It will be an exaggeration to describe Asoka Mehta as the last of the Mohicans. Some of them are still around, Achyut Patwardhan for instance. And if Achyut Patwardhan gave up active politics years ago to take up the search for his own spiritual and the society’s moral uplift, Asoka Mehta had been inactive for years. So, to be frank, his passing away will be a loss mainly for a small group of personal friends. They will remember him for his non-demonstrative quiet warmth, his scholarship, and, in some ways, child-like innocence. But his death is important as another signal that men and women who gave us and sustained for us the vision of a free and socialist India have almost disappeared from the scene leaving it bereft of idealism and faith.
Asoka Mehta was one of the triumvirate that dominated the socialist movement from the thirties, when the Congress Socialist party was formed inside the larger parent organisation, to the mid-fifties when the movement began to splinter, Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia being the other and in some ways more important members. Jawaharlal Nehru, on the one hand, and MN Roy, one of the founders of the Comintern, on the other, supported the formation of the CSP out of idealism as well as the calculation that the Congress could be taken over and used for ushering in socialism. But at the heart of it all lay an innocence born out of ignorance of the complexities of the Indian society and reluctance to comprehend it if only to be able to change it. Fortunately for India, Nehru had the good sense to allow his heart to rule over his head and to stay in the parent organisation under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership.
Of the Socialist triumvirate, Lohia was the most combative and perhaps realistic (or cynical). He equated the upcoming backward castes with the European proletariat as the engine of revolution and helped initiate a thought process and movement which has been rocking the country for almost two decades. Jayaprakash Narayan, as we know only too well, carved an important place for himself in the country’s history after 1973 when he took up the battle against corruption in public life and then came to symbolize the resistance to the emergency and the successful fight for the removal of Indira Gandhi from power in 1977. Ashoka Mehta was not so fortunate. He did not have his finest hour. But that was so mainly because he was one of the least populist of public men of his stature and one of the most cerebral. He played a leading role in the CSP’s decision to leave the Congress in 1948. He genuinely believed the people would only be too glad to vote them into office. Sixteen years later rather disillusioned he led his faithful back into the Congress equally convinced that it was now a fit instrument for ushering in socialism. For some time he was a member of Indira Gandhi’s “Kitchen Cabinet” and saw in her an architect of socialism in India. But he soon lost influence and quit the Union cabinet in 1968 using the government’s reluctance to attack Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia as a pretext. He never again recovered his moorings. By then socialism, not just communism, was beginning to be found wanting all over the world.