Freedom Struggle
Congress, prison,
and the underground
Between 1929 and 1946 JP moved from an unknown returning student to one of the most wanted men in British India. This file follows that seventeen-year arc — the party inside the party, the war, the jailbreak of 1942, and the fort at Lahore.
Entering the movement, 1929–1932
The Congress JP joined at the end of 1929 was on the eve of its most confrontational decade. The Lahore session of December 1929 had adopted purna swaraj — complete independence — as its objective; the salt satyagraha followed within months; and by 1932 the colonial government had imprisoned most of the leadership and declared the Congress organisation illegal.
JP's usefulness in this period was organisational and analytical rather than oratorical. Nehru, who had brought him in, put him to work on the Congress's labour research; it suited a man with an American degree in sociology, and it put him in touch with trade unionists and peasant organisers across the north. He was arrested in 1932 and sent to Nasik Jail.
Nasik, and the party inside the party
Colonial prisons were unintentionally excellent political seminaries. At Nasik, JP found himself confined with Acharya Narendra Deva, Achyut Patwardhan, Minoo Masani and Ashok Mehta — men who shared a specific dissatisfaction: the Congress was mobilising millions of peasants and workers without committing to anything that would change their material position after independence.
The Congress Socialist Party, formally constituted in 1934 with JP as general secretary, was their answer. It was deliberately not a rival party. Its members remained Congressmen; the intention was to shift the Congress from within, to supply it with an economic programme, and to organise the peasant and labour bases that a nationalist movement was mobilising but not representing.
Its existence produced three simultaneous arguments — with Gandhi, over whether class conflict had a place in the national movement; with the communists, over whether the Congress could be worked with at all; and with the Congress right, over property. JP was at the centre of all three, and set out the socialist case in Why Socialism? in 1936.
1939–1942
The war, and the collapse of cooperation
In September 1939 the Viceroy declared India a belligerent in the Second World War without consulting a single Indian representative body. The Congress ministries in the provinces resigned. The question that split Indian politics for the next three years was whether to support a war against fascism waged by an empire that was itself denying Indians self-government.
JP's answer was that no Indian contribution should be unconditional, and that the price of cooperation was a firm commitment to independence. He said it in public meetings and was imprisoned for it in 1940. He was held for a period at the Deoli detention camp, where he undertook a hunger strike, and was later moved to Hazaribagh Central Jail.
On 8 August 1942 the Congress passed the Quit India resolution. The government arrested the entire leadership within hours. What followed was, in most of the country, a leaderless rising: strikes, attacks on police stations, the cutting of telegraph wires and railway lines, and severe repression.
The Indian communists, following the Comintern's post-1941 line that the conflict had become a people's war, withdrew from the anti-colonial struggle and cooperated with the government. The socialists regarded this as a betrayal, and the bitterness of it shaped Indian left politics for a generation. JP, in Hazaribagh jail, decided to get out.
9 November 1942
The wall at Hazaribagh
On the night of Diwali, when the guard was thinner and the noise outside heavier, six prisoners scaled the wall of Hazaribagh Central Jail and walked into the dark. It is the single episode that made JP a national figure, and it did so precisely because the rest of the leadership was locked up.
For the better part of the following year he moved through northern India in disguise, organising a clandestine resistance: couriers, safe houses, sabotage of the communications the colonial state depended on, and the training of a volunteer force — the Azad Dasta — from across the Nepal border, beyond the reach of British police. The government offered a reward for information leading to his capture.
He was recaptured at Amritsar in September 1943.
Who went over the wall
- 01Jaya Prakash Narayan
- 02Yogendra Shukla
- 03Suraj Narayan Singh
- 04Ramnandan Mishra
- 05Gulab Chand Gupta
- 06Shaligram Singh
Accounts of the escape differ in detail — on the route taken, the distances covered and who carried whom — and this archive does not adjudicate between them. The names above appear consistently across the published record.
Lahore Fort, Agra Fort, and release
After his arrest at Amritsar, JP was held at Lahore Fort — a detention centre, not an ordinary prison, used for interrogation. He was later transferred to Agra Fort. He remained in custody for two and a half years, through the end of the war and the beginning of the negotiations over the transfer of power.
His detention became a public issue. Gandhi and Nehru both pressed for his release, and by 1945–46 ‘Release JP’ had become a slogan of the student movement. He was released, with Ram Manohar Lohia, in April 1946.
What he came out to was a country negotiating its independence and a Congress preparing to govern. He was, at forty-three, among the most popular figures in Indian public life — and within two years he would be in opposition to the government formed by the party he had served.
He was made by the freedom struggle and then declined everything it offered him afterwards. The refusal is the point.
Editorial summary — not a quotationIndependence, and the parting
He took no office in 1947. In 1948 the Congress amended its constitution to bar its members from belonging to other parties — a change aimed squarely at the Congress Socialist Party — and the socialists left to form an independent Socialist Party. The bloc that had spent fourteen years arguing that independence must be followed by economic transformation found itself, at the moment of independence, outside the party that would carry it out.
What followed is set out in the biography and, for the turn that came after it, in Sarvodaya.