Jayaprakash’s dialectic of Lokniti-Rajniti

Arun K Patnaik, Pol. Sc., University of Hyderabad

When I used to pass through the Congress Seva Dal’s office in Janpath, New Delhi, during the 1980s and 1990s, I would invariably recall the story of Maila Anchal, told by the Hindi literature’s famous novelist Phaniswar Nath Renu. What a realistic portrayal of a contemporary story of Indian nation-state unfolded during the early 1950s! The story runs like this in its tele-serial incarnation. There are three major protagonists like a teacher, his adult daughter and a young doctor who, along with the people of the village, played a crucial role in India’s birth of freedom from colonial rule. They sacrificed a lot for this freedom. They used to settle disputes before. That is how the Seva Dal activists gained new hegemony in the course of our struggle for freedom. They went to jail several times in the course of their confrontation with the Daroga.

After Independence, in a village dispute, all three got embroiled in settling a dispute as before. They assumed that they had power and their own freedom fighters were presiding over the new nation-state. Yet, they were surprised by the same Daroga-babu appearing in the village to arrest the doctor for meddling in Daroga’s jurisdiction, thus symbolically ending the role of the freedom fighters’ in the nation-state’s new legitimation process. No wonder, the Seva Dal office in Delhi which played a very critical role in India’s freedom struggle soon discovered losing out its relevance with the transfer of power to the Indians. So, consequently whenever I saw this office in the 80s and 90s, I found it deserted and standing as a lone testimony to all that happened to our freedom struggle under the birth of nation-state presided by the Congress Party led by Jawaharlal Nehru. The Daroga-babus acquired new prominence in India’s nation-state and Seva Dal activist lost their pre-eminent status, as the novelist Renu recounts here. This happened at a time, when the nation-building process was yet to begin and Gandhi was no more with us to guide any further. With Gandhi’s death, the Seva Dal also died in so far as the nation-state was concerned. These two events are not unconnected.

A decade after the nation-state’s new legitimation process was unfolded, the cause of Renu was taken up by Jayaprakash Narayana in his famous critique of Rajniti of the nation-state. The nation-state attempts in paralyzing what JP calls Lokniti, and its principles of communitarian democracy. Though the Seva Dal was envisaged as an extension of services of the Congress Party during the freedom struggle, JP reinvents its “seva” spirit in the dynamics and processes of organizations among the communities in India and argues for planning from below as opposed to the planning from above as envisaged by the Westminster model of nation-state. This paper tries to show that JP’s critique is at once a double criticism of centralization drive and decentralization drive of planning process and explores a middle path, even though there are problems in his critique. His is also a critique of Westminster model of liberal democracy imposed from above by submerging a communitarian model of democracy as practised all over India in various phases of India’s history.

The paper identifies a debate between Jawaharlal Nehru and Jayaprakash, the former representing the liberal democratic model and the latter communitarian democracy. Their debate is symptomatic of a similar debate taking place in other parts of the third world countries even after more than 50 years of decolonization. There are two dominant views, one representing Nehru’s approach, the other articulating JP’s views. Now, in the World Bank’s policy guidelines, we see a reflection of this debate. The Bank argues how to accommodate community forms of governance in the donor-driven development through the medium of the nation-state. Its critics assume that this is a fundamentally mistaken view, for there are no other forms of governance than the community management, even though communities may be reinvented in modern times for their own management of resources. As and when you try to accommodate community forms within the state, you will face “implementation crisis”. This happens as the nation-state will be taking up such forms, without necessary reconstruction of its centralized or decentralized polity or without any attempt to reconstruct community forms of management. This paper tries to suggest that these two models of polity are binary opposites and thus there may be a need to argue for a new synthesis in governance by highlighting the case studies of donor-driven governance in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.