It is only proper that Mr. Nanaji Deshmukh is taken at his word. For, it is quite possible that he is disenchanted with the working of the Janata Party and wants to call it a day. Indeed, coming as he does from a very different milieu, he could not have found it easy to adjust with the rough and tumble of mass politics. And, needless to add, he is as entitled to quit active politics and take to what he calls constructive work as anyone else. But if he believes that this can make the slightest difference to the country’s political life or that it can attract the support of the youth as such, he is sadly mistaken. He will be lucky if hecan attract some young men a la his parent organization, the RSS. He could have learnt that much from Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan’s experience or Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s. Gandhiji, too, was unhappy with the behaviour in office of men and women who had spent years and decades with him. But he was unduly harsh. The men and women he brought up have managed the country’s affairs all these 31 years and they have not at all done badly by any yardstick. Since apart from the Sikh Gurus, Gandhiji alone among Indian saints had combined an active political life with an intimate involvement in social work, the inference must be that his was the right approach. It certainly produced fairly tall men and women which is not what can be said of Acharya Bhave or Mr. Narayan, though it must be admitted that Gandhiji functioned in more favourable circumstances in the sense that the temptations then were fewer and less alluring.
Mr. Deshmukh has had the honesty to say publicly that Mr. Narayan’s “total revolution” has failed because young men and women, who were supposed to be its backbone, have also joined the long queue of office seekers. But he is unwilling to take the next step and recognise that this was unavoidable. In any case, how does he propose to avoid repetition of the same story and “evolve a constructive political style” and bring about “a qualitative change in the (country’s) political culture”? By running a project in Gonda district in U.P. and another in Krishna district in Andhra? Surely he must know better, though no one has the moral right to run down limited efforts like these. Mr. Deshmukh has been intimately connected with another effort at “total transformation” involving rejection of what he regards an alien value system and incorporation into day-to-day life of what he describes as Indian values. Apparently he is not fully satisfied with its results either. Else, he could have returned to the RSS which claims to be uninvolved in active politics. If this is, indeed, so, this should lead to the sobering realisation that “total transformation” is an impractical ideal. It is incidentally also a dangerous one because it invariably leads to tyranny on whatever scale. That danger is not too acute when the search for “total transformation” takes place in the context of a tradition of which escapism and individual search for omnipotence are an integral part. But it does not and cannot lead any society anywhere.