Narayan vs. the Indian Regime

...Gandhi's Congress party and its powerful ally, the Moscow-backed Communist party of India, has been the call for the dissolution of the Bihar Assembly...

...It has abundant supplies of minerals, and is blessed with perennially flowing rivers...

...JP's decision to challenge Indira at the polls in his own state and elsewhere, with the cooperation of various opposition parties, has given a different direction to his effort, and the Prime Minister knows that at least in Bihar the Congress would lose any such contest...

...Ordinary people who never before took part in a demonstration are drawn to him...

...See my "Challenge in India," NL, July 7.) JP, as Narayan is popularly known, had for some time been putting Mrs...

...His ideas-particularly his call for "total revolution"-were publicly derided...

...Shastri himself was subsequently nominated to the post...

...Very concerned that his movement be kept nonviolent, Narayan divided last year's strategy of confrontation with the Bihar administration into three broad phases...

...how even this right to vote was restricted severely by the powerful parties setting up their candidates from whom alone, for all practical purposes, the voters had to make their choice...

...Yet the underlying truth is that workers do not figure in JP's scheme of things either...

...The ends are agricultural expansion, equitable land ownership, reliance on appropriate technology (not, that is, the Western, capital-intensive type), development of small and rural industries, a functional and nonelitist educational system, eradication of illiteracy, the dismantling of the caste structure, and a fair deal for all disadvantaged groups...

...Bihar is the home of another British hand-me-down, the notorious zamindari system, under which tenants pay exorbitant rents to absentee owners of vast estates...

...How will the conflicting demands of landowners and peasants be resolved...

...A former Communist who picked up his radicalism while studying at four American universities, Narayan eventually joined the Socialist party...

...Then, in 1954, he became a full-time member of Sarvodaya, only to decide three years later to drop out of active politics altogether...

...Many of the top leaders of the Jan Sangh, for example, have been indicted by inquiry committees on corruption charges...

...how even this limited choice was made unreal by the fact that the issues posed before the electorate were by and large incomprehensible to it...

...Since the majority system allows for instability and gives rise to "money power," he talks about forming village committees that would choose delegates for a permanent council in each constituency...

...At present, of course, Mrs...

...But JP, though his whereabouts are currently unknown and his absence is being felt, cannot be wished away...

...Should things return to normal here, Bihar could be the precursor for a national campaign against Mrs...

...Jagannath Mishra, another Congress state boss...

...But he had not abandoned his socialist principles, and in a letter to his associates at the time described his goal as follows: "to create and develop forms of Socialist living through the voluntary endeavor of the people rather than to seek to establish Socialism by use of the power of the state...

...Nor can his campaign be crushed for long by throwing its leaders into prison...

...Because of sheer neglect by the central and state authorities, though, the northern half is racked by floods and the southern half is afflicted with drought...

...The cities, similarly, teem with enormous reserves of unemployed as a sterile educational complex, handed down by the British, churns out paper degrees to tens of thousands of young men and women who have no prospect of landing jobs...

...The tragedy is that Bihar is by no means poor in resources...

...Narayan himself has described India's political morass in some detail: "I saw how parties backed by finance, organization and the means of propaganda could impose themselves on the people...

...Between 1952-70, farm output in Bihar went up by only 0.57 per cent annually, as against 3.1 per cent in the rest of India...

...Besides, those who are elected cannot genuinely be called representative since, under the present laws, a candidate does not have to capture a majority to gain office...

...Not long after the unprovoked attack on the students that brought JP into his leadership position, police opened fire on demonstrators in Gaya, killing eight people...

...This arrangement is the major source of corruption in the country...

...Gandhi's Congress party won 350 out of a possible 515 seats in Parliament, it garnered only 43 per cent of the vote...

...His defenders cited his long years of activism in trying to explain what he really stood for...

...It was triggered in 1973 by local students taking their cue from events in the state of Gujarat...

...Although the system has been officially abolished, the large holdings remain...

...He insists that India has so far had a "cracy" without the "demos...

...This does not say much for his "nonpolitical" alternative...

...the wealthy evade the reform legislation by parceling out tracts of land to members of their family or registering possession under fictitious names...

...An alarming number of villagers-four out of every five people in a total population of 580 million-are either landless or jobless...

...But none of the extraparliamentary means he has adopted pose a serious threat to the Bihar regime, and his only trump card is to trounce the Congress party at the polls...

...Under his direction, demands quickly broadened beyond student issues, and he was soon spearheading an all-out attack against rising prices, food scarcity, corruption, unemployment, and misgovernment...

...Gandhi's government claims to appeal to all castes and classes, and to embrace many shades of ideology...

...But they have not...

...Young men in Bihar responded wholeheartedly to JP's request for a boycott of classes and examinations, and college students helped on occasion to expose black marketeers and hoarders of food grain...

...Significantly, the industrial proletariat has been no more enthusiastic about the movement than the peasants...

...In no general election has the Congress party, which has ruled without a break since independence, achieved a majority...

...Half of the rural population is landless, and three-quarters of those families with property have "uneconomic" holdings-less than two acres a head...

...Narayan's actions are impulsive, not purposive...

...Today Narayan advocates "partyless democracy," a typically Gandhian quest for indigenous solutions formulated three decades ago by the one-time Communist M. N. Roy in opposition to both Stalinism and bourgeois democracy...

...Obviously, too, in the light of his support from some traditional parties, any attempt by JP to steer clear of unsavory politics will certainly be difficult...

...He thus came, ultimately, to fully accept the Gandhian notion of minimum government and maximum independent community effort, a position he confirmed as far back as 1964 when he declined an offer by Senior Cabinet Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to succeed the ailing Nehru as Prime Minister...

...Indeed, the very magnitude of the response to Narayan has frequently led to direct, often brutal clashes with the police...

...As a result, JP has managed to bring politics into the street...

...Being a Gandhian, JP emphasizes the importance of means and ends...

...Like Roy, JP was disillusioned by the Soviet experience...

...When JP called for opposition members of the State Assembly-presumably his partners in any housecleaning attempt-to resign, only 41 from the 318-member house did so...

...Most prominent among them was the frail, 72-year-old Jayaprakash Narayan, who was roused from his sleep and taken into custody following a speech to a huge rally urging civil disobedience if Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not step down while appealing a lower court decision that had voided her 1971 election to Parliament...

...For even in remote villages JP's public appearances rarely draw less than 10,000 people...

...Yet despite its radical rhetoric, it derives its real support from the nation's industrialists, who depend on it for licenses, raw materials, imports, even electricity, and from rich farmers, who are tied to the prices it fixes for food grains...

...Stagnation has settled Over the countryside...

...He is against the parliamentary system, and thus does not want to form a party to win political power...

...The Narayan movement can be understood only against the backdrop of the grim economic and political conditions in the country as a whole and Bihar in particular...

...This met with a great deal of success...

...The second, during July, consisted of meetings and processions at district and block headquarters, and stepped up organizing efforts aimed at forming people's committees in the villages...

...What JP does not seem to realize is that divisive political, social and economic interests would still exist...

...At no point has his campaign extended beyond the confines of the towns, for he clearly has no broad message for the Indian nation...

...It may be that British parliamentary democracy is unsuited to a country as enormous, diffuse and poor as India...

...From March 1969-June 1973, Bihar saw no fewer than seven governments come and go, and it twice had Presidential rule imposed from New Delhi...

...In India's murky political jungles, he stands out as a "practical Gandhian,' and his admirers are prepared to join his movement solely on the basis of his record...

...This prompted student leaders from 67 colleges affiliated with five Bihar universities to form the Student Agitation Front...

...The only other person of whom this can be said is his former associate, the aged Sarvodaya leader Vinobha Bhave, who in the '50s launched the fruitless campaigns to grant free gifts of land to the landless and to organize voluntary village "communes...

...Gandhi has silenced the entire country...

...JP has also forced recognition of the need for food rationing, electoral reforms and improvements in the antiquated education system...

...In his eyes, corruption, electoral reform and educational improvements take precedence over more material issues, and with the urban lower-middle class, particularly the students, providing the backbone of his support, he apparently does not feel compelled to consider changing the fundamental economic and social relations within the country...

...One cannot reasonably expect the councils to function any more honestly than the present system just because they were set up by a movement imbued with a sense of righteousness...

...Unlike any other active political figure his career is without blemish...

...Narayan speaks of a "communitarian" society where the individual will be "a living cell in a living organization...

...indeed, it may surpass in size and intensity anything witnessed during the protracted struggle for freedom under Mohandas K. Gandhi (no relation to India's third Prime Minister, who is the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru...

...All that is wrong in modern India is magnified in Bihar, the state where JP was born, and where his movement has achieved its greatest momentum...

...Until this April the state government was headed by a bumbling, if honest, Congress veteran named Abdul Ghafoor...

...After the Front staged a blockade of the regional assembly on March 18, 1974, and the police responded with baton charges and indiscriminate shooting, JP was asked to assume its leadership...

...But unlike the Gujarat engineers, who lacked the support of any established political organization, they managed to gain backing for their complaints from the youth wings of the Jan Sangh (a Hindu-chauvinist party), the Socialist party and Sarvodaya, a Gandhian nonpolitical social reform group...

...Scarcely a day used to pass without Mrs...

...Darryl D'Monte is the assistant editor of the Times of India...

...The Gujarat uprising of 1973 subsided without any tangible change in state politics, let alone that of the country, but after Bihar, things may never be the same...

...At the minimum, the Narayan movement has forced the state government to be more careful in choosing ministers with unsullied public records...

...In addition, he has shown up the bankruptcy of all the established political parties, including the Communists, and he may even precipitate a second split in the Congress party (the first was in 1969), forcing a break between those Congress leaders who are aligned with the Communists and those who voice the interests of big industry and the landlords...

...He saw that, irrespective of Communist ideals, the USSR's strong bureaucratic apparatus produced tyranny, not freedom...

...There, a protest over an increase in canteen charges at several engineering colleges snowballed into a mass campaign that ultimately led to the downfall of the government...

...And corruption gnaws at the social fabric, having become so widespread by now that no one bothers to question it any longer...

...In the final analysis, JP's great contribution has been to generate a new moral climate in Indian politics...

...The third phase, in August, was directed at paralyzing the administration at the block, and later the district, level...

...In other words, the remedy is to establish People's Socialism, rather than State Socialism...

...The only answer JP himself provides is a long-term one: a regime that would reform the electoral mechanism...

...Two out of every three of the state's 60 million people live below what is defined as the "poverty line...

...The opposition movement he heads constitutes the largest mass upsurge since India achieved independence in 1947...

...And if the student movement has flourished in towns like Gaya, Monghyr and Bhagalpur, it is simply because the student wings of the Jan Sangh and Socialist party are strong there...

...Attempts to come up with the answers to such questions invariably expose the weakness of his movement...

...Though JP's organization claims to have set up "parallel governments" in some villages to collect revenue and operate independently of the state machinery, in reality any parallel governments that do operate function merely because state officials have been neglecting their tax collection duties in order to concentrate on law enforcement...

...As far as the peasants are concerned, he has made some stray noises about introducing land reform and paying agricultural wages in kind (as a buffer against inflation), but the rural population has never really been made a part of the movement...

...He lists the means as integrity in public life, clean elections and decentralization...

...And these statistics reveal neither the vice-like grip of feudal forces in the backward areas, where money lenders and rich farmers rule, nor the unspeakable oppression of low caste peasants and landless laborers...

...Moreover, it is rather unlikely that a cause as loosely strung together as Narayan's can supervise or initiate electoral and other reforms, especially since the commitment of its adherents is somewhat dubious...

...Whereas the per capita income of an Indian is approximately $120 a year, that of a Bihari is $80...

...Little wonder that Bihar and neighboring Uttar Pradesh are known as the "caste hinterland" of India...

...On the face of it, this is because most of Bihar's public-sector heavy industries (constructed with Soviet aid) are dominated by Communist unions...

...In fact, things are worsening day by day, as evidenced by the decay of India's political structure...

...He and his supporters are a reality both in his native state of Bihar and in the country as a whole, a political manifestation of the chaotic situation plaguing India today...

...A Cabinet member who suggested a dialogue with him was unceremoniously expelled...

...Yet none of this would be of solace to Jayaprakash Narayan, whose political dreams for India seem to bear little relationship to its political realities...

...But the major focus of the Narayan movement's recent agitation, and the demand that has touched a raw nerve within Mrs...

...But prices continue to spiral, and essentials such as food grains and sugar are in short supply...

...It is common knowledge that everyone who has a stake in the system pays into the Congress kitty before elections, and if the government is unable to curb inflation, introduce land-ownership ceilings, set a minimum wage, or bring about a hundred other vitally needed reforms, the reason, quite simply, is that it cannot afford to bite the hand that feeds...

...Between 1964-70, output actually declined by 1.8 per cent, as compared to an increase of 1.4 per cent for the nation overall...

...Gandhi or one of her trusted colleagues lashing out at Narayan for spurring on "Right reactionaries...

...Narayan's reputation was further enhanced not long ago by his refusal to head the opposition parties' united front against the ruling Congress party-an echo of his rejection of the Prime Ministership a decade ago...

...Some critics considered JP's program exceedingly vague...

...To build up the movement during its early stages, a five-week plan was instituted, beginning with a "people's awakening"-the formation of public agitation committees and popular demonstrations against political corruption and the Bihari ministry...

...Under the shadow of his movement, issues are being publicly discussed and people are taking sides, though not on ideological lines...

...But confronted with growing instability within the regional party organization and harassed relentlessly by the JP movement, he resigned in favor of Dr...

...In its current phase, therefore, JP's program is, as he has said, "demonstrative, propagative and educative...

...In the last midterm elections, in 1971, although Mrs...

...The first, lasting till July, was characterized by satyagraha (Gandhian nonviolent resistance) outside the gates of the Assembly...

...Nevertheless, no assessment of Narayan can ignore the fact that he represents a qualitative change in Indian politics...

...This council would not only select, nominate or endorse other candidates for regional and national bodies, but would also keep a watch on them...

...The Indian people assumed all of these familiar symptoms of underdevelopment would vanish with independence, the free functioning of parliamentary democracy and several Soviet-style five-year plans...

...The bulk of the electorate is illiterate (making it necessary for parties to use pictorial symbols on ballots), and therefore easily deceived by false promises and demagoguery...

...A missionary conducting a sociological survey discovered that in one village a man had been working for 20 years to repay a loan of $13...

...But if he is ever allowed to return to the political arena and he succeeds in unseating the Jagannath Mishra government, what would he replace it with...

...That situation is summed up in the word "poverty...

...This basic confusion has not been resolved...

...Meanwhile, the entire state suffers from a turbulent political life...

...Actually, JP is not doing anything revolutionary...

...how people's rule became in effect party rule...

...The primary cause of JP's ineffectiveness has been his failure to put his mind to the basic issue of how to better the lot of the masses...

...If a people's candidate has the backing of both Right-wing and Left-wing elements, what policies can he be expected to advocate...

...He also dismissed the Western welfare state for destroying initiative and encouraging dependence on remote, corruptible political technicians...

...how party rule in turn became the rule of a caucus or coterie...

...Still, it must be admitted that for all his noble intentions and thousands of supporters, JP has not been able to accomplish any of the things he has talked about...

...A parallel program concentrated on mobilizing the youth by establishing student committees at every college...

...Mrs...

...This was followed by calls for a revolution in education and the abolition of unemployment...

...In a surprising comment for someone supposedly committed to "total revolution,' he has said: "I am opposed to frequent strikes because they affect production, which is a basic issue...

...The paramilitary Central Reserve Police and Border Security Force have been used shamelessly, and the government has invoked emergency powers like the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, permitting detention without trial, to muffle dissenting teachers...

...Despite fasts, rallies and "final thrusts,' the Assembly shows no sign of dissolution, and before his arrest Narayan conceded that his battle with the authorities would have to be settled at the next elections...

...Gandhi and her, party...

...how democracy was reduced to mere casting of votes...

...But Vinobha is out of touch with modern developments...

...Gandhi and her ruling Congress party to the severest test they have had to face during her entire 10 years in power...

...His main weapon at that time consisted of morchas (processions), many of them silent to emphasize the nonviolent nature of the struggle...

...the Indian Regime BY DARRYL D'MONTE Bombay Even before a state of emergency was officially declared in India at dawn last June 26 to counter what the government-controlled radio later that morning described as a "threat of internal disturbances," the police were knocking on doors and rounding up opposition leaders...

...If at the same time he seemed to be questioning the very validity of the election system, the inherent confusion is unfortunately all too characteristic...