By Udeepta Chakravarty, 6/25/2023.

The Bihar movement (1974-1975) and the Emergency (1975-1977) have been studied substantially. This period was a turning point in Indian politics and has afterlives that still reverberate today. A youth movement broke out in the state of Bihar amidst severe political and economic stress and eventually became a movement to dissolve the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government ruling India at that time. In response to not just the movement but a conjuncture overdetermined by many crisis factors, the Indira Gandhi government declared an emergency, creating the first nationwide constitutional dictatorship in India.
Many capable and critical historical accounts have been produced about this period – perhaps the most comprehensive being Bipan Chandra’s In the Name of Democracy (2001) (Which was the first attempt at historically analyzing the relation between the two) and most recently Pratinav and Jaffrelot’s India’s First Dictatorship (2020), and Gyan Prakash’ Emergency Chronicles (2018). The latter two are mainly analyses of the cause and nature of the Emergency, and the Bihar movement has a presence in these texts as a cause. There is another genre of content on the Emergency and Bihar movement. These are from participants who experience both events from the front seat. For example, P.N. Dhar’s (head of Indira Gandhi’s secretariat) Indira which is both biographical and historical, and MG Devasthanam’s book JP Movement, Emergency, and India’s Second Freedom (2012). Devashayam was one of the rare bureaucrats who refused to budge to political pressure –and ultimately, he was the one to oversee JP Narayan’s treatment under arrest. Shorter Analytical studies of purely the Bihar movement is best done by Ghanshyam’s contemporaneous three-part series in Economy and Political Weekly.
The difficulty with such accounts and other interpretive analyses of the movement and the Emergency has been their obsession with personalities. Prakash is the one who tries to escape this trend, weaving together the lives of both minor and major figures, the executioners, and victims of the Emergency into a compelling narrative. But by and large, the two events – the Bihar movement and the Emergency are framed as a clash of two political personages – Jayaprakash Narayan or JP (the leader of the Bihar movement, also eponymously named the JP movement) and Indira Gandhi.
The temptation to study both events as a clash of two personalities is understandable. Indira Gandhi became, whether it was ever explicitly intended, the heir of Nehru. Her becoming the prime minister had fundamental effects on subsequent political development in India (geopolitically, economically, democratically, and in terms of Congress party politics itself). Gandhi became the PM in the 1971 general election with an overwhelming majority. The declaration of the Emergency in 1975 was definitively her decision, influenced, of course, by some advisors, primarily her son, Sanjay Gandhi. It was motivated by the real and imagined threats to her political authority.
The Bihar movement too, although initially spontaneous, acquired coherence and organizational sophistication only after JP became its leader. His involvement is crucial and cannot be dispensed with. JP himself has a remarkable political biography, and notwithstanding his overly moralizing, idealistic, and utopian political style, he remained a hugely popular political activist. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.” JP’s life is a kind of farcical tragedy. One gets the sense that he wanted to be the Gandhi of independent India – refusing to take political office but nonetheless being a kind of high counsel for those in power.
Like Gandhi, he abandoned and criticized party politics; like Gandhi, he was a grassroots organizer; and like Gandhi, the movement and party he shaped and led later relegated him and his ideas to the sidelines; and like Gandhi, he has become a mere empty symbol and icon for use by anyone and everyone. The movement he led called for a Total Revolution (Sampoorna Kranti) – the call at face value is a call for extra-legal extra-institutional revolutionary politics – it antagonized the Bihar Government, the Indian government, and the whole apparatus of the Indian state. Today, Sampoorna Kranti is the name of the state-owned Indian Railways “super” express train from Delhi to Patna (Bihar’s capital) in case one chooses not to fly into the Jayaprakash Narayan Airport of Patna. That’s the symbolic appropriation he has suffered.
JP’s own intellectual development is also complex and subject to controversy. The analyses of his political and social thought are either wholly sympathetic (Sugata Prasad and Bimal Prasad) or largely dismissive (Bipan Chandra). It is a difficult issue to deal with and would, of course, require serious and prolonged treatment. My own inclination is to suggest that there is a deep antinomy in his thought that emanates from his constant struggle to reconcile or productively mediate between a Marxian discourse of social analysis and a Gandhian discourse of ethico-political action. Much of the “wooly thinking” Bipan Chandra accuses JP of emerges from this tension between the two theoretical discourses JP was constantly negotiating with. Even though JP wrote a famous book – From Socialism to Sarvodaya where he explains his intellectual development and trajectory, claiming ultimately to renounce Marxism and adopt Gandhism – in his latter writings one always finds the presence of critical analyses of structures and institutions of a Marxian type, alongside a normative discourse of practice of the Gandhian type.
Regardless, to return to the main line of thinking, so far, the serious problem with studies of these events has been their understandable temptation to center on personalities.
My ambition in dealing with these events intellectually is to move away from a focus on these great, flawed, and complicated persons, and view them in relation to a field of politics where the category of the “people” – the undifferentiated, vague, but fundamental category of liberal democratic politics – became a site of contestation and struggles. My ambition is to see how “the people” as a layered ideological arena of conflicts over definition, representation, and material practice operates. One must thus view “the People” as an ideological staging ground for liberal democratic republican politics.
The theoretical ambition here is to write against Ernesto Laclau’s conception of populism as the construction of the “people” as a unified subject; I wish to instead examine the moments in which “the people” come under assault by the very parts of that people. I wish to focus on moments of dispute and non-identity as it unfolds in struggles between the state and its subjects.
Going beyond just the speeches and utterances of JP, how did concrete collectivities arise, claim, or challenge constructions of peoplehood in their material and symbolic practices (democratic and not) – of assemblies, councils, processions, and even popular violence? These have mostly been treated as insignificant in the literature that simply evaluates them from the perspective of success or failure. The Bihar movement included a whole range of creative activities and the establishment of a “parallel” people’s government (Janata Sarkars). Whether or not they brought about the “total revolution” JP wanted or were successful is not an interesting question. But what were their effects, and what did these mechanics reveal about the fraught category of the “people”?