The call of the times |
The 125th birth anniversary year of Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as JP, began on 11 October. JP’s life was inseparable from the struggle for freedom, democracy and social transformation. He endured imprisonment during the freedom movement and continued to experience the repression of state power even after independence. Jayaprakash Narayan led the student-youth movement against corruption in 1974.
Significantly, even today, students and young people in India are protesting against alleged electoral corruption. The 125th birth anniversary year of JP is more than an opportunity to remember a towering figure of India’s freedom movement and democratic movement. It invites us to ask a difficult but necessary question: how much of the India that JP dreamed of has actually been realised? Yet JP never reduced democracy to elections or political institutions.
For him, democracy meant the active participation of the people, the awakening of public opinion and the organised power of citizens. It was this faith in people’s power that brought JP to the forefront of the Bihar student movement in 1974. On June 5 that year, speaking at a massive gathering at Gandhi Maidan in Patna, he gave the historic call for Total Revolution. JP defined the objectives of Total Revolution in these terms: to make Indian democracy genuinely democratic and strong, to establish true people’s rule, to put an end to injustice and exploitation in society, to bring about a moral, cultural, and educational revolution, to build a new Bihar and, ultimately, to build a new India.
Needless to say, the objectives of Total Revolution were far-reaching. The phrase Total Revolution has acquired historical significance, but its meaning is much deeper than a political slogan. More than five decades after the call was given, its unfinished character is striking. India has made enormous progress in many fields, but inequality, unemployment, inflation, corruption, social discrimination and educational inequities remain serious challenges. The constitutional promises of equality, liberty and fraternity have not yet become a lived reality for everyone.
The question JP raised therefore remains relevant: can political democracy survive without social and moral democracy? JP believed that the transformation of India had to begin from the villages. Every problem of rural life had to become a concern of the larger revolutionary process. He proposed a fourfold method – constructive work, struggle, education and organisation. The objective was not merely to demand change from the government but to develop the capacity of people to transform their own communities. This approach has contemporary significance.
India’s villages are changing rapidly, but rural development cannot be measured only by roads,........