In the passing away of Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan, the country has lost one whose place in national life no one else can fill. He made his greatest contribution to the country in March 1977 when he helped the hastily put together Janata party defeat Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress which had during the 20 months of the emergency fouled its great record as the party of India’s independence and consolidation and thereby restore the rule of law and fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution.
As the Janata leaders settled down to the task of governing the country and coping with its enormous problems as best they could, his involvement in active politics had of necessity to become discreet. For governance of a large country like India with its myriad problems is too complex an activity to be managed from outside. His precarious health and failing memory, too, left him no choice but to limit his activities to occasional advice to those who sought it and occasional interviews to journalists, some of whom genuinely believed that he had a prescription for all our ills. But it speaks for the kind of man he was that those around him did not or could not use his enormous prestige to become extraconstitutional centres of authority and feather their own nests. After the installation of the Janata in office, he could have served as a tribune of the people if he was in reasonably good health and helped keep those in authority on their toes. But while he was too ill to play that role, he enjoyed the affection of the people of India as no one has since the death of Mr. Nehru in 1964, with the possible exception of Mrs. Gandhi during 1971-72.
JP’s career was more chequered than that of any other comparable political figure in the country. In a sense this itself is a great tribute to him. For, this shows that like his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, he was also engaged in the search for truth and was willing to change course if the search so demanded. JP left the Congress, which he had served with great devotion and distinction, on the eve of the transfer of power to it by the British because he thought it was not radical enough to bring social and economic justice to the common people. He turned down Mr. Nehru’s offer to join the government for a similar reason. He gave up Marxism in favour of Gandhism in the ‘fifties when he found that Marxism led to authoritarianism and felt convinced that industrialisation did not offer a solution to the problem of poverty in densely populated India.
He retired from active politics and joined Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s sarvodaya movement because he saw it as an extension of the Gandhian approach to the problems of social change. He struggled to find a substitute for what he regarded as formal democracy at the same time as he championed the cause of individual liberty against Stalinist communism. He failed in his search for a more genuine form of democracy than those which obtain in the West but in the process he demonstrated the extent to which he was prepared to expose himself to misunderstanding and even ridicule in his quest for truth. His commitment to clean public life led him to a confrontation with Mrs. Gandhi which must have been utterly painful to him in view of his respect for Mr. Nehru and regard for her. But he did not flinch. While he may not have known in advance that she would go as far as she in fact did to defend her position, he did not waver when he made this painful discovery on the night of June 25-26, 1975.
The Janata party he fathered has split. This must have caused him great pain. His last dream has been shattered, though not quite inasmuch as the Janata party remains a reckonable factor in the nation’s political life. This could have given him some satisfaction in his last days. But we can only speculate. He chose to keep quiet on developments leading to and following the fall of the Desai government last July. He is no more there to pull up those who deviate too far from the norms he sought to lay down. In this hour of grief we join the nation and seek to mitigate it with hope.
The Times of India, 9 October 1979