A life in the
search for freedom.

In the winter of 1929 a young man in his late twenties stepped off a ship at Bombay carrying a master’s degree in sociology from an American university, a habit of reading Marx, and no clear plan. He had gone to the United States seven years earlier as a student who could not pay his fees, and had put himself through Berkeley, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio State by picking fruit, working in canning plants, washing dishes and labouring in garages. He came back to a country in the middle of a civil disobedience campaign, and to a wife who had spent most of their marriage living at Gandhi’s ashram.

Jawaharlal Nehru brought him into the Indian National Congress almost immediately. Within three years he was in prison. Within five he had helped found the Congress Socialist Party, a bloc that stayed inside the Congress but argued that political independence without economic transformation would leave most Indians exactly where they were. It is the argument he spent the rest of his life restating in different vocabularies.

What made him a national figure was not an office but a jailbreak. In November 1942, with most of the Congress leadership behind bars and the Quit India Movement leaderless, he went over the wall of Hazaribagh Central Jail with five others and spent the next ten months organising an armed and clandestine resistance from the Nepal border. He was recaptured in 1943 and held, and interrogated harshly, in Lahore Fort. By the time he was released in April 1946, he was one of the best-known revolutionaries in India — and, to a generation of students, the most romantic.

After 1947 the socialists left the Congress and JP led them into opposition. He was, by common consent, the most popular politician in India who was not in government, and the Socialist Party did badly at the polls anyway. Nehru offered cooperation, then something close to a place in the cabinet; the talks of 1953 collapsed over how far the Congress was willing to go on land, on planning and on the machinery of the state. In 1954, at a Sarvodaya gathering in Bodh Gaya, JP announced jeevandan — the gift of his life — to Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement, which was asking landowners to give away land voluntarily. Three years later he formally left party politics altogether.

The two decades that followed are the least remembered and, for understanding him, the most important. He walked in the Bhoodan campaign. He drafted a constitutional alternative built upward from village councils rather than downward from Delhi. He joined a peace mission to Nagaland. He worked in the agrarian conflict of Musahari in north Bihar and wrote honestly about failing there. He persuaded dacoits in the Chambal ravines to surrender publicly rather than be shot. He was, in the language of the time, no longer a politician at all.

And then, at seventy-one, with his wife recently dead and his own kidneys beginning to fail, he was asked by a student committee in Patna to lead an agitation against corruption and unemployment in Bihar. He agreed on one condition: that it stay nonviolent. On 5 June 1974, at the Gandhi Maidan, he told an enormous crowd that what was needed was not a change of ministry but sampoorna kranti — total revolution. Within a year the movement had gone national, the Prime Minister’s election had been set aside by a High Court, and India was under a state of Emergency with JP in detention and the press under censorship.

He came out of prison in November 1975 with permanently damaged kidneys, and spent the last four years of his life on dialysis. He lived long enough to see the Emergency lifted, the opposition parties fuse into the Janata Party largely at his urging, the government defeated at the 1977 election — and then to watch that government fracture within two years. He died at Patna on 8 October 1979. Twenty years later the Republic gave him its highest civilian honour, which he was no longer in a position to decline.