their affinities and agreements—not only on obscure matters. This article seeks to soften this dichotomy on the basis of their correspondence, and complemented by other primary material, to sketch their consensus in an earlier period. It shows that before their break, the socialist JP and the statist Indira Gandhi exhibited complementary stands on national issues regarding Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh. This national nearness complicates their later adversarial politics on domestic issues, adds dimension to our understanding of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, and contributes to contemporary understandings of their respective places in narratives of the state against society in India.

Introduction

You have taken on a tremendous burden.… In Bhai [Nehru] you had an unequalled preceptor and Lal Bahadurji [Shastri], by his success … has lightened [it] somewhat. But it will be your own inner resources on which you will have to rely, and I have no doubt that they will not fail you … I pledge my full support [to] you … for the masses of this country. ¹

Thus wrote the Gandhian freedom-fighter, former Congress politician, and then-social activist Jayaprakash Narayan (JP, 1902–79), ² to his ‘Dear Indu’ on 20 January 1966, congratulating Indira Gandhi (1917–84) upon her election as Prime Minister of India. This was arguably more than a customary message between the two brightest stars in the political sky of India in the 1970s, whose rivalry dominated the decade, given JP’s ‘brotherly relationship’ with Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the ‘kindred friendship’ between JP’s wife Prabhavati and Indira Gandhi’s mother Kamala Nehru. In his Congress Socialist Party (CSP) phase during the National Movement years, JP was considered ‘a protégé’ of the CSP’s patron Nehru, who would, post-independence, invite him ‘many times to join his government’. ³ Their political comradeship was strong enough for JP to be thought of as Nehru’s heir apparent well into the mid-1950s. The scholarship on them, however, is usually suffused with their eventual break, ⁴ which is alive in current debates as a factor in the rise of the presently ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), given its predecessor Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s (BJS) participation in the JP movement. ⁵ With soaring unemployment, a stymied economy, and a stifling political culture, ⁶ students and workers had struggled against Gandhi’s government in a piece-meal fashion before JP, the moralist in semi-retirement, bestowed them with his leadership and the slogan Total Revolution. ⁷ Indira Gandhi’s imposition of Emergency in June 1975, as a response to this growing political crisis, has been recently termed Indian democracy’s ‘turning point’ and India’s ‘First Dictatorship’. ⁸ Following its easing in January 1977, the pent-up unrest saw the creation of an all-India opposition, ⁹ whose electoral victory against Gandhi in March 1977, however, proved short-lived. ¹⁰ She was back in power in January 1980, with JP having died in October 1979. In the long run, the events of 1974–77 turned out to have larger significances; from the formation of the first coalition union government to the beginning of a new generation of political leaders, ¹¹ who continue to profitably recall their involvement in the JP movement. ¹²

This well-analysed conflict between the chief protagonists of the mid-1970s on direct versus representative democracy has polarized them in a way that overshadows their earlier interactions. If nationalism and democracy were the two life-long quests for JP, then more attention, understandably, has gone to the latter in the ‘tumultuous days preceding … the Emergency’. ¹³ This article, instead, is interested in a slightly earlier period in their exchanges, when their focus was on varieties of inter-nationalism in South Asia. By foregrounding these, this article attempts an alternative prehistory of their later domestic political confrontation. Simultaneously, it seeks to trace the changing contours of their personal ties between 1966 and 1974, when JP and Indira Gandhi looked towards each other in a dynamic interaction that was not teleologically set. Secondly, this passage of their altering interactions offers a shifting vantage to see examples of their respective readings of the national interest. The article seeks to spotlight episodes from the period preceding their fallout, as well as to highlight their agreements at different moments about, as JP put it, ‘the masses of this country’. These instances help to qualify postulations about their later positions as well as to frame their relationship in a continuum.

The scholarly curtain on this relationship usually rises in 1974, when Indira Gandhi is pitted as a flawed authoritarian premier against JP; an ‘ageing people’s hero’. ¹⁴ On the other hand, Pupul Jaykar, one of Gandhi’s closest friends, dated their political break to earlier in late-1971, though it nevertheless remained bridgeable till mid-1974. ¹⁵ The political scientist Rajni Kothari recalled the period leading up to the Emergency from JP’s perspective, when JP had shared his ‘serious concern’ about Gandhi’s ‘dictatorial tendencies’. ¹⁶ However, as JP had hardly displayed any animus towards Gandhi before, exclusively personality-oriented interpretations of their later differences do not leave enough room to examine their earlier agreements. Still, if such was their personal disconnect, then what of the philosophical divide? Here, the established polarization is between India post-1971 as the parish of Indira Gandhi, into which JP arrived promising an utopia. ¹⁷ This a priori position on their exchanges gets easily consolidated by the Emergency though arguably, like it, remains ‘much mythologized but little studied’. ¹⁸ The insistence of much of the literature that Gandhi’s regime and JP’s movement must be examined in tandem is best illustrated in this state of exception in India, ¹⁹ which, however, inhibits interpretations of and insights from prior historical events. Indira Gandhi’s India went ‘to the brink’ in 1975, from where the JP-inspired Janata Party pulled it ‘back’ in 1977, ²⁰ but before that, as this article submits, JP and Gandhi took significantly similar lines on national (security) issues.

To list some cursory instances, Gandhi sought and got understanding and appreciation from ‘Dear Jayaprakashji’ on her ‘difficult and painful’ early decision to devalue the Indian rupee in mid-1966. ²¹ Next, ‘sharing views on Kashmir’, ²² she let him meet the then-imprisoned Kashmiri leader Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, hoping that it would be ‘helpful’. ²³ In turn, JP suggested to her a course of action on the agitations for banning cow-slaughter that was gathering steam in 1966–8. ²⁴ Her self-avowed secular government looked upon it as a ‘trap’; an illustration to Gandhi of how her opponents were ‘not disposed to use democratic framework’. ²⁵ In the wake of heightened communal tensions across the country throughout that decade, ²⁶ Indira Gandhi’s government and her father’s National Integration Council (established 1961) were both beleaguered at this spread of ‘desperation [and] discontent [by] the Jan Sangh, the RSS, the Muslim Majlis-i-Mushawarat and the Muslim League’. ²⁷ JP, a member of that council, who saw that ‘what is hidden within India is Hindustan’, ²⁸ could not understand

why in a Hindu-majority country … there cannot be a legal ban. In all Muslim countries … I doubt if pork would be allowed to be sold or served … the same would be true for Israel.… Human life … is far more irrational than rational. ²⁹

This article is interested in illuminating such key occasions from the years 1966–74, on which exchanges between JP and Gandhi saw more complementarity than confrontation. After all, her bank nationalization and abolition of privy purses in 1969–71 were also in his famous 14-points in 1953 to her father, ³⁰ and her ‘mixed economy’ philosophy was supported by his publication The Citizen in 1970. ³¹ Based on their private correspondence, and supplemented by a selection from JP’s papers, relevant published material on Indira Gandhi, and selective factual reportage from British diplomatic archives, this reading has value beyond complicating their individual portrayals and relations on their aligned readings of the national interest. On the three major inter-national issues of Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh, this article finds existing accord within emerging debates which led to Gandhi commenting upon JP’s death: ‘Differences apart, he was one of the few leaders who commanded universal respect and affection’. ³² On his part, JP drew a contrast between his interactions with Gandhi and her father: while he had differed with Nehru ‘mostly on international matters’, with Gandhi his differences concerned ‘domestic matters’. ³³ This article is interested in tracing the reverse trajectory of this formulation. However, as JP has become a by-word of people’s power in the India of the 1970s and Gandhi has been held as a symbol of an over-reaching, personalized state, their political legacies are appropriated in today’s party politics. Their grey passage of cooperation, that does not fit this black-and-white political usage, has been understandably given less attention. Before their parting of ways, they inhabited an overlapping consensus about the nature of state sovereignty and social challenges to it, the limits of self-determination and the redistribution of national-territorial lines in the subcontinent. On these national questions, their instincts were drawn from a shared consociational democratic experience of late-colonialism and early years of independence in India, ³⁴ which serves to contextualize their later domestic differences.

Nagaland: Self-determination Within the Indian Union

Throughout colonial rule, the Naga Hills had been on the periphery of the British Raj, as well as on the margins of Indian imagination until the Japanese invasion of 1944–5, which, with its accompanying Indian National Army, turned the area into both an imperial frontier and a national memorial. ³⁵ In 1946–7, as British India moved towards independence, a Naga National Council sought its own self-determination; thwarted by the incoming Indian rulers, who signed an ambiguous accord with it in 1947, while assimilating the neighbouring Manipur state in 1949. By the early-1950s, intra-Naga and inter-Indian differences on the nature of their relationship had widened into an armed conflict between prime minister Nehru’s soldiers and Naga nationalist A. Z. Phizo’s fighters. ³⁶ Subsequently, New Delhi responded to the Naga National Question with a classic stick-and-carrot; deploying massive troops from 1956 to 1958, followed by bestowing statehood in 1963. ³⁷ By then, there was a ceasefire, a people’s council, and, above all, a peace mission convened by the Nagaland Baptist Church, comprising the Anglican missionary Michael Scott, Assam’s chief minister B. P. Chaliha and JP. It chimed with the corresponding feeling in New Delhi that further talks could only be ‘behind the scenes’. ³⁸ In this peace mission, for those in the union government as well as on the ground, it was JP who was the ‘trusted member’. ³⁹

L. K. Jha (Indian Civil Service 1936), both Indira Gandhi’s and her predecessor Lal Bahadur Shastri’s private secretary, would complain to JP about Scott’s sympathies with the Naga underground and bring up the bogey of (East) Pakistan shadowing their activities. ⁴⁰ Vishnu Sahay (ICS 1925), Governor-Assam and Nagaland, would correspond privately with JP about the government’s position, which was negotiations ‘without being committed to … self-determination’. ⁴¹ On this, JP had ‘no disagreement’ and went ahead to push it informally in his talks with the underground leaders. ⁴² Similarly, while at times disappointed with New Delhi’s heavy-handedness, JP was not dismissive of the possibility of Pakistan’s hidden hand. Lydia Walker has recently noted that JP’s thoughts on Nagaland represented a ‘paradoxical positionality [of] an Indian patriot and an internationalist cosmopolitan’, ⁴³ but Bimal Prasad had recognized Nagaland and Kashmir as issues of ‘national integration’ in JP’s writings long ago. ⁴⁴

This is best glimpsed in an episode from late-1964. On 22 November, JP was reported to have said that the Indian constitution was ‘too rigid’ and ‘flexible arrangements’ were needed for Nagaland. Arguing that it was ‘more important for India to have friendly Nagas on frontier in some new constitutional manner than unfriendly Nagas kept forcibly’, he pinned his hopes on the Naga underground’s realization that ‘hostilities would spell ruin’ for them. Conversely, his fears came from ‘intolerant’ members of Indian parliament across political parties. Two days later, Prime Minister Shastri had to ‘deprecate [MP’s] demands for [JP’s] arrest’ because of this statement and defend his right ‘to hold different opinions’. ⁴⁵ A month later, on 23 December, there appeared press reports that JP had suggested a Sikkim or Bhutan type set-up for Nagaland. This again produced an ‘angry’ response across the political spectrum, leading JP to deny the news. When on the last day of 1964, the full text of the peace mission’s proposals was published, it denied ‘any question of independence’ and vindicated JP, who thence never, even in rhetoric, veered away from a ‘settlement within the Indian Union’. ⁴⁶

Unsurprisingly then, by August 1965, with war imminent with Pakistan, the government pinned all its hopes on JP to get through to the Naga leaders. He could be creative—seeking to apply the ‘Puerto-Rico-US pattern to Nagaland’ ⁴⁷ —but the pattern of his involvement at Shastri’s government’s behest in Nagaland foreshadowed the lines of his association with Gandhi’s government in both Kashmir and Bangladesh; indeed, it provided a key lead-in. Dharma Vira (ICS 1930), who was both Gandhi’s and Shastri’s cabinet secretary wrote to JP during the Pakistan war that they shared a hope that JP would visit Nagaland soon as ‘nothing but good’ could come out of it. But they differed on JP’s absolving the Nagas of ‘violating the peace terms’ and demurred at JP’s note regarding the Puerto-Rico-US pattern. ⁴⁸ For JP, as Walker has observed, ‘tensions between patriotism and his concern for justice worsened’ ⁴⁹ after the 1965 war.

However, even before the war, in January 1965, while JP was ignoring the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act passed in September 1958, he had assured the Nagas that India had an ‘unusual democratic and federal constitution [and] all they had to give up … was army, foreign affairs and currency’. Despite admitting that ‘Indian culture has not made an entry into Nagaland’, he asserted that Nagas could not sustain independence ‘with covetous China, Pakistan, and Burma’. ⁵⁰ In February, he argued that any ‘settlement could only be a compromise’, ⁵¹ and in March 1965, addressing a gathering in Delhi, he limited the Nagas’ ‘right of self-determination only as a participant within the Indian Union’. ⁵²

Given this uncompromising stand, in the first months of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, as the tenuous ceasefire in Nagaland started to fray and the blame-game began, JP resigned from the peace mission. ⁵³ On 8 February 1966, in a speech in Punjab, he was reported to have claimed that ‘the underground Naga leaders had developed a more realistic approach after the conflict between India and Pakistan’. ⁵⁴ However, it was not them but JP, who had found a new realism in his assessment of the Indian state’s ability ‘to put down rebellion’ after the 1965 war and they consequently distanced themselves from him.

Subsequently, Dharma Vira requested JP to think again given his special place as someone able ‘to look after both the parties’. ⁵⁵ Thus reassured, JP now donned the role of an honest broker between the government and the peace mission, which was increasingly being perceived by New Delhi as a personal and partisan machinery of Reverend Scott, ‘wholly detrimental to the interests of Government’, and a grateful Dharma Vira assured JP that they were ‘generally in agreement’ and he had ‘sent a [similar] reply to the Peace Mission’. ⁵⁶ In the late-1960s, as ‘the stiff attitude of the militant underground’ furthered New Delhi’s concern, JP urged it to ‘increase the number of observers and establish peace centres’, to which Foreign secretary T. N. Kaul agreed and responded that they would ‘take it up with the Underground’. ⁵⁷

For the moment, JP’s thinking on Nagaland had shifted from solo shuttle-diplomacy to small, collective steps like the All-India Shanti Sena Mandal establishing peace centres, the Youth Peace Corps holding camps, and the government starting khadi and village industries in the state. Sahay, about to leave his gubernatorial post, pitched an idea of a non-official society of Nagas like the Servants of India Society. He was being replaced by B. K. Nehru (ICS 1934) and JP had ‘no idea of his attitude towards the North-East borders of India’; equally, he feared that the hotheads among the Naga leadership ‘might be foolhardy to [turn] the mildest of Indian doves into hawks … [by] committing to China’. ⁵⁸

In five rounds of talks between February 1966 and August 1967, for all his goodwill and internationalism, JP and the peace mission could not find the middle ground, ⁵⁹ given his framing of the issue within the security concerns of an ‘integrationist’ Indian Union, ⁶⁰ and the underground leadership’s unyielding prism of ‘sovereignty and independence’. ⁶¹ By August 1969, he was telling different Naga groups in Kohima that ‘there could not be a peaceful settlement except within the Indian Union’. ⁶² The underground factions disagreed and refused JP any appointments. ⁶³ No longer on talking terms with them, he went to New Delhi to share his notes with Indira Gandhi. There followed a renewed cycle of insurgency, before the Indian victory in the 1971 Bangladesh war ‘weakened the underground.… A section broke away and came to a speedy understanding with New Delhi’. ⁶⁴ This led to the Shillong Accord of November 1975, signed in the shadow of the then-prevailing Emergency, which would eventually end up as another milestone on the still-continuing road of the ‘militant movement for independence’. ⁶⁵

Kashmir: Special Status Within the Indian Union

On the question of Kashmir’s freedom, ⁶⁶ JP similarly shared New Delhi’s position that ‘the real issue’ was between Kashmir and India, adding his ‘wishful’ hope that India would settle this issue ‘to the satisfaction of the people of J & K’. The Kashmir dispute at the time was essentially about the question-marks around Indian civil-military presence there since October 1947. ⁶⁷ Initially, it pivoted around the influence of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the paramount leader in the Srinagar valley, and his close friendship with Nehru. From August 1953, when Abdullah was jailed by Nehru’s government due to concerns that he was seeking independence, New Delhi relied on pliant regimes in Kashmir. Abdullah was released in April 1964 and sent to Pakistan to parle, but Nehru died a month later, ⁶⁸ and Abdullah was re-arrested in May 1965, for ‘leaning towards Pakistan embassies’ when on the Hajj pilgrimage, and allegedly discussing Kashmir’s independence when meeting with the Chinese Premier at Algiers. ⁶⁹

JP, a sympathetic friend, worked hard to ‘normalise the relationship’ between Abdullah and the government of India during Shastri’s premiership. ⁷⁰ The world saw Pakistan as ‘a party to the dispute’ because it had been on the United Nations Security Council’s agenda. But JP believed that this was a misreading of India’s complaint to that world-body in 1948 against Pakistan’s aggression. ⁷¹ To JP’s fellow travellers, the problem was ‘the quislings created in Kashmir’ and the solution was the release of Sheikh Abdullah, who ‘could dent Pakistani propaganda that it is the “Kashmiri freedom fighters” fighting against India’, as they felt sure that Abdullah did not want to join Pakistan but, they were also ‘chauvinistic enough to say, my country—right or wrong’. ⁷² For JP himself, the self-determination of Kashmiris moved from being a clear to a ‘complicated’ matter within the security frame of the postcolonial nation-state and, if anything, ‘he now clarified that not all peoples could be legitimately national’. ⁷³

Once again, JP’s speeches during the 1965 war are illustrative of this shift. In them, he argued that while Pakistani ‘aggression must be met … nothing can be solved by military’, and his reading of Pakistan’s terms for ceasefire, ‘war until India agreed to a plebiscite in Kashmir’, was that it was ‘going too far’: in fact, he wanted to see ‘Pakistan withdrawing’. ⁷⁴ As the war ended, JP reprised his role with Abdullah, sending his emissaries to the detained Kashmiri leader, but remained within the national security bind and lashed out at Pakistan for ‘launching armed infiltrators in Kashmir … utterly mistaken that the Kashmir question can be solved by force’. ⁷⁵ Abdullah was grateful for this acknowledgement of him as a person and his region as a problem, ⁷⁶ but Gandhi’s Home Minister Y. B. Chavan bluntly conveyed to JP his impression that ‘the Sheikh always considered himself something different from an Indian Muslim’. ⁷⁷ JP’s view, shared by politicians of the main opposition Swatantra Party who had visited Srinagar in November 1965, was that ‘a plebiscite was pointless … Pakistan had … ceased to be a party’. ⁷⁸ It was a problem ‘to be settled between India and Kashmiris’, with some kind of ‘autonomy except defence, foreign affairs and communication’ being the likely solution. ⁷⁹ Swatantra Party’s resolution on Kashmir, drafted by JP, shows the wider field of play on this issue:

Infiltration [makes] the goodwill of [Kashmiris] decisive … Pakistan disqualified from further locus standi [but] it cannot reduce [Indian] obligations.… In this context, the detention of Kashmiri leaders [regrettable].… Whatever their views [they] have been opposed to accession to Pakistan. ⁸⁰

Here, JP’s celebrated letter to Gandhi, on 23 June 1966, pleading for Abdullah’s release is a contradiction in terms. On one hand, it called out India’s ‘rule by force in Kashmir’ stamped by ‘Hindu Nationalism’ that had distorted ‘India’s image’, on the other, it admitted that ‘any de-accession is now impracticable—no matter how just or fair according to … democracy and secularism’. It was only ‘within accession’ that Sheikh Abdullah could play a ‘decisive’ role. Defending himself against ‘a created image of a silly idealist or a hidden traitor’, JP denied that he had ‘even remotely advocated the giving away of Nagaland to the Nagas, Kashmir to the Pakistanis’ and described his reason for advocating Abdullah’s release: ‘Because [he] is the only leader who could swing Muslim opinion in the Valley towards … accession’. Distancing himself from any plebiscite, he asked the Kashmiris to decide their future with ‘the Sheikh … by fighting the 1967 elections of India’. He concluded with sounding a realist note on behalf of Abdullah, much like his invocation for the underground Naga leaders:

[Abdullah] did no doubt entertain … an independent Kashmir but I believe he is realist enough to realise that no solution of Kashmir could ever be accepted by India, after the last war with Pakistan that involved de-accession and an independent state could have little chance … in the face of Pakistan’s consuming hunger … and the Chinese power. ⁸¹

As has been recently argued, if Indira Gandhi ‘understood the importance of co-opting Abdullah to ensure that New Delhi’s hold over Kashmir remained unshaken’, then ‘among the inputs that shaped her thinking’ was ‘advice from an unlikely quarter’: namely JP, ‘an advocate of self-determination for Kashmir [who] had changed his mind after … 1965’. ⁸² JP also tried to sell the opposition his ‘solution within Indian Union and special status to Kashmir’ because he was convinced that while Gandhi ‘would like to move on [these] lines … the greatest difficulty is her party’. ⁸³ So, he hoped to persuade enough opposition MPs to strengthen her hands, holding his initiative. This proved easier said than done, given that S. A. Dange of the Communist Party of India (CPI) told JP that:

Abdullah talks like a ‘King of Kashmir’, trying to preserve ‘his people’ from two ‘giant grabbers’ … [And] he is a little soft to Pakistan … due to a slight tinge of religious affinity.… He also thinks that by ‘physical affinity’, the trade of Kashmir has to flow towards Pakistan. ⁸⁴

Still, after Abdullah’s talks with Foreign Secretary T. N. Kaul in October 1967, when he was released in March 1968, P. N. Haksar, Gandhi’s trusted secretary, suggested that JP ‘be encouraged to meet’ Abdullah. ⁸⁵ But, on 10 October 1968, inaugurating the Sheikh’s Kashmir Convention in Srinagar, with politicians from Jana Sangh and the CPI in attendance, JP ‘startled his audience by stating … that no Indian government could accept a solution, which would place Kashmir outside the Indian Union’, bringing up, by way of justification, ‘inevitable limitations imposed by circumstance’ and, for the watching diplomatic corps, these remarks ‘caused a good deal of rejoicing in Delhi [but] were received in sullen silence in Srinagar’. ⁸⁶ Then, when in June 1970, an editorial in The Statesman quoted Abdullah, ‘we will wrest our freedom as Indians did from the British and Algerians did from the French’, JP complained that ‘it was one thing to insist on ascertaining the wishes of the people … quite another to talk of fighting for independence’. By now, his interest in Kashmir was being overtaken by his ‘intensive [and] important grass-root work’. ⁸⁷

And so, while he pleaded with Gandhi and Haksar in January 1971 to let Abdullah, his follower Afzal Beg, and his son-in-law G. M. Shah participate in the general election of March calling it ‘fantastic to imagine that just three MPs from Kashmir could ever wreck a Constitution supported by an entire Nation, succeed in preaching secession and achieving it?’ and, invoking the consequent ‘incalculable damage to our democratic image’, ⁸⁸ he did so from within his preferred frames of the nation, its constitution and their international reception. Simultaneously, he fulminated privately against ‘Indira’s Kashmiri stooges’, for whom he had strong words:

[S]he has killed democracy in Kashmir and … the people there will, for ever, be stirring [with] the smouldering fire of hatred for India. Indira may not be Prime Minister when, years from now, those fires might leap into uncontrollable flames. ⁸⁹

Underneath these soaring sentiments however, JP had not much of substance to do for Abdullah, who made an about-turn of his own to join hands with Gandhi. She was willing to consider him a nationalist ⁹⁰ from her position of strength after her victories in the March 1971 election and the December 1971 war. In June 1972, Haksar advised her ‘to make a fresh start and lead [Abdullah] by hand on the … tortuous road [to] reconciliation’. ⁹¹ These events had sobered the Sheikh’s nationalist aspirations as well and they eventually signed their 1975 accord, which tamed the lion of Kashmir as an Indian state chief minister but also provided space for ‘different heroes … of Kashmiri national consciousness’. ⁹² Gandhi’s 1975 accord was not very different from what JP had sought in his 1966 letter: ‘Sheikh Sahib … would be prepared to accept internal autonomy for Kashmir provided history [his 1953 arrest] were not allowed to repeat itself’. Unsurprisingly, ‘when Abdullah was made chief minister … in February 1975, [JP] welcomed the move despite being, by now, a bitter opponent of [Gandhi]’. ⁹³

Bangladesh: A National Security Problem for India

Much before this, in March 1971, JP—joined by his wife Prabhavati—had sent a congratulatory letter to ‘Indu’, on her win in the general election. Terming it ‘a victory which is yours alone’, he called it ‘an unprecedented incident in the democratic history of India’. This time, however, he proceeded to caution her that ‘neither socialist slogans nor magical steps will alleviate the complex problems for the country’. Second, he hoped that she would show ‘patience and tolerance’ in her ‘unique opportunity’ and ‘a sense of fairness and justice’ in her ‘unparalleled power’. Finally, he added that he ‘did not like [Gandhi’s] political conduct during the Presidential elections although … it was a moment of political life or death for [her]’. ⁹⁴ This was a reference to the 1969 presidential election, when Gandhi had broken away from her party bosses’ preferred candidate and urged legislators to vote according to their conscience; an episode that formed the prelude to the 1969 split of the old Congress. ⁹⁵

This reference ‘saddened’ Gandhi and she sought to justify her conduct by claiming that ‘it was not about my future but [that] of the Congress … the country’. Further, she reminded JP of the ‘direction some people in our party were taking since 1966 … there was a section … closer to the ideology of [liberal] Swatantra Party and [Hindu] Jan Sangh’. ⁹⁶ Now, it was JP’s turn to express an apology and explain his words. Beginning with the admission that he knew her, ‘very little … as a politician’, JP re-emphasised his ‘personal affection’ and happiness at her success. However, he took issues with Gandhi on her self-righteous interpretation of the 1969 split. His immense experience in politics saw him pronounce archly that ‘whenever a party breaks, both sides claim the high moral ground’. ⁹⁷ Regardless, he reminded her that he had ‘never spoken against’ her and, in fact, had ‘tried to make’ her critics ‘understand’ her. In five years of her premiership, JP had ‘barely criticised’ any of her policies and he ended this letter with his own aggrieved feeling that ‘you too know me very little’. ⁹⁸

This downturn in their personal equation did not stop Gandhi from asking JP, nor JP from accepting the position of her roving envoy, presenting India’s case on East Pakistan to the world. This undertaking, ‘as a sort of informal John the Baptist’, ⁹⁹ saw JP visit sixteen countries in six weeks in the summer of 1971. Emerging in 1947, the two wings of Pakistan corresponded to two distinct regions on two sides of India. Within five years, this regional separateness manifested itself in the language question—Bangla versus Urdu—and within ten, it was overtaken by economic discrimination and political domination. This chasm was exacerbated by the military rule in the country starting in 1958, and when an election in 1970 saw the East Bengali Awami League led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman winning a majority in the new parliament on its federal manifesto, the consequent parliamentary process was held up by the West Pakistani civil and military elite. ¹⁰⁰ The East Pakistani response of a strike was met by the Pakistani army’s martial repression from March 1971, inflicting a ‘spectral wound’ and precipitating the ‘great exodus’ of 1971, ¹⁰¹ as ten million refugees crossed the border into India. With New Delhi supporting Bengali resistance, this internal crisis became international by December 1971 and led to the creation of Bangladesh. ¹⁰²

Within twenty days of their aforementioned chequered exchange, JP was in Moscow playing his part in this internationalization. His reception by N. P. Firyubin (deputy minister, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, USSR) is as much a reflection of the Gandhi-JP combine as of the India-USSR understanding. Firyubin assured JP that Moscow valued ‘the wise policies of Prime Minister directed towards the preservation of peace’. Like her, they were ‘very much agitated’ and could ‘not be neutral observers … bloodshed should stop’. He shared with JP his ‘deep anxiety [on] the arrest of Mujibur Rehman’ and recalling the great friendship between the USSR and India, ¹⁰³ Firyubin assured JP that Moscow would ‘always help’, before concluding emphatically: ‘we shall do nothing, not an iota, which may damage our great friendship’. In his reply, as an admirer of Soviet Union, JP was ‘happy at [this] identity of views’ and ‘grateful for [their] help’ but, as Firyubin had ‘mentioned political settlement’ in East Pakistan, JP wished to convey to the Soviets, India’s ‘conviction that:

Pakistan has no intention to listen … while India is faced with an immense problem … of the refugees.… Nothing but a sovereign Bangladesh would satisfy the people.… As put by my Prime Minister, time is of the essence.… Only a settlement with the leaders of Bangladesh can be termed a solution. And India will have to take some radical steps to defend her security. ¹⁰⁴

JP’s friends at home were ‘delighted to read [his] newsy letter[s] about [people’s] reactions to the Bangladesh situation’. His visits were being given ‘a fair amount of coverage’ and were considered invaluable in conveying to the world firstly the unfolding refugee crisis and secondly Gandhi’s dilemma: ‘whether it would be to India’s interest if the conflict between the two wings of Pakistan becomes a conflict between India and Pakistan’. ¹⁰⁵ From Moscow, JP reached London in early June 1971 via Rome (where he met the Pope) and Helsinki (where he addressed the Socialist International) and talked to the Mandarins at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). They had read from their High Commission in New Delhi that ‘Indian Missions overseas are organizing his visits [as] an “unofficial” emissary to put a humanitarian-cum-Bangladesh case [to] the world’. ¹⁰⁶ JP told the FCO that while he did not wish it, ‘separation between East and West [Pakistan] was now inevitable’. Interestingly, apart from emphasizing India’s inability to ‘indefinitely support refugees’, JP repeatedly brought up the danger in East Pakistan of ‘guerrilla activity … Maoist groups … [and] a Vietnam situation’. ¹⁰⁷

Next, JP was in Washington, where he found himself amidst the infamous tilt of the Nixon administration against India. ¹⁰⁸ M. K. Rasgotra, Gandhi’s Foreign Secretary in the early-1980s, who was then posted in Washington, wrote to JP that after he left, ‘American duplicity on … arms and ammunition [to Pakistan] was exposed.… We have reason to be unhappy but at least we know where we stand with them’. American Congressional opinion had ‘crystallized further’ since JP’s visit, thanks to which, it supported ‘the cause of Bangladesh; clearly opposed to the administration’s policy’. The House of Representatives, ‘usually very deferential to the [White House], approved a ban on military [and] economic assistance to Pakistan’. The President was peeved but Rasgotra, echoing JP’s views in Moscow, felt that ‘the basic question will be decided on the ground in Bangladesh … Nixon, like Mao, seems to believe that all political power lies in the barrel of a gun’. ¹⁰⁹

JP was well aware of this, and in his correspondence with Gandhi stressed that ‘whatever help we have agreed to give [Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini] … shall be given expeditiously.… The stakes are too high for … inefficiencies, excuses, corruption.… Our Border Security Force [has] acquired a bad reputation … [for] economic deals with Pak army’. ¹¹⁰ Simultaneously, he stressed ‘the danger of Big Brother behaviour on our part with the Bangladesh Ministers and Mukti Fauj officers.… The American behaviour in South Vietnam should be a lesson’. Lastly, and ironically considering their later differences around centralized power, JP stressed that Gandhi ‘personally should remain in charge … and have [her] own direct sources of information’. This concern came from JP’s worries ‘about Haksar’s approach’. As Jairam Ramesh writes, JP ‘had taken up the Bangladesh cause in right earnest … been in touch with the Bangladesh leaders’, and complained about Haksar’s annoyance with them and ‘asperity’ to himself. ¹¹¹ An example of this was the international conference on Bangladesh organized by JP from 18 to 20 September 1971 in New Delhi. It was a characteristically mixed bag effort that saw sixty unofficial delegates from twenty-four countries, including sitting British MPs, a former chief justice of then-Ceylon, a former foreign minister of Indonesia, editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, office-bearers of the London-based charity War on Want, secretary of the Fabian Society, academics, and clergymen. ¹¹² It concluded with a strongly worded resolution:

The world must recognise Bangladesh as a ‘sovereign nation’ … the agony of 75 million people must end … India should be relieved of the burden for millions of refugees.… [The] true character of Pakistan regime [was] racist—militarist—theocratic—intolerant … [a] vital inter-national concern, not ‘internal-domestic’ Pakistan problem. ¹¹³

Thus, after Indian intervention, the war with Pakistan in December 1971, ¹¹⁴ and the subsequent Simla Agreement between Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in July 1972, while much critical attention was focussed on the unchanged ceasefire line in Kashmir, Bangladesh’s belated recognition by Pakistan and the slow exchange of Prisoners of War, ¹¹⁵ JP agreed with Gandhi that it was ‘more important’ that an ‘understanding relationship has been established between you and Bhutto’. Simultaneously, he drew Gandhi’s attention to ‘Bihari Muslims in Bangladesh … the plight of these people is really pitiable’. ¹¹⁶ This plight, of the community Dina Siddiqi has called ‘left behind by the nation’ goes some way in explaining why, ¹¹⁷ through 1971, JP and his friends had almost been ‘clamouring for war’ and pressurizing Gandhi’s government for ‘the early recognition of an independent Bangladesh’. ¹¹⁸ A famous example comes from the following quote attributed to JP, in the infamous paper entitled Bangladesh and India’s National Security by K. Subrahmanyam, then-director of the government think-tank Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses: ‘It is no longer an issue of liberating in an altruistic way a neighbouring area oppressed by colonial rule. [It is] a crucial security problem for India [like] Aksai Chin or Kashmir’. ¹¹⁹ In February 1974, when Pakistan finally recognized Bangladesh, Gandhi expressed their shared happiness to JP, ‘even though this has come about under an Islamic smokescreen’. ¹²⁰

1973–4: Personal Distance, Political Difference

Before their differences on party(less) democracy, it was the instance of supersession in the appointment of the Chief Justice of India in 1973, which saw JP and Gandhi draw swords in a celebrated episode. ¹²¹ To his invocation of ‘dissent is indispensable to democracy’, she posited that ‘equally indispensable [was] a readiness to shoulder responsibilities to fulfil the dreams of a people’. To his lament that his ‘early visions [of India had] remained unfulfilled’, she countered with ‘the [continuous] duty of working for the vision’. To the ‘dismal conclusions’ he had drawn, she replied disingenuously that there was ‘no question of the executive subordinating the judiciary.… The seniority principle had led to an unduly high turnover of CJIs.… [It] had the sanction neither of the Constitution nor of rationality’. She concluded with ironic words, given her actions two years hence: ‘Democracy, independence of judiciary and fundamental rights are not in danger’. ¹²² On his part, JP’s plea was that as ‘the Prime Minister is completely free to appoint anyone’, the judiciary ‘cannot but become a creature of the government of the day’. He too would conclude with incongruent words that ‘parliament must agree to constitutional constraints so as to prevent another parliament in future, whose commitment to democracy may not be particularly strong … from extinguishing fundamental freedoms’. ¹²³

After a period of mutual silence, in April 1974, as JP was leaving for Christian Medical College, Vellore, to have his kidneys operated, Gandhi sent him her good wishes, while admitting that she was ‘finding it difficult to find the right words’. ¹²⁴ A month later, one of Congress’s Young Turks and later Prime Minister (1990–1), Chandra Shekhar met Gandhi after visiting JP at Vellore and informed her that his operation had been successful. She utilized this opportunity to write to JP in a manner both personal and political, starting with recalling the privilege of their ‘friendship for many years, the mutual regard between [Nehru] and [JP]’ and her mother’s ‘affection for Prabhavatiji’. However, she continued, ‘even the highest personal regard and affection need not preclude an honest political or philosophical difference’. Still, their mutual criticisms were ‘without personal bitterness or questioning of each other’s motives’, and Gandhi assigned value to JP’s sympathy. ¹²⁵ She could have added that she would value his support too, for regarding the then- ongoing railway strike, JP was writing to Gandhi’s bête noire George Fernandes, then-president of the powerful union of railwaymen in conciliatory words ‘both as a friend and as a onetime president of All-India Railwaymen’s Federation’:

You are aware of the harm which the present strike is causing nation … I, therefore, suggest a compromise, namely that you … agree to suspension of the strike for the duration of the negotiations, if Government agrees on that condition. ¹²⁶

Fernandes, interned in Delhi, agreed about ‘a way to end the strike’ in JP’s messages to Gandhi and himself, but was sceptical that the government would accept. Newspapers were reporting that Gandhi’s cabinet had rejected JP’s advice and her railway minister L. N. Mishra had boasted that ‘the army, police and [officials] between themselves will break the strike’. ¹²⁷ So, while he broke his hunger strike, Fernandes sought JP’s moral support for this momentous episode. ¹²⁸ Gandhi followed up by writing to opposition and union leaders, considering JP’s genuine desire. She was glad for JP’s appeal to the striking employees, admitted that there were ‘several anomalies in our wage structure … distortions and shortcomings in our economic system and political functioning’ and hoped that JP would help in ‘earnest discussion at various levels’. ¹²⁹ In turn, JP clarified that ‘his suggestion to railwaymen … was not meant unilaterally’ and urged Gandhi, in light of Fernandes’ position, to give him ‘an indication … privately though in an authoritative manner … that the government would be prepared to accept suspension of the strike as sufficient for [talks]’. ¹³⁰ He had been similarly reasonable when the socialist S. M. Joshi (1904–89) had led a trade union strike in September 1968. Writing to then-Home Minister Chavan, JP had been rather even-handed: ‘I do not feel that the strike was called for, or that the draconian ordinance issued was justified … the Government must lay down procedure to deal with its employees’ demands when negotiations fail’. ¹³¹

It was a month later, in June 1974, that JP picked up the personal and philosophical gauntlet laid down by Gandhi. He began by admitting to being ‘stung’ by her oblique public charges of personal corruption against himself, alleging connections with ‘monied people and big businessmen’. With JP writing in his articles that he ‘would no longer remain an idle spectator but would personally take up the fight against corruption’ and Gandhi’s claims, they were speaking ‘different languages’, and JP felt that they ‘will never be able to understand each other’. And yet, not only had he not let these disagreements make ‘any difference in personal affection and regard’, but he also had, as recently as February 1974, undertaken her assignment to seek help of the opposition on Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh. As far as JP was concerned, any talk of a confrontation between them was ‘silly talk’. They had ‘hurt and angered’ each other and that meant that their words mattered to each other. But JP ended with a prophetic caution to Gandhi that if every people’s movement in which he was involved was to be considered a confrontation, then that was ‘to miss … the meaning of the upsurge that is welling up from below’. ¹³²

Indira Gandhi replied within ten days, using her previous style of managing the personal and messaging the political. Assuring JP that she did ‘not have any feeling of confrontation either’, she articulated her sadness at the mounting spiral of JP’s perceived anger at her presumed arrogance. His purported remark ‘that “all bonds” between [them had] snapped’ made it difficult for her to debate the merits of democracy and difference, concerns ‘about the country, people’s welfare’ and ‘the need to cleanse public life of weakness’. To her, he was a political thinker, some of whose ideas which ‘could perhaps work if the whole population consisted of Jayaprakash-s’ appeared rather utopian. She, on the other hand, held an institution from where, notwithstanding its ‘germs of erosion’, JP’s course did not appear remedial to her. For ‘surely the evolution of social phenomena’ was ‘far too complex a process to allow … spontaneity’ and whether it was high election expenses or corruption, these were ‘used as a political weapon for partisan purpose’. And then she summoned the capricious nature of mass politics:

Are you sure that all the people who follow you are different … from the people, who, according to you, have found shelter behind government? The problems we are up against cannot yield to simple solutions however catchy. ¹³³

As far as JP was concerned, this communication marked an end of their personal relations unless Gandhi made ‘public amends for her remarks’. His pride was ranged against her contempt now and the personal battle was giving way to a political war provoked by the ‘action of government in Bihar’ against protesting students. ¹³⁴ Put plainly, their ‘misunderstanding [was] growing and not lessening by correspondence’. ¹³⁵ A saddened JP and a sobered Gandhi marked fresh guards: he as a self-righteous private citizen, she as a high-handed Prime Minister. Incidentally, Gandhi publicly clarified some of her remarks, thereby pragmatically repairing their personal relationship, born as it was from a familial background. That said, their mutual smear campaign had started to engulf the north Indian public sphere. At stake was the substance of JP’s party-less democracy, an ‘evolution of organs of people’s power to exercise strict vigilance’ over democratic systems and set-up. ¹³⁶ Their entrenched public debate was not leading to any public enlightenment and from this point onwards, it would be about reciprocal personal attacks competing for an effect on people.

JP soon began to believe firmly that the ‘continuation of the present Congress Ministry in Bihar [and later the country] is not going to help’. ¹³⁷ With Gandhi’s response of imposing the Emergency in June 1975—until recently a period ‘frequently invoked but little examined’—a political watershed was reached. ¹³⁸ Afterwards, popular reaction against it propelled a heteroclite coalition to power against the hitherto hegemonic Congress, with JP as the guiding light for this all-India opposition to Indira Gandhi, ‘out of the magma of [which] eventually emerged a party of comparable electoral strength [BJP]’. ¹³⁹ It had deliberately ‘sought to identify itself with the political legacy of JP’. ¹⁴⁰ It was able to do so without much difficulty because there was ‘a real conjunction of Gandhian Socialism and Hindu nationalism in the JP Movement … a surprisingly good [cultural] fit … a public endorsement [of] shared beliefs’. ¹⁴¹ Equally, there were to be continuities between the Janata coalition and Gandhi’s convictions—on the above-discussed (security) questions—reflecting the broad national (Nehruvian) consensus on such issues until well into our own times; ¹⁴² notwithstanding personality differences and varying political emphases.

Conclusion

In June 1976, Indira Gandhi contributed ₹90,000 from the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund for the purchase of a dialyser machine for JP’s failing kidneys. JP accepted the money initially, thinking that it was from her personal account. However, with ‘more than 3 lakhs collected from the public … a dialysis machine had been purchased along with accessories and supplies for a year’; therefore, JP returned ‘such a large donation from [PM] Relief Fund’, adding that it ‘should be used where it is needed most’ and hoping that Gandhi would ‘not misunderstand’, as he meant no discourtesy and was ‘grateful for the concern shown by [her]’. ¹⁴³ This episode shows the distance they had travelled politically while trying to maintain personal relations. In November 1976, an old socialist N. G. Goray (1907–3) sent a sentimental letter to Gandhi, sharing ‘an experience … unique in view of the prevailing climate’. He had

spent two days with Jayaprakash in Patna, the 13th–14th of November. On the 14th morning, [he] saw something that was so unostentatious … so meaningful. Jayaprakash had asked to arrange a table near his seat, with a photograph of Jawaharlalji, in front of which an offering of home-grown flowers was placed.… It was his silent homage to the man he loved. ¹⁴⁴

On the next day, in newspapers, Goray had seen Gandhi offering flowers at Nehru’s samadhi and mused on this ‘irony of fate … that two persons who so loved and respected Jawaharlal, should have drifted apart to such an extent, that no bridge exists between them’. This can be seen as a symbolic end to the consociational politics by a national elite in India, who hitherto achieved rapprochement by balancing ‘pressure’ and ‘consensus’. ¹⁴⁵ This article focuses on this drift, documenting whose eventual denouement, Ramachandra Guha wrote that theirs was a ‘political rivalry, but also a personal one.… As a comrade of her father’s, Jayaprakash Narayan would regard Mrs Gandhi as something of an upstart. For her part, the prime minister saw JP as a political naïf. By the end of 1974, the polarization was very nearly complete’. ¹⁴⁶

Before it did though, their relations and interactions were personally agreeable and nationally aligned; after all JP came from the Nehruvian political world of the 1930s–40s. Not only did JP ‘applaud her leadership during the Bangladesh war’, he actively worked under it and if he was ‘less approving of her conduct during the [1969] presidential election and with regard to the supersession of the judges of the supreme court [1973]’, ¹⁴⁷ then he was more accepting of her conduct on Nagaland and Kashmir, both of which saw accords in 1975. As he would write to Gandhi’s Home Minister Uma Shankar Dixit as late as July 1974, ‘I did not say that I am opposed to both external and internal policies of Indiraji … all that I said was that I had differences on her centre-state policies’. ¹⁴⁸

Ultimately, one epitomised people’s power and the other personified state apparatus, but beneath their epic showdown was a shared emphasis on the general will (people as nation), albeit from the opposite ends of ‘representation’ and ‘association’, ¹⁴⁹ which accounted for JP’s dissimilar response to Gandhi’s external and internal policies. It is important to remember that the JP versus Indira Gandhi binary, which has since been set in stone to frame party and personality politics in India, was a product of three years (1974–7): an Emergency chronicle. ¹⁵⁰ With the current decline of Gandhi’s party and the relentless rise of one set of participants from JP’s movement, their titanic duel has taken on a near-mythical status. Their agreements before their divergence, however, show a complementary lineage of their nationalist thought, with ample resonances in India today.