Travails of the Socialist Movement in India:

A Historical Interrogation from the Birth to Demise

(1934-1977)

Academic Report
Major Research Project

UGC Approval
F.No. 5-202/2014 dated November 18, 2015

Rahul Ramagundam, PhD

Associate Professor/ Director
Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy
Jamia Milia Islamia
New Delhi-110025

1
 The Revolutionary Road
Birth and the demise of a political party and ideology

A Study of

The Socialist Party of India

UGC MRP
(2015-18)

Rahul Ramagundam
Jamia Millia Islamia
New Delhi

2
 The Revolutionary Road1
Birth and the demise of a political party and ideology
On the borders of present-day Bihar with Uttar Pradesh – in a plague-ridden, flood-prone region
that changed its geography as the river flowing through changed its course – Jayaprakash
Narayan was born: the village was Sitab-Diyara in Bihar’s Sahabaad district, and the year,
1902. He would become the star-campaigner of socialism in India. In 1920, a young
Jayaprakash dropped out of his Patna College in response to Gandhi’s call for boycotting
British-run educational institutions. Soon after this, he left for America to pursue self-financed
higher studies. Once there, he worked at various odd jobs to earn enough to support himself.
As his biographer tells us, Jayaprakash washed dishes and served food in restaurants, polished
floors and worked in boiler-rooms, coaling booths, barber shops etc. He cleaned toilets and
worked as a shoe-shine boy, hawked creams and lotions on streets. But the hardships did not
turn him into a tough or thick-skinned man. He retained his vulnerabilities, his mystique and,
worse, his wooliness. In 1929, after a seven-year hiatus, he returned to India a confirmed
Marxist, to find his wife Prabhavati Devi living in Gandhi’s ashram at Wardha, having taken a
vow of celibacy. This gave rise to a dichotomous situation that would weigh on him throughout
his political career and cause him to flounder repeatedly at the altar of ideology. When he went
to meet his wife at Wardha, he found himself gravitating towards Jawaharlal Nehru, who
happened to be there. He later wrote to the Mahatma that his ideas were ‘to a great extent
similar to’ Nehru’s, and asked if he could work with the latter.2 Gandhi consented, and Nehru
sent an invitation. Jayaprakash (or JP as he popularly came to be known) was offered a position
in the Labour Department of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at Allahabad. There
wasn’t much he could achieve there though, as it was a short-lived tenure, cut short by the
death of his mother when he resigned his position.3
But even in that short period, Jawaharlal showed remarkable hospitality towards the recruit. JP
had taken his wife along and rented a bungalow to house them. It became expensive for him,
living as he was on a salary paid from Congress funds.4 A concerned Jawaharlal invited JP and
his wife to stay at the Nehru ancestral home, Anand Bhavan. His acceptance within the Nehru
household showed the confidence, mutual admiration and friendship that had developed
between the two of them. Throughout their political interaction, even when disputes arose, their
friendship endured; in his letters and conversations, JP always addressed Jawaharlal Nehru as
Bhai and was among the very few who could do so. There was a third axis of Rammanohar
Lohia (1910–67) who too was a Jawaharlal protégé, joining the Congress Foreign Department

1
This particular phrase did not emerge ‘inspired’ from the recent Brad Pitt starrer Hollywood film of the same
name. Addressing the assembled socialists at Gaya in December 1967 as the Chairman of the Samyukta Socialist
Party, S M Joshi said, ‘The socialists were compelled to come out of the Congress immediately after freedom to
get ahead on the revolutionary road abandoned by the Congress’. S M Joshi, (Year not mentioned), Socialist
Quest For the Right Path, Bombay: Sindhu Publications Pvt. Ltd, Pp 66.
2
Letter to Mahatma Gandhi, January 11, 1930, Selected Works of JP, volume 1, p 41; The selected works of
Jayaprakash Narayan is a singular contribution of Dr Bimal Prasad and is published by the Nehru Museum and
Memorial Library. The volumes add much to our knowledge about both pre- and post-independence India’s
politics and intellectual ferment. The work though is marred by poor editorial and production qualities, irritating
typographical mistakes, and sub-standard translations.
3
Haridev Sharma, 2004, Jaiprakash awam Prabhavati, Delhi: NMML. Based on oral interview with the socialist
scholar Haridev Sharma in 1971.
4
Lakshmi Narain Lal, 1977, Jayaprakash: India’s Voice, India’s Soul, Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, p. 40.
3
and working with him for twelve long years before parting ways on the eve of independence.
All his life, after his return from Humboldt University in Germany, Lohia would be called
‘Doctor Saheb’ by his followers and colleagues; yet, truth be told, he never submitted a printed
copy of his thesis to the university and therefore was never awarded a degree.5 It is in the
context of Nehru’s relationship with Jayaprakash and Lohia that some suggest, not unfairly,
that the Congress Socialist Party which came into being in 1934 was incubated not in Patna or
Bombay, not even in Nasik Jail, as history books faithfully report, but at Allahabad, in Nehru’s
Anand Bhavan home.6 Throughout the freedom struggle, and even after, most of the veteran
socialist leaders remained deeply intertwined with Jawaharlal’s politics. They received their
politics as well as an ideology from him, and in their conception socialism was something that
Jawaharlal must put into practice when he came to rule India.7
Socialism is a beautiful word, so said Gandhi. The beauty of it had attracted India’s young,
educated and dynamic individuals as its ardent admirers in the days of the struggle for national
freedom. When the idea of a Socialist Party within the Indian National Congress was mooted,
however, a spate of critical voices was heard. When Acharya Narendra Dev, the venerable
teacher of Kashi Vidyapith and erudite Marxist scholar, whose face always wore a famished
look, sent a manifesto on behalf of the motley group of little-known young intellectuals who
called themselves members of the Congress Socialist Party to Gandhi for his comments, the
latter was bemused.8 Finding the ideas in the manifesto trite and unconvincing, the Mahatma
called it ‘intoxicating’, adding he feared all ‘intoxicants’. Socialism then was a competing idea
to divide-up national wealth to achieve the equitable distribution goal.9 The idea as such was
not a novel one. But how it was to be done was. The socialist way was to let the wealth produced
in society be owned by the state. Many in the Congress Party did not like this hankering after
socialism, as they thought it was not an indigenous idea. Sardar Patel saw an espousal of
socialism as a precursor to a split in the Congress itself. He said,‘socialism could not be brought
about by reading Lenin’ and asked the socialists to acquaint themselves with the reality of India
by ‘going to the peasant’. Then, the all-powerful Congress Working Committee (CWC) warned
the socialists against ‘loose talks’. S.K. Patil, by defeating whom George would don the mantle
of ‘giant-killer’, putting an end to the Congress veteran’s political career, said, rather
mockingly, ‘A Socialist Party within the Congress is a meaningless thing.’10 According to him,
the Congress was already socialist, and Gandhi and Nehru its most ardent exponents.
In response, an indignant Jayaprakash calling the Congress leadership ‘reactionary’ asked his
comrades to redouble efforts to ‘overthrow the leadership’.11 But despite the bluster, JP
recognised the threat to their nebulous organisation, that the Congress might just ‘drive us
out’.12 He was quick to defend the socialists against the insinuation of being ‘disruptionists’.
He lowered the pitch by declaring that their position was not that the Congress either accept
their creed or they leave. In a conciliatory note, he said, ‘we merely place our views before the
Congress and the country and, through the most proper and legitimate methods, expect to bring
the Congress to our point of view.’ Jayaprakash claimed that although they remained within
the Congress today, theirs was a venture for the future. ‘We shall go to the peasants’,

5
Haridev Sharma Papers, Correspondence with Humboldt University, October 8, 1982, NMML, New Delhi.
6
Interview with Arun Kumar Panibaba, Delhi.
7
Selected Works of JP, volume 2, p. 5.
8
Dr Sampurnanand (1890–1969), 1962, Memories and Reflections, Delhi: Asia Publishing House.
9
Bernard Shaw, Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Communism and Capitalism, ADD
10
‘S K Patil Article on the formation of the CSP’, Bombay Chronicle, August 10, 1934, Selected Works of JP,
volume 1, Appendix 6, p. 263.
11
Statement on Congress Working Committee Resolution, June 22, 1934, Selected Works of JP, volume 1, p. 65.
12
Letter to Syed Mahmud, July 20, 1934, Selected Works of JP, volume 1, p. 69.
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Jayaprakash responded to Patel with characteristic conviction, derived less from intemperate
youthfulness than from the belief in one’s ideological and moral superiority, a self-image that
remained with him till his last, ‘but we shall go to them not with a spinning wheel but with the
militant force of economic programme’.13 Claiming they were there to infuse ‘content’ into
India’s urge for freedom, Jayaprakash contended that the Congress had failed to adequately
link the freedom movement with the everyday economic struggles of the mass of Indians.14
Indicting the party, he said it had failed the workers and peasantry. Gandhi’s khadi was ‘totally
inadequate and incomplete’15 and its workers were completely unaware of ‘what an economic
approach to the peasant is’.16 Jayaprakash in the 1930s was too much of a Marxist to toe the
line of Gandhi. He was critical of Gandhi’s views on several matters. Without himself being
adequately informed of the Indian reality and being ideologically firm on Marxism, JP’s
criticism derived not just its content but also its language from Jawaharlal.
As Jawaharlal was the first among Gandhi’s close colleagues to raise disturbing questions on
his politics, he became a draw for young India.17 A new politics was waiting to be invented, to
interrogate internal socio-economic issues. This new politics had Jawaharlal at its fore. While
Jawaharlal maintained a public silence, the opposition to Gandhi orchestrated by the socialists
in 1934 mounted to an extent that the latter was forced to resign from the Congress. Gandhi, in
the view of Nehru and others of his ilk, was not ‘Socialist’ enough.18 If socialism was to take
roots, according to its advocates, not just Gandhi had to be reshaped – it was not a good idea,
after all, to jettison him completely, given his mass appeal – but the organisation – Indian
National Congress – of which he was the leader had to be captured as well. This was the first
left-wing challenge from within the Congress to his leadership; in their conception, Gandhi
was past his political expiry date. Hitherto, and later as well, the right-wing was unrelenting in
its opposition to him.
The Congress Socialist Party (CSP) was Nehru’s firing line in his ideological tussle with
Gandhi. In 1963, while outlining the history of the socialist movement in India, Lohia admitted
that having regarded Gandhi conservative and Nehru radical, the socialists had sided with the
latter.19 Without engendering many recriminations, one may safely assert that the options
before Gandhi were scarce. There were three categories of people to choose from: first, his
close followers like Vinoba Bhave, second, his political colleagues including J.B. Kripalani
and Rajendra Prasad, and third, those personally close to him but ideologically distanced,
which included JP. But Gandhi’s close followers were intellectually defunct. The 1948 post-
Gandhi meeting of Gandhians at Sewagram, the chronicle of which until recently was in the
custody of the Sarva Sewa Sangh, an organisation whose establishment was the outcome of
that meeting, amply proved the intellectual bankruptcy of the Gandhians.20 No one came
anywhere close to Nehru, who remained independent while yet accepting Gandhi’s leadership

13
Comment on Vallabhbhai Patel’s Speech at Bombay, July 18, 1934, Selected Works of JP, volume 1, p. 68.
14
‘Genesis of Congress Socialist Group: Reply to S K Patil, August 11 1934’, Selected Works of JP, volume 1,
pp. 73–7.
15
Speech in support of the resolution on a constructive programme of the Congress, September 16, 1934, Selected
Works of JP, volume 1 (1929–35), p. 78.
16
Presidential Address at the Bengal Congress Socialist Party Conference, Calcutta, September 21, 1935, Selected
Works of JP, volume I, p. 177.
17
Letter from Jawaharlal Nehru, January 11, 1928, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, volume 3, pp. 10–15.
18
Letter from Jawaharlal Nehru, January 11, 1928, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, volume 3, pp. 10–15.
See also, for a detailed discussion, Rahul Ramagundam, YEAR, Gandhi’s Khadi, particularly ‘Clothing the
Congress’ADD DETAILS.
19
Ram Manohar Lohia, 1969, Samajwadi Andolan Ka Itihas, Hyderabad: Samta Nyas.
20
YEAR, Gandhi Is Gone. Who Will Guide Us Now?: Nehru, Prasad, Azad, Vinoba, Kripalani, JP and Others
Introspect, edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, New Delhi: Permanent Black..
5
at convenience. The socialists’ relationship with both these top leaders of India’s national
liberation movement underwent perceptible change in later years. Although Gandhi would be
respectfully critical and differ with their viewpoint, Nehru would not hesitate either to mobilise
them under him or to castigate them for being reckless critics.
The socialists had to tackle the two most important political relationships that underpinned and
determined not just their genesis but also survival. To the Congress they were organisationally
bound, conceived and nurtured within the parent organisation, and to the Communist Party of
India (CPI) they owed an ideological kinship, both being Marxism-inspired. Seeing itself as a
Marxist party, the CSP competed with the communists for the ideological niche; and bound as
it was to the Congress, pitted itself against the parent for organisational space. The socialist
quest for power was so self-righteously founded that they stumbled on both these two
relationships that proved at first disorienting and eventually fatal. The serious flaw in their
relation with the Congress was misjudging the significance of their foster-mother. They forgot
what an advantage it was to have the Congress’s tacit tolerance and broad platform to their
socialist credo. And with the communists, who sometimes were the fellow-travellers on the
road to revolution and at others the repulsive agent provocateurs of an international conspiracy,
they proved as much opportunists as they accused the latter of being. The communists with the
Communist International and Moscow on their side proved more resourceful than them,
causing much heartburn. JP wrote to Subhas Bose in 1940, proposing a new left party as
‘Congress no longer remains an instrument for revolutionary action’. He asserted that the new
party would not be anti-Communist International as it ‘should indeed have contacts with
Moscow and seek the aid of the Soviet in our revolution’. He further said the CSP was to be
kept going merely as a cover to deflect Congress malevolence.21 The socialists’ overtures to
the communists, either for power-sharing or just electorally, remained ambiguous, driven as
they were from their frustration at having lost to the CPI in their bid to forge a relationship with
Moscow. Their antipathy turned vituperative after the ‘Quit India’ movement, which, if for the
socialists proved their nationalist credentials, established the communists as betrayers of the
nationalist cause.
The year 1948 began on a bad note for the socialists. Gandhi, who had ironically been emerging
in his last years as a bridge between them and the Congress, was murdered. Marginalised during
his lifetime and reduced to a larger-than-life Congress emblem, he died a perfect death.
Gandhi’s mortal disappearance changed the fortunes of the socialists. In 1946, after JP was
released from prison, Gandhi had proposed him for the Congress Presidency, an idea vetoed,
ironically, by Jawaharlal Nehru, who harped on divisions among the socialists.22 Their
revolutionary role in the ‘Quit India Movement’ had won them public acclaim. But despite this
and Gandhi’s advocacy, socialists – ‘Augusters’ they were then called – were denied positions
in the Congress hierarchy. Long accustomed to seeing Congress as a conservative bastion, they
refused to mellow down, and persisted with their characterisation of it being run by ‘ancient
people’ with ‘narrow, sectarian, static’ views.23 JP pitched for the organic assimilation of
socialists in the body-polity of the Congress to infuse a new life in ‘a machine that had stopped
running’. But in the scramble for power, an ageing leadership, as Rammanohar Lohia would
opine years later, spurned their overtures.24 Ceasing to be a movement, the Congress had

21
Jayaprakash Narayan to Subhas Chandra Bose, 1940, Selected Works of JP, volume ADD
22
Ram Manohar Lohia, 1969, Samajwadi Andolan Ka Itihas, Hyderabad: Samta Nyas.
23
‘Reorganise the Congress: Task for Leadership’, Selected Works of JP, volume 4 (1946–48), p. 7–10.
24
Ram Manohar Lohia in Guilty Men of India’s Partition DETAILS apportioned blame for the partition on the
ageing leadership.
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crystallised into a parliamentary party.25 Amending its constitution, debarring the dual
membership, it first forced the socialists to drop ‘Congress’ from their name, and, then, soon
after Gandhi’s death, ordered them to voluntarily dissolve or leave.26
So, in March 1948, a month after Gandhi’s murder, the Congress Socialists gathered at Nasik
to take a call on their ever quibbling, querulous relationship with the Congress.27 Fifteen years
before, in Nasik jail, the blueprint for a Socialist Party within the Congress was drafted. Now
was the time to sever that connection. There were apprehensions among the socialists about
life post-divorce. ‘Who will listen to us? Will we not get isolated and crushed?’ JP wondered.28
Nehru, at whose behest – and, as some old-timers have claimed, at whose home, once again –
the Congress Socialist announced their separation due to ‘ideological incompatibility’, kept his
silence at the development. If there would be anyone who drew political mileage from the
severance it was Nehru. He gained in the breakaway socialists a bulwark against his cabinet
colleague and Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, who had been at the receiving end of the
socialists’ political rhetoric since the beginning of their journey.29 Their first salvo after having
largely decided on separation from the Congress was against the Sardar, accusing him of being
lax about the Mahatma’s safety and lenient towards the RSS. The new party called itself the
Socialist Party and now aspired to replace the Congress as the party of government. Or else,
they would constitute ‘a democratic, free, fearless, and healthy opposition to the party in
power’.
Many years later, this decision to separate from the Congress would still be subjected to
scrutiny for its effect on the socialist movement in India; they argued over its necessity and
fretted about its correctness. This decision breathed life and gave a flying start to the new party,
but simultaneously it sapped it, raised doubts on its motivations, generated mutual distrust
among its adherents and gradually weakened it over the years, so much so that when it met its
end, it was a relief to everyone around, to its flag-carriers as well as to its pall-bearers. It was
truly a momentous decision; it would inspire and caution, in equal measure, a series of political
moves that would eventually end in the party’s rolling over into the history books. Now, it can
be said, safely perhaps and with impeccable historical hindsight, that the fate of the political
organisation, founded in 1934 and annihilated in 1977, was doomed at its very genesis. The
ideological choices that it made, the political trajectory it took, the power-games that it so
ambitiously unfolded, had just one end and that was its end. Of course, between what was
founded in 1934 and what went bust in 1977, two years before the death of its veteran leader
JP – in that sense, it was with JP that the party was born and died – there were a series of tragic
mishaps that define socialism in India.
***
In the general elections held in 1951–52, with a harvest of mere ten seats in the 497-strong
Parliament, the socialist dream of replacing the Congress came crashing down.30 But the defeat

25
Aruna Asaf Ali recalled that Nehru was not happy with the use of separate flag and manifesto by the Socialists
when they functioned still from inside the Congress. GNS Raghavan, 1999, Aruna Asaf Ali: A Compassionate
Radical, Delhi: National Book Trust. PLEASE MAKE STYLE CONSISTENT WHEN YOU USE INITIALS;
e,g. GNS OR G.N.S.
26
The prefix was dropped in 1946 at its convention at Kanpur; in February 1948, the AICC passed a resolution
debarring organisations carrying independent existence within the Congress.
27
Socialist Party, Report of the Sixth National Conference, Nasik, March 19–21, 1948.
28
Jayaprakash Narayan, 1948, Will the Socialists leave the Congress?
29
Asoka Mehta, YEAR, The Economic Cost of Sardar Patel, DETAILS
30
Asoka Mehta, August 1952, The Political Mind of India: An Analysis of the Results of the General Elections,
Bombay: A Socialist Party Publication.
7
was not electoral alone. With a powerful will, and after a healing gap of time, it could have
been reversed. However, not just the will went amiss, the desperation made them hard-hearted
and impatient. They found it easier to turn against each other. And they found it even easier to
propose a return to the parent body, the Congress.31 One man who violently opposed the
thought was Rammanohar Lohia. He rebuked the Party for the absence of a socialist doctrine
that was independent of Communism and Capitalism.32 In order to build a distinct identity for
the Party, he spoke of launching a perpetual struggle against injustice, whenever, wherever.
His vigour made colleagues look intellectually inept and politically naive. JP, the Party’s long-
serving general secretary, who since its foundation, had raised finances, established provincial
branches and chosen people, felt the barb when Lohia said organisations aren’t raised but they
evolve in the crucible of action.33 In response, he began to recoil from a Party he had spent a
lifetime building, ostensibly to engage with the new-age Sarvodaya movement, but actually to
bide revengefully to inflict wounds on it. He would ultimately have his revenge when some
twenty-five years later, he forced the socialists to merge into the Janata hotchpotch. It was a
pedicide that went largely unnoticed in the exigent times of its accomplishment.
In desperate confusion, when their bête noire the Communist Party of India, despite loads of
vilification, had won more seats, even while fighting on a far lesser number, the socialists went
for a quick-fix solution. They merged their party with another Congress break-away, the J.B.
Kripalani (1888–1982) led Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party, to have a consolidated strength of 19
members in Parliament and a new name, the Praja Socialist Party (PSP). Soon after, driven by
something as basic as the congenital birthmark, they got into a sort of dangerous involvement
that eroded the new Party’s viability and sounded, as it seems in hindsight, the beginning of its
end. It all began in February 1953, when at the top of the heap Jawaharlal Nehru invited JP for
‘cooperation at all levels’ dialogue. It was simply unbelievable why an all-conquering Prime
Minister would seek cooperation from a defeated outfit. A section of the socialists was enthused
at the invitation, whereas another section was equally dismayed. Led by Asoka Mehta, the
enthused section felt futility in continuing independently when Nehru at the helm was doing
all they had intended to. Led by Lohia, the dismayed section was aghast at those pining to
return home. Dissipated by indefiniteness, egotistic men turned quarrelsome and a loosened
djinn left them convulsions while Nehru relished their flapping death-wish.
This was vintage Nehruvian politics to which JP had willingly played on. The bluntness with
which he had retorted to Sardar Patel about going to the peasant ‘not with a spinning wheel,
but with a radical economic programme of transformation,' the impetuosity with which he had
told the Mahatma of his ‘inadequacy’, with the same reckless abandon JP now wrote Nehru to
accept a fourteen-point socialist programme if he desired cooperation.34 Nehru publicly
rescinded the dialogue, and for the socialists the damage was done. The loosened djinn whirred
more rapidly. Twenty years after he had found Gandhi uninspiring, doing the same odd job,
speaking the same language, JP admitted how false his discovery was. Twenty-five years after
this dialogue with Nehru, maybe to join his cabinet, JP would admit again how misplaced his
charter of prerequisites was: to implement them one would need a dictatorship, not democracy.
Although no tears were shed on the futility of the Nehru-JP talk, it left a lingering shadow on
intentions of interlocutors. Motivated by the chagrined egos of two men, Nehru and JP, their
talk was meant primarily to slight Lohia, who was actively stirring people’s struggles,
wherever, whenever, that embarrassed Nehru and annoyed colleagues. If the invitation to JP,

31
Edit: ‘A Political Slip’, Bombay Chronicle, April 28, 1951.
32
Report of the Special Convention, Panchmarhi, Madhya Pradesh, May 23–27, 1952.
33
Rammanohar Lohia’s Chairman’s Address, Report of the Special Convention, May 23–27, 1952, p. 153.
34
JP to Nehru, March 4, 1953, The Age of Hope, DETAILS pp. 376–84.
8
leaving Lohia out, was Nehru’s way of insulting Lohia, JP’s acceptance was to cut him down
to size. He found Lohia insufferable because of his ‘extraordinary vanity’.35 The access of the
three socialist leaders (JP, Lohia and Asoka Mehta) to Nehru was made plain thus: Asoka’s
was limited to Nehru’s study, JP’s to his dining hall, but the deepest access of them all was
availed of by Lohia who reached up to Nehru’s bedroom.36 Nehru and Lohia knew each other
more intimately than anyone else and the level of intimacy bred a matching contempt. Lohia
knew his colleagues as well. As early as July 1950, he had written to JP, ‘The way you have
begun to talk to different people about me is good for nobody, neither for you nor for me. If
you dislike me so much, keep your dislike to yourself. We are not children anymore, and we
have, after all, to stay together.’37
The socialists were now in a fratricidal war. In June that year, Asoka Mehta gave a theoretical
cover to the deep-seated urge to join the Congress, calling it a ‘political compulsion in a
backward economy’.38 It was a plain argument that what had earlier been said to sever from
the Congress was now turned upside down and became the new reason for rejoining. The
Congress that had repulsed them was now to be changed by uniting with it. ‘Reform of other
political parties should never become an aim of one’s political action,’ a livid Lohia said at a
specially called party conclave. Exactly a decade later, these very words would be returned to
him, but here when spoken they sounded convincing and made him heroic and dauntless. But
his words cast a dim shadow on JP’s integrity, and the cause was lost. Asoka Mehta faced so
much opposition from the rank and file for his pro-Congress thesis it would take him almost a
decade to muster the courage to finally cross over to the Congress.39 In July 1960, still waiting
in the wings, he would spearhead a central government employees’ nationwide general strike.
Prime Minister Nehru would look straight into his eyes across the aisle in Parliament and speak
deriding those ‘trying to ride a tiger when they cannot ride a donkey’.40 But the indictment
wouldn't restrain him from later worming his way into Nehru’s power circle. He became the
Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission and joined the Congress. Years later, turned out
of Indira Gandhi’s kitchen cabinet, he found himself in a camp he had always derided. It was
an ironical twist to his political career, which would end in bitter solitude.
Nehru was still not satiated. In January 1955, at the Congress Party’s 60th annual conference,
held at Avadi, he announced his aim of building a ‘socialistic pattern of society’.41 He had been
the Prime Minister for more than eight years now; still, the declaration made headlines. It was
a consolation in rhetoric but the anxious socialists took it as an actual concession. There was a
renewed clamour to join the Congress. From then on, it was an inexorable march to a point
where the Party's moral right to exist would no longer exist. The coalitionist termite would
relentlessly nibble at its inner core, making it lose its soul and paralyse its body. While the rest
of the Party got deceivingly embroiled in a false debate about who between the Congress and
the Communists was the greater enemy, a dauntless Lohia would liken the Communists to the
maggots that bred on the dung heap of the Congress. ‘To want to destroy that maggot without

35
Speech of Jayaprakash Narayan, Report of the Fifth National Conference of the Praja Socialist Party,
Bombay, November 5–9, 1959, pp. 44–57.
36
Interview with G.G. Parikh, Mumbai, October 29, 2017.
37
Rammanohar Lohia to JP, undated, but sometime before July 1950, The Age of Hope, p. 324.
38
Report of the Special Convention of the Praja Socialist Party, Betul, Madhya Pradesh, June 14-18, 1953.
39
Asoka Mehta’s arguments were based on Nehru’s statement announcing withdrawal from talks with JP. Age of
Hope
40
Jawaharlal Nehru, Resolution and Motion regarding Ordinance and Strike, Lok Sabha Debates, August 9,
1960, p. 1667.
41
‘Without a single voice of dissent, Congress pledge to make India wealthy and adopt a socialistic pattern of
economic development’, Bombay Chronicle, January 20, 1955.
9
wanting to demolish the dung heap is absurd.’42 He wanted the socialist energy focused on
wiping the Congress off the face of Indian politics. Soon, the socialist fraternal tension reached
boiling point. A series of conflicting views culminated in a cusp where its unity could no longer
be held. JP in a final salvo suspended Lohia from the Party.43 And, in Lohia’s evolving
conception, the only redemption was in the Party’s further diminution. He chipped away to
establish a new Socialist Party at Hyderabad in December 1955, and began a painful, slow
ascent to a vague and vagarious electoral success.
***
On June 18, 1963, from inside his prison cell in Nagpur Central Jail, George wrote a letter to
Madhu Limaye, informing how “Doctor has shocked me.”44 The “Doctor” referred to was Ram
Manohar Lohia (1910-1967), a PhD holder from Germany’s Heidelberg University.45 Lohia
presently was the founder-leader of the Socialist Party of India, founded in 1955 at Hyderabad.
What George wrote was a long letter describing in detail his disenchantment with “Doctor”
despite his enormous love and adoration for the leader. The cause of resentment, as George
wrote, was Lohia’s flinging “to the winds, principles for which we have sacrificed so much”.
In his letter, George suggested resignations from party’s national committee as “shock
treatment” to bring party in line, or as George wrote to Madhu, to actually bring the “Doctor”
in line.
A month ago, in a bye-election held in May, Lohia had won a parliamentary seat from
Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh. At the age of 54, he was the first-time member of the Lok Sabha.
It was a moment for which he was self-confessedly desperate for the last fifteen years. Lohia
had won a handsome victory against the Congress candidate by bringing about an opposition
unity from across the political spectrum. The idea, Lohia had reasoned, was to search for the
“areas of agreement” with parties in opposition without labelling them left or right.46 It meant
neither ‘the reactionary’ Jan Sangh nor the ‘anti-national’ communists were any longer pariah
to the socialists. Already, Lohia said, on the issues of national security and national language
their views matched coherently. He was prepared to forge alliance even with the Communist
Party describing it as “maggot that breeds on the Congress dung-heap”. His “quarrel”, Lohia
said, was with the Congress. “To want to destroy that maggot without wanting to demolish the
dung-heap is absurd.”47 It was the beginning of what came to be famously labelled as the non-
Congressism at the Calcutta convention of the Socialist Party in December 1963. Here, Lohia
had argued for a grand alliance with the parties across the ideological divide to defeat the
Congress.
The anti-Congress front was not a novel idea. It was borne out of the electoral reality of India.
The Congress was winning in spite of its performance and on less than a majority votes. The
successive elections that the Congress had won were more due to the division in opposition
votes. But Lohia’s party-men, including George and Limaye, were unhappy at what they called
“unprincipled” alliance building. In his letter to Madhu, George wrote, “I believe it’s time the
Socialist Party got wedded with an ideology which is more than just what Doctor says.” But

42
‘PSP-Red Clash of Views in Kerala/Vituperative Comment by Dr Lohia’, The Times of India, February 13,
1954.
43
A Praja Socialist Publication, 1955, Facts relating to Lohia’s attempt at disrupting the PSP.
44
Letter from George Fernandes to Madhu Limaye, June 18, 1963, from Nagpur central prison, George’s Archive,
1963
45
Indumati Kelkar,
46
Times of India, May 26, 1963,
47
‘PSP-Red Clash of Views in Kerala/Vituperative Comment by Dr. Lohia’, Times of India, February 13, 1954,
P11
10
even while George wrote – “I know the ideology is there” – he knew as well that “minus
Doctor” there was no party!
The idea that the Congress under Nehru was the political enemy number one for a political
party in opposition was not unequivocal. Nehru had successfully harangued a much harassed
nation to willy-nilly acquiesce to his notion that the Communism and Communalism presented
a greater threat to the idea of India. Lohia was an exception to the mesmerising spell of Nehru.
On August 16, two days after he took the oath of membership in the Lok Sabha, Lohia locked
himself into an altercation with the Prime Minister. He charged the government lacking in
strength of character in dealing with the Chinese invasion in October 1962. “It was not alone
the case of military unpreparedness”, he alleged. “The government lacked the will to take on
Chinese. What preparation the government is now doing to strengthen its character”, Lohia
asked. The Prime Minister Nehru was condescending and refused to answer the question
terming it “stupid”. An acerbic Lohia held, “The Prime Minister is a servant and the House the
Master. The servant should learn the proper way to talk to his Master”. Nehru was livid and
asked the Chair to intervene. “The Member”, Nehru said to the Speaker, “is crossing the limits.
Dr. Lohia is new to the parliamentary norms. He is talking things that are generally never
spoken in this House. He lacks manners. Please teach him how to behave here.” Not someone
to be bogged down by the stature of Nehru, Lohia retorted, “Now-onwards, Mr. Prime Minister,
please get used to my behaviour.”48 Lohia’s straight, irreverent, and extraordinary response left
Nehru stunned and speechless. Soon, the temperatures had begun to soar in the cool
deliberative body.
In 1963, Lohia was at the peak of his political career. He had finally arrived, after fifteen years
of desperate wandering, and he would not let a chance slip by in hitting at the Prime Minister.
The victory to the Lok Sabha had given him a happy and marauding mood. Quickly, in
association with J B Kripalani, he moved the first-ever no-confidence motion against the
Nehru-cabinet alleging an all-round failure of the government: “this is a barren government
based on ignorance that runs on empty, verbal sermonising”.49 Lohia’s speech was original,
devastatingly incisive and laid bare the inadequacy of the Nehru’s government in the face of
mounting national crisis. He talked of growing inequality, how mere fifty lakh of people have
fattened themselves at the cost of exclusion of 43.50 crore, how whereas 60% of the Indian
people subsist on mere 3 anna a day, the Prime Minister’s dog enjoys a luxury of 3 rupees per
day expenditure. Lohia questioned the socialist credentials of the Prime Minister and alleged it
was for a show. “He speaks of socialism, but in his hands, he has, not even capitalism, but
feudalism. In India, he wants to run a sham and corrupt socialism.” His assessment of the
Nehru’s regime was harsh: “The winds that have blown over the country for the past eighteen
years have been ill, very ill.” And then, Lohia added: “I am the only member in this parliament,
who, leaving the first few initial months of this government when I had nurtured some hope,
never in the last fifteen years ever had any confidence in it.”
For eighteen long years Lohia trained his gun steadfastly on Nehru. Many of his ideas were
erroneous at its foundational core and yet the sheer force of its eloquence, the courage and
conviction with which it was aired, the irreverent manner and the political timing of its airing
and the potential impact on the shape of the future all provided a great weight to his words and

48
Lok Sabha mein Lohia, 16 August, 1963
49
‘Motion of No-Confidence in the Council of Ministers’, August, 20-22, 1963, Fifth Session of the Parliament,
Lok Sabha Debates, Third Series, Volume XIX, 1963, New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat; Lohia’s speech on the
no-confidence motion on 21 August 1963 was a policy critic of the Nehru’s government; it showed Lohia’s grasp
over the fundamentals of the governance. Lok Sabha mein Lohia, 21 August 1963;

11
opinions. He was not what he himself had characterized much of the Indian political leadership
to be a “man of adjustment”. He was against the politics of consensus. He revelled in disturbing
the status-quo. His bristling attack on the Prime Minister sometimes went below the belt. Nehru
would poke fun, disregard or even insult Lohia at his audacity but the latter would be
unrelenting. Nehru also was the axis around which socialism in India in its various forms
evolved and got decimated.
1. Political Histories
The whole of socialist political trajectory in India is played out between three protagonists.
They are Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) and Ram Manohar Lohia. Rest of the
other leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, who influenced the socialists in so many ways,
remain peripheral to this cast of three main actors. Among themselves, Nehru, Jayaprakash and
Lohia lay the foundation of socialism in India, define its meanings, chart out its revolutionary
route and eventually also conspire, sadly, in its demise. The history of socialism in India is so
full of ironies. Sympathies it claimed to have of the toiling masses of India, and yet when its
history is interpreted it is almost always from the doings of its leaders. The political choices
and the ideological trajectories of a Jayaprakash or a Lohia almost overshadow its doings
among the masses. Each of these three individuals in their own unique ways influenced
George’s political evolution.
The star campaigner of the socialism in India was Jayaprakash Narayan (1902-1979). In 1920,
a young Jayaprakash had dropped out of his Patna College in response to Gandhi’s call for
boycotting the British supported educational institutions. But soon he left for America to pursue
a self-financed higher study. In 1929, when Jayaprakash returned to India, he was a confirmed
Marxist who found his wife, Prabhavati, living with Gandhi at his Ashram. This dichotomous
situation would weigh him down throughout his political career so much so that he would
repeatedly flounder at the altar of ideology. In 1929, when he went to meet his wife at Gandhi’s
ashram at Wardha, he met Jawaharlal, who, he found, was interested in him. Jayaprakash too
found his “ideas are to a great extent similar to” that of Nehru’s.50 Jayaprakash was soon invited
to work under Nehru’s leadership as Secretary to the Labour Research Department of the All-
India Congress Committee (AICC) at Allahabad. The Department was a brain-child of
Jawaharlal Nehru after he became the Congress President in December 1929. In his interview
to the socialist scholar Haridev Sharma in 1971, Jayaprakash admitted that there wasn’t much
he could do as the Secretary of the Labour Research Department.51 It was a short-lived tenure,
cut-short by the death of Jayaprakash’s mother, after which he resigned.
But Jawaharlal showed remarkable hospitality towards the new recruit. Jayaprakash was given
residence with in Nehru’s Anand Bhavan at Allahabad. They formed a mutual admiration club.
Throughout their political interaction, Jayaprakash continued to address Jawaharlal as Bhai.
Even when disputes arose, Jayaprakash maintained cordiality with Jawaharlal and addressed
him as Bhai in his letters and conversations. Together, Jawaharlal and Jayaprakash would shape
the destiny of socialism in India, in both ideological as well as institutional way. Since its
inception in 1934, Jayaprakash was the moving force and guiding light of the Socialist Party.
In organizational term, he became Party’s General Secretary and remained so till 1953. It was

50 Letter to Mahatma Gandhi, January 11, 1930, Selected Works of JP, volume I, P41; The selected works of
Jayaprakash Narayan is singular contribution of Dr. Bimal Prasad and Nehru Museum and Memorial Library. The
volumes add much to our knowledge about both pre- and post independence India’s politics and intellectual
ferment. The work though is marred by their poor production qualities and editorial mistakes. Irritating
typographical mistakes abound. Wherever translations from Hindi have been done, they are sub-standard as well
as fail to convey meanings due to grammatical and other mistakes.
51
Jaiprakash awam Prabhavati, NMML, 2004, Oral, Haridev Sharma,
12
therefore under his tutelage that the Party was established, its political trajectory planned and
major decisions affecting its course taken. There would be a third angle of Ram Manohar Lohia
who too in some way was a Jawaharlal protégé, joining latter’s Foreign Department and
working with him for twelve long years before parting ways.52
How could Jawaharlal, himself largely on move or in jail, locate two young men – handsome,
foreign-returned, multi-tongued, with no less a penchant for romantic liaisons, despite celibacy,
despite commitments – into his large, palatial house at Allahabad with abounding young
women remains little intriguing? It might be that Nehru household was always divided into two
halves, the traditional core and the modern public. But we have testimonies from the inhabitants
of the household itself that indicate at the twines often meeting.53 Whatever be the reason,
locating of Jayaprakash and Lohia within the shouting distance of Nehru household in
Allahabad showed the confidence and comradeship with which Jawaharlal saw his relationship
with the socialist duo.
It is in this context of Nehru’s relationship with Jayaprakash and Lohia that some suggest, not
unfairly though, that the Congress Socialist Party was first established not in Patna or Bombay,
or not even in Nasik Jail, as history books faithfully tell us, but was incubated at Allahabad,
inside Nehru’s Anand Bhavan home.54 Throughout the freedom struggle, and even after, most
of the socialists remained deeply intertwined with Jawaharlal’s politics. They received their
politics as well as ideology from him. Socialism was something in the conception of the young
socialists that Jawaharlal must do.55
Socialism is a beautiful word, so said Gandhi. The beauty of it, like all beautiful things,
attracted India’s young, educated and dynamic individuals as its ardent admirers while she was
in the midst of struggle for national freedom. In 1934, when the idea of a Socialist Party within
the Indian National Congress was mooted, it attracted the attention of the latter’s leadership. A
spate of critical voices was heard. When Acharya Narendra Dev, the venerable teacher of Kashi
Vidyapith, erudite Marxist scholar, who always wore a famished, emaciated look on his face,
sent Gandhi for his comment a manifesto on behalf of a motley group of little-known young-
intellectual Indians56, calling themselves the Congress Socialist Party, it left the latter bemused.
Finding the ideas expressed in the manifesto trite and unconvincing, the Mahatma called it
“intoxicating”, adding that he feared all “intoxicants”. Finding the ideas expressed in the
manifesto trite and unconvincing, Gandhi replied, ‘I fear all intoxicants’. It’s intriguing to note
that Gandhi’s harshest critics were also his ardent admirers. At a time when his friend Shastri
was writing to him ‘to leave Congress’, he had another set of advice-seekers who were
clamouring for his resignations. They were what Sampurnanad says ‘little known young
Indians’ claiming for themselves a honorific of being socialists. They accused him of sheltering
the right-wing within the Congress. He established Charkha Sangh and worked to spread its

52
In 1936, Lohia, came back from Germany, where he had gone to pursue his doctoral studies, and was
immediately invited by Jawaharlal to join him and was made Secretary of the Congress Foreign Department, in
which capacity he worked from within the precincts of Anand Bhawan, Nehru’s ancestral house, in Allahabad.
53
Rajen Nehru, wife of ICS officer and Jawahar’s first cousin, B K Nehru, in her reminiscences writes
54
Panibaba
55
JP, Volume 2; p 5
56
Dr Sampurnand (1890-1969), 1962, Memories and Reflections, Delhi: Asia Publishing House. Terming
foundation of the Congress Socialist Party as an ‘important chapter in Congress history, Sampurnand wrote in his
autobiography, ‘It did not come into existence on the sudden impulse of a group of comparatively unknown
youngmen who were dissatisfied with the older leaders, nor had Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru anything to do with it. He
tried to exploit it once or twice but, on the whole, his attitude towards it was one of amused contempt.’
13
wings. But Gandhi’s khadi even while serving its political interest had no takers in the
Congress.
Sardar Patel saw it a move that might split the Congress itself. He said “socialism could not be
brought about by reading Lenin or by discussions” and asked the socialists to acquaint
themselves with the reality of India by telling them “to go to the peasant”. Then, the all-
powerful Congress Working Committee (CWC) warned the socialists against indulging in
“loose talks”, while taking cognizance of the socialist design of nationalization of the means
of production.
In response to the CWC’s resolution, an indignant Jayaprakash called the Congress leadership
“reactionary” and asked his comrades to redouble the effort to “overthrow the leadership”. 57
But a real threat loomed large on their nebulous organization. Despite all that bluster,
Jayaprakash was worried that the Congress might put an end to their radicalism by resolving
to “drive us out”.58 Jayaprakash was quick to defend against the insinuation of them being the
“disruptionists” who might cause split in the Congress.59 He prudently lowered the pitch by
declaring that their position was not that of Congress either accept their creed or they leave. In
a conciliatory note, Jayaprakash wrote, “we merely place our views before the Congress and
the country and, through the most proper and legitimate methods, expect to bring the Congress
to our point of view.” Jayaprakash claimed that although inside the Congress today, theirs was
a venture in preparation for the future. “We shall go to the peasants”, Jayaprakash responded
to Patel with a characteristic conviction, derived less from the intemperate youthfulness than
from the belief in one’s ideological and moral superiority, a self-image that remains with
Jayaprakash till his death, “but we shall go to them not with a spinning wheel but with the
militant force of economic programme”. 60
S K Patil, by defeating whom in 1967 George would don the title of ‘giant-killer’ and put an
end to Patil’s political career, asked, rather mockingly, “What in God’s name is the cardinal
difference between the perspectives of the Congress on the one hand and those of the Socialist
Groups on the other? A Socialist Party within the Congress is a meaningless thing.”61 Patil was
mostly eager to repeat ad-vertium the charges put up by Sardar Patel.
In response to S K Patil’s jibe at them, Jayaprakash wrote a vigorous response, outlining why
they were needed in contemporary Indian politics.62 They were there to infuse “content” in
India’s urge for freedom. Congress, Jayaprakash contended, had failed to adequately link
India’s freedom movement with everyday economic struggles of the mass of Indians. In a more
direct way, Jayaprakash said, Congress had failed in addressing the concerns of workers and
peasantry. He said Gandhi’s khadi was “totally inadequate and incomplete” as a programme
intended for the achievement of independence63 and its workers were completely unaware of

57
Statement on Congress Working Committee Resolution, June 22, 1934, Selected Works of JP, volume I, P65
58
Letter to Syed Mahmud, July 20, 1934, Selected Works of JP, volume I, P69
59
Comment on Vallabhbhai Patel’s Speech at Bombay, July 18, 1934, Selected Works of JP, volume I, P68
60
Comment on Vallabhbhai Patel’s Speech at Bombay, July 18, 1934, Selected Works of JP, volume I, P68
61
‘S K Patil Article on the formation of the CSP’, Bombay Chronicle, August 10, 1934, in Bimal Prasad (Ed),
2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar; Appendix 6, p263;
patil then was general secretary, bombay congress
62
‘Genesis of Congress Socialist Group: Reply to S K Patil, August 11 1934’, in Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001,
Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar, p 73-77.
63
‘It is absurd to talk of khadi to the kisans of Gaya where the agrarian problems are well nigh appalling.’
Speech in support of the resolution on constructive programme of the Congress, September 16, 1934, in Bimal
Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar, p 78
14
“what an economic approach to the peasant is”.64 Jayaprakash in thirties was too much of a
Marxist to toe the line of Gandhi. In fact, keeping up with Nehruvian critique, Jayaprakash was
disdainful towards Gandhi’s pet khadi project. Without being adequately informed of the
Indian realities and being ideologically firm on Marxism, Jayaprakash, in all possibility, was
making a criticism that derived not just the content but also the language of the critique from
Jawaharlal.
An exasperated Jawaharlal in 1928 had vented against khadi by writing to Gandhi, ‘I do not
see how freedom is coming in its train.’65 Gandhi’s khadi work was ‘almost wholly divorced
from politics’. India’s ‘fundamental causes of poverty’, according to Jawaharlal, had remained
untouched by khadi. ‘You’, Jawaharlal accused Gandhi, ‘do not say a word against the semi-
feudal zamindari system which prevails in a great part of India or against the capitalist
exploitation of both the workers and the consumers.’ As Jawaharlal was the first among
Gandhi’s close colleagues to raise disturbing questions on his politics, the former became a
draw of the young India. Gandhi’s khadi even while serving its political interest had no takers
in the Congress. The Congress leadership, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel,
although supposedly charkha-pliers and khadi wearers, had no ambiguity towards Gandhi’s
khadi or other “old-man’s fads”. They just hated it lacking any ideological conviction in it.
They repeatedly poured scorn on it, ridiculed it, sabotaged it.66
It was not that economics was not part of Gandhi’s politics: the launching of the Salt Satyagraha
in 1930 was an ample proof for that; the ‘mute-millions’ and their ‘salt’ was now at the centre
of Gandhi’s politics. It is just that his politics being nationalistic to the core, Gandhi’s indicting
fingers for economic woes of Indians were largely pointed towards the British system. A new
politics was waiting to be invented, to be ready to interrogate internal socio-economic causes.
No political formation any longer could afford to talk of freedom from the bondage without
addressing the issue of widespread poverty and entrenched exclusion.
This new politics had Jawaharlal at its fore. While Jawaharlal maintained a public silence, the
socialists were in the forefront to oppose Gandhi’s move to make the habitual use of khadi as
a qualification for membership of elected Congress bodies, calling it discriminatory.67
Orchestrated by socialists, opposition to Gandhi in 1934 was so mounted that Gandhi was
forced to contemplate resignation from the Congress. This was the first left-wing challenge
from within the Congress to Gandhi’s leadership. Gandhi, in their conception, was past his
political expiry date. Hitherto, and even later, the right wing was unrelenting in opposition to
Gandhi.
Since his forced withdrawal from the Congress, Gandhi and Nehru waged a war of attrition
against each other; Gandhi to force Nehru to see through his eyes, and Nehru to flung Gandhi
aside in order to wield total ideological control over the Congress. Gandhi revived Gandhi
Sewa Sangh, a defunct organization first established in 1923 by Gandhi sympathisers in the
wake of suspension of the Non-Cooperation movement (1920-22). It had remained largely
dormant till Gandhi himself withdrew from the Congress in 1934. Its annual conventions were
independently held and so organized as to give rise rumours of rivalries between Gandhi and
Nehru. In Nehru’s ideological tussle with Gandhi, the Congress Socialist Party was Nehru’s

64
Presidential Address at the Bengal Congress Socialist Party Conference, Calcutta, September 21, 1935, in
Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar,
p 177
65
Letter from Jawaharlal Nehru, January 11, 1928, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, volume 3, P10-15
66
Gandhi’s Khadi, particularly the chapter ‘Clothing the Congress’
67
Letter to Secretary, Bihar Congress Socialist Party, January 2, 1935, in Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash
Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar, p 97
15
front against Gandhi’s Gandhi Sewa Sangh. If the Gandhi Sewa Sangh was Gandhi’s
organizational prop, the Congress Socialist Party was Nehru’s ideological wand, which he
wielded at his convenience but never to the detriment to his claim over the Congress itself. In
a speech outlining the history of the socialist movement in India, Lohia in 1963, admitted that
the socialists regarded Gandhi as conservative and Nehru as radical, and sided with the latter.68
But Gandhi was soon forced to disband the Gandhi Sewa Sangh, announcing perhaps his own
defeat.
Did Gandhi fear the Socialists or Nehru as to cave in so unceremoniously? The question needs
to be looked at from all round historical perspective. Without engendering much recrimination,
one could safely assert that the political options before Gandhi were very much scarce. There
were three categories of people to choose from: first, his close followers, second, the fellow-
political colleagues, and third, those personally close but ideologically distanced. Those
constituting the Gandhi Sewa Sangh were in the first category. But Gandhi’s close followers
were intellectually defunct. The 1948 post-Gandhi meeting of Gandhians at Sewagram, the
chronicle of which was till very recently in the custody of the Sarva Sewa Sangh, an
organization whose establishment was the outcome of the meeting, amply proves the
intellectual bankruptcy that had come to afflict the Gandhians.69 There was no one, including
Vinoba and Jayaprakash who had come anywhere near Nehru, who mainly constituted the
second category, independent and yet accepting Gandhi’s leadership at convenience. In the
third category were the Socialists who were in an ambiguous relationship with Gandhi,
disapproving ideologically while eulogising in their personal relationships with him. The
Socialists held Gandhi’s khadi in total contempt and disparaged it repeatedly. Established in
the wake of failure of the civil disobedience movement that was launched with the March to
Dandi, the CSP in its successive annual conventions, sometimes held alongside the Congress
annual sessions, rarely forgot to mention Nehru as their political mascot and ideological bacon
light. But the socialists’ relationship with both the top leaders of India’s national liberation
movement slowly underwent perceptible change. Although Gandhi would be respectfully
critical and differ, Nehru would not hesitate either to mobilise them under his umbrella or
castigate them for being reckless critics.
Now, it can be said, safely perhaps and with impeccable historical hindsight that the fate of the
political organization, founded in 1934 and annihilated in 1977, was doomed at its very genesis.
The ideological choices that it made, the political trajectory it took, the power-game that it so
ambitiously unfolded had just one end and that is its own end. Of course, between what was
founded in 1934 and what went bust in 1977, there is a series of tragic mishaps that define
socialism in India.
The Socialists had to tackle two most important political relationships that underpinned and
determined not just their genesis but also their survival. To the Congress they were
organizationally bound, having been conceived and nurtured within the parent-organization,
and to the Communist Party of India they owed ideological kinship, both, the Socialists and
the Communists, being Marxism inspired offshoots. As it saw itself as a Marxist party, it
competed with the Communist Party of India for the ideological niche. And bound as it was to
the Congress, it competed with the parent Congress for the organizational space and control.
Irony and tragedy moved in step as far as history of the socialist party is concerned. From its
very inception, while being in the Congress, whereas it regarded the Congress itself a

68
Lohia, ‘Samajwadi Andolan ka Itihas’, 1963
69
‘Gandhi Is Gone. Who Will Guide Us Now?: Nehru, Prasad, Azad, Vinoba, Kripalani, JP and Others
Introspect’, edited by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, New Delhi: Permamnet Black
16
conservative den, the Communist Party always held a temptation. While it grew holding the
hand of the Congress, its own hands were always eager to grasp the one of the Communist
Party.
The revolution in their conception could only come through state power. It dreamt openly of
seizing power, dislodging the Congress from the mass-consciousness, and displacing
established Congress politicians and occupying their positions. Their quest for power was so
obsessively founded on the self-righteousness that they made two daring ‘deviations’ before
independence that proved to be first disorienting and then, eventually, fatal. Their most serious
miscalculation was about their relationship with the Congress, the womb that nurtured them;
they, it seems could never properly gauge the implication of having Congress as their foster-
mother, in their search for ‘revolution’, in advocating their founding aim of ‘radicalizing’ the
Congress, they repeatedly spitted, shunned and ultimately, severed their relationship with the
Congress. Their second most adverse relationship tangle was with the Communists, who
sometimes were brothers-in-arms on the road to revolution and at others, the repulsive agent
provocateurs of the bigger, broader and baser international conspiracy. In their relationship
with the Congress, they forgot that what a strength it was to have the Congress’s tacit tolerance
and broad platform to advocate their socialist credentials. And, in their relationship with the
communists, they proved themselves as much an opportunist and conspiratorial as the latter-
group was accused of by them; it was just the matter of harnessing and mobilizing resources,
when one could cave into the other, and the Communists with Communist International and
the Moscow on their side proved themselves to possess more resources than the indigenous
revolutionaries, and hence cause of the Socialist frustration and anger against the Indian
Communist. JP himself writes to Netaji, in 1940, proposing establishment of a new left party
as ‘Congress no longer remains an instrument for revolutionary action’ and asserting that the
new party would not be anti-Communist International as it ‘should indeed have contacts with
Moscow and seek the aid of the Soviet in our revolution’. JP wrote Netaji inviting his
participation in the establishment of a new left party that would have a working alliance with
the Communist Party and the CSP within the Congress ‘may or may not be kept going merely
as a cover and platform for the new party and particularly to function within the Congress as
long as we consider it feasible to do so.’70 All through the period the Socialist overtures towards
Communist, either for power-share or just electorally remain ambiguous, driven as they were
from this frustration and anger at having lost to the Communist in their bid to establish
relationship with the CI. The socialist antipathy towards the Communists have been
vituperative, mostly owing to their role during the “Quit India” movement in 1942, which if
for the Socialists proved their nationalist credentials, established the Communists as the
betrayers of the nationalist cause. The Socialists in 1940s were trying to chalk out a programme
of action that was fundamentally independent of the Congress. It was from this crucible of
ideological churning that the CSP was born within the Congress. In 1936, when Congress
mulled over the issue of taking over the ministerial responsibilities, it would not let the
Congress accept it.
Nehru used the CSP to his advantage in his intra-party battles within the Congress but never
allowed it to emerge as an alternative to the Congress itself by lending his physical presence in

70 To Netaji, 1940: Congress being a chief instrument of political action – a multi-class front (with workers and
the national bourgeoisie constituting the extreme ends) against imperialism. The Congress indeed remains a borad-
based mass organization, but its leadership is more than ever concentrated in the hands of a coterie that is anti-
masses (anti-labour, anti-peasant, and even anti-democratic to some extent) and completely bourgeoisie in
ideology and sympathy.

17
it. He used the CSP’s ideological fidelity to him as a pawn in his larger battles to wield control
over the congress, but he never stood by the CSP in its hour of crisis or shielded it from attacks
of its ideological opponents within the Congress. For them Nehru was a radical, whereas
Gandhi was conservative. But in 1948, in the months soon after Gandhi’s assassination, when
the group’s radicalism came to be questioned within the Congress hierarchy, their supposed
saviour, Nehru, couldn’t muster courage to stand by them. They were forced to move out of
the Congress. It was this historical denouement, when they dropped Congress from their name
and took to build an independent political party called the Socialist Party, became not just a
cause of the birth of a political party but also was inherent in it the reasons for their demise.
Nehru had a vision and a charisma; unlike many Indian politicians, Nehru had an uncanny
understanding of power, too. With a famed family, foreign education, international jaunts,
coupled with jail terms and repeatedly expressed sentiments of being ideological indignant,
Nehru in the thirties was a people’s hero. It was perhaps the beginning of secular power being
attached with a personality of an individual. It would not be an exaggeration to note that Nehru
laid the foundation for such an articulation of power, whereby in one individual secular power
capable of delivering material goods came to rest and was given for canvassing. It was Nehru’s
consummation with the radical ideas on national struggle and economic organization of the
country that brought to fore a group of people with the ideological belief in socialism; not just
group’s birth but also its end was an outcome of Nehru’s politics. Piece by piece he chipped its
ideological plank, then poached on its adherents, and ultimately robbed it of its cadres and
leaders leaving it bare and prone to vicious cycle of fission and fusion. Since 1936, he was
emerging as the most significant politician on the Indian firmament. The Socialists fell prey to
Nehru’s carnivorous carnival.
Nehru who was even earlier seen by young left-leaning politicians as more radical in
comparison to Gandhi, came to be regarded as a font of progressive values, whereas Sardar
Patel was characterized as the epitome of Congress conservatism. Taking a cue from Professor
J M Keynes’s 1925 brochure called ‘The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill’, Asoka
Mehta in 1949 published a pamphlet titled ‘The Economic Consequences of Sardar Patel’71
wherein he tried to show how disastrous are the policies of Patel for India. Asoka conceded the
greatness of Patel in forging the Congress into a mighty instrument of power and in the
integration of the princely states into India. But at the same time, Asoka observed, the economic
policies pursued by the government are those of Patel, and ‘Sardar’s economic policies are
heading the country to disaster… Every single economic policy, pursued so far, by the Sardar
is wrongly conceived and wrongly oriented. Its consequences have already proved to be
destructive; the historic achievements of a politician of genius have been endangered by the
wrong economic pretentions. He must either reverse his policies or abdicate.’ The insinuation
was that even while Nehru headed the government, it was Sardar who was shaping the
government’s policy, not just the Home but even the Economics. This Asoka Mehta had a
chequered political career: a trade union leader of repute in Bombay, he had been the one in
the forefront of those socialists clamouring to break off from the parent Congress;
The second alternative was organizational power, which in some sense came to be identified
with Patel, who wielded organizational influence in the Congress. The third alternative of the
power in India was Gandhi with his moral stature and spiritual voice; he was the master to be
revered but seldom adhered to. In the democracy, while Gandhi’s moral power rapidly became

71
Asoka Mehta, Economic Consequences of Sardar Patel, Hyderabad: Chetna Prakashan, 1949

18
a relic in the race to development, Patel’s organizational strength, after his death if not in his
lifetime, was made to yield to Nehru’s individual centric concentration of secular power.
The new party would not be anti-Communist International as it ‘should indeed have contacts
with Mascow and seek the aid of the Soviet in our revolution’
One line from the letter of JP to Bose proposing formation of a new left party and also
establishment of favourable relationship with Moscow and the Communist International can
open a Pandora Box of hidden issues of Indian history.
Born of the womb of nineteenth century capitalism that had given rise to a system which
combined unparalleled material riches of a few with appalling human misery of majority,
socialism in twentieth century had suddenly become highly respectable.72 Written in 1883,
Bernard Shaw’s ‘An Unsocial Socialist – A Novel’ has a central character, a scion of super-
rich, who endeavoured to become a clumsy commoner to repent for his father’s ill-gotten and
idle wealth.73 Many of the bluest of the blue blooded became its earnest adherents and
advocates. The brewing revolt against the private ownership of the means of production had
capitulated and on its ashes had sprang forth a new tyranny controlled and mediated by an
omnipotent State.
In 1934, when the Socialist Party held its founding conference at Patna, it was a party within
the party; it was even called the Congress Socialist Party, which though had a separate
constitution of its own, had its umbilical cord firmly attached with the body-polity of the Indian
National Congress. In Nehru’s ideological tussle with Gandhi, the CSP was Nehru’s front
against Gandhi’s Gandhi Sewa Sangh, a body established by Gandhi sympathisers in the wake
of suspension of the Non-Cooperation movement (1920-22) but was a body that had remained
largely dormant till Gandhi himself withdrew from the Congress in 1934. Since his forced
withdrawal from the Congress, Gandhi and Nehru waged a war of attrition against each other,
Gandhi to force Nehru to see through his eyes, and Nehru to flung Gandhi aside in order to
wield total ideological control over the Congress. If the Gandhi Sewa Sangh was Gandhi’s
organizational prop, the CSP was Nehru’s ideological wand, which he wielded at his
convenience but never to the detriment to his claim over the Congress itself.
Unable to discipline the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru under the command of party, the
Congress President in 1948, J B Kripalani not only resigned from Congress Party’s Presidency
but eventually from its primary membership, too. Kripalani was not the first casualty to the
deity of discipline. There were others too, in fact a whole bunch of inconvenient political
ideologues, who when first established in 1934, the Socialists within the Congress, were called
‘ginger’ group, providing radicalism to the Congress conservatism. For them Nehru was a
radical, whereas Gandhi was conservative.
The history of the political formations around the ideology of socialism is murky,
presumptuous, and self-defeating. Since the 1930s, socialism had been gaining currency as an
ideology for Indian development. A group of youth, mostly foreign educated and inspired by
Marxian Socialism, nurturing a notion of better ‘theoretical grasp of the forces of our present
society’ than the Congress itself had, initiated formation of the Congress Socialist Party within
the parent Congress.74

72
‘The Old and the New’, editorial, The New Socialist, New Delhi: November 1957 (Inaugural Issue)
73
Shaw, Bernard, 1932, An Unsocial Socialist – A Novel, London: Constable and Company Limited
74
Statement on Party’s nature, Task and Programme, popularly called Meerut Thesis, adopted by the second
Annual Conference of the Congress Socialist Party, at Meerut, January 20, 1936, in Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001,
Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume Two (1936-39), New Delhi: Manohar
19
What are the evolutionary stages in the political trajectory of the Socialist Party? It began its
fledgling political career by constituting itself as a ‘ginger group’, a party within a party, to
radicalise the economic pronunciation of the Indian National Congress with the aim to foster a
‘socialist state’ in a post-independence scenario; mid-way, driven by greater claim not only to
pure ideology but also substantially to distended political image of the self, it severed its
umbilical cord, again only tenuously, from the foster mother-Congress by dropping its name
and foisting itself independently into the rumble-tumble of electioneering that suddenly
brought it down sourly depleted; grounded, and its ambition smithereened, soon, it began to
position itself a party of pre-eminence in ‘opposition’ to the monolith Congress of Nehru by
forging alliances, bringing about merger, and in consequence, changing its name; but as
negativity rarely has long-run steam and faced with a prospect of a merely crying hoarse,
confusion and impatience began to get better of itself bringing more confusion, more mutual
suspicion, further fissions, further depletion; and, then as the last gasping breath of the dying,
it rose brilliantly in the declining days of Nehru, propelled by Lohia’s indefatigable energy,
indomitable will, and the ‘fecundity’ of his mind, to provide a possibility of replacing a
diminishing Congress by forging parties ranged against the ruling party under the exigent
umbrella of the ‘non-Congressism’. By the time, George came to helm its political formation,
the Party had already lived its glorious days and slide had irredeemably begun. Why George
could not control it or whether he was equipped enough to handle the self-annihilating crisis in
the Party or if the Party afflicted with an in-built fault-lines that was destined to decimate it
into a painful death and a scattering of despair was at all amenable to recovery and good
electoral health are some riddles whose unravelling needs reasoned arguments and
dispassionate exploration.
The two great upheavals in Congress proved catastrophic for the ideological sustenance of the
other Indian political parties: the first great marker was ‘the Avadi Congress’ in 1953 where
the party took a left-leaning turn and proclaimed itself committed to build a ‘socialistic pattern’
in India, the second was the Great Split in the Congress in 1969 after a protracted war of
attrition between what was then called ‘syndicate’ meaning those state bosses and influential
politicians who wielded power in the Congress organization and ‘indicate’ meaning those who
veered close to and were loyal to young, charismatic Nehru scion, Indira Gandhi, mouthing
radical slogans and writing ‘stray thoughts’ on India’s economic turnaround. Both these great
upheavals left other parties into ideological confusion, brought organizational chaos upon
them, and decimated many parties in its wake. The Socialist Party suffered on account of both
these great changes in the Congress Party. In fact, it can safely be claimed, if the first marker,
i.e., the Avadi Congress of 1953 began the process of disintegration of the Socialist Party, the
second, i.e., the Great Spilt in the Congress decimated the Socialist Party, confirmedly,
decidedly, and for eternity. But the Socialist Party was not just the only one to suffer on the
account of twin upheavals in the Congress; the Communist Party of India too went through the
same cathartic changes and would have met the same fate that awaited the Socialist Party but
it escaped somehow to remain content with patches of influence due to its deep grassroots hold
in those limited areas. And take for instance, Swatantra Party, meaning ‘Freedom’, a party
headed by C Rajagopalachari, that got its founding impetus from the Avadi Congress and that
of its liquidation in the wake of the Great Split. The dilemma of the political parties, a dilemma
that sowed the seeds of self-annihilation, is best described by that maverick Marxist, EMS,
when he says,
To discover the causal factors that brought the end, it sometimes is imperative to look at the
immediate past rather than the hoary beginning. In 1970, Indira Gandhi riding the popularity
chart after she had engineered a split in her own party in order to unsaddle the syndicate and

20
had enunciated her ‘stray thoughts’ on the impending economic design calculated to eradicate
poverty, announced abolition of ‘privy-purses’ to the princes. It was a long-sustaining demand
of the Socialist. The award of privy-purses to the princes was seen by the Socialist Party as a
taint on the freedom. The announcement of abolition caught the Socialist Party off-guard. It
was a demand that established the Socialist Party’s socialistic credentials; it was a major
political demand in their election manifesto; it was an issue that was repeatedly brandished as
an evidence of ruling party’s pro-capitalist tilt; and suddenly, in one stroke, not just the wrong
was undone but Indira Gandhi – keeping alive the tradition set by her poaching, rapacious
father – robbed Socialist Party of its few remaining political rhetoric. It was a time when the
Socialist Party was in dilemma: to go with the splinter Congress group headed by syndicate
which was engaged in fratricidal battle with the Ruling Congress or support the Ruling
Congress on an issue that for long was their own demand. The career of the Socialist Party
unfortunately is replete with such self-debilitating dilemmas and each time it faced one such
dilemmas its options were few, right choice could have added to its halo and wrong choice was
sure to further erode its credibility;
Each of the Socialists unabashedly proved themselves to be the real representative of their own
class – the self-seeking middle-class. Once Aruna Asaf Ali left the Socialist Party crying
dilution of the Marxism after the Party had shunned closed, cadre-based membership and
embraced a –mass-based organizational structure, she had no qualms to call herself to be a
‘Nehru-Socialist’.
By 1955, having exhausted socialists on the ideological turf, he had now turned to bring an
exodus of party leaders and cadres into the Congress. His attempts unleashed an internecine
war among the Socialists and it suitably served Nehru’s purpose; he continued to stoke fire in
the house of Socialists. It was only the ‘fecundity’ of Lohia’s mind that recognised Nehru’s
carnivorous carnival. Socialist agenda was already hijacked by the Congress, now his
simmering charisma coupled with Socialist imbecility brought the Praja Socialist Party on the
threshold of self-annihilation. But for Lohia, Nehru’s design was a resounding success. Shorn
of any distinguishing ideological features, Lohia’s only option was to politically oppose Nehru
and Congress to nurture democracy and provide political choice to the Indian electorates.
Hitherto, the Socialists had only seen socialism through the class prism; they wanted to build
class organizations of workers, farmers or students and through those class organizations, their
idea was to usher in Socialism in India. They took initiative to build Hind Majdoor Sabha and
Hind Kisan Panchayat, although they hadn’t yet thought of ways and means to bring about
organization of landless labourers. But now, in the post split phase, Lohia was in search of a
new political constituency; his quest was to get a ‘vahan’, a carrier to put his political aims and
ambitions on. The search took many hues; it took a political shape of confronting Congress by
forging an alliance with the rest, evocatively called the non-Congressism; it took an electoral
hue of mobilizing the backward caste; it took the social philosophy of identifying with the
theory of creating special rather than equal opportunity for mending the social and economic
backwardness in India – it inaugurated a politics of caste rather than class.
Although, as many would say, Lohia was an indefatigable critic of the government and pointed
out many a glaring examples on the basis on which the government needed to be voted out,
there was no alternative in the critique of Lohia. There were enough pointers about the
extravagance of the Nehru government and difference between the life styles of the Prime
Minister and the common citizenry in Lohia but what was the alternative to all these was trifle
absent. He did point out the need to reduce the income difference by fixing not just the
minimum wages but also the maximum expenditure limits for individuals. Like the rest of his
socialist colleagues, Lohia was fond of propounding high-sounding thesis and theories.
21
The problem in the Indian socialist movement lay in its beginning, perhaps. Perhaps such a
competition played out for long proved to be depleting. It certainly imbued it with an
organizational as well as ideological insecurity. If it had people with brimming confidence, the
same people also had scepticism about their capabilities that ever made them look for crutches.
If it had people with courage, the same people also proved to be cowardly. They hinged their
fate on extraneous factors such as personalities other than their own. Each political move,
calculated to increase their strength, backfired and instead of augmenting eroded their strength.
Only Lohia provided a momentary respite from this killing scepticism, but soon after his death,
the respite was short-lived.
Despite their repeated rhetoric, ‘go to the peasants’ remained an unmet challenge for socialists
for a long time. At best, they could go to factories.
‘the borrowed ideology of socialism has been misused in establishing fascism’ ‘so-called
slogan of socialists to ‘March Forward” is nothing but hollow talk’
They were what Sampurnanad says ‘little known young Indians’ claiming for themselves a
honorific of being socialists.
When the Party held its founding conference at Patna in May 1934, it had the limited aim of
radicalizing the Congress from within.
Although, there is an acute dearth of critical history in India, the political activists have saved
the day by bringing about conspiracy theories from where we do receive inkling into history.
Academics being mostly state-sponsored, the theories from the street-smart political activists
are subversive and scandalous. One such history is about the formation of the Congress
Socialist Party.
Lohia who wrote a treatise titled ‘Guilty Man of India’s partition’ apportioned blame for the
political division of India on the aging leadership of the Congress. The aging leadership did
not comprise only of Nehru, Patel, Prasad or Azad but also the youthful expectants as JP, Asoka
Mehta, Aruna Asaf Ali, Lohia or who wanted to partake their share in the nation-building or
power-structure.
It’s all for people and society itself. If any ideology that goes against people’s lives must be
shunned.
JP in 1930 had everything: he had a western education, a wife who lived in Gandhi’s Ashram,
a job that was given to him by none other than Jawaharlal Nehru, a friend-circle that looked
upto him for leadership, and an ideology of Marxism to show off his progressive social and
economic outlook; in short, being a destiny’s child he was expected to deliver a lot. Yet, he
repeatedly faltered throughout his political career proving more of a wayward child of Indian
national movement than what he was destined to be;
He failed to accomplish his destiny, lost his track again and again, faltered repeatedly, and
ultimately is consigned into the history as a wayward child of Indian national movement. Again
and again power that he was seeking with so much passion came knocking at his door but he
scarcely had a grabbing sense; each time that power came knocking, his inadequacy was
glaring. He had an uncommon urge for power and also equally besotted he was to see its
slipping away. he proved himself to be inadequately equipped to know what use
Asoka Mehta, another significant figure in the socialist pantheon, achieved his political
eminence due to his organizational work amongst the factory workers in Bombay. The
metropolis of Bombay was made into a socialist stronghold solely due to their trade union work
among the workers of Bombay.
22
That Nehru’s regime was on a slow slide from its peak and was tottering at its seams was
evidenced not by the 72 members of the parliament (of 500+) who had signed the first-ever no-
confidence motion against it. The evidence was writ large in the defence of its satraps who had
smelled a kill in Nehru’s dying days. Morarji Desai, Nehru’s Finance Minister, soon to be axed
under the Kamaraj Plan, provided a defence of Nehru’s government that in guise was in fact
reiteration of attack on him. He brought on the floor of parliament some of Lohia’s most
pernicious and darkest comments on Nehru and thereby giving greater legitimacy to them as
well as an indication that Nehru was facing challenge to his succession plans.
‘Militancy merely for its own sake is a juvenile pastime. It may generate heat in some hearts
but it does not spread light in the minds of men. Professional law-breaking, like perennial law-
making, has no place in socialism.’75
The criticism against the PSP was that it was bound to always remain a junior partner in any
coalition formation it joins in. They can be ministers but never capture power. The PSP could
be a ladder through which one can aspire to become only an MLA, MP or at best a Minister.
Political expediency is the sole growth of socialist thought consideration of the PSP. The Party
can never think of reconstructing or rejuvenating the country.76
After breaking away from the PSP, when the size of party-slice that had been chipped by Lohia
was under contention, Lohia mooted the idea of a common code for political parties. Lohia
mooted the idea of evolving ‘a common code for political parties’ to reduce falsehood,
pretentions and deception and unreliability. For instances sources of funding of a political party
must be revealed as their account of expenditure. There are tall claims about the membership
of a party; there must be some mechanism to ascertain the truth, just the way there is ABC in
the media that keeps a tab over the circulation claims. Such a body however must never infringe
over the content of political activities. Political corruption is not just financial or nepotism but
delves down to selection of a member rejected by another party; political cross-over on the
floor of assembly, centralisation of decision making which reduces the role of district and
village level to merely carrying out of orders from above and reduces participation; he offered
to organise such a conference of political parties to evolve a code of conduct but only a few
smaller parties responded;77
After a thorough drubbing the Socialists received in the first General Election, while others
wavered, wilted or withdrew from active politics, Lohia was undaunted. ‘Live nations do not
wait for five years’, he had said addressing the students at the Delhi University, his words
laying not just a challenge but also raising the morals of the socialists while charting a future
course of action. Most of Lohia’s pictures show ‘his lips slightly twisted in a smile and his eyes
twinkling with affection, mischief, and a lot of challenge’78. Lohia’s colleagues lacked a
resolute will. Asoka Mehta who had called Nehru a pitiable defender of the rotten social order,
soon declared that India’s future was safe in Nehru’s hands.
Bearded, bespectacled, and intellectual looking Asoka Mehta took over the position of Deputy
Chairmanship under the besieged Nehru’s Congress government just a few months after the
Bhopal conference which had resolved to offer uncompromising opposition to the Congress.
Asoka who had led the PSP till Bhopal had handedover the baton of party leadership to S M
Joshi at Bhopal and turned into renegade and was expelled from the party. In return, Asoka,

75
Editorial: The Old and the New’, in the launch issue of ‘The New Socialist’, the journal edited by N G Goray,
November, 1957, Volume 1, No. 1;
76
‘Spotlight on Orissa Politics’, Mankind, August 1958,
77
A Common Code for Political Parties, Document, Mankind, August 1958,
78
Om Prakash Deepak, The Waywardness of History, Mankind, March, 1969,
23
the former Chairman of the PSP, that organ of opposition to the Congress, joined the Congress’
leaving the colleagues red-faced and open to much ridicule. Chandrasekhar was one of those
who left the PSP and joined the Congress in the wake of Asoka Mehta’s walk-over to the
Congress. But while certainly it weakened the PSP and dissipated a little the faith of the
common voters in the capacity of socialist parties to take up the challenge of the Congress, it
instead of triggering Congress-PSP consolidation kindled the hopes of Socialist Party-PSP
consolidation which after some initial hiccups led to the formation of a new socialist party in
the form of Samykta Socialist Party in June 1964. But undigested merger puked out at the very
founding conference of the SSP at Banaras, Rajanarayan’s forte. The party broke up again,
even before the taste of merger had been savored. The PSP delegates at the very conference
that had been called to ratify the merger, held a parallel conference, annulled the merger and
revived the PSP. Election commission restored ‘Hut’ symbol to the PSP, and SSP challenged
the award in the Supreme Court but there too it met with failure.
Why is that Socialists despite having captured national imagination since late thirties, and
placed much more favourably than the communists; having led the boisterous 42 movement
and thereby national gratitude; having JP or Lohia as an iconic intellectual-leaders; having
multiple state governments in late sixties as leading proponents of Samyukta Vidhayak Dal
governments; having taken many grassroots concerns, having some very grassroots agendas,
struggles, and having led struggles on the issues of governmental accountability, freedom and
liberty, did not have a lasting and uncontaminated control on the government? Why did they
require crutches of the RSS to stand on; during SVD governments, in 1977, in 1999? Can anti-
Congressism be so strong as to negate the negativity of the RSS? Socialists not only had an
economic programme that was close to Marxists but their nationalist ethos brought them close
to Jan Sangh/Hindu Maha Sabha.
The growth of socialist thought in India is almost absolutely a phenomenon of the twentieth
century, unlike the West, where pre-eminent socialist thinkers flourished in the nineteenth
century.79 In the popularization of socialist ideas the establishment of the Congress Socialist
Party in May 1934 is a landmark. The formation of the Congress Socialist Party in May 1934
was also an important forward step in the organizational development of socialism in India.80
The first all-India conference of socialists was held on May 17, 1934, at Patna under the
presidentship of Narendra Deva. Jai Prakash Narain was the main figure behind this party. He
was closely assisted by Achyut Patwardhan, Yusuf Meherally and Asoka Mehta. The socialists
played a heroic role in the 1942-Movement at a time when Communists and Royists were busy
harping hymns of hate against the Indian National Congress and condemning its leaders as
fascists. In March, 1948 the socialists decided to leave the Congress because the leadership of
the Congress forbade all inner groupings with that organization. They formed a new political
party Socialist Party by dropping the prefix of Congress. After 1952 general elections, the
Socialist Party and the J B Kripalani’s Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party (KMPP) merged to form
a new Praja Socialist Party. The consolidation of the Socialist forces brought about in 1953.
In 1959, the Indian Socialist Movement competed its twenty-fifth years of existence. Hari
Kishre Singh, author of the commemorative volume ‘A History of the Praja Socialist Party’,
wrote in his preface to the book, ‘The attempts of Socialist both in the realm of ideas and in the
field of action are fascinating. Since the Congress Socialist days they have tried to achieve a
synthesis of three epoch making ideas in the twentieth century – Marxism, Nationalism and

79
Mehta, Asoka, 1959, Democratic Socialism, Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan
80
V P Verma, 1967, Modern Indian Political Thought, Agra: Lakshmi Narain Agarwal
24
Social Democracy. Because of their active and organic association with the national movement
Gandhian methodology also made its impact on them.’81
Ram Manohar Lohia’s birth centenary was observed in the year 2010. The Opposition politics
in India has been an unexplored terrain, more so from the perspective of the marginalized and
the socially excluded. How have opposition parties and politicians debated the issues of
exclusion and discrimination in their manifestos, on the parliamentary floors and forums, and
in media is the concern of this project. The 50s and 60s had little space for the opposition
parties as Nehru’s mammoth personality straddled the decades with undisputed control over
the structures and institutions of power. The years soon after independence were also idealistic
decades so much so that even the opposition politicians instead of questioning the authority
and its action offered unquestioned allegiance to the government. The Socialist Party that had
its origin in 30s did not provide much ammunition against the then post-independence
government. Politicians such as Rammanohar Lohia or Acharya Kirpalani were few of those
politicians who could call a spade a spade and embarrass the government. The issues of
corruption in public dealings, of development direction, of planning for poverty eradication
were some of the issues that opposition politicians took up. Lohia gave a revolutionary call for
reserving fifty percent positions for women in the political parties. Lohia and his colleagues
took up issues of rights of construction workers, domestic workers, and the marginalized castes.
Since Lohia’s victory in the bye-election in 1963, the whole socialist politics got centred around
dislodging the Congress from its perch in Delhi. More the political power became the pursuit
of politics, more the Socialist Party came off ideologically, comrades fell off, Party got
increasingly shrunk, internecine battles became more intense and petty, unforgiving; its
political calculations became lame-duck that often came unstuck resulting in the dampening of
sheen and frittering of opportunities, and yet, miraculously, it retained not a vote-share though
but a space in the conscience of voters. Slowly, the party was reduced to an open house, where
none respected anyone, where individual egos so grandiose that collective became an
impossibility. Now, it was a race to retain a simple formal identity, a mere inconsequential
existence; it was reduced to a political non-entity, big-mouth, but just blabbering, heeded by
none; newspapers gave less and less space to the Party and more to the shenanigans of its
larger-than-life leaders; if the media covered anyone of their leaders, it was because of their
never-say-die approach. Defeated, Raj Narain began a campaign against the victorious Indira
Gandhi claiming chemical contamination of the ballot papers; defeated, Madhu Limaye, went
to fight the bye-election at Banka and won; defeated, George founded the Pratipaksh and
sweated day and night, to launch one of the largest labour strike in the world; they were all
desperadoes: with nothing left to stand on, individual glory was the only way for self-salvation,
political survival, and socialist deliverance. The decade of seventies was defined by them, it
belonged to them: they might not have held the reign of powers but they shook the powers that
be; they scarcely understood the power-game, had even less sense of what the power is or use
it could be mobilized for, but they were resolute, dangerously honest, courageous to the core,
and believers in their way. The more they pursued power, less they understood power’s power.
Lohia’s non-congressism was founded on a conception that gave negativity a political primacy
and a strategic urgency, dislodgement of a political party was its primary objective, in its
deepest recesses it lacked a constructive ideology; the Party, therefore, if mobilized all its
resources, all its faculties, and all its manoeuvrings it was towards the purpose of fulfilling a

81
Singh, Hari Kishore, 1959, A History Of The Praja Socialist Party (1934-59), Lucknow: Narndra Prakashan

25
negative objective, and when opportunity arrived, it was left with no conception, no ideology,
no energy to even conceive an idea to which begotten power could be harnessed.
As Devdat insists there never ever was a ‘movement’ in the name of socialism in the country;
there might have been some events, though. ‘Now, if you would like to join the dots and call it
a movement, then you are using your hindsight that skips facts.’82
JP himself had seen the Communist International to be the ‘fountain-head of revolution’.83
Writing in 1940, Subash Bose characterized Indian socialism as a dated ideology, practising
something that got expounded in Europe some sixty years before.
In the last 400 years or so there has occurred disconnect of mainland India from its northern
mountainous Himalayas. If British had not developed some summer-capitals and holyday-
abodes, no one would have bothered to notice the Himalayas and its geo-political locations.
Indians have no sympathy with happenings in Himalayas. Have no comprehension, no
knowledge, no concern. Despite Lohia’s involvement with issues like Nepal, Urvasim,
Manipur and Kashmir, JP’s truce-seeking intervention in Nagaland or on Tibet, the socialists
too lacked an understanding and a comprehension; their intervention was mostly sporadic and
forgotten after having made some hue and cry; there was no effort to build a bigger paradigm,
train cadres accordingly, and formulate national policies by deeper engagements.84
‘Look at the irony, we are advocating inclusion of China into United Nations, it’s the same
China that has attacked us, that has captured millions of acres of our sacred land. Don’t you
think it’s akin to a boy who is advocating marriage of his mother with her rapist? This is our
immoral foreign policy. There is a rebel son of India who are called Nagas. The government
bombarded their habitat. This government bombarded fleeing Portuguese in Goa. But the same
government held back its air-power against the advancing Chinese army. People say we are
enamoured by the world-peace. When someone asked our Ambassador in America why India
was not using its air-power, he answered saying that we feared retaliation by air from the
Chinese.’
Lohia asked evocatively, ‘If India is the most frequently invaded country in the world, what
are the reasons?’85 It was ingenious way of framing the question. No professional historians –
he called them ‘international playboys of history’ – of India, indigenous or foreign-bred, had
ever framed that question, or if framed found motivation or rigour to answer that. ‘Historicism
in this country has been essentially foreign. With the invader came chroniclers of events.’ They
have largely been justifiers of their own nation’s act in subjugating India. This kind of history
is meaningless. ‘The essential point of our history is successive succumbing of the native to
the foreign. It is precisely here that historicism in this country has been turned upside down.
What is actually the succumbing of the native to the foreign is interpreted as assimilation of
the foreign by the native.’ But the history has told us that accompanied with each foreign
invasion was not just assimilation but also the renaissance. ‘First, some marvellous capacity of
the people to absorb and assimilate conquerors and to change them into natives has been
detected. Secondly, each times that this happens, a flowering of culture and rebirth takes place.
Thirdly, such emotionally charged and pleasantly flavoured concepts as ‘synthesis’ and ‘unity
in diversity’ become peerless features of our people and historians’ trade-in-stock.’ He

82
Interview with Devdut, Pritish Nandy’s interview with Morarji in late 1980s when he makes a critical comment
on JP needs to be seen;
83
‘Interview to Press after meeting M N Roy’, December 5, 1936, in Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash
Narayan, Selected Works, Volume Two (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar, p 125.
84
Panibaba
85
Lohia, India’s Armed Forces II, March 1966
26
questioned the concept of synthesis, as the term denotes ‘coming together of that which has
been freely chosen in the new with the old that exists’; in the Indian situation, condition was
more of imposition than of synthesis; similarly, rebirth is more about ‘internal transformation’,
and not a result of outside action; ‘renewal has to take place within, through native forces, of
native design and native materials and resources’. ‘We must kill completely our capacity to
absorb and assimilate the conquerors. …Only an international playboy of history can describe
this vice of succumbing to forign invasions as the virtue of assimilation, synthesis and rebirth.’
‘No people so numerous as the Indian could ever have succumbed to a conqueror because of
what they had. The people suffered defeat because of what they did not have.’ Superior
weapons or deceitful ways do not explain the defeat. But something is lacking in our people.
What is that lack? It is not disunity or treachery. They existed everywhere and in every period.
‘When the people have been filled with a purpose, it has known how to master and root out
disunity or treachery.’ But sadly, in the last 1200 years, people in India have not existed at all.
‘In the last 1200 years, the people has not existed, at least in so far as armed struggles for the
mastery of the land are concerned. …Let every school boy know that not disunity among the
princes but the disinterest of the people has given successes to the conquerors. …The greatest
single item of this disinterest is without a doubt caste.’
‘we are determined to see that our revolution is worked out by methods which do not make use
of weapons. Partly this is due to the tradition we have inherited from Mahatma Gandhi. Partly,
it is due to our desire to achieve a revolution which perhaps may for the first time give us a
world whose parts are equal in strength and also where the common man is in a position to
wield power and exercise authority.’86
Lohia always spoke in a sexually surcharged language. He could harness such a language even
while expostulating on serious subjects. While speaking on Indian preparedness on Chinese
front, he said
‘Things which are quite obvious and which an ordinary man like me could visulaise with any
instrument, do not catch the eyes of the government and the intellectuals. The only reason is
the bent of their mind. Indian politics and public life are corrupt; for the government policies
are directed towards unrealistic modernisation of 40-50 lakhs of the population and the rest of
the 40 crores are just neglected.’87
Absence of desire to build an enduring ideological infrastructure among the socialists explains
their eventual decimation into caste centric political fragments. The slow take over of socialist
block by caste leaders.
What exactly are the political and economic implications of the ‘socialist pattern of society’,
the objective that the Congress set before itself at its Avadi session in 1955?
Personal Predilections
‘They simply were ordinary womanisers’. This is Arun Kumar Panibaba’s assessment of
socialist stalwarts. Shocking and audacious though, it cannot be ignored. He calls himself a
rug-laying party-worker. ‘I have massaged each one of their bodies. I have cooked Lohia’s
meal, massaged his tired legs, prepared his sleeping beds and readied the places of his public
meetings. I have personally served Kishan Patnaik.’ At 72, as a social scientist, Panibaba is
irreverent; he is a historian with a long-view. He has facts on tip of his tongue. His
interpretations are fresh, incisive and bold. It is quite unlike the professional historians in India.

86
Ram Manohar Lohia, Talk at Stanford University, August 17, 1951, (from Lohia and America Meet)
87
Ram Mnaohar Lohia, Statement to the Press on Water scarcity and simultaneous flooding in Bihar, Documents,
Mankind, August 1958,
27
They are mostly state-sponsored, archival, and careerist. Such faculty one acquires only when
one has critically lived through his times, engaged with events with feelings. Panibaba has been
a political worker, a journalist, a modern activist. He has lived many roles.
with ears well-grounded in Indian traditions. Himself a lifetime socialist worker, he is
embittered with socialist stalwarts.
They were ‘swyambhu’, standing in themselves, seemingly complete in themselves, with no
past or roots in this country’s historical, intellectual or social milieu.
In April-May 1958, Nehru’s statement on his desire to retire from politics stirred a political
nest, bringing out varied responses; JP was preparing to go to Europe and had met Nehru before
going, he too spoke that in a moment of emergency who knows what might happen and he
might be the leader of the socialist blocs inside and outside the Congress and might succeed
Nehru;88
Nehru could have broken the party; youth was with him; Gandhi and patel apprenhded such
eventuality; Nehru doesn’t have the brilliance of Lohia; Nehru and JP wrote long sentences,
wrote muddled stuff; Gandhi and Lohia also wrote in English but they wrote readable stuff.
Asoka had G dh cole & laski by heart. Vasanti Shroff, political worker of considerable means,
devoted to Asoka Mehta, when he got Rani Mahendra Kaur, maharani of some Punjab estate,
he abandoned the devoted Shroff; Asoka is not even good human being; when he came to
planning commission, she was with Nehru, one of Nehru widows, it used to take months to get
a turn with Nehru, she preferred Mehta when he became the deputy chairman of the planning
commission; sweepress vimla with uni and mehta’s house; children of vimla treated by Mehta
like his own were taken by Chandrasekhar for fun;
They neither had organizational basis nor ideological back-up but were a motley group of
idealist revolutionaries with undefined Marxist leanings; that idealism produced a
psychzophrenic personality that brought a divide between their private and public lives; jp had
a railway pass owing to his presidentship of the AIRF, led a very soft existence; no programme
for ideological training; it was an age of ideology, but they had no ideological infrastructure;
post bentham politics is dictated by ideological concerns;
M P Aiyer, PTI correspondent, with whose wife gf had a long term relationship; an ordinary
newsman with a bad English but a nose for being there at right place when the news was being
made, knew about their relationship; he did not object to their relationship; bina could be that
lady; aiyer was killed by haji mastan; They were all ordinary womanisers. There were
occasions when Prabhavati and JP had public spat on JP’s relationship with other women.
Achut Patwardhan’s sister is said to have a long-term serious relationship with JP which was
within the knowledge of her brother. Asoka Mehta’s relationship with Mr. Shroff’s wife was
within the knowledge of her husband. These people fought over women, and shared them
amongst themselves. Not just his politics was shallow but JP was a facile politician, having no
ideological maturity. JP’s reluctance at power-politics was simply a sham copy of Gandhian
sacrifice. Lohia’s relationship with PSV Raju’s wife was the cause of their divorce. Ram
Bahadur Rai would give details on Edwina and Nehru relationship; it began with Nehru when
a curtain was drawn on the private lives of the politicians; in 1948, after Edwina left India in
June, a lovelorn Nehru would write a letter to her almost on a daily basis; those letters have
been the basis of some salacious biography of Edwina and thrown light on her relationship with
Nehru; Maulana Azad has accused Nehru’s love for Edwina as reason for partition; Lohia
88
To retire or not to retire, Document, clippings from media reports on vacillation with in Nehru, JP and Congress,
Mankind, August 1958,
28
however has discounted the possibility and said that both Nehru and Patel had already decided
on partition for the sake of power rather than Nehru forsaking country’s unity for love of
Edwina; love might have occurred between them, and from all accounts Nehru and Edwina did
certainly share a serious relationship, but Nehru, according to Lohia, could never partition
country for love because he could never stoop to love. Husband did not object to their wife’s
relationship with gf or asoka or Lohia or jp. Rama Mitra’s book of letters from Lohia89
In 1947, when the constitution was being framed and its Preambles thought over, the final Draft
of the Constitution began with words ‘India that is Bharat’; a duality that is evident in the first
page of constitution gets in thirty years manifested into an expression of two Indias: one
privileged and another deprived. None of the political leaders of India, barring few exceptions
such as Gandhi, had ever lived in a village or had a conception of what the rural society
constituted of. Tagore who is so progressive in his art and expressions, was most backward in
his own personal life; as a 24 year old, he marries a 11 year old girl who delivers their first
child at the age of 13; both of his daughters were married off at very early, pre-pubescent age,
and died early; Tagore himself had visited a rural countryside only at the age of ten and that
too when his urban abode was afflicted with dengue; Nehru is representative of a big,
burgeoning lobby and therefore to extricate oneself from it is not an easy affair; JP’s wife
Prabhavati had to carry the prized silver-tea-set everywhere her husband went as he was fond
of drinking his beverage in style; JP is extremely soft personality and shows that he has no
hardy constitution that a socialist was supposed to have; Nehru-JP-Lohia all have royalty in
their sense and revel in it; the socialist howevermuch it might ridicule the aristocracy, it stills
deeply nurture a hope being a part of it; JP by virtue of being a President of AIRF had a first
class railway ticket with accompanying companion ticket free all his life;
16.09.2013; Interview with Kamlesh
As he read my first piece on 1963, Kamlesh commented some times in rage and at other times,
in mocking. In 1963, when I met Devdutt, he was working in WHO and was married to a
Christian, school-teacher.
In 1952, the government of India celebrated Buddh-Purnima’s 2500 anniversary in a big way;
Dalai Lama was invited to participate; the young Lama came with his advisers and a retinue to
attend the ceremonies. It was clear by 1952, that China would one attack Tibet and try to
establish its suzerainty over it. India is said to have advised the visiting Tibetan monk, who
carried both the spiritual as well as state mantle in his personality, to bring all those gold in
Tibet for the safe-keeping in India. In accordance, Tibetans brought 52 gold-laden mules from
Tibet via a secretive route. Whatever happened to all those gold-treasure? Is it with Tibetans,
still? Or is it with the Indian government’s safe-keeping? Or has been eaten away by the termite
of corruption and greed?
In 1963, in the aftermath of 62 Chinese skirmishes on the northern border, the Congress leaders
addressed big public meetings and asked people to donate their wealth to the cause of the Indian
security. Many Indian women gave away their gold ornaments on the pleadings of the
government leaders. Whatever happened to all those gold collected from the general public?
During the freedom struggle and also on other occasions, Indian people have liberally
contributed their wealth to the calls of the nation. But no account has been kept of those donated
gold items: where did they go? After the 1962 skirmish, when they attacked and we fled, the
Chinese did nothing, nor did we do anything.

89
Panibaba
29
During the tension with Chinese, three individuals, acting in unison, wrote an open letter to
Nehru. The individuals were L C Jain, Dharampal, and Roop Narayan (still living, located
somewhere across Yamuna, and old socialist, was a close associate of JP). All three were
immediately arrested. In response, JP wrote a letter to Nehru vouching for the nationalist
credential of all three and asking for their immediate release.
Ram Swaroop wrote two books: 1) Soviet Imperialism: How to stop it? 2) Communism and
Peasantry. Ram Swaroop mentions how collectivisation in Russia and China led to immense
hardship and created famine like situations and decimated millions.
In the folkloric mythology Lohia is said to have been smitten by Indira Gandhi from early on
and his attacks on her in later days –remember the jibe, ‘Gungi Gudia’ or even earlier of him
preferring her from others in succession war due to possibility of a ‘pretty-face’ donning the
front page of the newspapers every morning – was that of a jilted lover.
Kripalani’s Kisan Majdoor Praja Party had neither kisans nor majdoor but was a
conglomeration of those aspirants who were denied or could not avail the Congress nomination
in the first General Election. After all those big talks, the result of the election was not just
disheartening but also dampening. The Coming together of the Socialist Party and the KMPP
was an effort to get their combined parliamentary strength against imposing Congress total
look trifle respectable. Krpalani: ‘I see my country going down every day, day after day.’
If the purpose of quoting an adverse comment on Nehru was to provide a defence, Morarji not
just failed, he highlighted the attack thereby further embarrassing the leadership of Nehru. The
insinuation is not entirely unfair as Morarji was facing axe under the Kamaraj Plan and
therefore would have naturally been miffed as to adopt a tactical way to hit at Nehru by
highlighting most disparaging of remarks made by Lohia while outside the Parliament. Nehru’s
own reply, jaded and lacking in punch, to the motion was a dispirited defence of the attack on
his government.
After fifteen years of desperate wait, for the first time at the age of 53, he had just entered the
Lok Sabha, having defeated Dr. B V Keskar, in a bye-election from Farrukhabad. And what a
parliamentary debut it was.
‘It is an evidence of how a man with mere wordy enthusiasm could keep the people enthralled
for long. I have no personal enmity with the Prime Minister. My fight is simply on the issue of
morality.’90
‘if the British jailed me eight times, the Prime Minister of independent India too kept me in jail
for ten times. Still, I am ashamed that the nation has remained weakened and we have not been
able to do much for it. But the PM has no shame, of India’s weakness, of not been able to stand
before the Chinese, or of 27 crore people who live on the meagre three anna a day earning. …It
is due to the caste system that opportunities and merit have undergone a gradual and continuous
contraction. It has become so contracted that father becomes the head of government and the
daughter the head of people. If there is one person who is a kingpin of those gripped with a
caste and kinship affliction, it is the Prime Minister. Till the time you don’t give special
preferential opportunities to the 90% of the population comprising of women, dalits, adivasis,
backwards, and religious minorities, you would scarcely be able to clean the dirty water off the
country. Theory of Equal opportunities would not help, you have to adopt the theory of Special
Opportunity if you want to expand the scope of merit and opportunity for a larger section of
the population. …we have no resources, no money yet hundreds of people come to us

90
China is an ‘intervenist Dragon’
30
requesting us to facilitate their mundane work. This is true not just for those in the government
but even for those in opposition. Personal issues take so much of our attention that we have not
been able to pay serious attention to public issues. There is no doubt that we all have to sit
down and find some solution to this issue. …today, it is true that opposition is fragmented but
today the cement is little wet and loose, but mould is developing; its quite possible that in time
of one or two years, a possibility might emerge of a party that believes in national boundary as
it was on August 15, 1947 and another party whose boundary would be as on 8 September
1962. …This government is of national shame and it does not have any support of people.
As a member noted, in Nehru’s India, ‘Neither is their ‘mind free of fear’, nor is their ‘head
held high’.91 Other socialist members in Parliament vied in giving their own time to enable
Lohia’s speech continue in the parliament. Dirty language, uncivilized language, uncultured
language,
AICC meet at Patna, May 18, 19, 1934; prior to AICC meeting, on May 17, an All India
Conference of Socialist Congressmen was held at Patna, ‘to make united and organised efforts
for the promotion of the socialist cause’.
The socialists considered ‘creation of or participation in workers’ and peasants’ organizations
based on the demands of these classes’ were the only way by which revolutionary mass
movement could be developed.
The task is to so influence and change the Congress as to make it a real anti-imperialist body.
The CSP is a political party uniting on its platform all anti-imperialist elements and its task is
to lead such elements to the overthrow of British imperialism and the establishment in india of
a real swarj for the masses.
‘It is true that there ia hardly anything in the present programme of the Congress which is of
interest to us. (105)
Congress should be converted into an organization of the exploited classes of India which
forms the bulk of the population of the country. Accused of weakening the Congress, the CSP’s
national executive decided ‘that while giving up the stressing of Socialism as such on Congress
platforms we must vigorously propagate Socialism among Congressmen and others and build
up general sympathy and support for the movement.’ The committee not only attacked the
individual programmes of the Congress but the committee enjoined upon its members to avoid
use of harsh and unbecoming language. The object of the Party is to win over genuine
Congressmen particularly the rank and file to our views by propaganda and patient work till
the great majority of Congressmen become our supporters. (153)
It was presumptuous on the part of the socialists to regard their role in the national movement.
‘unity is a process, not an isolated incident’
In 1940, when Gandhi was still writing ‘I have not lost faith in Britain’92 and advocating
unconditional moral support to the British war effort, the SP position was clearly stated by JP
to be ‘The war is an imperialist war and Indians cannot fight for Britain in order that Britain
might hold their country more firmly down.’93 They refused to abide by the new Independence
Pledge that talked of reinforcing belief in the constructive work. JP wrote, doubting capacity
of khadi to remove poverty or win independence,

91
Buta Singh, Shiromani Akali Dal, Augsut 21, 1963, NCM, debate, p1891
92
Mahatma Gandhi, 1940, ‘The Dissentients’, Harijan, January 20, 1940, JP volume 3, Appendix 6
93
From JP to Provincial Secretaries and members CSP, December 31, 1939; vol 3
31
 ‘Any one who wants to rule Delhi, should go to her not as wooer but as her subduer (sic). The
Congress Party, which now rules Delhi, shifted its base from Allahabad only after it had made
sure of its possession of Delhi. The Communist and Praja Socialists have come to woo and not
to subdue, and they have already established their central offices in this town of diseased
elegance. They will not have won Delhi, but Delhi will have turned them into its drummers.’
94

13th August 1963: the day Lohia took oath of membership to the Lok Sabha, the first act of his
was to move an adjournment motion on the labour strike in Bombay.
Did George attend the foundation conference of the Socialist Party in 1955 at Hyderabad?
George’s dressing: till 1970. He used to wear bush-shirts with two breast pockets; after
marriage, Leila gave him a few stitched shirts. While in the government, George began to wear
kurta-pyjama and remained in the same dressing all through his life.
Madhu Limaye was a person who nurtured grievances; George was forgiving yet not the one
who shall forget.
Obituary writings on Lohia would give an insight into his works, life and politics. Edatata
Narayanan, Patriot’s editor, Aruna Asaf Ali’s boy friend, wrote an intimate obituary on Lohia
in Patriot. Needs to be seen. Narayanan’s pamphlet PSP: Monopoly’s Pawn (People’s
Publishing House, Bombay)
In India, when socialistic ideology and its adherents came to fore, it was already some forty
years behind its scheduled emergence in Europe. Bernard Shaw’s An UnSocialist Socialist was
first published in 1885. In India, stifled by colonial condition and necessity of liberation
struggle, socialism really picked up as an ideology when she turned into a republic. Lohia is
largely characterized by his friends and foes alike to be an iconoclast, irreverent, and in
perpetual opposition to authorities and ruling ideas, much like the central character in Shaw’s
book. Lohia has often been accused of picking up phrases and expressions from Shaw’s
writings to impress his Indian constituency. His most commonly quoted phrase on woman
speaks of force and betrayal as two emotions that must never be exercised on the fairer sex,
every other emotions or acts being forgiven, is also picked up from Shaw’s novel. Another of
Shaw’s text was his iconic Every Woman’s Guide to Capitalism, Socialism and Communism.
Lohia seems to have picked up ideas and phrases as well as smart one-liners from Guide. One
of his close observers noted much later that Lohia was ‘eclectic’ in his ideological construction;
he freely picked up strands of thoughts from whatever sources he could lay his mind on. His
writings on Indian mythology, particularly the one on ‘Ram, Shiv and Krishna’, are the brilliant
pieces of thoughtful writings.
In the first twenty-five years of its existence, the Socialist movement in India was characterized
by its relationship with Nehru; the ideology of the Socialists was the ideology of Nehru, and
Nehru’s own inspiration was the western developmental model and its achievements. Socialists
had no understanding of Indian village or its needs, none of them had ever ventured into India’s
village to learn about its unique problems or to ponder over them.
What is the ideology of the Socialists and how different that is different from Nehru’s? One
must look at the Party Platforms and Manifestoes that they have produced, both of PSP and SP.
The whole saga of internecine conflict within the socialist movement in India, suitably stoked
by Nehru, was determined mostly by their inability to resolve the question about hierarchical
primacy to be given between politics and economics. The eventual irrelevance of such
94
Ram Manohar Lohia, 1958, Dilli, also called, Delhi, Mankind, October 1958
32
preeminent scholar- politicians as Asoka Mehta or Narendra Dev is an outcome of their
misunderstanding that economics could be shorn of politics.
Pratipaksh paper came from General Paper supplier in Old Delhi; they
The man who has been quoted as having said ‘God and woman are the two purposes of life’
was political to the core and gave many an ideological bents to the Indian politics. If 1950s in
India is said to have belonged to Jawaharlal Nehru, the 60s belonged to Lohia for his sheer
political perseverance and cutting-edge ideological enunciations and the 70s, to three of his
most accomplished acolytes, Madhu Limaye, Raj Narain and George Fernandes, for their
capacity to unsettle the placid and live dangerously at the edge.
Born to a Marwari parents, Lohia never felt an insider in Indian politics, nor did the Indian
politics let him nurture such notions. Roma Mitra, his later day political companion and care-
giver, remembers Lohia telling her again and again how misfit he was in Indian politics.
‘Nothing is right with me – I have no state. My caste is wrong. What am I to do? You just can’t
fight your own election with the whole country as a base.’95 A man with virile intellect and
dynamic personality, Lohia repeatedly presented ideas and opinions that were much against the
current thoughts. In the Builders of the Modern India series, published by the Government of
India owned Publication Division, Ram Manohar Lohia does not figure. In Delhi’s iconic
Nehru Memorial Museum, where almost all the contemporaries and colleagues of Nehru find
their place, Lohia is singularly conspicuous by his absence. Despite the overwhelming bias in
favour of Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in the contemporary India, Lohia could not be wiped away
and is still acknowledged as not just a ‘fecund mind’ but a political leader of considerable
influence.
In 1934, he had joined some foreign-returned Indians and indigenous Marxists to found the
Congress Socialist Party, as a pressure group espousing radicalism within the Congress. The
Congress Socialist Party was always powerfully influenced by the personality and ideas of
Nehru.
Jan, February, 1966
Jan was restarted in February 1966. An article by Balkrishna Gupta on Congress Party made a
scathing attack on its achievements since independence and called the nation to get liberated
from the Congress rule. A formula he suggested for the opposition parties was to ensure that in
the forthcoming 1967 general election there was one to one fight between the Congress and
Opposition candidates. The theme was further elaborated in the editorial of Jan’s next issue
(March). The theme’s main strand was that eighteen years of uninterrupted rule by the Congress
had brought India to an all-round debilitation. It was mainly due to the absence of a credible
opposition party to the Congress in the Parliament; nor was there any possibility in the near-
future of emergence of one opposition party capable of facing the numerical majority of the
Congress in the Parliament. Four Opposition parties – Swatantra Party, Communist Party, Jan
Sangh, and the SSP – were more or less of equal strength but lagged far behind the Congress
in their individual strength. All the Opposition-run politics of agitation or people’s
mobilizations around issues of public interest was unable to translate into votes for opposition
parties. Electoral Politics was such that it would not in any near-future bring the capitulation
and expulsion of the Congress as a ruling party. The Congress government sustained itself on
mere 24 % of positive votes. It was a government of minority.

95
Roma Mitra, ‘His Last Months’, Mankind, March – April 1968,
33
Lohia spent a total of six years in British prisons during the fight for Indian independence, and
has been arrested about twenty times by the British, Portuguese, Nepalese, and Indian
governments. Lohia and his associates have been almost alone in applying Gandhian principles
of civil disobedience to correcting injustices in independent India. His emblems are the spade,
the prison, and the ballot, symbolizing constructive work projects, civil disobedience, and
electoral struggle against the status quo. In 1942, Lohia organized and led the underground
struggle against British rule; he inspired setting up of an underground radio. This resulted in
his imprisonment and torture in 1944 by the British in the notorious Lahore Fort. In 1949, soon
after the independence, Lohia’s first experience of being tear-gassed happened in Delhi while
demonstrating before the Nepalese embassy against the imprisonment of B P Koirala by the
Rana rulers of Nepal. Lohia was arrested and imprisoned by Nehru’s police for demonstrating
against a foreign government. Lohia was hurt. Two years ago they were comrades in arm,
Congress colleagues fighting against the British imperialists. Lohia wryly observed that even
violent revolutionaries had never acted against their former colleagues so soon. That arrest
would be a turning point in his relationship with Jawaharlal.96
The Communist Party of India got its tentative start in the year 1925.
Then the Socialists and how all of them were admirers of Nehru, reach out to their role as
underground revolutionaries in 1942, and how Nehru used them to have a cross with Sardar,
their split from the Congress and emergence of Lohia as an entity with remarkable
independence of thought and an intellectual par-excellence
The transformation of the Indian National Congress into a ‘purely parliamentary party’ while
being an inevitability in the constitutional democracy that the Republic of India had adopted
as its governing ethos was also seen as a betrayal of the aspirations aroused by the freedom
struggle. While the nationalist politicians saw the independence as an opportunity to lay the
foundations of self-rule, for those of the left leaning ideologies, the Communists and the
Socialists, it was an occasion to establish economic equality and social justice as the twin state
ideal.
After breaking away from the PSP, Lohia went ballistic against the Prime Minister Nehru,
questioning brazenly his claim to aristocracy, ‘extravagance’ or expenses incurred by the state
to secure his movements or pointing out the daily expenditure in maintaining a Prime
Ministerial poodle in contrast to the He accused the Prime Minister of being ‘the sanctimonious
humbug’ and ‘the chief source of waste, corruption and luxury in the country today. When a
man is himself the centre of such enormous pomp and corruption and luxury, he cannot inspire
others to act differently.’ His words largely went unreported and therefore he had to devise
means to reach out to the public domain. Lohia took to writing letters to the editors of
newspapers to bring about his views on various issues in public domain, knowing well that his
speeches would largely go unreported in the mainstream press. Although they were not Nehru-
phobic journals, in the absence of any other forums, Mankind and Jan, the twin journals
founded by Lohia in the aftermath of the founding of the Socialist Party, became the platforms
to express his political commentaries. He was desperate to enter into Parliament and mobilize
the parliamentary platform into an arsenal for people’s cause. ‘One man, if he is clear of mind
and clean of conduct, can put the Prime Minister and his colleagues, if they are dishonest, into
sweating fright.’97 Suddenly, even before Lohia could set his foot in the Parliament, Nehru’s
government already seemed to be scandal-ridden, porous,

96
Nehru’s letter to Sardar Patel on Lohia’s jail term
97
Lohia, Mankind, April 9, 1957, ‘Rs. 25,000/- A Day’
34
Calling for complete equality in primary schooling in the country, Lohia said, ‘A first act of a
socialist government would be to close all unequal schools like Dehradun.’
Followers of some strands of Marxism; but slowly distancing happens; although they were all
initiated into political activism through Marxism, slow disenchantment from it; Royists and
Trotskyites most of them, those with political ambitions, joined the Congress and the rest the
Socialist Party; George is g
Babulal Makheriya’s house in 1955 met Lohia for the first time; and George decided to join
Lohia’s group; Limaye, a 28 year young socialist ideologue, was behind George’s allegiance;
Limaye was much closer to JP and veered around Lohia as latter took to political retirement;
the relationship that Lohia shared with Babulal deteriorated after and Lohia took to other
residences during his visits to Bombay;
If you have bread and butter problem you can always come to us as dock workers’ union is
your mother organisation, George was told when conditions conspired to make George bid
farewell to the dockworkers’ union; by 1955, he was persona non-grata at dock-workers union;
in 1955, he inaugurated his own Bombay Municipal Workers’ Union and it is said, presented
a fait-accompli to d’Mello to accept the position of Chairman of the Union; in 1957, d’Mello
died a sudden death in Calcutta; it was said he was poisoned; George brought back d’Mello’s
mortal remains from Calcutta to Bombay where he was given a memorable send-off in a
massive workers’ procession
It was at the d’ Mello’s Condolence meeting at the BEST Union that Madhu in the absence
organized a clamour for George; the PSP was outwitted and for which it always felt embittered;
Discipline is logic of convenience. There is seldom a notion of mutuality in the demand of
discipline. Demand of discipline from others, possibly, only behoves those who are victors;
vanquished can only be disciplined, they have no right to demand its mutual adherence.
Discipline is twin-edged armour; it empowers those who demand its adherence while at the
same time it further reduces the self-esteem of those from whom adherence is demanded.
Discipline stifles dialogue and brings forth totalitarian tendencies inherent in those who
demand its adherence.
CGK Reddy, who was later to be named as an accused in Baroda Dynamite Case, and who had
remained a friend of Lohia since the first time they met in Calcutta in April, 1946, has only
admiration for Lohia. ‘It was from Dr. Lohia I acquired political perception, a spirit of enquiry
and the mental reservation against accepting anything without questioning.’ Lohia’s courage
of conviction and his determination to fight evil and injustice inspired CGK. ‘He was the
greatest political thinker that the country had produced after Gandhiji .’ Lohia made CGK to
see ‘dishonesty and chicanery’ of Jawaharlal Nehru, unravel his ‘vanity, pettiness and the
Machiavellian quality’, and in turn, CGK during his term as the member of the first Rajya
Sabha mounted an attack against Nehru and his policies.
‘The tide of patriotic fervour and moral idealism which swept the country with the launching
of the Civil Disobedience Movement on March 12, 1930, had, after a temporary wave caused
by Gandhi’s fast of September 1932, begun rapidly to ebb away. In the last days of April 1933,
Gandhi, shocked by increasing evidences of insincerity or moral lapses on the part of workers
engaged in Harijan service, decided to undertake a 21 days self-purificatory fast. It was an
announcement meant to rekindle the now-doused out zeal of reforms. On being released from
the prison at the commencement of the fast, he first suspended and later withdrew mass civil

35
disobedience and replaced it by individual civil disobedience. The withdrawal of the mass
struggle was an admission of failure.98
Pre-cessor and not predecessor as etymologically the latter stands for one who dies before, not
one who goes before…
A party that from its very inception demanded socialization of one thing or another so much so
that Girilal Jain/Sham Lal writing in Times of India quoted …announcing his annoyance with
nationalizing spree of the Indira Congress or its supporters in Communist and Socialist parties.
The same party could not socialize one of its own comrade Raj Narayan. N G Goray writing in
his editorial in Janata almost
1932-34: with the suspension of Satyagraha and advent of constitutionalism, frustration among
the nationalists and need to combat constitutionalism path made some young people to forge
the CSP
Between 1934 and 1946, anyone who wanted to be a member of the Congress Socialist Party
had to be a member of the Congress as well. At the Kanpur session in 1946, the CSP decided
to drop the word Congress from its name.
Report of the Sixth Annual Conference held at Kotwalnagar, Nasik, March 19th to March
21st, 1948; under the Chairmanship of Purshottam Trikamdas; General secretary:
Jaiprakash Narain; Joint Secretary: N G Gore;
In 1948, at Nasik, in whose jail the idea to establish a Socialist group within the Congress had
first cropped up during 1932-33 incarceration of the some of the young moving spirits of the
movement, the Socialists had gathered to take a call on their relationship with the Congress.
Those party people who had congregated there took the fateful decision to separate their group
from the mother umbrella organization and become an independent party. Many years later,
this one decision would still be subjected to scrutiny for its affect on the socialist movement in
India; the political participants would argue over its necessity or fret about its correctness; this
decision bequeathed life, brought energy, and gave a flying, ambitious start to a new party, but
time and again, simultaneously, it sapped its potential, raised doubts on its motivations,
generated mutual distrust among its adherents, and gradually weakened it so much that when
it met its end, it was a relief to everyone around, to its flag-carriers as well as to its depleting
sympathisers. It was truly a momentous decision; it would inspire or caution, in equal measures,
a series of political moves that would eventually end in the party’s rolling over into the history.
The Congress government arming themselves with Public Security Acts, declaring
indiscriminately the whole region under the Section 144 of the CPC
In contrast to the ‘totalitarian communism’ wherein everyone but the ruling party is
suppressed, wherein life, liberty and livelihood of the state-subjects is controlled and
commandeered – there is no such thing as independent of the bureaucracy in power which is
the sole determinant of all factors within or without the state – the ‘democratic socialism’
A group of leaders, however gingery that might be, had to now, after independence and after
their break-up with the Congress, transform itself into a mass-based party, to fight elections, to
be not just an alternative to the Congress but be the party in opposition.
The seventh annual conference – the first since breaking away from the parent Congress – of
the Socialist Party was held at Patna in March 1949.99 Fifteen years ago, in 1934, here at

98
Volume 55, CWMG; letter from Shastri and Nehru
99
Report of the Seventh Annual Conference of the Socialist Party, at Patna, between 6 – 10 March, 1949,
36
Patna itself, the Party had held its founding conference under the presidentship of Acharya
Narendra Dev. Now in 1949, a big crowd had gathered at Patna’s sprawling Gandhi Maidan to
welcome and witness the conference presided over again by Acharya Narendra Dev and
attended by a galaxy of Socialist leaders.
Presidential Address of Asoka Mehta to the Eighth National Conference of the Socialist
Party, Madras, July 1950
In July 1950, the Socialist Party held its eighth annual conference at Madras ‘in the shadow of
death’. Although, it was to be presided over by Yusuf Meherally, his sudden death on 2 July
cast a shadow over the meeting that was now presided over by Asoka Mehta. Yusuf Meherally,
in Mehta’s presidential words, was a leader with ‘mellow wisdom, natural kindliness and
organic dream-sure understanding’. Yusuf died young at the age of 47 (1903-1950). ‘To all
who visited Bombay’, Mehta gave vent to the general grief that the party colleagues felt,
‘Meherally’s sick-bed was the place of pilgrimage, and his frail body was the fount of
inspiration.’100
Asoka Mehta’s presidential speech at Madras in 1950 is a poetic delineation of socialism
almost akin to Nehru’s famous mid-night ‘tryst with destiny’ speech; it has the same ambitious
design, same abstract allurements, same flourish of language, it criss-crosses from universal to
particular and back, draws as much from mythologies as from ideologies, brings to fore Marx
as well as Gandhi with same eloquence, pays respect to each and all,
1952
‘A shadow has fallen over the party of socialism in our land’, began Lohia in his presidential
address to the special convention of the post-election Socialist Party at Pachmarhi in Madhya
Pradesh in May 1952.101 The first general election to the India’s parliament had brought bad
news for the socialists. They had been trounced beyond expectations. The choice of venue to
deliberate their rout and plan their future had some symbolic value. At Pachmarhi, as reminded
by the Chairman of the Reception Committee, ‘the Pandavas, driven away from their rightful
place in Bharat by the conspiratorial, deceitful and unjust acts of their adversaries, had repaired
and here they had stayed, deliberated, planned their future course of action, and made
preparations for the war of Kurukshetra, the war for justice and truth.’ Pachmarhi therefore
was an appropriate place to meet and dwell after the devastating defeat in the just concluded
first general election.
General Secretary’s Report
It was only after the independence that the party turned its attention to elections.
The Socialist Party was formed in 1934 but it continued to exist within the Congress as a group
rather than as a party with separate structure and identity till 1948, when the group decided to
drop its prefix of Congress and became an independent political party.
Bombay Municipal Corporation election in February 1948 in which it won 26 of 114 seats was
engineered by Asoka Mehta and that too against the wishes of the Congress bosses, the
Socialist Party fought independently and on its own. The intransigence was impelled by the
current mood in the Party to have its separate entity and identity.

100
Presidential Address of Asoka Mehta to the Eighth National Conference of the Socialist Party, Madras, July
1950
101
Report of the Special Convention held at Pachmarhi, MP, 23-27 May, 1952, presided over by Lohia as Party
Chairman in the absence of Acharya Narendra Dev, and Asoka Mehta was its General Secretary

37
But soon the Party requested its members who had won on the Congress ticket to resign as now
the party had an identity and structure, a constitution and a programme that was separate from
the Congress. The resignation led to the bye-elections and in which the same candidates who
had resigned were re-nominated as candidates of the Socialist Party. Most candidates, including
Naredra Dev, the Party Chairman lost their deposit. The electoral failure made ‘the Party
conscious, but only partly, of the relationship between electoral success and the method of
election’. Wherever the Party registered victory in bye-elections, they won due to the straight
fight with the Congress. ‘The complications of many parties and candidates in a constituency
did not emerge fully till the eve of the General Elections.’
The experience of elections, in the Party ranks, was markedly uneven. The Party went into
elections with calculations that were based on inflated estimation of the self and proportionate
under-estimation of strength of other contending parties. Jan Sangh which was a newly founded
political party that claimed to espouse and protect the Hindu causes and demands. The
Communists were there but were supposedly a discredited lot due to their role in post-war
Indian politics whereby they supported the allies against the national aspiration. But the newest
element was the Kisan Majdoor Praja Party, a conglomerate of breakaway Congress led by
Kripalani, who had resigned from the Congress due to his differences with Nehru. But the
Socialist Party was smug in its own popularity and the crowd its leaders attracted during the
public meetings. The Party failed to realize that there was no well organized alternative to the
Congress, and in such situation political parties might mushroom to diffuse the opposition vote.
‘Our electoral approach’, admitted Mehta, ‘lacked the quality of being many-pronged.’ The
Socialist Party, by fighting in the largest number of constituencies, next only to the Congress,
stretched its resources by initiating an extensive fight with the Congress. The electoral
agreements and alliances with other parties that it forged on the eve of election either came
unglued or became tainted by opportunistic considerations. Although the Socialists gathered
largest vote share next to the Congress, its position in terms of number of seats won came to
third; it won 12 seats while it put candidates for 255 Lok Sabha constituencies. Socialists lacked
core voters who could vote it to victory on minority vote in a multi-party contest. Socialists
also lacked pockets of strength which could give effective opposition to the Congress in a
constituency specific contest. One enduring conclusion out of 1951 General Election was that
given effective agreement among the parties contesting against the Congress would have given
the Socialist Party better results. The 1951 election was candidate-driven election where parties
pinned their labels on independent candidates who had already resolved to contest given the
fluid situation prevailing, and also to take benefit of the well-entrenched parochial and
primordial loyalties to the detriment of secular mobilization under party banners and
manifestoes. Feudal loyalties drew votes. Socialist Party suffered a massive blow to its stature
and most of its spokespersons were mauled badly by the electorates. The Party was exposed to
its organizational vulnerabilities. The General Election though provided an opportunity to
extend the influence of the Party widely and systematically.
‘The recent elections have undoubtedly imparted strength to the Congress Party. Over four
crores of voters have voted for it and its lease of power has been renewed with popular sanction.
The Congress has regained, to no small extent, its self-confidence, and it has a great opportunity
before it. Youth that never looked at the Congress in the past four years will change its attitude.
Disintegration of the Congress Party is unlikely in the near future. The Congress is however
unlikely to move towards socialism.’ (70)
Against the nationalist halo possessed by the Congress, and international advantage enjoyed
by the Communists, the Socialists had only their cause and their devotion to fall back upon. In
its initial days, soon after it came out of the Congress, organizationally not just it was weak but
38
the Party constituted of groups of active workers. In 1949, it threw open its door to mass
membership and invited collective affiliation of trade unions or peasant organizations. This
was done despite immense pressure from party leaders to maintain the Party’s exclusive nature.
Struggles intensive and stubborn undoubtedly change the climate of opinion.
In India, with her vast populations and limited resources of land and capital, economic
development cannot be on large scale patterns so dear to capitalist and Communist ideologies.
India’s progress lies through co-operation, small tools and devoted labour.
In India, freedom has to be a concomitant of bread, in a way its pre-requisite, and not its
alternative. There is no dichotomy between the urge for bread and desire for freedom
Lohia perhaps was the first political Indian to realize the emerging new contradiction between
the indigenous Indian state and the Indian people, a contradiction that most attempted to gloss
over in their expectation from the newly won independence or in their avowed admiration for
the leader of the government, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Lohia was a colourful personality; his love life was extremely riveting as well as pulsating; he
had a number of women as his consorts but none so important as to affect his politics or make
him jettison a busy public life for the bliss of a private home; Lohia never married but was
perpetually smitten by the feminine charm. Although, no record exits, word-of-mouth says that
Aruna Asaf Ali’s younger sister, Purnima Banerjee, a woman known for her ravishing beauty
was one of them. Purnima was married off early at the age of fourteen. When still in her teens,
the child-bride lost a child of hers, and she herself died young, when she was in early forties,
in May 1951. Separated from her husband, Purnima, in her short life, while being political,
worked for organizing women on a non-political basis.102 Celibacy, Lohia held, is a prison
house, and asked young men and women to revolt against such inane puerilities. ‘I believe’,
Lohia wrote in an essay titled ‘The two segregations of caste and sex’, ‘that spirituality is
absolute but morality is relative, and each age and even individual must discover a specific
morality.’103 In his conception, God and women were two real pursuits of men; all his
engagements, his passion, his achievements were for the realization of these two life-truth. He
held Draupdi – her unpredictable, angry and brooding nature and her dark skin, she with ‘five
husbands and a platonic affair or two in addition’, ‘a woman of ready wit and deep wisdom’ –
and not the chaste Savitri, so devoted to one man that she rekindles life in him after he had lost
it, or the fair Sita, to be the greatest embodiment of womanhood in the Indian mythology.104
Lohia’s lasting love was a woman named Illa Mitra, whom he rechristened as Rama, as he did
not like the Tamil connotation of Illa. Rama Mitra was a lecturer of English literature at Delhi’s
elite Miranda House, a college for women. Swaraj Kaushal who came close to Rama in her
later, post-retirement years, remembers her as a woman drinking expensive wine and venting
her frustration on Lohia’s memory for not giving her a child. She was with Lohia from 1948
onwards. Her first name was ILLA but Lohia insisted it to be changed into Rama as he didn’t
like its Tamil connotation. Sometimes when she would be angry, she would say that Lohia was
cruel to her. She had pleaded with him to give him a child at least but much to her agony he
would pull himself up just at the knick of the moment leaving her desperate. She died all of a
sudden, lonely, desolate and senile. In her last days, Kamlesh brought a senile Rama Mitra to

102
GNS Raghavan, 1999, Aruna Asaf Ali: A Compassionate Radical, Delhi: National Book Trust, p112
103
The two segregations of caste and sex, Collected Works of Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, Volume 2, He held two
segregations of caste and sex primarily responsible for the decline of Indian spirit. Lohia’s social philosophy
centred around eradication of three human-made inequalities, that based on caste, race and gender; their
eradication alone can establish a socialist social order, he would say.
104
Beauty and Skin Colour, Collected Works of Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, Volume 5, p145.
39
his own house and took care of her. Rama’s expensive taste in wine would still be procured by
Kamlesh. Rama in turn, imaginatively though, would accuse Kamlesh of gifting her expensive
and imported silk brassier to Gita Kapoor, an art-critic who regularly contributed her column
on art in Pratipaksh, when Kamlesh was its editor in early seventies.
It was in one of the evening parties thrown by Rama Mitra that George met Leila, a student of
Rama at Miranda House.
In 1950, in his presidential speech at Madras Socialist annual conference, Mehta had called
Lohia ‘the most fecund mind in our country’.
‘socialism of envy’, ‘equate socialism with sympathy’ ‘mutual jealousies and internal
antagonism’ ‘social particularism’ ‘climate of envy and insecurity’
Madras annual conference in July 1950 Presided over by Asoka Mehta said of him, was to
preside over the Madras Conference but died on its eve (2 July) paving way for Asoka.
The Allahabad Thesis that had sought to position the Party as one of ‘militant opposition’ was
being violated with an impunity by claiming areas of agreement with the Congress by Mehta.
Allahabad Thesis advocated the militant opposition line to the Congress rule headed by Nehru.
As Limaye put across, the basic question was: whether the party of socialism should function
as a constructive yet militant opposition or should become the ruling party’s pliant instrument?
Ghazipur: 2nd Annual Conference of the PSP (UP): held its meeting by defying the ‘National
Executive’s undemocratic and anti-socialist fiat’
The National Committee instead of resolving the ‘burning issues’ itself became a party in
dispute. A reign of suspensions was unleashed. Asoka Mehta who was bloating over the
emerging ‘new area of agreement’ between the PSP and the Congress was leading the pack.
The ‘new area of agreement’ was the Congress resolution on its determination to establish the
socialistic pattern of economy passed at its annual Avadi session held in 1954. The socialists
hadn’t received the Congress resolution on socialism with equanimity. They saw in it a sinister
design to destroy and decimate the Socialist Party and its leadership by appropriating their
agenda and subsequently by spreading confusion among the people at large. Limaye
characterized the Congress resolution as a ‘fraud to hoodwink the voters’, others said it was a
piece of ‘political dishonesty’, ‘a fraud’. Acharya Narendra Dev himself termed the resolution
a ‘mere myth’ and said that the Congress was ‘an ineffective instrument for Socialism’. But
Asoka was not swayed, instead he asked the PSP not to help in ‘scattering disbelief’ against
the Congress intentions on Socialism and ‘counter the forces of cynicism’.
First to face Asoka inspired wrath of the Party was Limaye; he was suspended by the Bombay
branch of the Party, itself a constitutionally incompetent body to undertake such a dictate. Then,
the UP branch, after its request to ‘reconsider or rescind’ the suspension order against Limaye
was turned down by the National Committee, invited Limaye to inaugurate its annual
conference. The National Committee reprimanded the UP branch by disbanding its executive
and replacing it by a nominated, ad-hoc committee of its own. It banned the Conference itself.
Most party members did see through the ‘game’. Jagdish Shah, a Party activist from Amritsar,
published a pamphlet and in that after enumerating various acts of indiscipline by various other
members and yet the Party taking no cognizance of those violations, asked if action on
suspensions raised a fundamental question about the party’s role. “Is party a mere
parliamentary opposition, always waiting for a smile of the Prime Minister or a Party of the
people ever ready to pounce upon the enemies of the people, ever ready to defend the interests

40
of the have-nots and prepared to uproot the vested interest of the Congress.”105 Madhu Limaye
repeated the charge when in his inaugural address to the disbanded UP branch annual
conference he said the questions is not whether the PSP in its present form survives or not, but
it is of more vital nature. The question is: ‘Whether the Party of Socialism should function as
a constructive yet militant opposition or should become the ruling party’s pliant instrument?’
Lohia was of the opinion that suspensions and bans, if not defied, ‘will help ruin outward
democracy by destroying internal democracy of political parties’. The PSP leaders offered
coalition when the Congress had just asked for cooperation.
‘pro-Congress temper’ in the party, ‘Every Constituency committee must meet debate and pass
resolutions. This will be powerful beginning towards people’s participation in politics.’

Lohia: ‘Parliament has become an old harridan ever waiting on the smile of its prince-
charming, the Prime Minister. Unemployment, ejectment, price disparities and injustices, are
there but nothing rouses a people’s movement. No political party prepares a national struggle
against injustice. Individual civil disobedience is discouraged. The PSP must become active on
all these fronts of parliamentary opposition, people’s movement, mass struggle and individual
civil disobedience, before it can be called an opposition party of an effective parry’.

‘What after all is discipline?’ asked Gopal Narayan Saxena in his presidential address at the
disbanded UP Branch Annual Conference. Saxena was disciplined by an executive order of
suspension for his agreeing to preside over a conference that was inaugurated by another
suspended party member, Madhu Limaye. ‘It is an instrument to build up an organization for
the furtherance of an idea or is it a weapon for the perpetuation of authority and the silencing
of dissident voices. I should like to state that in relation to political parties discipline has both
a positive and a negative aspect. In the positive sphere it means the execution of acts designed
to achieve one’s objective. In the negative sphere, it means the non-doing of acts which are
likely to help other parties against one’s own. These tests should now enable one to find out
the real offenders of discipline in the PSP.’ It was a matter of internal democracy within a
political party in India. As for the role of opposition party, ‘All opposition parties keep mum
in relation to the big problems and criticise the Government on minor issues. That keeps up the
appearance of opposition but achieves the substance of friendship. I want the PSP not to keep
mum in parliament and assemblies over the big question but to kick up such a din in relation
to unemployment, falling agricultural prices, curtailment of civil liberties and the like that that
the people as well as the government sit up and take note.’ How can a party whose legislators
are tied up with the ruling party raise issues of people’s misery and aspirations in the
Parliament? The wedding of the ‘socialist intellect’ with the ‘congress power’ that some party
members earnestly desire can merely place few hundred party leaders in various legislatures
but ‘Are we a party of two hundred or so leaders, perhaps eminently able, whose talents are
still unused or are we a people’s party out to change the face of India?’. The nature of answer
to the question raised by Saxena was also an indication of whether Socialist Party in India
would survive mercenary and monopolistic tendencies of the Congress or would submerge its
identity into the Congress.
Preventive detention, restrictions on trade unionism, indiscriminate implementation of the
section 144 to stifle the voice of protest, Defence of India Rules,

105
Jagdish Shah, Socialism Paralysed, Amritsar: Socialist Publication
41
Manipur, Goa struggle led by Lohia only saw the Party Executives adopting a line of public
denunciation of those engaged in those struggles,
Limaye harped on the fact that under Nehru, the state was heading towards totalitarianism, and
economy towards centralization,
‘There has been a split in the party and our ranks have been thinned to a certain extent in
consequence’, the erudite scholar of Marxism Acharya Narendra Dev began his presidential
speech at Gaya on December 26, 1955.106 It was the second national conference of the Praja
Socialist Party. Three years after the foundation of the party, if it lay comatose, Dev said it was
due to the ‘growth of indiscipline in our ranks’ that he had tried to purge. His first urge was to
displace the blame on ‘them’, then recall the history of splits in the Congress but ‘it overcame
all obstacles, rose again and became much stronger than before’ and thereby implying that the
PSP would see the same phoenix like ascension in the near future . He was constrained enough
to act, ‘I found that there was a calculated move by a small group to capture the party by
disruptionist tactics or to break it if these tactics did not succeed’. Soon, in keeping with Dev’s
attitude of ‘blame-displacement’, the PSP published a polemical tract titled ‘Facts relating to
Lohia’s attempt at disrupting the PSP’107 as if to convince itself and its cadre of its precipitating
action. Expulsion orders came in swiftly and in scandalous magnitude; not just individuals
were expelled but units after state units were either disbanded or suspended and sought to be
replaced by ad-hoc committees pliable to the central command structure.
There were oblique references to Lohia and his anti-government criticism or his emphasis on
struggle component of the political activity. Decrying the need for ‘wholesale denunciation’ of
the government as a pastime the PSP can no longer profitably afford, Dev asked for
‘enlightened criticism’ of the governmental measures. He asked his comrades to remember that
a nation-wide struggle cannot be started ‘at our bidding’. ‘Revolutions are not made to order.’
Opportunities emerge out of people’s seething discontent. ‘Wisdom lies in not missing
opportunities and in making preparations for taking advantage of them when they come.’ Both
his points of the need for ‘enlightened criticism’ of the government and to wait for
revolutionary moment to spring forth were twin responses to Lohia’s challenge. Lohia not only
believed in unambiguous attack on Nehru’s government but also in fomenting discontent and
stoking the festering sores. Dev in defending his actions that had precipitated a self-debilitating
split in the PSP was in fact laying bare the basic, fundamental cause of painful separation.108

106
Presidential address by Acharya Narendra Deva to the Second National Conference of the Praja Socialist Party,
Gaya, December, 1955
107
Facts relating to Lohia’s attempt at disrupting the PSP, A Praja Socialist Publication, 1955
108
‘Parliamentary work, struggle and constructive work are all important and each should be assigned its due
place in our programme. Wholesale denunciation of the Government is a pastime in which we can no longer
engage ourselves with any profit. Only a critical study of Government measures will enable us to make enlightened
criticism, which alone can make an impression both on the Government and the public.
‘Struggles against injustice are an integral part of our programme. …But it is well to remember that a nation-wide
struggle cannot be started with a light heart and at our bidding. Revolutions are not made to order. There is a tide
in the affairs of men, but one does not know when it will come. When minor struggles are waged throughout the
country with more or less success, when people seethe with discontent and their tempers run high they are
indications that a major struggle is in the sight, but even then none can say with certainty that the tide will surely
come. Wisdom lies in not missing opportunities and in making preparations for taking advantage of them when
they come.’ Presidential address by Acharya Narendra Deva to the Second National Conference of the Praja
Socialist Party, Gaya, December, 1955, p11

42
In 1942, after the call for ‘Quit India’ to the British rulers was made at Bombay on 8 August,
Socialists displayed a kind of militancy not associated with Gandhi led freedom movement. In
fact, soon after his release from jail, in 1945, and even during his jail-term, Gandhi had
Economic Equality, Right to protest against erosion of Civil Liberties,
Resolutions – National Executive, Bombay, January 10, 11, 12 & 13, 1948; ‘Will the
Socialist leave the Congress?’ by Jayaprakash Narayan, Bombay: Socialist Party
National Executive Meeting, Bombay, concern over Gandhi’s fast; JP’s article on continuing
dilemma;
‘Will the Socialists leave the Congress and form an opposition party, or will they merely talk
about it and never make up their mind?...indecision…vacillation of the Socialists…the issue
is: can we build up a socialist India by remaining within the Congress or by working outside
it? In other words, can the Congress be made an instrument of Socialism? To others issue would
be: of national survival and of building up a powerful State and a prosperous country. Sardar
Patel: ‘disparaged isms, and denounced the parrot cries of socialism’; Socialists: ‘in building
up the national State and the new India a consideration of isms is essential: we believe on the
basis of socialism alone is it possible to build up a strong and prosperous India. When Sardar
Patel decries socialism, he is defending the status quo, and is saying that his ism, namely,
status-quo-ism, is superior to all others.
Can the Congress become an instrument of socialism? Many contradictory trends and forces
within the Congress, the Socialists, the Constructive Gandhians, the social-democrats, Nehru,
Azad, Gandhi and other forces together could succeed in taking the Country towards socialism.
But there are others who have no faith in Congress to be the vehicle for socialism. ‘And for
some of us whose love and admiration for mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru are not
circumscribed by Marxian dogmas or the Party line, it was, and is, not an easy task to disregard
their advice.’ So, socialists carried on…
If socialists are to continue to work within the Congress in the hope of converting it, they cannot
run with the hare and hunt with the hound. In that case we must disband our party and cease
functioning as a body parallel to the Congress or conflicts would accumulate and they would
defeat the very purpose of remaining in the Congress, i.e., the conversion of the Congress. The
Constituion Committee of the Congress, as reported in the press, already seems to have
recommended that no one who is a member of another political party should be allowed to join
the Congress. We must be in the congress as congressmen; at most as an ideological group, but
not function as members of an independent party…this sort of arrangement worked when we
were fighting together for freedom but not any more…The Socialist Party can not dissolve
itself until it is sure that the Congress would fulfil the task of socialism. This surety it is
impossible to have at present.

Mahabaleshwar Tracts, No. 2; The Congress and other parties, Socialist Party
Ceasing to be a movement, the Congress with the achievement of its political objective of
independence has crystallized into a parliamentary party.
Kamla Devi, July 1949, Socialists “A Bunch of Reactionaries”? Reply to Pandit Nehru,
Hyderabad: Chetna Prakashan
Nehru had made a U-turn on the question of independent India joining the British
Commonwealth. In 1929, he had rejected the idea and had asked rhetorically by joining the

43
British Commonwealth, wouldn’t an Independent India ‘assist England in exploiting Egypt and
Africa?’ But the same Nehru in 1949 had taken a diametrically opposite line and had brought
India to formally join the British Commonwealth. Socialists took this as a betrayal and were
opposed to it. Lohia even termed it one of the four faultlines that tainted the face of the freedom,
the other three being partition, privy-purses allotted to princes signing accession treaties with
the Indian government, and …. Asked about Socialists criticism of his advocacy of
commonwealth, prompt came a spirited reply from Nehru: ‘Oh, the Socialists, they are bunch
of reactionaries.’ Nehru explained, ‘The Socialists are so tied up in the past that they cannot
see the present, much less the future…the problems of world may change but they only think
of those problems, in terms of a generation back…I find the Socialist Party is stuck in past
groves of thought and is unable to get out of itself. The biggest thing that has happened in the
world is the emergence of Asia and it is quite impossible for you to judge of this in some hard
and fast way, applying the same simple slogan which you might have used ten or fifteen years
ago.’109
Asoka Mehta, Economic Consequences of Sardar Patel, Hyderabad: Chetna Prakashan,
1949
Taking a cue from Professor J M Keynes’s 1925 brochure called ‘The Economic Consequences
of Mr. Churchill’, Asoka Mehta in 1949 published a pamphlet titled ‘The Economic
Consequences of Sardar Patel’ wherein he tried to show how disastrous are the polices of Patel
for India. Asoka conceded the greatness of Patel, and wrote: ‘His forging of the Congress into
a mighty instrument of power has been equalled and surpassed by his political integration of
the States into India.’ But at the same time, Asoka observed, the economic policies pursued by
the government are those of Patel, and ‘Sardar’s economic policies are heading the country to
disaster… Every single economic policy, pursued so far, by the Sardar is wrongly conceived
and wrongly oriented. Its consequences have already proved to be destructive; the historic
achievements of a politician of genius have been endangered by the wrong economic
pretentions. He must either reverse his policies or abdicate.’ The insinuation was that even
while Nehru headed the government, it was Sardar who was shaping the government’s policy.
‘Prime Minister Nehru ‘His capitalist friends’, wrote Asoka, ‘and advisers are taking Sardar
Patel along the wrong track.’ Asoka always seemed to have a feeling that he was intellectually
better equipped to solve country’s problems. ‘We need a wizard who will out-Cripps Cripps.
There are such men in the country but they do not sit in the Treasury Benches nor are they to
be found among those who preamublate behind Sardar during his morning walks’. He also
increasingly not just shelled out unasked for advises but also began to nurture ambitions to
occupy those policy-making echelons to affect the course of the nation making. It was this self-
image and self-suitability in the scheme of things that brought him in conflict with his
colleagues in the SP and closer to those in the Congress.
The SP has consistently advocated a policy of economic equality and austerity. It has favoured
planned production and workers participation in industry – a participation which would mean
shouldering responsibilities with asserting rights. It demanded constitution of a Land Army to
face the ballooning food-crisis by improving ‘through careful husbanding the undulating acres
of ageless India’; put the accent on small scale production; ‘emphasised the need of scientific
research and technological investigation into effective methods of production involving a low

109
Kamla Devi, July 1949, Socialists “A Bunch of Reactionaries”? Reply to Pandit Nehru, Hyderabad: Chetna
Prakashan

44
ratio of capital to labour’; optimum utilization of installed capacities – ‘No man, no machine
shall remain idle – that must remain our relentless resolve’.
1952 General election and dawning of the first streak of political maturity among the socialists
as exemplified in their effort to consolidate their political strength by merging with Kripalani’s
Majdoor Kisan Praja Party to establish Praja Socialist Party:;
PSP1955 break up induced by Lohia after Kerala firing, the CM joining the Congress and made
governor of Punjab;
A Report, Ram Manohar Lohia, April 1956, Socialist Publications series No. 3
Field Reports on not just what one does but what other organizations and parties are doing, a
habit of report writing that Lohia wanted his Socialist followers to inculcate:
At a conference of the Lucknow division of Backward Castes’ Federation held at Rae Barelli
and presided over by Lohia, the entire leadership of the backward castes in the district signed
for the membership of the Socialist Party. A pamphlet issued on the occasion made the
following discovery: of the population of 6 crores and 32 lakhs in UP as a whole, according to
the 1951 census, high castes population numbered 1 crore 20 lakhs and their MLAs 260, the
Muslims 60 lakhs and their MLAs 43, the Harijans at 1 crore and 14 lakhs and their MLAs 84,
and the backward castes number 3 crores 26 lakhs and their MLAs 43. An even worse situation
is reflected in the district statistics. This disturbing situation is gradually weaning the backward
castes away from the Congress Party, and they have hitherto been its most valuable support.
Banwari Singh Yadav, the Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Rae Barelli Backward
Conference reflected the sentiments regarding the representation deficit when he said: We are
aware that Pt Nehru has raised the slogan of Socialism, but we want to know whether Harijans
and backward castes would be able to acquire an honourable place in every sphere of life under
his socialist system. We doubt that because whatever steps the government has taken towards
Socialism, those who have so long exploited us continue to be at the top. We shall reject every
system that does not understand our sentiments, which asserts our rights on paper but in
practice robs us of them instead of adding to them.’ Having observed that last nine years of the
Congress government at the Centre as well as in the state did not accrue any benefits to the
backward castes, they were leaning towards the Socialist Party. Lohia wrote, ‘There is no doubt
that our doings of the past ten years or so have had a profound emotional impact on the
backward castes.’ Socialist Party’s criticism of President’s action of washing the feet of
Brhamins at Kashi, their precipitating stand against the police firing by their own government
in Cochin-Travncore or their campaign of no-tax on profit-less agriculture did secure a warm
reception among the backwards.
Socialist Position in respect of the backward castes: ‘Socialism is a doctrine of equality. In
trying to practice the doctrine of equality based on merit, socialism will actually become a
doctrine of inequality. If merit were to be the sole criterion for election or appointments, the
high castes with their 5000 years old tradition and more of specialization in mental pursuits
would be unbeatable. In order, therefore, to achieve equality between the Dwija and the Sudras,
injustice will have to be done to the Dwija. The backward castes number 15 crores in India as
against the 8 or 9 crores of the high castes and the 6 crores of Harijans, and must be brought
up on an accelerated speed. Offices of consequence in the Socialist Party must be specially
open to them, for justice in this case must mean preference. …The proudest day for the
Brahman and the Bania would be when they end their supremacy. …Without in any way
pandering to baser sentiments of the backward castes or appealing to their sentiments of
bitterness and jealousy, the attempt to combine backward castes into the Socialist Party with
their sentiments of anger against the caste system and to open a frontal assault on it must be
45
taken up with deliberate design all over the country. …The main reason for the stalemate in
the country’s politics is the occupation of positions of leadership, whether those of the
government or of the opposition, by the high castes. The extent to which the Socialist Party is
able to change this situation would also be the extent to which it would remove the political
stalemate in the country.
Civil Rights: Section 144 needs to be tested in the Supreme Court. I am absolutely convinced
that this section is an utter violation of the Indian constitution. This Section enables, in theory
at least, any district magistrate to abolish freedom of speech in his area for the entire year except
any two days on which a break between two orders must take place. It denies freedom of
assembly, processions and the like. In any event, the Government can, during any movement
or agitation, make use of this Section. It will pretend to do so on behalf of Law and Order.
Actually this will be done because the Government in its indolence does not like any kind of
people’s agitation, although there may be no danger of outbreak of violence. Agitation is
certainly not rioting. It is during times of agitation that the people need most to use their
freedom of speech, assembly and processions. The Government denies these freedoms under
Section 144 precisely when they are needed.110
“if the working class and the individual workman do not respect their word, they cannot
obviously take decisive part in the struggle for abolition of tyranny.’ Lohia
When I asked leading socialists among Nagpur workmen why they could not be equally
colourful, I was told that the working classes preferred to follow a middle-class leader, in
particular a bold and aggressive lawyer, rather than leaders from their own ranks. In any event,
I have been noting a most regrettable feature of trade union activity over the entire country and
over many years that the more colourful trade-unionists are precisely those who cannot be
relied upon either because of their individualism or because of their self-seeking politics.
There can be no socialist politics through English.
Jayaprakash Narayan, Structure of the Socialist Party: Draft Proposals, Mahabaleshwar
Tracts, No. 1
The structure of the party did not change in any basic manner since its inception. The Party
grew up as a group within the Congress: remained an ideological group within a great mass
movement. The salient points of earlier Party structure were: i) small selected membership; ii)
admission to membership depending upon fulfilment of certain work quota; iii) a probationary
period for all members, scrutiny and confirmation or rejection of membership. In order to
expand and broaden out as an independent political party, the Party must become the party not
only for the toilers but also of the toilers. The opening of the Party to the general membership
was resented. The influx of the masses was supposed to dilute the ideological purity of a party
and blunt its revolutionary edge and make it too cumbrous and heavy for revolutionary action.
‘If the Party is made up of a handful of socialist workers and the masses are barred from coming
in, how can we be justified in claiming that we are the Party of the masses? Restricted
membership is no essential attribute of revolutionarism.

110
{In reference to Rajya Sabha research, while making a comprehension of Untouchability Offence Act and
debates surrounding it in the parliament, one should also keep in mind not just outside presence of Ambedkar and
his threat of conversion but also the Socialist Party’s campaign around the temple entry that made the government
not just abolish practice of untouchability but also designate penal measures in case of its continued practice. A
large number of Socialists were arrested in March for attempting to enter the Vishwanath Temple together with
Harijans .}

46
The idea that the mammoth Congress organization can electorally be faced by a combined
opposition force was something that was in circulation even at the threshold of the first General
election.
Unity and splits, perversion and preservation,
JANATA
Three-fold Constructive, Combative and Parliamentary programme of the action of the PSP
JP: ‘I am in politics, not in power or party politics.’ Politics in free India is meaningless if it
does not seek to mould the people anew and pave the way for a new social edifice.’
Peaceful class struggle as the principal means of achieving Socialism
He created enormous ill-will and
Kamlesh111 was born in a Brahmin family in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur district. It was then a
poverty-stricken, flood-prone, conflict-ridden and land-dependent rural dwelling that
witnessed high out-migration of men looking for employment, earning and escape. Sometimes,
the migrating men took their female-folk along; otherwise, it was mostly male migration with
the hope that earnings would be repatriated home from wherever they were.112 Over 2500 years
ago, Gautama Buddha had attained his nirvana at the adjoining Kushinagar. Gorakhpur
however has an iconic place in nationalist historiography due to the infamous Chauri Chaura
case; it was here that in February 1922, an enraged mob burnt down a police station in which
perished 23 police-men; ‘this un-Gandhian riot at the very inception of our mass freedom
struggle was the greatest thing that the district had done to history’, is how Shahid Amin makes
an assessment in his celebrated study of the tragic event.113
Son of a manager of a local zamindari, Kamlesh from early on was a voracious reader; his
interest was varied: he read old issues of Hindi periodicals, safely kept in his father’s cupboard,
novels and plays, religious opus and translations from other Indian languages, mostly of
Bengali originals,
Kamlesh says he has hardly ever worked in his life for purely monetary benefits.
Kamlesh worked as personal secretary to Lohia in sixties (1963-64) and lived with him. ‘Lohia
taught me how a work of Lok Sabha is done, how does one frame a question, how does one
move a calling attention motion, how are proposals sent to Lok Sabha secretariat to initiate
debates on various subjects. Lohia later for all the parliamentary work had to just give me a
signal and I would do it on my own. He later left all the parliament related work upon me.
Every morning, we would cull issues from out of newspaper, select subject and then drop
notices for calling attention motions in the box provided. I would also cater to complaints from
his parliamentary constituency and direct them to ministries and follow-up their redress.’
‘In 1968, I was in Calcutta editing a short-lived literary journal when my father passed away
at my village. That day it had rained heavily, streets were filled with rain-water, I searched for
any train that went in the direction of Gorakhpur, after changing many more trains on my way
I reached my village. I performed his last rites; by this action I was deemed untouchable for
whole of one year, even my family members would not partake food touched by me, the place
I would usually sit, no one else would sit fearing defilement; only after the expiry of one full

111
From a long interview to ‘Samash’ an intermittently published Hindi literary journal; Udayan Vajpeyi (ed),
2012, Samash-5,
112
Bring Amitabh Ghosh’s Sea of Poppy
113
Shahid Amin, 2006, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992, Delhi: Penguin
47
year after the last rites I again became a touchable; during this one year period I remained in
my village and contemplated farming. But just then I received a wireless message from Delhi
informing me that I was appointed as Joint Secretary of the Samyukta Socialist Party and was
asked to reach Delhi immediately to take up the responsibility.’
Badri Vishal Pitti, Hyderabad based Marwadi businessman who not only dabbled in the field
of Hindi literature but also in Socialist politics. He published a Hindi literary journal called
‘Kalpana’ in whose editorial department in 1959-60 Kamlesh cut his first teeth and learnt the
art of ‘copy-editing’. Pitti’s greatest contribution to history has been in employing his
resources to first conduct Lohia’s workshops and speaking tours, recording his speeches,
making a transcript of those speeches, and after meticulous editing publishing them into books.
Lohia mostly orally spoke his thoughts. Today, what we have in the form of Lohia’s written
work is largely due to the effort of Pitti.
Phulpur in 1962, against Nehru, not one activist or political worker
I bet that George would his deposit in 1971 election
Lohia’s non-violence was shorn of timidity or sectarianism. Coupled with the element of civil-
disobedience, it was not powerless.
Mankind, now edited by Rama Mitra, who after a gap of over a year, gave in graphic detail,
what all happened after Lohia was wheeled into the operation theatre of the Willingdon
Hospital.114 He suffered from hyper-tension and his enlarged prostate-gland was troubling him.
Operation was suggested in November 1966 itself but he as well as his close friends – he had
no family – had initially dilly-dallied and later, a year later, was hurried through. In the early
hours of October 12, 1967, Lohia died of medical negligence, haphazard treatment, and an
infection acquired in hospital. While Lohia lay in room no 17 of Willingdon Hospital, a stream
of doctors from all over the country visited him. Like many other socialist leaders, George too
had brought physician Dr. Dastur from Bombay to examine Lohia. ‘Ila’, Rama recounted in
her long piece, how a weakening Lohia, had almost entreated, knowing well, the death was
near, ‘I am getting frightened.’ Coming from a man in whose dictionary the word ‘fear’ did not
exist, Lohia’s words choked Rama’s heart. Rama was aghast that the Socialist Members of the
Parliament did not bring the Parliament to standstill demanding a probe into Lohia’s death.
‘Why did not our men force the House to stop its proceedings, to be named by the Presiding
Officers, and ordered to be thrown out of the Houses, by the Marshall ‘lock, stock and barrel’
is most disappointing. Did not Lohia create stormy scenes over the ‘unnatural’ death of Lal
Bahadur Shastri at Tashkent.’
‘He was deprovinced, decasted, declassed, dispossessed citizen of India.’
In April 1967, a police strike was on in Delhi and Lohia wrote about it and worked for it.
1969
In keeping with Lohia’s enunciations, the SSP tried to keep upto the concrete and time-bound
programmes tethered to its uncompromising non-Congress politics.
PSP’s support for building atomic bomb
Planning at Below: District administration which is close to the people and has democratic
foundations has to be the principal unit of economic planning.

114
Roma Mitra, ‘Death of a Socialist – An Open Letter’, Mankind, March 1969;
48
The PSP too under its new chairman S M Joshi elected at Bhopal national conference of the
party, while supporting the continuance of emergency, resolved that ‘the PSP cannot be a party
to an unprincipled alliance with reactionary and anti-national elements’. It meant it would
neither forge partnership with ‘the reactionary’ Jan Sangh nor with ‘anti-national’ communists.
The PSP whose repeated overtures for unity with Socialist Party was being spurned by Lohia
had come to this conclusion exactly because Lohia had now been advocating such an alliance.
In the by-elections held in May 1963, Lohia had won a handsome victory against the Congress
candidate by bringing about such an opposition unity. Not just Lohia, who at 53, for the first
time entered parliament, independent Kripalani and Minoo Masani, the Swatantra Party
president, also won their respective seats in May by-elections. It was a virtual sweep by the
opposition and the idea was to help build a momentum against the decaying Congress regime
of Nehru. It was then that Lohia propounded his idea of non-Congressism as a strategy to forge
opposition unity to unseat the Congress from its uninterrupted reign over the country since
independence.
In 1952, in India’s first republican election, the Socialist Party had emerged as the main
opposition party although it trailed Nehru’s congress by a large margin. Having realized its still
limited appeal to the electorates, the Socialist Party of JP, Lohia and others had merged with
Kripalani’s Kisan Majdoor Praja Party to from a new party called Praja Socialist Party (PSP).
The PSP government in Kerala found itself under severe strictures from Lohia when the
government headed by Thanu Pillai ordered a peasant demonstration be dispersed by police
firing. Lohia asked the state government to resign in order to distinguish socialists from the
Congress. Many in the PSP did not like the way Lohia dictated the PSP government in Kerala
to relinquish its regime. It led to fissure in socialist camp. At Hyderabad, in 1956, Lohia led a
breakaway group of PSP to found a new political party with the old name of the Socialist Party
(SP). Raj Narain from Varanasi, Madhu Limaye from Poona, Raju from Andhra were close
associates of Lohia in forming the new SP. The Socialists then had a political strategy of
maintenance of equidistance from all three other political formations of Congress, Jan Sangh
and Communists. But such a strategy did not yield much electoral dividend and the political
fortune of the Socialists in parliament, meager that was, remained unchanged from 1957 to
1962. In 1963, at Calcutta convention of the Socialist Party, Lohia propounded his famous
dictum of non-Congressism. In that he said, to defeat the Congress the Socialists would forge
a grand alliance with Jan Sangh and the Communist.
Soon after the opposition victory in the by-election, and moving of motion of no-confidence
against the government on the very day the new members took oath in the parliament, a loaded
Kamaraj Plan unfolded with Nehru’s blessings. Kamaraj Nadar was the chief minister of
Madras state and a powerful congress satrap. In the aftermath of the Chinese war, in the
declining years of Nehru’s regime, when corruption charges flew thick around Congress Chief
Ministers and some of his cabinet ministers, when the stock of Congress had begun to fall for
the first time since independence, when opposition stalwarts had won vital parliamentary seats
in the by-elections held, and more importantly, when question about ‘after-Nehru who?’ had
to be addressed on an urgent basis, Kamaraj proposed his plan to revitalize the organization by
asking senior functionaries to resign from the government and work for the party.
Some state Chief Ministers too resigned. Nehru described the Kamaraj Plan as ‘unique in the
history of India’ and as the beginning of ‘a new chapter for the Congress’. The Kamaraj Plan,
he said, ‘would help to pull the Congress out of the rut into which it had got in many states’.
In effect, it did no such thing. What it did achieve was a mundane thing: got rid of some
competition in the succession bid in a post-Nehru scenario. The whole plan, as V N Gadgil
said, was ‘undemocratic’ and ‘wholly inadequate and irrelevant’ as far as suggested remedy
49
for revitalizing the Congress was concerned. By a telling allusion, Gadgil said: ‘You cannot
improve the grammar of your son by giving him a new fountain pen.’ It was worse: it neither
wanted to revitalize the Congress, nor wanted infusion of fresh blood; it just desired to lay
foundation for a dynasty.
AICC decision empowering the PM to do whatever he liked in regard to the reorganization of
Ministries in the Centre and the state was not a democratic decision. Vitally, Gadgil added, ‘I
doubt whether the PM can exercise such powers in respect of states in accordance with the
constitution. The CM is the leader elected by the majority party and both, he and his Ministry,
are responsible to the Legislature.
An outside individual or a body has no right constitutionally to demand his or any of his
colleague’s resignation.’115 Gadgil said the resolution was only a regulation of what was a
current practice. ‘No President of the Congress has functioned independently of the PM. He
has to be the PM’s rubber stamp as one ex-President is reported to have said some time ago.’
Jai Prakash Narain, the socialist in sabbatical leader, welcomed ‘party-before-post’ resolution
of the AICC, the Kamaraj Plan; he said he had been advocating same principles for several
years but in vain. Something similar will crop up a decade later when JP and his followers
would demand resignations of the state ministries who in his opinion had lost the trust of the
people. Indira Gandhi would be one opposing him on his demand of resignations of
constitutionally elected ministries. The JP’s demand would be turned into the cause of internal
emergency clamped by Indira in June 1975.
In 1955, Lohia had been expelled from the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) – some would say he
engineered the split in the PSP; there is a pamphlet titled “Facts relating to Lohia’s attempt at
disrupting the PSP”116 published in the same year, obviously by the PSP. In December that
year, arguing for the acceptance of his theory of “equal irrelevance” of both the Congress and
Communists in the socialist scheme, he led his renegade group to establish the All India
Socialist Party. Lohia in 1955 was on the threshold of becoming an independent politician after
spending some three decades in Indian politics.
What Lohia provided to the Indian politics was speed, a situation that was much more agreeable
than the moribund state of political affairs during the one-man dominance of Nehru.
By 1930, the national politics of India had veered to concern itself with the content of
freedom.117 No political formation could afford to talk of freedom from the bondage without
addressing the issue of widespread poverty and entrenched exclusion. The launching of the Salt
Satyagraha was an ample proof of the change that had perceptibly occurred in the political
discourse. The ‘mute-millions’ and their ‘salt’ was now at the centre of Gandhi’s politics. The
earlier mass movement – the non-co-operation movement in 1920 – had focused mainly on
hurt sentiment of ‘national identity’ – the causes were many but mainly oppressive Rowlatt
Act, the atrocities in Punjab under martial law, the betrayal of Khalifa. It had appealed to the
educated, middle class, ‘the politicized lot’ to give up government given titles and boycott state
run educational and judicial institutions, to withdraw from services and to boycott legislatures.

115 ‘AICC Decision Undemocratic/ Need for thorough Clean-up of Congress’, The Tribune, August 13, 1963,
also see ‘Revitalize the Congress Party Machine’-Edit article by Duga Das
116
Facts relating to Lohia’s attempt at disrupting the PSP: A PSP Publication, 1955
117
Dev Dutt, Socialism and National Movement (1927- 1939), Mankind, January – February 1969, Pertinent
Point: when in 1974 JP led movement demanded resignation from state governments, its demand was said to be
unconstitutional and emergency was imposed, here however was Nehru who was kingpin of such a demand and
was PM and leader who wanted to prune critical flab. No wonder he advises same route in 1974 for agitating
students in Gujarat and Bihar.
50
It was not that economics was not part of Gandhi’s politics. It is just that his politics being
nationalistic to the core, Gandhi’s indicting fingers for economic woes of Indians were largely
pointed towards the British system. A new politics was waiting to be invented, to be ready to
interrogate internal socio-economic causes.
In a speech outlining the history of the socialist movement in India, Lohia in 1963, admits that
the socialists regarded Gandhi as conservative and Nehru as radical.118 In Nehru’s ideological
tussle with Gandhi, the Congress Socialist Party was Nehru’s front against Gandhi’s Gandhi
Sewa Sangh. It was a body first established in 1923 by Gandhi sympathisers in the wake of
suspension of the Non-Cooperation movement (1920-22) but had remained largely dormant till
Gandhi himself withdrew from the Congress in 1934. Since his forced withdrawal from the
Congress, Gandhi and Nehru waged a war of attrition against each other; Gandhi to force Nehru
to see through his eyes, and Nehru to flung Gandhi aside in order to wield total ideological
control over the Congress. If the Gandhi Sewa Sangh was Gandhi’s organizational prop, the
Congress Socialist Party was Nehru’s ideological wand, which he wielded at his convenience
but never to the detriment to his claim over the Congress itself. But Gandhi was soon forced to
disband the Gandhi Sewa Sangh, announcing perhaps his own defeat.
Nehru had a vision and a charisma; unlike many Indian politicians, Nehru had an uncanny
understanding of power, too. With a famed family, foreign education, international jaunts,
coupled with jail terms and repeatedly expressed sentiments of being ideological indignant,
Nehru in 1934 was a people’s hero. It was perhaps the beginning of secular power being
attached with a personality of an individual. It would not be an exaggeration to note that Nehru
laid the foundation for such an articulation of power, whereby in one individual secular power
capable of delivering material goods came to rest and was given for canvassing.
Since 1936, he was emerging as the most significant politician on the Indian firmament. It
exemplified middle class opportunism at its worse.
The Socialists hold Gandhi’s khadi in total contempt and disparages it repeatedly as not just
‘incomplete and inadequate’ to solve India’s poverty tangle but also as an instrument to wage
war against the British. Although Gandhi would be respectfully critical and differ, Nehru
would not hesitate either to mobilise them under his umbrella or castigate them for being
reckless critics.
The socialist antipathy towards the Communists have been vituperative, mostly owing to their
role during the “Quit India” movement in 1942, which if for the Socialists proved their
nationalist credentials, established the Communists as the betrayers of the nationalist cause.
The Betul/Panchmadi conference report was prepared by the CG K Reddy. The typing and
composing work was done by George. This part of fact was told to Panibaba by Reddy himself.
George had a high speed typing expertise and was quick note-taker. In the report however
George has not been acknowledged but the fact is recorded by Panibaba who was told about it
by C G K himself.119
George also had a massive library at his Pangali residence in Bombay. In 1966, when I first
went see him, I got immensely impressed by the collection of books in his library. He was not
a selective reader.

118
Lohia, ‘Samajwadi Andolan ka Itihas’, 1963
119
01-10-2013, with Panibaba

51
15.09.2013; Interview with Devdat; at Vaishali
17.10.2013 interview with Ved Prakash Vedic
Gloria used to live with George when he became the MP and lived for long at his MP’s flat.
Vedic went to receive George upon his arrival in Delhi after his victory in 1967 election. Vedic
brought him directly to Raj Narayan’s house at 97 or 93 North Avenue flat where he freshened
up, took bath, changed cloths in Janardan Dwidey’s room (he used to live with Raj Narayan
then) and then was taken to meet Lohia. Later George lived at 214, North Avenue flat; Arjun
Singh Bhdoria lived next door in flat no. 216.
17.10.2013 interview with Panibaba
In the last 400 years or so there has occurred disconnect of mainland India from its northern
mountainous Himalayas. If British had not developed some summer-capitals and holyday-
abodes, no one would have bothered to notice the Himalayas and its geo-political locations.
Indians have no sympathy with happenings in Himalayas. Have no comprehension, no
knowledge, no concern. Despite Lohia’s involvement with issues like Nepal, Urvasim,
Manipur and Kashmir, JP’s truce-seeking intervention in Nagaland or on Tibet, the socialists
too lacked an understanding and a comprehension; their intervention was mostly sporadic and
forgotten after having made some hue and cry; there was no effort to build a bigger paradigm,
train cadres accordingly, and formulate national policies by deeper engagements.
The problem in the Indian socialist movement lay in its beginning, perhaps. As it saw itself as
a Marxist party, it competed with the Communist Party of India for the ideological niche. And
bound as it was to the Congress, it competed with the parent Congress for the organizational
space and control. Perhaps such a competition played out for long proved to be depleting. It
certainly imbued it with an organizational as well as ideological insecurity. If it had people
with brimming confidence, the same people also had scepticism about their capabilities that
ever made them look for crutches. If it had people with courage, the same people also proved
to be cowardly. They hinged their fate on extraneous factors such as personalities other than
their own. Each political move, calculated to increase their strength, backfired and instead of
augmenting eroded their strength. Only Lohia provided a momentary respite from this killing
scepticism, but soon after his death, the respite was short-lived.
Lohia mooted the idea of evolving ‘a common code for political parties’ to reduce falsehood,
pretentions and deception and unreliability. For instances sources of funding of a political party
must be revealed as their account of expenditure. There are tall claims about the membership
of a party; there must be some mechanism to ascertain the truth, just the way there is ABC in
the media that keeps a tab over the circulation claims. Such a body however must never infringe
over the content of political activities. Political corruption is not just financial or nepotism but
delves down to selection of a member rejected by another party; political cross-over on the
floor of assembly, centralisation of decision making which reduces the role of district and
village level to merely carrying out of orders from above and reduces participation; he offered
to organise such a conference of political parties to evolve a code of conduct but only a few
smaller parties responded;120
In April-May 1958, Nehru’s statement on his desire to retire from politics stirred a political
nest, bringing out varied responses; JP was preparing to go to Europe and had met Nehru before
going, he too spoke that in a moment of emergency who knows what might happen and he

120
A Common Code for Political Parties, Document, Mankind, August 1958,
52
might be the leader of the socialist blocs inside and outside the Congress and might succeed
Nehru;121
‘Militancy merely for its own sake is a juvenile pastime. It may generate heat in some hearts
but it does not spread light in the minds of men. Professional law-breaking, like perennial law-
making, has no place in socialism.’122
Masani Papers
That Nehru’s regime was on a slow slide from its peak and was tottering at its seams was
evidenced not by the 72 members of the parliament (of 500+) who had signed the first-ever no-
confidence motion against it. The evidence was writ large in the defence of its satraps who had
smelled a kill in Nehru’s dying days. Morarji Desai, Nehru’s Finance Minister, soon to be axed
under the Kamaraj Plan, provided a defence of Nehru’s government that in guise was in fact
reiteration of attack on him. He brought on the floor of parliament some of Lohia’s most
pernicious and darkest comments on Nehru and thereby giving greater legitimacy to them as
well as an indication that Nehru was facing challenge to his succession plans.
A successor government to y b chavan why did it go against George. Dissent within a
democracy is always within the parameters defined by authority. George’s rise is testimony to
the negotiated space that authority provided; supported by Chavan and others George rose in
Bombay, so what really transpired that after Chavan, the Bombay government took George to
prove its separateness from Chavan; by arresting George, the Bombay government was hitting
at Chavan; in 1950s, George begins to work in Bombay trade union and comes in confrontation
with Maniben Kara who was then a seasoned trade union leader of railways in Bombay; she
complains to DMello about George’s infringement of her trade union territory; DMello takes
George to task and possibly asks him to leave his house; Maniben Kara angle needs to be
explored;
He learnt that trade unionism to be ladder to political power; each of the trade union strike was
not conducted for any bread &butter issues but always had political manifestations; Not on
bread and butter movement; he repeatedly says, strike involves high stakes, so must have larger
political aims, and not peter out; When Nehru came to Bombay to inaugurate Bhabha BRC, at
Santacruz, George with few of his supporters stopped nehru’s cavalcade, Nehru was aghast, he
released a statement, Shamlal’s edit in toi ridicules Nehru’s comment; some times in 1954;
Gandhi was successful in injecting a kind of cordiality in the political discourse: one might
have political dispute but that mustn’t entail personal enmity. Politicians potentially invidious,
under Gandhi’s influence, would at least still maintain a cordial façade in the face of their
ideological and political opponents. Such a space was grudgingly available under Nehru. While
Gandhi would be critiqued by Socialists and Nehru, too, they would still have love and passion
for the man. In Nehru’s time, either due to the exigencies of being a ruling party vulnerable to
attack, ideological or political differences were not allowed to be aired in public against a
colleague. In 1953, Nehru writes a letter to S K Patil, then a Bombay Congressman, aspiring
big-ticket promotion, restraining him in straight language from openly critiquing the Morarji
government. Nehru even tells Patil to not use certain publication for public pronouncements.

121
To retire or not to retire, Document, clippings from media reports on vacillation with in Nehru, JP and
Congress, Mankind, August 1958,
122
Editorial: The Old and the New’, in the launching issue of ‘The New Socialist’, the journal edited by N G
Goray, November, 1957, Volume 1, No. 1;
53
Throughout their political interaction, JP continued to address Nehru as Bhai. Even when
disputes arose, JP maintained a cordiality with Nehru and addressed him as Bhai in his letters
and conversations.
Coca cola, ford foundation, railway signalling ‘Shard yadav was my mistake in Indian politics;
once yadav won election, who was brought by me, George adopted him and not once asked
him, arun how we should groom him; no sense of party organization, George or any socialist
did not leave any lasting impress as creator of a party.’
Kranti prakash: in patna, as a ten year old boy used to polish shoes and contribute money to
jp’s fund;
Less duality in Limaye and Raj Narayan
Absence of ideology leads to JP’s failure to decode Nehru and his motives
Total ideological bankruptcy has reduced their following to; no ideological cohesion or the
basis on which few socialists could come together;
Madhu Limaye spent his last fifteen years of his life in isolation, writing books and being
visited occasionally by sonal man singh, narendra bhati; kamal morarka, gopi manchanda and
raj kumar jain were other two regular visitors; not even George Fernandes, who was nurtured
by Limaye, visited him; 1989 manifesto was structurally designed by me but he was
contemptuous about it;
Deputy leader of the CPP was abolished ; Nehru’ anonymous piece who after Nehru
Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru
Volume 21, Second Series
In the task of transforming society in India, Nehru sought the cooperation of Jayaprakash
Narayan and his socialist colleagues. He wrote to JP that ‘I am not satisfied with the rate of our
progress…I want to hasten it and want your help’.
Rajesh Nehru, wife of ICS officer and Jawahar’s first cousin, B K Nehru, in her reminiscences
writes
In the folkloric mythology Lohia is said to have been smitten by Indira Gandhi from early on
and his attacks on her in later days –remember the jibe, ‘Gungi Gudia’ or even earlier of him
preferring her from others in succession war due to possibility of a ‘pretty-face’ donning the
front page of the newspapers every morning – was that of a jilted lover.
With a famed family, foreign education, international jaunts, coupled with jail terms and
repeatedly expressed sentiments of being ideological indignant, Nehru in 1934 was a people’s
hero. It was perhaps the beginning of secular power being attached with a personality of an
individual. It would not be an exaggeration to note that Nehru laid the foundation for such an
articulation of power, whereby in one individual secular power capable of delivering material
goods came to rest and for canvassing. The second alternative was organizational power, which
in some sense came to be identified with Patel, who wielded organizational influence in the
Congress. The third alternative of the power in India was Gandhi with his moral stature and
spiritual voice; he was the master to be revered but seldom adhered to. In the democracy, while
Gandhi’s moral power rapidly became a relic in the race to development, Patel’s organizational
strength, after his death if not in his lifetime, was made to yield to Nehru’s individual centric
concentration of secular power.

54
The Socialists fell prey to Nehru’s carnivorous carnival. Since 1936, he was emerging as the
most significant politician on the Indian firmament. He had a vision and a charisma; unlike
many Indian politicians, Nehru had an uncanny understanding of what power
Orchestrated by socialists, opposition to Gandhi in 1934 was so pronounced that Gandhi was
forced to contemplated resignation from the Congress. His Khadi had been totally and
wholesomely rejected not just by the rank and file of the Congress, but also by its leadership.
The Socialists had to tackle two most important political relationships that underpinned and
determined not just their genesis but also their survival. To the Congress they were
organizationally bound, having been conceived and nurtured within the parent-organization,
and to the Communist Party of India they owed ideological kinship, both, the Socialists and
the Communists, being Marxism inspired offshoots.
The socialist antipathy towards the Communists have been vituperative, mostly owing to their
role during the “Quit India” movement in 1942, which if for the Socialists proved their
nationalist credentials, established the Communists as the betrayers of the nationalist cause.
‘The Primary task of the Party is in relation with the Congress, in radicalizing it and developing
the anti-imperialist elements in it so as to make it a real anti-imperialist elements in it so as to
make it a real anti-imperialist organization. … It was for the first time that an organised group
appeared in the Congress with its own political philosophy and a complete alternative
programme. We have been the most uncompromising opponents of the move of some
prominent Congressmen in favour of acceptance of ministerial offices under the new
Constitution. …I refer to the lack of the spirit of solidarity within the Party. Members have
not shown the spirit of discipline and loyalty to the Party that socialists are expected to possess
for their organization. (Communist infiltration or loose conglomeration) … The Party attaches
considerable value to international contacts. It was with this object in view that the Party
appointed two secretaries in London, V K Krishna Menon (1896-1974) and M R Masani to
bring about closer understanding between the working class and other anti-imperialist
movements in Great Britain and the struggle of the Indian masses. …Some time between June
and November, on a invitation to Britain, M R Masani was able to pay a flying visit to Soviet
Russia, where he was able to bring about a better understanding of our Party and its works.
(while JP quotes extensively from masani’s report on Britain, he goes complete silent on his
visit to Russia)’123
At Lucknow, Nehru was appointed the Congress President. ‘Although unanimously elected as
President, he failed to get the support of his colleagues on the working Committee, who almost
throughout the session, remained in opposition to him. The old junta took advantage of the fact
that it had the Congress machinery in its hands. The majority of the rank and file and general
public is with Pt. Jawaharlal.’124 Soon, Nehru was ‘carrying on a whirlwind campaign
propagating ideas which he and we have at heart’.125 JP considered the Communist
International as the fountain head of the revolution.126 The Socialists’ position vis-à-vis the
Congress acceptance of the ministry was that of ‘uncompromising opposition’.
One line from the letter of JP to Bose proposing formation of a new left party and also
establishment of favourable relationship with Moscow and the Communist International can
open a Pandora Box of hidden issues of Indian history.

123
General Secretary’s Report (1935), January 20, 1936, JP Vol 2; p 90-97
124
Interview to Press on Lucknow Congress, April 14, 1936, JP Vol 2; p106
125
Circular to Provincial Secretaries, CSP, June 4, 1936, , JP Vol 2; p 109
126
Interview to Press after meeting M N Roy, December 5, 1936, , JP Vol 2; p125
55
 ‘Motion of No-Confidence in the Council of Ministers’, August, 20-22, 1963, Fifth Session of
the Parliament, Lok Sabha Debates, Third Series, Volume XIX, 1963, New Delhi: Lok Sabha
Secretariat;
‘The revolution of 1942 was the greatest after that of 1857. It brought about a revolution in the
minds of the people …Your enthusiasm has convinced me that however mistaken we might
have been in the eyes of Gandhiji and the Congress High Command, the people approve of
what we did.’ Those who took part in the 1942 movement were came to be called as ‘Augusters’
and JP thought and proposed integration of ‘Augusters’ in the body-polity of the Congress to
bring about its reorganization and revitalization. He desired positions of power in the Congress
to be filled with Augusters in order to assimilate the new elements within the Congress.127 ‘Will
the Congress allow them to do all this – to work, to serve, to organise, to bring order into our
life, to educate – as a part of the day-to-day Congress work?’ (10) In the Socialist chronology,
the 9th of August came to acquire a significance that equalled to that of the 26th January and the
National Week. ‘On that day in 1942 started a revolution which shook the British Empire to its
roots and during which for the first time since 1857 large tracts of the country were completely
freed for varying periods from British rule. August 9 has therefore become a burning symbol
of our national revolution.’ (23) Socialist opposed the idea of British sponsored Constitution
making body…128
After fifteen years of desperate wait, for the first time at the age of 53, he had just entered the
Lok Sabha, having defeated Dr. B V Keskar, in a bye-election from Farrukhabad. And what a
parliamentary debut it was. On the very first day, in the middle of August, 1963, he, along with
others, moved the first-ever notice of no-confidence against the Nehru’s uninterrupted fifteen
years of rule. And before it was taken up for parliamentary evaluation, he got into an altercation
with the Prime Minister who had attempted to cut him to size; Lohia’s straight, irreverent, and
extraordinary response left Nehru stunned and speechless. Asked to comment on governmental
preparation to strengthen the moral character of the fighting army, who in 1962, on the advice
of a circular from the government that had asked them to desert the posts if faced with
advancing Chinese, had humiliatingly fled leaving the border-posts unmanned. In response,
Nehru said what a stupid question it was. Lohia retorted, without losing his composure, ‘Prime
Minister is the servant and Parliament, the master. The servant must know how to talk to the
master.’ A livid Nehru rose and asked the Chair to intervene. ‘The Member’, Nehru said to the
Speaker, ‘is new to the parliamentary norms. He needs to be taught some etiquettes. He is
indulging in talks and behaving in a way that is normally not acceptable in this House. Please
restrain him.’ Not someone to be bogged down by the stature of Nehru, Lohia retorted, ‘Now-
onward, Mr. Prime Minister, please get used to my behaviour.’129
The ‘want of confidence motion’ that Lohia, Kripalani and others moved against the Nehru
government is most significant of such motions in the independent India. Lohia’s speech was
original, devastatingly incisive and laid bare the inadequacy of the Nehru’s government in the
face of mounting national all-round crisis. ‘I charge this government with running a barren
administration, based on total ignorance, empty verbiage, and wordy-enthusiasm. We are the
hungriest country in the world surviving on the bare minimum calories. This government is of
fifty lakh big people. It has nothing to do with the other 43 and half crore people. 60% of the
Indian people that is 27 crore survive on expenditure of less than 3 anna per day whereas at the
same time on Prime Minister’s dog’s per day expenditure is three rupees a day. This situation
127
‘Reorganize the Congress: Task for leadership’, Janata, May 5, 1946
128
JP volumes III ‘Unity is a process, not an isolated incident; JP volumes IV
129
Lok Sabha mein Lohia, 16 August, 1963
56
has resulted in extreme disparity in the country. The Prime Minister often mouths leftism and
socialism but in his hands is not even capitalism, it is sheer unadulterated feudalism. He wants
to run a sham and corrupt socialism in the country. It is an evidence of how a man with mere
wordy enthusiasm could keep the people enthralled for long. I am the only member in this
parliament, who, leaving the first few initial months of this government when I had nurtured
some hope, never in the last fifteen years ever had any confidence in it. I have no personal
enmity with the Prime Minister. My fight is simply on the issue of morality.’130
Lohia was leader of the Socialist Party of India, established in 1955, at Hyderabad, after Lohia
and others had been expelled from the Praja Socialist Party that itself had been formed by
amalgamating the then Socialist Party and Krishk-Majdoor Praja Party in 1953. But it is not
that simple.
JP to Gandhi: ‘I want to meet Pandit Jawaharlal at Allahabad. I have great respect for him and
my ideas are to a great extent similar to his. I shall, therefore, derive great satisfaction if
somehow I can be with him.’131 Soon, in March, whereas Gandhi launched the salt satyagraha
at Ahmedabad, by beginning his march to Dandi, on March 12, JP began his work with Nehru
as Secretary to Labour Research Department at Allahabad.132
According to Yusuf Meherally, who edited writings of JP into a volume and wrote an editor’s
introduction, ‘JP came out of prison with an idea, a purpose and a vision. And out of that was
born the CSP’133
AICC meet at Patna, May 18, 19, 1934; prior to AICC meeting, on May 17, an All India
Conference of Socialist Congressmen was held at Patna, ‘to make united and organised efforts
for the promotion of the socialist cause’.
The socialists felt that Gandhi’s constructive programme was ‘totally inadequate as a
programme intended for the achievement of independence’. They considered ‘creation of or
participation in workers’ and peasants’ organizations based on the demands of these classes’
were the only way by which revolutionary mass movement could be developed.
Constructive programme of the Congress ‘inadequate and incomplete’ to secure political
independence. ‘Reconstruction can only follow from political power and we have to see if our
present programme is calculated to secure that power. I do not understand what Gandhiji
implies when he criticises the political exploitation of labour. The truth is that mere trade
unionism is not enough; workers must also be made politically conscious. The basis of the new
approach that I am advocating must be economic. It is absurd to talk of khadi to the kiasans of
Gaya where the agrarian problems are well nigh appalling.
The task is to so influence and change the Congress as to make it a real anti-imperialist body.

130
Lohia’s speech on the no-confidence motion on 21 August 1963 was a policy critic of the Nehru’s government;
it showed Lohia’s grasp over the fundamentals of the governance. Lok Sabha mein Lohia, 21 August 1963; China
is an ‘intervenist Dragon’
131
Letter to Mahatma Gandhi, January 11, 1930, in Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected
Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar; p41
132
Letter to Mahatma Gandhi, February 24, 1930, in Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected
Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar; p42
133
Jayaprakash narayan, Towards Struggle, ed. Yusuf Meherally, Bombay, 1946, Editor’s introduction, in
Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar;
pxx
57
The CSP is a political party uniting on its platform all anti-imperialist elements and its task is
to lead such elements to the overthrow of British imperialism and the establishment in india of
a real swarj for the masses.
Habitual use of khadi as condition of membership of the congress: the CSP took a position that
habitual use of khadi should not be made a qualification for membership of elected Congress
bodies, the plea being that it is an unnecessary restriction & discriminates against certain
genuine anti-imperialist elements in the country, who have as much right to represent the
masses in the congress as any else.
‘It is true that there ia hardly anything in the present programme of the Congress which is of
interest to us. (105)
Congress should be converted into an organization of the exploited classes of India which
forms the bulk of the population of the country. Accused of weakening the Congress, the CSP’s
national executive decided ‘that while giving up the stressing of Socialism as such on Congress
platforms we must vigorously propagate Socialism among Congressmen and others and build
up general sympathy and support for the movement.’ The committee not only attacked the
individual programmes of the Congress but the committee enjoined upon its members to avoid
use of harsh and unbecoming language. The object of the Party is to win over genuine
Congressmen particularly the rank and file to our views by propaganda and patient work till
the great majority of Congressmen become our supporters. (153)
As the Congress Socialist Party was trying to strengthen its foothold within the Congress, there
was no dearth of onslaught on it. The Congress Working Committee cautioned it against
indulging in the loose talks regarding the ‘confiscation of private property and necessity of
class-war’.134 S K Patil, by defeating whom in 1967 George would don the title of ‘loin-slayer’,
asked, rather mockingly, ‘What in God’s name is the cardinal difference between the
perspectives of the Congress on the one hand and those of the Socialist Groups on the other?
Are these differences of such a fundamental nature as can never be mutually adjusted. Then, a
Socialist Party within the Congress is a meaningless thing. ’135 ‘a blend of Gandhi=Jawahar
philosophy with a proper admisture of economism and spiritualism would have been an ideal
solution to India’s peculiar problems. For a number of years Jawaharlal was known to be a
socialist of confirmed views. One could see his hand in the shaping of many resolutions with
an economic bearing but he never despaired of success to a point where formation of a new
party would become a necessity. His creative mind backed by his forceful personality would
have certainly avoided a split within Congress ranks. With the incarceration of JN came a chaos
and confusion which is growing every day and with disastrous consequences. The formation
of the CSP within the Congress fold has put an enormous strain on many people’s loyalty to
the Congress.
The Intelligent woman’s guide
…But you cannot alter anything unless you know what you want to alter it to….Revolutionary
history is the history of the effects of a continual struggle by persons and classes to alter the
arrangements in their own favour….

134
135
‘S K Patil Article on the formation of the CSP’, Bombay Chronicle, August 10, 1934, in Bimal Prasad (Ed),
2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar; Appendix 6, p263;
patil then was general secretary, bombay congress
58
Nehru’s autobiography quotes Kalhana, the Kashmiri, to emphaise that a ruler must create a
situation of abahya and must rule by dharma….how critical Lohia was of Nehru on these two
accounts.
Although, as many would say, Lohia was an indefatigable critic of the government and pointed
out many a glaring examples on the basis on which the government needed to be voted out,
there was no alternative in the critique of Lohia. There were enough pointers about the
extravagance of the Nehru government and difference between the life styles of the Prime
Minister and the common citizenry in Lohia but what was the alternative to all these was trifle
absent. He did point out the need to reduce the income difference by fixing not just the
minimum wages but also the maximum expenditure limits for individuals.
It will not be correct to say that the socialists were the creation of Nehru to reign in his
conservative colleagues in the Congress or to build his own support group within the Congress;
such an insinuations would not do justice to either of them. It is another matter to say that both
derived sustenance from each other and supported each other’s cause as and when such a course
suited to their convenience.
Like the rest of his socialist colleagues, Lohia was fond of propounding high-sounding thesis
and theories.
‘the borrowed ideology of socialism has been misused in establishing fascism’ ‘so-called
slogan of socialists to ‘March Forward” is nothing but hollow talk’
In 1936, Lohia, came back from Germany, where he had gone to pursue his doctoral studies,
and was immediately invited by Jawaharlal to join him and was made Secretary of the Congress
Foreign Department, in which capacity he worked from within the precincts of Anand Bhawan,
Nehru’s ancestral house, in Allahabad. In 1934, he had joined some foreign-returned Indians
and indigenous Marxists to found the Congress Socialist Party, as a pressure group espousing
radicalism within the Congress. The Congress Socialist Party was always powerfully
influenced by the personality and ideas of Nehru.
By 1930, the politics of India had veered to concern itself with the content of freedom. 136 No
political formation could afford to talk of freedom from the bondage without addressing the
issue of poverty and exclusion. The launching of the Salt Satyagraha was an ample proof of
the change that had perceptibly occurred in the political discourse. It was the first major attempt
by the politically dominant Congress to reach out to the masses and bring into the political
ambit the issues that directly affected the masses – poor, marginalize d and the ‘mute-millions’.
The earlier mass movement – the non-co-operation movement in 1920 – had focused mainly
on hurt sentiment of ‘national identity’ – the Rowlatt Act, the military atrocities in Punjab, the
Khilafat wrongs, and appealed to the educated, middle class, ‘the politicized lot’ – give up
titles, educational and judicial institutions, services, legislatures. Gandhi’s non-co-operation
movement was in main a militant extension of an old politics that by 1927 had lived its utility.
Gandhi’s politics was nationalistic to the core and when he referred to the economic wrongs,
his indicting fingers were largely pointed towards the British and rarely touched the internal
socio-economic contradictions that had given rise to the abject and endemic poverty. A new
politics was waiting to be invented.
Throughout the 20s, besides making the non-co-operation movement a Hindu-Muslim show,
Gandhi was mostly devoted to Khadi; he undertook a massive exercise in its propagation by
repeatedly speaking about it in his public meetings, he built a nationwide network of spinners,

136
Dev Dutt, Socialism and National Movement (1927- 1939), Mankind, January – February 1969,
59
weavers and Khadi workers linked to the Charkha Sangh, whose centres were established all
over the country, he even made an unsuccessful attempt to transform Congress into a spinning
organization. But it was largely seen as a distraction, or at most inadequate in meeting the
challenge thrown by extreme poverty and entrenched exclusion. He was taunted and often his
efforts truncated. ‘You had said that the independence would come in the wake of national
acceptance of Khadi.
The CSP’s leading lights were those left-leaning members of the Congress who saw in Nehru
their mentor and to Gandhi, they showed profound reverence but ambiguous adherence.
Gandhi, in their conception, was past his political expiry date. It was Nehru’s consummation
with the radical ideas on national struggle and economic organization of the country that
brought to fore a group of people with the ideological belief in socialism; not just group’s birth
but also its end was an outcome of Nehru’s politics. Piece by piece he chipped its ideological
plank, then poached on its adherents, and ultimately robbed it of its cadres and leaders leaving
it bare and prone to vicious cycle of fission and fusion.
From the time of its inception to the time when the CSP decided to drop its suffix of the
Congress in its name, in 1946, Nehru was never formally present in its annual conventions but
he always made himself present in the speeches of its Presidents. In Nehru’s ideological tussle
with Gandhi, the CSP was Nehru’s front against Gandhi’s Gandhi Sewa Sangh, a body
established by Gandhi sympathisers in the wake of suspension of the Non-Cooperation
movement (1920-22) but was a body that had remained largely dormant till Gandhi himself
withdrew from the Congress in 1934.
“My Dear Madhu”, George wrote to Limaye from his prison cell expressing resentment at
Doctor Ram Manohar Lohia’s “unprincipled” attempt to forge a non-Congress alliance. In
August 1963, with George in jail, incarcerated for the alleged act of indiscipline of putting forth
demands of taximen union during a phase of national emergency occasioned by the Chinese
aggression on the northern border in October 1962, Lohia entered the Lok Sabha, the lower
House of the Indian Parliament, for the first time, at the age of 54, through a bye-election from
Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh. He had successfully forged an all-party alliance against the
Congress. While his candidature had received support from the Jan Sangh and Swatantra Party,
he himself had campaigned for Deen Dayal Upadhyay at Jaunpur and for Kripalani who had
stood as an independent from Kannuaj. Minoo Masani, the former socialist colleague of Lohia,
also won from Gujarat on Swatantra Party ticket. In the Parliament, on the very first day of him
being there, even before he took an oath, he created a scene that made Nehru cry for halt. ‘The
Member’, Nehru said to the Speaker, ‘is new to the parliamentary norms and therefore needs
to be taught some etiquettes.’ Not someone to be bogged down by the stature of Nehru, Lohia
retorted, ‘……’ Soon, Lohia along with Kripalani moved the first ever no-confidence motion
against the Nehru’s government.
What Lohia provided to the Indian politics was speed, a situation that was much more agreeable
than the moribund state of political affair during the one-man dominance of Nehru.
George supported the idea mooted by Limaye to resign from the Socialist Party National
Committee to inject ‘shock-treatment’ to Lohia; he further wanted to strengthen the
Maharashtra branch of the Party by expanding the base of the Party by roping in the ‘Bahujans’
in Maharashtra.
In proposing to incorporate ‘bahujan samaj’ leadership in the Socialist party, George was not
completely ingenious. It was a political idea on which Lohia had been working since he
established the Socialist Party after being expelled from the Praja Socialist Party in 1955. Ram
Manohar Lohia, as one might think, did not belong to the caste of iron-smiths as his surname
60
suggests. To qualify his caste at the very beginning of his introduction is important as to many
of political observers and practitioners, he is the father of the sudra upsurge in the Indian
politics. Just as Ambedkar has seen some kind of ideological rebirth, Lohia too has suddenly
emerged as a credible ideologue of middle-caste eminence. It is in keeping with Lohia’s own
intuition. He had….
My Dear Madhu,
Yesterday Champa & today Dada gave me the gist of happenings of the past few weeks
culminating with the resolution of the NC. Both briefed me on your thoughts, and Dada showed
me the draft of your resignation letter. I am now recording my thoughts and feelings with the
awareness that if I were free to discuss the matters with you and with other friends, I might
modify my conclusions.
Doctor has shocked me, as he has shocked so many others. I have tremendous love for him,
and more respect. But I am now resentful at his throwing to the winds principles for which we
have sacrificed so much. We are also proud of Doctor’s thoughts, but he seems to forget that it
is the action of thousands of ordinary people that has given momentum to his thinking. Having
said that I believe it’s time the Socialist Party got wedded with an ideology which is more than
just what Doctor says. I know the ideology is there, but that is not what binds the party together.
How often have we not said that ‘minus Doctor, there is no party!’And no body is more
conscious of it than Doctor himself. That is why he makes the NC to resolve whatever he wants
it to resolve upon at a given moment, even if it means tearing to shreds the statement of
principles on which there could be no compromise till the other day! In my view the NC has
committed a gross violation of the party’s policy statement by resolving to support candidates
of other parties and has ….itself to severe disciplining action; and, the last that you and I could
do in such circumstances is to resign from it. The subsequent steps that you have thought of do
not appeal to me. Dada called them (along with own resignations from the Committee) ‘shock
treatment’ that might bring the party in line. But it is Doctor who has to be brought in line, not
the party. And my feeling is that the disaffection of the Maharashtra Party (or the State Party
supporting its work, as Dada put it) from the Central organization may create bitterness to
recover from which (should there be recovery at all) many persons on both sides may not live.
It may, in fact, mean a further splintering of the socialist movement of our dream, a prelude to
its ultimate liquidation. Nothing succeeds like success and natural corollary of the N C
resolution being that other parties will support socialist candidates (with a “joint programme
on concrete and specific issues” bringing about a ….political joint front) electoral success will
come aplenty to the Socialist Party in UP, MP and Bihar particularly and elsewhere on a smaller
scale. While we look with disinterestedness at the unprincipled policies, we may, of course,
function as prophets of the definitely impending disaster to demonstrate ideas consequent upon
the unprincipled policies so zealously initiated by our erstwhile colleagues, but that will not
save us from jack-boot.
I would suggest the following course of action for us in Maharashtra. And while allowing the
presence of a couple of persons who will always disagree with what the Maharashtra party may
agree, I believe that there will be many units of the Party in other states that will follow the
lead of the Maharashtra Party on this critical issue.
1. our resignation from the national committee
2. The annual or special conference of the state party that will repudiate the NC resolution and
reiterate the policy statement.

61
3. organizational steps to make our voice louder in the National Conference. Here, the B…and
now the P…should give us considerable assistance. The smell of fight should stimulate harder
war in all our ranks.
4. A Socialist Party charge sheet on the state government to be submitted say on 9th August or
any other convenient date, with a massive demonstration of the city’s workers and of small
jathas from as many districts as possible. With the present mood of the workers we could do
this on a grand scale. This will be the first time in India that any public charge-sheet (and the
charge sheet must contain specific charges) is served on a government. The SP doing it alone
on 9th August will put some national spot light on our state party vis-à-vis the Red March on
August 13.
5. You should tour the south, especially Mysore, and see to what extent we can carry the
southern parties with us.
Now follow some random thought on the party in Maharashtra:
Looking at the special forces working in Maharshtra’s politics, I see hardly any future for our
party in the state in our present condition. Is not the frustration in that otherwise brilliant group
of men we have in Poona essentially due to these very social factors? Dada keeps on drumming
that you and I should undertake a tour of Maharashtra to renew your old contacts abd to
establish new ones, and thus lay the foundation of party. We are the only party in the state that
is …totally denied the ‘bahujan samaj’ leadership, and that in my view, is the largest single
factor that prevents our growth. More than 7 years of selfless work has not helped us to create
or attract such leadership, even inspite of 60%...
We should now concentrate our activities in and around Bombay. Ullas Nagar may be a
frustrating experience, but not so frustrating when we count the number of state assemblies
where we have our men. Bombay has 24 seats in the Assembly and key to those seats is in the
Corportaion. Municipal elections are in 1965, a full two years before the General Elections. If
the single member wards are introduced, we should make a bid to take over Bori Bunder I am
dead serious on this one. People want an alternative, don’t they? We tell them, here we are in
this city, an alternative government. This calls for a lot of planning, but there is no other way
by which we can spread in Maharashtra. For myself, I have decided to plunge into this fight to
take over Bori Bunder right from the day I am out of the prison.
Now, if as you think the party suspends its work, in my view all our cadres, especially those in
trade unions, will lose whatever little touch they have with the masses; and you know better
that I do that ideology without organization means nothing. Incidentally, if we succeed in
organizing the HMP, that will give us another good platform all over the country. By and large,
t.u. workers can not afford political compromises with parties like CP & PSP as the t.u. rivalries
and conflicts keep them at violent loggerheads with others. If the HMP could gain recognition
at the tripartite, we get national voice which will not be feeble. Cutting….away from the central
party will deny us access to the organizations and workers in other states. Besides I don’t see
why we should at all…our lines with t.u. work if it is not to help the growth of the socialist
movement.
I shall be a little personal. One of the most frustrating experiences I have had in recent years is
your reluctance to effectively function on the national scene. The money factor apart, I see no
other reason why you should try to withdraw yourself into a shell. Money should be no major
problem from now on, and the present crisis is an opportunity which I would want you to seize,
if for no other purpose at least to keep the party on the ball.

62
As ….said when to him all seemed lost, ‘fight, fight and fight’ till we are able to make the party
walk the straight road or we are thrown out by those who would have the short-cuts. That’s
all…affy…George137
Place of Socialist Opposition; in its numerical terms, in the ideological terms, and in the
profundity of its impact;
Why is that Socialists despite having captured national imagination since late thirties, and
placed much more favourably than the communists; having led the boisterous 42 movement
and thereby national gratitude; having JP or Lohia as an iconic intellectual-leaders; having
multiple state governments in late sixties as leading proponents of Samyukta Vidhayak Dal
governments; having taken many grassroots concerns, having some very grassroots agendas,
struggles, and having led struggles on the issues of governmental accountability, freedom and
liberty, did not have a lasting and uncontaminated control on the government? Why did they
require crutches of the RSS to stand on; during SVD governments, in 1977, in 1999? Can anti-
Congressism be so strong as to negate the negativity of the RSS? Socialists not only had an
economic programme that was close to Marxists but their nationalist ethos brought them close
to Jan Sangh/Hindu Maha Sabha.
EMS Namboodiripad, 1966, Economics and politics of India’s socialist pattern, Delhi: PPH
What exactly are the political and economic implications of the ‘socialist pattern of society’,
the objective that the Congress set before itself at its Avadi session in 1955?
Since Lohia’s victory in the bye-election in 1963, the whole socialist politics got centred around
dislodging the Congress from its perch in Delhi. More the political power became the pursuit
of politics, more the Socialist Party came off ideologically, comrades fell off, Party got
increasingly shrunk, internecine battles became more intense and petty, unforgiving; its
political calculations became lame-duck that often came unstuck resulting in the dampening of
sheen and frittering of opportunities, and yet, miraculously, it retained not a vote-share though
but a space in the conscience of voters. Slowly, the party was reduced to an open house, where
none respected anyone, where individual egos so grandiose that collective became an
impossibility. Now, it was a race to retain a simple formal identity, a mere inconsequential
existence; it was reduced to a political non-entity, big-mouth, but just blabbering, heeded by
none; newspapers gave less and less space to the Party and more to the shenanigans of its
larger-than-life leaders; if the media covered anyone of their leaders, it was because of their
never-say-die approach. Defeated, Raj Narain began a campaign against the victorious Indira
Gandhi claiming chemical contamination of the ballot papers; defeated, Madhu Limaye, went
to fight the bye-election at Banka and won; defeated, George founded the Pratipaksh and
sweated day and night, to launch one of the largest labour strike in the world; they were all
desperadoes: with nothing left to stand on, individual glory was the only way for self-salvation,
political survival, and socialist deliverance. The decade of seventies was defined by them, it
belonged to them: they might not have held the reign of powers but they shook the powers that
be; they scarcely understood the power-game, had even less sense of what the power is or use
it could be mobilized for, but they were resolute, dangerously honest, courageous to the core,
and believers in their way. The more they pursued power, less they understood power’s power.
Lohia’s non-congressism was founded on a conception that gave negativity a political primacy
and a strategic urgency, dislodgement of a political party was its primary objective, in its
deepest recesses it lacked a constructive ideology; the Party, therefore, if mobilized all its

137
Long letter from George to Madhu Limaye, 18 th June 1963, from Nagpur central prison, talks of Lohia, SP,
and how to capture the national scene;
63
resources, all its faculties, and all its manoeuvrings it was towards the purpose of fulfilling a
negative objective, and when opportunity arrived, it was left with no conception, no ideology,
no energy to even conceive an idea to which begotten power could be harnessed.
After a thorough drubbing the Socialists received in the first General Election, while others
wavered, wilted or withdrew from active politics, Lohia was undaunted. ‘Live nations do not
wait for five years’, he had said addressing the students at the Delhi University, his words
laying not just a challenge but also raising the morals of the socialists while charting a future
course of action. Most of Lohia’s pictures show ‘his lips slightly twisted in a smile and his eyes
twinkling with affection, mischief, and a lot of challenge’138. Lohia’s colleagues lacked a
resolute will. Asoka Mehta who had called Nehru a pitiable defender of the rotten social order,
soon declared that India’s future was safe in Nehru’s hands.
Lohia’s non-violence was shorn of timidity or sectarianism. Coupled with the element of civil-
disobedience, it was not powerless.
Given the contemporary political scenario that has somehow brought itself to at least show
abhorrence to those caught for corruption, Jaya’s arrest is an inevitability. It is also certain that
not a single soul would raise its voice against her arrest; her own Samata Party whose President
she was when Tehelka journalists disguised as arms-dealers with hidden camera caught her
directing where money was to be given now has merged itself with the JD(U) whose member
she now is only in name and with whose reigning bosses she has estranged relations would not
stand by her; even those civil society members who have either worked with Jaya in her craft-
work or have benefited by her association would not stand by her, some have even felt alienated
due to her advocacy of Modi; she has an acute sense of her isolation, which ironically is not of
her doing but that’s the way the world functions; also the way the BJP has disowned Bangaru
Laxman, its only Dalit President ever, calling his predicament as personal, does not augur well
for Jaya; her impending conviction could be construed as of her own making; the JD(U) would
not stand by her, the NDA would not touch her, Modi or other political friends would be quick
to make her into a pariah, the civil society would watch listlessly, her contribution in the making
of Dilli Haat or in empowering the crafts-person would be forgotten in minor details, her age
or gender disregarded, in short, her cup of woes are full – nothing really can stop her from
being convicted and sent to jail. The question that remains to be answered is how she would
go: head held high or buried deep in her long neck. Corruption is a social stigma only when
you are caught; so long you are not caught it helps in winning admiring glances.
Lok Sabha mein Lohia, volume 1: Lohia was a member of the Lok Sabha from August
13, 1963 to August 12, 1967
The idea of non-Congressism really started in the wake of Indian debacle at the hands of
Chinese. Lohia began to call Nehru government as that of national shame. To defeat which he
formulated the idea of electoral adjustment and common minimum programme. Bred in
Lohia’s puritan politics, his own colleagues now went against him and refused to consider
electoral adjustment as a policy. They opposed tooth and nail but Lohia persisted. But
government instead of strengthening its defence against the Chinese incursion, used the
occasion to suppress political dissent at home. They promulgated a draconian act of Defence
of India Rules, known widely by its acronym of DIR. It mopped up communist leadership from
everywhere on the pretext of their ideological affinity with the communist Chinese. In March,
1963, George carried a procession of socialists and trade union affiliated people to
Maharashtra’s Governor and submitted a memorandum demanding emergency’s abrogation.

138
Om Prakash Deepak, The Waywardness of History, Mankind, March, 1969,
64
Its text, which was drafted by Madhu Limaye in chaste Hindi, a copy of which I found in his
private paper collection at the manuscript section of the TeenMurti library, is revealing. In
April 1963, George who then was also a leader of Bombay Taximen’s Union was arrested for
demanding a fare-hike for taximen. He was in jail for full nine months.
From the day he entered into the Parliament, he daily raised the question of the striking workers
of Bombay. In his speech on no-confidence motion against Nehru’s cabinet, he referred to
continuing incarceration of George Fernandes, ‘who is this George Fernandes? A man of such
magnificent nationalism that the Prime Minister himself – I presume wrongly, though – had to
ask forgiveness to the Chinese Prime Minister.’
For seventeen long years while Lohia trained his gun steadfastly on Nehru, he avoided a face
to face meeting with the Prime Minister. His bristling attack on the Prime Minister sometimes
went below the belt and was taken to be undignified. Nehru’s ‘parrot-like’ foreign policy
floundered in ‘empty idealism and excessive practicality’.
Shastri wore a ‘smile of the eternal bride’.
‘India has for fifteen centuries now been a land of disintegration and adjustment. Very notable
exceptions apart, her leaders have been men of adjustment. This adjustment has indeed been
somewhat different from craven submission, for some kind of identity has been sought to be
maintained throughout the turmoil. Mr. Nehru was such a man of adjustment, as was earlier
Raja Ram Mohan Roy and still earlier Raja Man Singh. Mr. Shastri rose to his high office
without even a challenge from anyone else in his party, primarily because of all Congress
leaders he adjusted best with Mr. Nehru. In common parlance, this virtue is called flattery,
which makes it a vice from the viewpoint of the common good. With flattery goes backbiting
and gossip. These vices ensure promotion in practically every sphere of the nation today. But
Mr. Shastri had a secondary virtue. He was soft-spoken and therefoe listened to people or at
least so appeared. To that extent, he was spokesman par excellence, the flag that fluttered with
the wind in whose blowing he had no hand. …The winds that have blown over the country for
the past eighteen years have been ill, very ill. Not even a miracle can produce a Congressman
who can initiate policies instead of expressing consensus.’
What Lohia provided to the Indian politics was speed, a situation that was much more agreeable
than the moribund state of political affair during the one-man dominance of Nehru.
Vinod K Singh/Sunilam
Congress Socialist Party: 40s: show of potential; 50s: groping for independent existence; 1952
General election and dawning of the first streak of political maturity among the socialists as
exemplified in their effort to consolidate their political strength by merging with Kripalani’s
Majdoor Kisan Praja Party; Praja Socialist Party: Nehru-Jayaprakash negotiations, its failure,
its reminder again to JP when he was imprisoned by Indira in the post-emergency period and
20-point programme foisted over the country by the regime of totalitarianism; PSP: Betul
churning and Asoka Mehta’s thesis on ‘political compulsions for a backward economy’ as an
effort to veer the socialists again towards the Congress; PSP: 1955 break up induced by Lohia
after Kerala firing, the CM joining the Congress and made governor of Punjab; political
irrelevance and non-congressism; 60s: momentarily turning tides amidst fratricidal and friendly
turmoil; 70s: mergers and marginalization; increasingly pushed into periphery: turning of
Gungi Gudia into rampaging Durga; politically suicidal alliances and cry in wilderness;
PSP meet at Betul (1953), at Bhopal (1963),
Congress meet in 1953: at Awadi: resolution on Socialism;
65
Sources: Why Praja Socialist Party? By N G Goray and Surendranath Dwivedy; Popular
Prakashan, before 1967 general election
Source: Report of the Special Convention of the Praja Socialist Party, Betul (Madhya Pradesh),
14-18 June 1953; Bombay: R P Parusuram of PSP
1938: Last conference held before Kanpur conference in 1947; at Lahore
February 1947; at Kanpur; first conference of the party since the outbreak of war; here prefix
‘Congress’ was dropped and party was opened to non-congressmen as well; on the threshold
of being launched as the independent political party;
1948 at Nasik conference: terminated its fourteen year connection with the parent Congress
Party
Source: Forward to a mass party: Socialist party
Under the influence of Nehruvian secularism and Marxist materialism, the Socialists in India
posited themselves as a harshest critique of Indian society’s primordial loyalties as manifested
in caste and community ties. They attacked it as backward, non-modern, and invidious. They
wanted to replace such primordial ties with that of factory-floor and farm-field horizontal
loyalties. It was an audacious imagination that sought replacement of primordial sentiments
with newly minted class-consciousness.
But later when electoral debacle forced them to rethink their policies, programmes and political
line, the Socialists did not go too far or deep; they made certain cosmetic changes and
refashioned themselves as India-made brand. They began to look after the caste and community
from the utilitarian point-of-view.
They sought to equalise people horizontally not knowing perhaps that the traditional institution
itself could have also nurtured some form of equality-inducing mechanism or might have been
an institution of equals.
Each time they raised the hackles in public for an issue and succeeded in partially getting that
issue debated in public, Nehru’s Congress adopted it as its own. This happened again and again.
And each time, by his adoption of the issue, Nehru chipped at the Socialists, taking a morsel
here and a crumb there.
Even at the threshold of the first General Election, which would decide for all the fate of the
Socialist Party in India, much of the party was still undecided about the ‘ideological just’ nature
of its chosen means of democratic election.
Under Lohia’s Command, the Socialist Party was shorn of its revolutionary aims and became
an election machine which was scornfully spoken against by JP at Madras.
Somehow, JP was a luxury-loving person; he was soft; on the other hand, Lohia, Limaye or
George were not luxury-loving, they just needed a modicum of amenities, George’s idea of
luxury was limited to eating a few times in the high-end restaurants; their sense of dressing was
also not so luxuriously defined; George might have got a palatial house to live in as a Minister
but he was not so keen to have a rose garden or Italian tiles in his bathroom; JP on the other
hand, had a luxurious bent of mind, Gandhi had to shell out a fortune in maintaining his
comrades; it does not reveal the nature of the recipients but capacity of Gandhi to endure and
carry on; Nehru as the President of the Congress received a sum for his maintenance and also
received rents for Anand Bhavan even after he had dedicated it to the nation; AICC papers
would have details about the payments made to the individual leaders;

66
The electoral debacle in 1952 General election brought some stark revelations that were both
partly uplifting and in most parts dampening of the mood. It dawned upon them that the
Congress simply won because of votes division between opposition parties. While the
Socialists had garnered one crore of votes, the Congress had got five crores. Consolidation
became the key word. Mergers, acquisitions and alliances came into the political lexicon. From
the illustrative electoral arithmetic that led to the debacle, three strands emerged: One
immediate thought of those led by Asoka was of winding of the party and merging with the
Congress; second, exactly opposite response was that of strengthening the Party to make it
rqui-distanced from both the Congress and the Communists. And the third thoughtful response
was that of Jayaprakash who saw injustice of it all and cried for electoral reform and became
an advocate for party-less democracy. Each of the three responses took wildly long time to
concretise and each in a way collaborated and conspired in consigning the Party to the History.
India’s long association with alien power somehow disrobed her of her mental vigour and
spiritual vitality. Governmental association is always seen as reliable and deliverable source of
power. The non-State status, however lofty and moral, is at best draws a deferential treatment
at the personal level.
In JP’s case he changed from his over-dependency over the legislation to being an advocate of
chainging people’s heart.
They had their ideological mission writ large on their personalities; they wore their ideologies
on their sleeves. They had a conception of ideological superiority, a belief in their missionary
role, a destiny that was within their grab.
At the threshold of second General Election in 1957, when JP called the PSP to forge electoral
understanding with the opposition parties, he was attacked from all side for his unprincipled
suggestion. The attack was so swift and sharp that soon JP was on defensive. His own party
colleagues were against the idea. Asoka Mehta went to the extent of telling that his idea was
not just unprincipled but also propounded ideology-less power-politics. JP also proposed that
Nehru should have helped build a strong opposition to the ruling party. He said that that the
effectiveness and responsiveness of the ruling regime can only be ensured by the presence of a
strong opposition. His idea of electoral understanding between different political parties in
opposition was borne from this concern to build not just a check on the ruling party but also to
ensure its effectiveness. Nehru did not take kindly to the proposal and in his public meetings
ridiculed it to say that JP wants him to build opposition party. ‘What they want? For me to
nominate even the opposition candidates?’ JP alleged that Congress under Nehru was least
concerned with the institution building. Nehru’s devouring nature with respect to the socialists
was entirely on different plane. On the other hand, in 1961, when President Kennedy came
visiting India, Nehru introduced Atal Bihari Vajpayee as his ‘loyal opposition’. If Nehru was
a rapacious as far as socialists were concerned, he had a kid-glove approach towards the
communal party. Nehru is presented as someone against the communalisation of the Indian
polity. But actually he nurtured it against his own ilk, the socialists in opposition.
The West-Minister model of the government is sum-total of the modernity. In this model, it
befalls upon the government party to also nurture an effective and vocal opposition. The
opposition is within; the model abhors opposition from without. Nehru encouraged the
communal Jan Sangh against the secular Socialists.
His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition
Marxism within the system

67
Who after Nehru? Nehru’s piece on himself; not one rioter from 1947 to 1964 have been legally
punished; Gandhi
What unfolds below is a re-telling of a tragedy, a political tragedy
JP was a man in search of an ideology. Removal of social inequality and eradication of endemic
poverty were twin revolutionary aims of socialism in India.
For JP as well, just the way he accuses Lenin of committing the folly, realisation of socialism
was a matter of the conquest of political power.
In From Socialism to Sarvodaya, JP makes a candid admission of his ideological search. He
points out the futility of founding a derivative socialism in India as Western Socialism is
primarily about a society where industrialism and capitalism both have attained a maturity.
Critique that JP formulates is Marxian still.
The question is why the socialists in India took such a long time to realise that socialism in
India could only be engendered according to Indian ethos.
The whole of socialist political trajectory in India is played out between three protagonists.
They are Jawaharlal Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia. Rest of the other
leaders, including Gandhi, who influenced the socialists in so many ways, remain peripheral to
this cast of three actors. Among themselves, Nehru, JP and Lohia lay the foundation of
socialism in India, define its meanings, chart out its revolutionary route and eventually also
conspire, sadly, in its demise. George supported the idea mooted by Limaye to resign from the
Socialist Party National Committee to inject ‘shock-treatment’ to Lohia; he further wanted to
strengthen the Maharashtra branch of the Party by expanding the base of the Party by roping
in the ‘Bahujans’ in Maharashtra.
The fact that he was the party and his words, the ideology, even Lohia was acutely aware of.
His political career had begun in 1936 when he was invited by Nehru to join
Nehru was the axis around which the Socialist Party in its various forms evolved and got
decimated.
Gandhi was successful in injecting a kind of cordiality in the political discourse: one might
have political dispute but that mustn’t entail personal enmity. Politicians potentially invidious,
under Gandhi’s influence, would at least still maintain a cordial façade in the face of their
ideological and political opponents. Such a space was grudgingly available under Nehru. While
Gandhi would be critiqued by Socialists and Nehru, too, they would still have love and passion
for the man. In Nehru’s time, either due to the exigencies of being a ruling party vulnerable to
attack, ideological or political differences were not allowed to be aired in public against a
colleague. In 1953, Nehru writes a letter to S K Patil, then a Bombay Congressman, aspiring
big-ticket promotion, restraining him in straight language from openly critiquing the Morarji
government. Nehru even tells Patil to not use certain publication for public pronouncements.
Political Histories
The problem in the Indian socialist movement lay in its beginning, perhaps. As it saw itself as
a Marxist party, it competed with the Communist Party of India for the ideological niche. And
bound as it was to the Congress, it competed with the parent Congress for the organizational
space and control. Perhaps such a competition played out for long proved to be depleting. It
certainly imbued it with an organizational as well as ideological insecurity. If it had people
with brimming confidence, the same people also had scepticism about their capabilities that
ever made them look for crutches. If it had people with courage, the same people also proved
68
to be cowardly. They hinged their fate on extraneous factors such as personalities other than
their own. Each political move, calculated to increase their strength, backfired and instead of
augmenting eroded their strength. Only Lohia provided a momentary respite from this killing
scepticism, but soon after his death, the respite was short-lived.
The consolidation of the Socialist forces brought about in 1953
Since Lohia’s victory in the bye-election in 1963, the whole socialist politics got centred around
dislodging the Congress from its perch in Delhi. More the political power became the pursuit
of politics, more the Socialist Party came off ideologically, comrades fell off, Party got
increasingly shrunk, internecine battles became more intense and petty, unforgiving; its
political calculations became lame-duck that often came unstuck resulting in the dampening of
sheen and frittering of opportunities, and yet, miraculously, it retained not a vote-share though
but a space in the conscience of voters. Slowly, the party was reduced to an open house, where
none respected anyone, where individual egos so grandiose that collective became an
impossibility. Now, it was a race to retain a simple formal identity, a mere inconsequential
existence; it was reduced to a political non-entity, big-mouth, but just blabbering, heeded by
none; newspapers gave less and less space to the Party and more to the shenanigans of its
larger-than-life leaders; if the media covered anyone of their leaders, it was because of their
never-say-die approach. Defeated, Raj Narain began a campaign against the victorious Indira
Gandhi claiming chemical contamination of the ballot papers; defeated, Madhu Limaye, went
to fight the bye-election at Banka and won; defeated, George founded the Pratipaksh and
sweated day and night, to launch one of the largest labour strike in the world; they were all
desperadoes: with nothing left to stand on, individual glory was the only way for self-salvation,
political survival, and socialist deliverance. The decade of seventies was defined by them, it
belonged to them: they might not have held the reign of powers but they shook the powers that
be; they scarcely understood the power-game, had even less sense of what the power is or use
it could be mobilized for, but they were resolute, dangerously honest, courageous to the core,
and believers in their way. The more they pursued power, less they understood power’s power.
Lohia’s non-congressism was founded on a conception that gave negativity a political primacy
and a strategic urgency, dislodgement of a political party was its primary objective, in its
deepest recesses it lacked a constructive ideology; the Party, therefore, if mobilized all its
resources, all its faculties, and all its manoeuvrings it was towards the purpose of fulfilling a
negative objective, and when opportunity arrived, it was left with no conception, no ideology,
no energy to even conceive an idea to which begotten power could be harnessed.
Ideological Trajectories
Pritish Nandy’s interview with Morarji in late 1980s when he makes a critical comment on JP
needs to be seen;
In the last 400 years or so there has occurred disconnect of mainland India from its northern
mountainous Himalayas. If British had not developed some summer-capitals and holyday-
abodes, no one would have bothered to notice the Himalayas and its geo-political locations.
Indians have no sympathy with happenings in Himalayas. Have no comprehension, no
knowledge, no concern. Despite Lohia’s involvement with issues like Nepal, Urvasim,
Manipur and Kashmir, JP’s truce-seeking intervention in Nagaland or on Tibet, the socialists
too lacked an understanding and a comprehension; their intervention was mostly sporadic and
forgotten after having made some hue and cry; there was no effort to build a bigger paradigm,
train cadres accordingly, and formulate national policies by deeper engagements.139

139139
Panibaba
69
‘Look at the irony, we are advocating inclusion of China into United Nations, it’s the same
China that has attacked us, that has captured millions of acres of our sacred land. Don’t you
think it’s akin to a boy who is advocating marriage of his mother with her rapist? This is our
immoral foreign policy. There is a rebel son of India who are called Nagas. The government
bombarded their habitat. This government bombarded fleeing Portuguese in Goa. But the same
government held back its air-power against the advancing Chinese army. People say we are
enamoured by the world-peace. When someone asked our Ambassador in America why India
was not using its air-power, he answered saying that we feared retaliation by air from the
Chinese. ’
Mankind, February, 1966
The socialist antipathy towards the Communists have been vituperative, mostly owing to their
role during the “Quit India” movement in 1942, which if for the Socialists proved their
nationalist credentials, established the Communists as the betrayers of the nationalist cause.
One line from the letter of JP to Bose proposing formation of a new left party and also
establishment of favourable relationship with Moscow and the Communist International can
open a Pandora Box of hidden issues of Indian history.
Kripalani’s Kisan Majdoor Praja Party had neither kisans nor majdoor but was a
conglomeration of those aspirants who were denied or could not avail the Congress nomination
in the first General Election. After all those big talks, the result of the election was not just
disheartening but also dampening. The Coming together of the Socialist Party and the KMPP
was an effort to get their combined parliamentary strength against imposing Congress total
look trifle respectable.
If the purpose of quoting an adverse comment on Nehru was to provide a defence, Morarji not
just failed, he highlighted the attack thereby further embarrassing the leadership of Nehru. The
insinuation is not entirely unfair as Morarji was facing axe under the Kamaraj Plan and
therefore would have naturally been miffed as to adopt a tactical way to hit at Nehru by
highlighting most disparaging of remarks made by Lohia while outside the Parliament. Nehru’s
own reply, jaded and lacking in punch, to the motion was a dispirited defence of the attack on
his government.
Temperatures soon began to soar in the cool deliberative body.
Kripalani: ‘I see my country going down every day, day after day.’
In 1963, Lohia was at the peak of his political career. The victory to Lok Sabha had given him
a happy and a marauding mood.
We are also proud of Doctor’s thoughts, but he seems to forget that it is the action of thousands
of ordinary people that has given momentum to his thinking. Having said that
After fifteen years of desperate wait, for the first time at the age of 53, he had just entered the
Lok Sabha, having defeated Dr. B V Keskar, in a bye-election from Farrukhabad. And what a
parliamentary debut it was. On the very first day, in the middle of August, 1963, he, along with
others, moved the first-ever notice of no-confidence against the Nehru’s uninterrupted fifteen
years of rule. And before it was taken up for parliamentary evaluation, he got into an altercation
with the Prime Minister who had attempted to cut him to size; Lohia’s straight, irreverent, and
extraordinary response left Nehru stunned and speechless. Asked to comment on governmental
preparation to strengthen the moral character of the fighting army, who in 1962, on the advice
of a circular from the government that had asked them to desert the posts if faced with
advancing Chinese, had humiliatingly fled leaving the border-posts unmanned. In response,
70
Nehru said what a stupid question it was. Lohia retorted, without losing his composure, ‘Prime
Minister is the servant and Parliament, the master. The servant must know how to talk to the
master.’ A livid Nehru rose and asked the Chair to intervene. ‘The Member’, Nehru said to the
Speaker, ‘is new to the parliamentary norms. He needs to be taught some etiquettes. He is
indulging in talks and behaving in a way that is normally not acceptable in this House. Please
restrain him.’ Not someone to be bogged down by the stature of Nehru, Lohia retorted, ‘Now-
onward, Mr. Prime Minister, please get used to my behaviour.’140
The ‘want of confidence motion’ that Lohia, Kripalani and others moved against the Nehru
government is most significant of such motions in the independent India. Lohia’s speech was
original, devastatingly incisive and laid bare the inadequacy of the Nehru’s government in the
face of mounting national all-round crisis. ‘I charge this government with running a barren
administration, based on total ignorance, empty verbiage, and wordy-enthusiasm. We are the
hungriest country in the world surviving on the bare minimum calories. This government is of
fifty lakh big people. It has nothing to do with the other 43 and half crore people. 60% of the
Indian people that is 27 crore survive on expenditure of less than 3 anna per day whereas at the
same time on Prime Minister’s dog’s per day expenditure is three rupees a day. This situation
has resulted in extreme disparity in the country. The Prime Minister often mouths leftism and
socialism but in his hands is not even capitalism, it is sheer unadulterated feudalism. He wants
to run a sham and corrupt socialism in the country. It is an evidence of how a man with mere
wordy enthusiasm could keep the people enthralled for long. I am the only member in this
parliament, who, leaving the first few initial months of this government when I had nurtured
some hope, never in the last fifteen years ever had any confidence in it. I have no personal
enmity with the Prime Minister. My fight is simply on the issue of morality.’141
‘if the British jailed me eight times, the Prime Minister of independent India too kept me in jail
for ten times. Still, I am ashamed that the nation has remained weakened and we have not been
able to do much for it. But the PM has no shame, of India’s weakness, of not been able to stand
before the Chinese, or of 27 crore people who live on the meagre three anna a day earning. …It
is due to the caste system that opportunities and merit have undergone a gradual and continuous
contraction. It has become so contracted that father becomes the head of government and the
daughter the head of people. If there is one person who is a kingpin of those gripped with a
caste and kinship affliction, it is the Prime Minister. Till the time you don’t give special
preferential opportunities to the 90% of the population comprising of women, dalits, adivasis,
backwards, and religious minorities, you would scarcely be able to clean the dirty water off the
country. Theory of Equal opportunities would not help, you have to adopt the theory of Special
Opportunity if you want to expand the scope of merit and opportunity for a larger section of
the population. …we have no resources, no money yet hundreds of people come to us
requesting us to facilitate their mundane work. This is true not just for those in the government
but even for those in opposition. Personal issues take so much of our attention that we have not
been able to pay serious attention to public issues. There is no doubt that we all have to sit
down and find some solution to this issue. …today, it is true that opposition is fragmented but
today the cement is little wet and loose, but mould is developing; its quite possible that in time
of one or two years, a possibility might emerge of a party that believes in national boundary as
it was on August 15, 1947 and another party whose boundary would be as on 8 September
1962. …This government is of national shame and it does not have any support of people.

140
Lok Sabha mein Lohia, 16 August, 1963
141
Lohia’s speech on the no-confidence motion on 21 August 1963 was a policy critic of the Nehru’s government;
it showed Lohia’s grasp over the fundamentals of the governance. Lok Sabha mein Lohia, 21 August 1963; China
is an ‘intervenist Dragon’
71
As a member noted, in Nehru’s India, ‘Neither is their ‘mind free of fear’, nor is their ‘head
held high’.142
Other socialist members in Parliament vied in giving their own time to enable Lohia’s speech
continue in the parliament.
Dirty language, uncivilized language, uncultured language,
AICC meet at Patna, May 18, 19, 1934; prior to AICC meeting, on May 17, an All India
Conference of Socialist Congressmen was held at Patna, ‘to make united and organised efforts
for the promotion of the socialist cause’.
The socialists felt that Gandhi’s constructive programme was ‘totally inadequate as a
programme intended for the achievement of independence’. They considered ‘creation of or
participation in workers’ and peasants’ organizations based on the demands of these classes’
were the only way by which revolutionary mass movement could be developed.
Constructive programme of the Congress ‘inadequate and incomplete’ to secure political
independence. ‘Reconstruction can only follow from political power and we have to see if our
present programme is calculated to secure that power. I do not understand what Gandhiji
implies when he criticises the political exploitation of labour. The truth is that mere trade
unionism is not enough; workers must also be made politically conscious. The basis of the new
approach that I am advocating must be economic. It is absurd to talk of khadi to the kiasans of
Gaya where the agrarian problems are well nigh appalling.
The task is to so influence and change the Congress as to make it a real anti-imperialist body.
The CSP is a political party uniting on its platform all anti-imperialist elements and its task is
to lead such elements to the overthrow of British imperialism and the establishment in india of
a real swarj for the masses.
Habitual use of khadi as condition of membership of the congress: the CSP took a position that
habitual use of khadi should not be made a qualification for membership of elected Congress
bodies, the plea being that it is an unnecessary restriction & discriminates against certain
genuine anti-imperialist elements in the country, who have as much right to represent the
masses in the congress as any else.
‘It is true that there is hardly anything in the present programme of the Congress which is of
interest to us. (105)
Congress should be converted into an organization of the exploited classes of India which
forms the bulk of the population of the country. Accused of weakening the Congress, the CSP’s
national executive decided ‘that while giving up the stressing of Socialism as such on Congress
platforms we must vigorously propagate Socialism among Congressmen and others and build
up general sympathy and support for the movement.’ The committee not only attacked the
individual programmes of the Congress but the committee enjoined upon its members to avoid
use of harsh and unbecoming language. The object of the Party is to win over genuine
Congressmen particularly the rank and file to our views by propaganda and patient work till
the great majority of Congressmen become our supporters. (153)
As the Congress Socialist Party was trying to strengthen its foothold within the Congress, there
was no dearth of onslaught on it. The Congress Working Committee cautioned it against
indulging in the loose talks regarding the ‘confiscation of private property and necessity of

142
Buta Singh, Shiromani Akali Dal, Augsut 21, 1963, NCM, debate, p1891
72
class-war’.143 S K Patil, by defeating whom in 1967 George would don the title of ‘loin-slayer’,
asked, rather mockingly, ‘What in God’s name is the cardinal difference between the
perspectives of the Congress on the one hand and those of the Socialist Groups on the other?
Are these differences of such a fundamental nature as can never be mutually adjusted. Then, a
Socialist Party within the Congress is a meaningless thing. ’144 ‘a blend of Gandhi=Jawahar
philosophy with a proper admisture of economism and spiritualism would have been an ideal
solution to India’s peculiar problems. For a number of years Jawaharlal was known to be a
socialist of confirmed views. One could see his hand in the shaping of many resolutions with
an economic bearing but he never despaired of success to a point where formation of a new
party would become a necessity. His creative mind backed by his forceful personality would
have certainly avoided a split within Congress ranks. With the incarceration of JN came a chaos
and confusion which is growing every day and with disastrous consequences. The formation
of the CSP within the Congress fold has put an enormous strain on many people’s loyalty to
the Congress.
Vallabhabhai Patel: ‘Questioned about the socialist group, the Sardar was reluctant to say
anything about them. When pressed to give his views, he said that as long as the socialists, for
that matter, any group had any programme, which would maintain the prestige and honour of
the great organization and would not imperil it in anyway, he would welcome them and support
them, but if the programme of such a group meant the lowering of the Congress prestige he
would oppose them. In this connection the Sardar said that the Congress needs more of unity
within its ranks, than it did at any time before. He felt that the differences of opinion should
not divide the Congress at present as it would be unfair to those who have burnt their boats in
their loyalty to the Congress. Every Congressman should implicitly carry out the Congress
programme as a matter of discipline.’145 Sardar appealed to the CSP to make the ensuing
Congress session a complete success and not to create a situation of split within congress. ‘If
he were a socialist today he would show his loyalty to the Congress by sending Congress
candidates Congress candidates to the legislatures. Socialism could not be brought about by
reading Lenin or by discussions. At this stage when they were themselves in bondage, true
socialist should concentrate his energies in maintaining firstly the solidarity of the struggle
which was now being carried on by the Congress. His appeal to them was to go to the rural
areas and work among the peasants – a work which was dear to his heart and to explain to them
their principles. Having won the confidence of workers the Congress would be theirs. The name
of the Pt Jawaharlal was being mentioned in connection with the formation of the new Party.
But he thought they were doing a great injustice to the Pandit because he was now in jail and
when he was out of jail he was not thinking of the creation of a new Party. Some of the socialists
were thinking of settling the correct ideology. But this was all foolish talk. Did the last struggle
fail because there was no ideology or because they had not strength and organization? He asked.

143
144
‘S K Patil Article on the formation of the CSP’, Bombay Chronicle, August 10, 1934, in Bimal Prasad (Ed),
2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume One (1929-35), New Delhi: Manohar; Appendix 6, p263;
patil then was general secretary, bombay congress
145
‘Sardar Patel to support Congress decision on Council entry; refuses to criticize Socialists’, Bombay Sentinel,
July 14, 1934; P N Chopra (Ed), 1994, Collected Works of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Volume IV (1932-34), Delhi:
Konark Publishers; Pp158-9; Sardar was released from the Nasik jail after two and half years of imprisonment on
July 14, first interview while on way to home in Bombay from jail; he called Nehru, ‘life of the Congress’ still in
jail; Patel was then Congress President;
73
He appealed to the Socialists to go to the villages and gain confidence of the people and the
Congress would be theirs.’146
‘the borrowed ideology of socialism has been misused in establishing fascism’ ‘so-called
slogan of socialists to ‘March Forward” is nothing but hollow talk’
To Netaji, 1940: Congress being a chief instrument of political action – a multi-class front
(with workers and the national bourgeoisie constituting the extreme ends) against imperialism.
The Congress indeed remains a borad-based mass organization, but its leadership is more than
ever concentrated in the hands of a coterie that is anti-masses (anti-labour, anti-peasant, and
even anti-democratic to some extent) and completely bourgeoisie in ideology and sympathy.
JP wrote Netaji inviting his participation in the establishment of a new left party that would
have a working alliance with the Communist Party and the CSP within the Congress ‘may or
may not be kept going merely as a cover and platform for the new party and particularly to
function within the Congress as long as we consider it feasible to do so.’ The new party would
not be anti-Communist International as it ‘should indeed have contacts with Mascow and seek
the aid of the Soviet in our revolution’
A ‘revolution’ seeking group of youth whose leadership scarcely had a conception of what its
vehicle would be or in what shape it would yield revolution was what the Socialists within the
Congress were. Their espousal of revolutionary sentiments was mostly an outcome of an
aggregation of read books, gathered information, innocent idealism and flimsy experience.
They were mostly educated abroad, English-speaking and urban individual, who sounded
intelligent, liked raking up controversies and be what Ram Manohar Lohia very aptly put it
later a ‘ginger group’. A reading of JP’s collected works show what an infantile and yet
idealistic intervention the Socialists had during the course of the national struggle, particularly,
in late thirties and forties. The Socialists hold Gandhi’s khadi in total contempt and disparages
it repeatedly as not just ‘incomplete and inadequate’ to solve India’s poverty tangle but also as
an instrument to wage war against the British. Although Gandhi would be respectfully critical
and differ, Nehru would not hesitate either to mobilise them under his umbrella or castigate
them for being reckless critics.
‘Any one who wants to rule Delhi, should go to her not as wooer but as her subduer (sic). The
Congress Party, which now rules Delhi, shifted its base from Allahabad only after it had made
sure of its possession of Delhi. The Communist and Praja Socialists have come to woo and not
to subdue, and they have already established their central offices in this town of diseased
elegance. They will not have won Delhi, but Delhi will have turned them into its drummers.’
147

Despite Leila being born into a politically illustrious family, she was least interested in what
all it took to build a political following and was least prepared to sacrifice her comfort at the
altar of politics. Rama Mitra was never happy about Lohia’s habit of colleting people at her
dining table and invading her privacy. Similar unhappiness also weighed Leila into domestic
conflict. Lohia however would go about the whole house searching for anyone who had not
taken in lunch; at the same time he would also molly cajole Rama by declaring that it was her
house. George could never go against Leila’s wishes. The Lohia’s charm was ebullient, his
enthusiasm infectious, his concern genuinely drew people closer to him. George could only

146
‘Sardar Patel asks people of Bombay to accept government challenge and return Congress candidates to
assembly with thumping majority’, Bombay Chronicle, July 16, 1934, P N Chopra (Ed), 1994, Collected Works
of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Volume IV (1932-34), Delhi: Konark Publishers; Pp159-62;
147
Ram Manohar Lohia, 1958, Dilli, also called, Delhi, Mankind, October 1958
74
copy him; his sharpness, his aggression, George had it in himself or was just pretentious. I
remember an incident in 1978, George was returning from a visit to Bhilwara in Rajasthan.
Along sat my wife Vasanta in the same car. George stopped the car when he noticed that sun
beams were hitting my wife and interchanged his position with her. He was chivalrous but it
was limited to a moment. If his concern made him change positions, it was also so fleeting that
he would fail to notice her at another place. Vasanta travelling in rajasthan, him protecting her
from sun was not a moment
What is the ideology of the Socialists and how different that is different from Nehru’s? One
must look at the Party Platforms and Manifestoes that they have produced, both of PSP and SP.
The foundation conference of the SSP at Varanasi in January 1965 that ended in fiasco
Lohia had a freakish element, absent in most of his political colleagues that impelled him to
break free from Nehru’s charm, act autonomously, be independent and unfurl his own banner.
Lohia was eclectic in his ideological making. Mohammad Umer tailor of Nehru, besides regal
film hall: Nehru asked JP to get some sherwani tailored
Martin Bubber’s Paths to Utopia; gave a new birth to German language by his translation of
Bible into German that was second such translation after martin Luther
Did Gandhi fear the Socialists or Nehru as to cave in so unceremoniously? I think the question
needs to be looked at from all round historical perspective. Without endangering much
recrimination, one could safely assert that the political options before Gandhi were very much
scarce. There were three segments of people to choose from: first, his close followers, second,
the fellow-political colleagues, and third, some of those who were personally close to him but
ideologically distanced. Such were the people around him to draw his lot from. Gandhi Sewa
Sangh, the organisation established in 1923 to take physical care of the incarcerated Gandhi-
followers, were some of his closest followers. The organization in 1934 was defunct when
Gandhi revived it and made it so predominant on public front that people began to insinuate
rivalries between the Congress and the Gandhi Sewa Sangh. The 1948 post-Gandhi meeting of
Gandhians at Sewagram, the chronicle of which was still very recently in the custody of the
Sarva Sewa Sangh, an organization whose establishment was the outcome of the meeting,
amply proves that intellectual bankruptcy that had come to afflict the Gandhians. There was no
one, including Vinoba and JP who had come anywhere near Nehru. The Socialists who were
in an ambiguous relationship with Gandhi, disapproving ideologically while eulogising in their
personal relationships with him.
In 1936, Lohia, came back from Germany, where he had gone to pursue his doctoral studies,
and was immediately invited by Jawaharlal to join him and was made Secretary of the Congress
Foreign Department, in which capacity he worked from within the precincts of Anand Bhawan,
Nehru’s ancestral house, in Allahabad. In 1934, he had joined some foreign-returned Indians
and indigenous Marxists to found the Congress Socialist Party, as a pressure group espousing
radicalism within the Congress. The Congress Socialist Party was always powerfully
influenced by the personality and ideas of Nehru.
Now, it can be said, safely perhaps and with impeccable historical hindsight that the fate of the
political organization, founded in 1934 and annihilated in 1977, was doomed at its very genesis.
The ideological choices that it made, the political trajectory it took, the power-game that it so
ambitiously unfolded had just one end and that is its own end. Of course, between what was
founded in 1934 and what went bust in 1977,
In 1934, when the Socialist Party held its founding conference at Patna, it was a party within
the party; it was even called the Congress Socialist Party, which though had a separate
75
constitution of its own, had its umbilical cord firmly attached with the body-polity of the Indian
National Congress. The CSP’s leading lights were those left-leaning members of the Congress
who saw in Nehru their mentor and to Gandhi, they showed profound reverence but ambiguous
adherence. Soon, while Gandhi resigned his primary membership of the Congress, Nehru
became the President of the Congress for two successive terms, leading the Congress to victory
in elections held under newly enacted Government of India Act, 1935. Nehru therefore was on
ascendance and was attracting young India with his radical pronunciations. Gandhi on the other
hand was in deep morass, searching for ideological as well as spiritual solace in the wilderness
of Wardha where at a village Sagon, he established his new, fledgling idea for reinvigorating
rural India and called his hamlet, Sevagram, the village of service. Established in the wake of
failure of the civil disobedience movement that was launched with the March to Dandi, the
CSP in its successive annual conventions, sometimes held alongside the Congress annual
sessions, rarely forgot to mention Nehru as their political mascot and ideological bacon light.
Gandhi, in their conception, was past his political expiry date. It was Nehru’s consummation
with the radical ideas on national struggle and economic organization of the country that
brought to fore a group of people with the ideological belief in socialism; not just group’s birth
but also its end was an outcome of Nehru’s politics. Piece by piece he chipped its ideological
plank, then poached on its adherents, and ultimately robbed it of its cadres and leaders leaving
it bare and prone to vicious cycle of fission and fusion.
Since his forced withdrawal from the Congress, Gandhi and Nehru waged a war of attrition
against each other, Gandhi to force Nehru to see through his eyes, and Nehru to flung Gandhi
aside in order to wield total ideological control over the Congress. If the Gandhi Sewa Sangh
was Gandhi’s organizational prop, the CSP was Nehru’s ideological wand, which he wielded
at his convenience but never to the detriment to his claim over the Congress itself. He used the
CSP to his advantage in his intra-party battles within the Congress but never allowed it to
emerge as an alternative to the Congress itself by lending his physical presence in it.
To discover the causal factors that brought the end, it sometimes is imperative to look at the
immediate past rather than the hoary beginning. In 1970, Indira Gandhi riding the popularity
chart after she had engineered a split in her own party in order to unsaddle the syndicate and
had enunciated her ‘stray thoughts’ on the impending economic design calculated to eradicate
poverty, announced abolition of ‘privy-purses’ to the princes. It was a long-sustaining demand
of the Socialist. The award of privy-purses to the princes was seen by the Socialist Party as a
taint on the freedom. The announcement of abolition caught the Socialist Party off-guard. It
was a demand that established the Socialist Party’s socialistic credentials; it was a major
political demand in their election manifesto; it was an issue that was repeatedly brandished as
an evidence of ruling party’s pro-capitalist tilt; and suddenly, in one stroke, not just the wrong
was undone but Indira Gandhi – keeping alive the tradition set by her poaching, rapacious
father – robbed Socialist Party of its few remaining political rhetoric. It was a time when the
Socialist Party was in dilemma: to go with the splinter Congress group headed by syndicate
which was engaged in fratricidal battle with the Ruling Congress or support the Ruling
Congress on an issue that for long was their own demand. The career of the Socialist Party
unfortunately is replete with such self-debilitating dilemmas and each time it faced one such
dilemmas its options were few, right choice could have added to its halo and wrong choice was
sure to further erode its credibility;
Incorrigible optimist, he always called himself; Solution oriented, survival instinct, not ‘When
JJ withdrew support, and NDA lost by one vote, I said to him does not matter, lets get the care-
taker government in our hand. See, what an advantage it was. We went into kargil as a care-
taker government.’
76
As Lohia became more militant in his jettisoning of the Nehruvian regime, the PSP termed
‘elevation of the will to power into a philosophy’ as ‘dangerously opportunistic’. The editorial
of the newly launched, N G Gorey edited ‘The New Socialist’ hit out at Lohia’s militancy when
it wrote, ‘We agree with Bertrand Russel that the habit of militant certainty about objectively
doubtful matters is destructive of the temper of fruitful scepticism which constitutes the
scientific outlook. To seek to provide for socialist endeavour spectacular and palpably
irrelevant manifestations is to deny the test of immediacy. Militancy merely for its own sake is
a juvenile pastime. It may generate heat in some hearts but it does not spread light in the minds
of men. Professional law-breaking, like perennial law-making, has no place in Socialism.’
As the PSP struck to the legacy of the past, endeavouring to rethink within the framework
provided by the masters, Lohia took to experimenting and innovation. Despite being told that
‘the desire for progress cannot be the exclusive preserve of a single person or group’, Lohia
took to not just provide definitions but also the method to socialism. He said: ‘If socialism is
to be defined in two words then they are, equality and prosperity’.148 And, then, ‘spade, ballot
box, and prison’ be the three weapons to spawn socialism. Under Lohia’s leadership, the
socialism evolved into a Nehru’s bête-noir, rose into political prominence under a time-bound
PSP always criticised the Government for alleged appeasement of Communist imperialism. In
contrast, the Socialist Party, ever since its formation in 1956, maintained a strident equi-
distance between the Communist and Capitalist camps.
‘The election of 1952 exposed the numerical inadequacy of the leftist opposition. The myth of
leftist power was exploded.’149
Nehru and the halo of progressism; Congress versus the rest;
The splitting of votes to the advantage of the Congress was so pervasive and perverse that
Lohia began the talk of ‘straight contest’ and constituency-wise electoral adjustments. A
dialogue with the Communist Parties and the Jan Sangh and the Swatantra was inevitable.
Non-Congress Coalition – its possibilities and limitations150
Mankind stood for ‘Socialism, Democracy, Equality, World Government, and the Non-violent
Revolution’,
Followers of some strands of Marxism; but slowly distancing happens; although they were all
initiated into political activism through Marxism, slow disenchantment from it; Royists and
Trotskyites most of them, those with political ambitions, joined the Congress and the rest the
Socialist Party;151
Chitra Subramanium who during those days of investigative reporting on Bofors had helped
George lay hands on explosive material in Sweden was once in Calcutta at a friend’s place. On
the cabinet she saw a framed photograph of Lohia. She was struck by a remarkable similarity
between Lohia and George; clean-shaven face, the black, thick framed spectacles, same
determined look in piercing eyes. It is indeed a fact that after Lohia, it was not Madhu Limaye,
not Raj Narayan, not even JaneBabulalswar Mishra, who was called Chote-Lohia by his

148
Ram Manohar Lohia, ‘Equality and Prosperity’, Mankind, December, 1966
149
Kishan Pattanayak, ‘Congress vs. Others: A New Approach’, Mankind, December, 1966
150
By Om Prakash Deepak and Roma Mitra, Mankind, December 1966; the issue also has extracts from the
political parties’ election manifesto; Notes and Comments by Lohia has him admitting lack of organization and
its crippling effect on his work; Narayan fenani; bal dadavate; s m joshi; anna sane (son is there); satav; s r
kulkarni; s r rao; bhanu;
151
Talk with Arun Panibaba: 31-01-13
77
political friends, but George who not just took up the mantle of Lohia’s political agenda but
even shaped his political personality on him. It is for this that we have to first understand who
this Lohia was and what he stood for before we go further in our story of George. We therefore
have to begin from the beginning.
Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialism drew not from nineteenth and twentieth century social
inequalities born out of capitalist economic system – of unparalleled richness and appalling
poverty – but interrogated hierarchical inequality perceived to be established in the Indian
society from millennia. In building caste as a basis of degrading inequality among human
beings in the Indian society, Lohia founded an Indian variant of socialism and thereby brought
socialist idealism closer to the people, so uncomfortably close for many who were unconscious
beneficiaries of the Indian social order. Most Indian intellectuals and political ideologues had
refused to closely interrogate caste and swept off its influence by calling it as pernicious,
fissiparous and primordial that was so contrary to modern ethos of Nehru’s India and its
geographical unity. In 1956, Rajya Sabha discussed a motion on ‘casteism and communalism’.
Discipline is logic of convenience. There is seldom a notion of mutuality in the demand of
discipline. Demand of discipline from others, possibly, only behoves those who are victors;
vanquished can only be disciplined, they have no right to demand its mutual adherence.
Discipline is twin-edged armour; it empowers those who demand its adherence while at the
same time it further reduces the self-esteem of those from whom adherence is demanded.
Discipline stifles dialogue and brings forth totalitarian tendencies inherent in those who
demand its adherence.
CGK Reddy, who was later to be named as an accused in Baroda Dynamite Case, and who had
remained a friend of Lohia since the first time they met in Calcutta in April, 1946, has only
admiration for Lohia. ‘It was from Dr. Lohia I acquired political perception, a spirit of enquiry
and the mental reservation against accepting anything without questioning.’ Lohia’s courage
of conviction and his determination to fight evil and injustice inspired CGK. ‘He was the
greatest political thinker that the country had produced after Gandhiji .’ Lohia made CGK to
see ‘dishonesty and chicanery’ of Jawaharlal Nehru, unravel his ‘vanity, pettiness and the
Machiavellian quality’, and in turn, CGK during his term as the member of the first Rajya
Sabha mounted an attack against Nehru and his policies.
From being a ‘ginger group’ within the Indian National Congress committed to radicalise its
policies in order to bring about a ‘socialist sate’ to positioning itself as a party of pre-eminence
in ‘opposition’ to the monolith Congress of Nehru to foster an ambition to replace a declining
Congress by forging parties ranged against the ruling party under the exigent umbrella of the
‘non-Congressism’, are the various evolutionary stages in the political trajectory of the
Socialist Party.
‘Gandhi-Irwin talks form a landmark in the history of British rule in India. For the first time
since its establishment the British government dealt with a representative of the country, one
who had defied its authority, on a footing of equality and with respectful courtesy. The
negotiations yielded no tangible gains to the nationalist cause; the Viceroy drove hard bargain
and secured all the immediate advantage and the truce terms were bitterly criticized by the
radical nationalists. Viceroy thought that Gandhi’s firmness on the issue of salt was “mainly
vanity”.’152
From the very beginning, there was an ideological bent towards bringing the working class,
peasantry and the middle classes on the political platform of the CSP. The party’s programme

152
Preface, CWMG, volume XLV (December 1930-April 1931), p vii-viii.
78
was to transfer all political power to the producing masses. The party was of the opinion that
there could be no political freedom without the implicit component of the economic freedom
therein; it judged freedom from the standard of improvement of the material conditions of the
toiling masses. It was this ideological understanding that made the leaders of the Socialist Party
speak after the independence much in the same language as they had been speaking in during
the British rule. ‘The ultimate ideals of Socialism are clear: in the final lap of development, in
the words of Professor Haldane, “men will be able to think like Newton, to write like Racine,
to paint like Van Eykes, to compose like Bach. They will be as incapable of hatred as St.
Francis. And every moment of man’s life will be lived with the passion of a lover or
discoverer.”’153
The twin goal of bringing prosperity and equality was never in dispute, but the quest for means
and ways to bring them about became not just contentious but also divisive and destructive. It
always induced an element of looming crisis in its organization. ‘Not ends but means divide
the Socialists and spread confusion in the ranks of simple people.’ From early on, the Congress
and its culture and its constitution did not satisfy their urges. The primary purpose behind its
formation was to radicalise Congress politics and spread socialist thought in the country. Its
constitution required suitable amendment as to provide for adequate representation to peasants,
workers and other exploited classes through their class organizations. The leadership needs
revitalization. Gandhi was conservative, Nehru was their radical leader. Subhas Bose needed
to be voted to the Congress President even if his ethos went against those of Gandhi.
Most socialists almost revelled in going to jail. They saw it as part of educating the masses as
well as in capturing the popular imagination; out of the 1942 ‘Quit India’ movement, many
socialist leaders emerged as national heroes due to their exceptionally courageous exploits in
leading the underground movement. George was not the first socialist leader to lead a dream-
journey from prison cell to the cabinet berth. Yusuf Meherally was the first socialist to have
that unique journey from prison cell to elected post; while still in Lahore jail in April 1942,
Meherally was elected to the mayoral chair of the Bombay city.154
1932-34: with the suspension of Satyagraha and advent of constitutionalism, frustration among
the nationalists and need to combat constitutionalism path made some young people to forge
the CSP
Between 1934 and 1946, anyone who wanted to be a member of the Congress Socialist Party
had to be a member of the Congress as well. At the Kanpur session in 1946, the CSP decided
to drop the word Congress from its name.
Aruna Asaf Ali recalled, as her biographer has recorded, that Nehru was not happy with the
use of separate flag and manifesto by the Socialists when they functioned still from inside the
Congress. ‘When objection was raised by some Congress leaders to dual membership, Gandhiji
wanted the Socialists to stay with the Congress.’ 155 She expressed her fear of the Socialists
being used by the Congress like a ‘doormat’. The Congress soon after Gandhi’s assassination,
however, amended its constitution to debar dual membership. The Socialists were left with no
option than to drop the prefix of as well as from the Congress. The socialist journal Janata
published an article titled ‘Why I must join the Socialist Party’ by Aruna Asaf Ali in its issue
of 14 March 1948. Her motivations in joining the newly launched Socialist Party were due to
the current need to build a workers’ and peasants’ party by unscrambling ‘the national coalition

153
Presidential Address of Asoka Mehta to the Eighth National Conference of the Socialist Party, Madras, July
1950, p7
154
GG Parikh runs Yusuf Meherally Centre in Bombay
155
GNS Raghavan, 1999, Aruna Asaf Ali: A Compassionate Radical, Delhi: National Book Trust
79
of all the politically conscious elements in the country’ that the Congress hitherto was. ‘If I
and such as share my beliefs leave the Congress at last, we do so to serve the common man’.
But soon, she was disillusioned and castigated the Socialist Party for, as she wrote in a 35-page
pamphlet, its rejection of Marxism and conversion into ‘a party of gradual social reform’. 156
Hers was the first post-independent break-up of the break-away Socialist Party. Madhu Limaye
did not find her convincing in arguments about the reasons of her leaving the party. 157 He
thought her espousal of Marxism was un-digested one and was at the behest of Nehru’s
Congress. Aruna’s venom, Madhu wrote, was directed against the Socialists, ‘what she aims at
is purely negative objective: to discredit and destroy the Socialist Party’. Later events and her
enduring friendship with Nehru-Gandhi family to the point of being christened as ‘Nehru
Socialist’ proved Limaye’s prognosis not just true but also showed what a challenge it was to
build a party in opposition to the Nehru’s ruling Congress. Her media ventures were either in
defence of Nehru or to propagate his rule, and were undertaken with the support of the
government largesse. So, the 1950 opened with bad omen for the nebulous Socialist Party;
Meherally died, and Aruna Asaf Ali was abandoning. It was in this context, that the eighth
National Conference of the Socialist Party was convened at Madras in July, 1950.
It was only after the independence that the party turned its attention to elections.
The Socialist Party was formed in 1934 but it continued to exist within the Congress as a group
rather than as a party with separate structure and identity till 1948, when the group decided to
drop its prefix of Congress and became an independent political party.
Bombay Municipal Corporation election in February 1948 in which it won 26 of 114 seats was
engineered by Asoka Mehta and that too against the wishes of the Congress bosses, the
Socialist Party fought independently and on its own. The intransigence was impelled by the
current mood in the Party to have its separate entity and identity.
The experience of elections, in the Party ranks, was markedly uneven. The Party went into
elections with calculations that were based on inflated estimation of the self and proportionate
under-estimation of strength of other contending parties. Jan Sangh which was a newly founded
political party that claimed to espouse and protect the Hindu causes and demands. The
Communists were there but were supposedly a discredited lot due to their role in post-war
Indian politics whereby they supported the allies against the national aspiration. But the newest
element was the Kisan Majdoor Praja Party, a conglomerate of breakaway Congress led by
Kripalani, who had resigned from the Congress due to his differences with Nehru. But the
Socialist Party was smug in its own popularity and the crowd its leaders attracted during the
public meetings. The Party failed to realize that there was no well-organized alternative to the
Congress, and in such situation political parties might mushroom to diffuse the opposition vote.
‘Our electoral approach’, admitted Mehta, ‘lacked the quality of being many-pronged.’ The
Socialist Party, by fighting in the largest number of constituencies, next only to the Congress,
stretched its resources by initiating an extensive fight with the Congress. The electoral
agreements and alliances with other parties that it forged on the eve of election either came
unglued or became tainted by opportunistic considerations. Although the Socialists gathered
largest vote share next to the Congress, its position in terms of number of seats won came to
third; it won 12 seats while it put candidates for 255 Lok Sabha constituencies. Socialists lacked
core voters who could vote it to victory on minority vote in a multi-party contest. Socialists
also lacked pockets of strength which could give effective opposition to the Congress in a

156
Aruna Asaf Ali, 1951, Socialist Party: Its Rejection of Marxism,
157
Madhu Limaye, 1951, The Barren Path: A Reply to Aruna Asaf Ali,
80
constituency specific contest. One enduring conclusion out of 1951 General Election was that
given effective agreement among the parties contesting against the Congress would have given
the Socialist Party better results. The 1951 election was candidate-driven election where parties
pinned their labels on independent candidates who had already resolved to contest given the
fluid situation prevailing, and also to take benefit of the well-entrenched parochial and
primordial loyalties to the detriment of secular mobilization under party banners and
manifestoes. Feudal loyalties drew votes. Socialist Party suffered a massive blow to its stature
and most of its spokespersons were mauled badly by the electorates. The Party was exposed to
its organizational vulnerabilities. The General Election though provided an opportunity to
extend the influence of the Party widely and systematically.
‘The recent elections have undoubtedly imparted strength to the Congress Party. Over four
crores of voters have voted for it and its lease of power has been renewed with popular sanction.
The Congress has regained, to no small extent, its self-confidence, and it has a great opportunity
before it. Youth that never looked at the Congress in the past four years will change its attitude.
Disintegration of the Congress Party is unlikely in the near future. The Congress is however
unlikely to move towards socialism.’ (70)
Against the nationalist halo possessed by the Congress, and international advantage enjoyed
by the Communists, the Socialists had only their cause and their devotion to fall back upon. In
its initial days, soon after it came out of the Congress, organizationally not just it was weak but
the Party constituted of groups of active workers. In 1949, it threw open its door to mass
membership and invited collective affiliation of trade unions or peasant organizations. This
was done despite immense pressure from party leaders to maintain the Party’s exclusive nature.
Struggles intensive and stubborn undoubtedly change the climate of opinion.
In India, with her vast populations and limited resources of land and capital, economic
development cannot be on large scale patterns so dear to capitalist and Communist ideologies.
India’s progress lies through co-operation, small tools and devoted labour.
In India, freedom has to be a concomitant of bread, in a way its pre-requisite, and not its
alternative. There is no dichotomy between the urge for bread and desire for freedom
Lohia perhaps was the first political Indian to realize the emerging new contradiction between
the indigenous Indian state and the Indian people, a contradiction that most attempted to gloss
over in their expectation from the newly won independence or in their avowed admiration for
the leader of the government, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Although, Nehru depicted Socialists, in the words of Kamla Devi, as a ‘bunch of sparrows who
are so pathetically caught in the outworn cage of a Socialist ideology (that) they can only twitter
and chirp and round inside the bars’, in short, denounced talk of socialism as reactionary, Nehru
adopted Socialists declared economic aims and policy objectives as his own.
On 25th May, 1949, Nehru’s government arrested a demonstrating Lohia in Delhi. Nehru’s
government used restrictive provisions on meetings or processions imposed in the wake of
‘general emergency’ that came into existence during the World War to arrest Lohia. When the
war ended, the emergency should have ended, too, but it did not. The restrictions had not only
continued but provisions were strengthened in the wake of partition violence. Every time the
designated period ended, the regulation was re-extended. The people had to subject themselves
to the ‘humiliation of begging for a license’ to hold a meeting or mobilize a procession or a
public-protest. The state was also prone to resorting a coercive violence at the slightest excuse.
It was a continuum of an old habit of resorting to force to cow-down people’s aspirations.
Kamla Devi made much of Nehru’s reaction. Kamla Devi wrote deprecating the state’s resort
81
to violence, ‘That the police should feel the necessity to use the lathi and let loose tear gas to
disperse a crowd, no matter how small or peaceful, no matter in how disciplined manner it
conducts itself, it does not arm itself with a permit, is a standing threat to a state which wishes
to be democratic.’
Jayaprakash Narayan, Structure of the Socialist Party: Draft Proposals, Mahabaleshwar
Tracts, No. 1
The structure of the party did not change in any basic manner since its inception. The Party
grew up as a group within the Congress: remained an ideological group within a great mass
movement. The salient points of earlier Party structure were: i) small selected membership; ii)
admission to membership depending upon fulfilment of certain work quota; iii) a probationary
period for all members, scrutiny and confirmation or rejection of membership. In order to
expand and broaden out as an independent political party, the Party must become the party not
only for the toilers but also of the toilers. The opening of the Party to the general membership
was resented. The influx of the masses was supposed to dilute the ideological purity of a party
and blunt its revolutionary edge and make it too cumbrous and heavy for revolutionary action.
‘If the Party is made up of a handful of socialist workers and the masses are barred from coming
in, how can we be justified in claiming that we are the Party of the masses? Restricted
membership is no essential attribute of revolutionarism.
Nehru proved to be a devouring deity for the socialists. By 1955, he had exhausted Socialists
by making their programme and policies as Congress’ own. In the aftermath of the Avadi
Congress, where he laid the Congress aim as to establish the ‘socialistic pattern of society’ in
India, he opened the Congress door for an influx of Socialists. Even before, he had set the cat
among pigeons by selectively inviting Socialists to negotiate their support for his government.
Many fell to his bait. Many were invited to head Indian Embassies abroad, relatively
prestigious assignments to the aspiring socialists languishing outside the power corridor. He
invited them to be part of foreign delegations; and, each time he invited one of them, he
succeeded in sowing the seeds of confusion, dissensions, mutual distrust among the Socialists,
the cumulative impact of which was to unleash acrimonious bickering and parting of ways.
After exhausting Socialists ideologically, he had begun to poach and tempt Socialist leaders.
JP’s silence, Asoka Mehta’s return to fold, Aruna Asaf Ali’s domestication as a ‘Nehru
Socialist’, Achut Patwardhan’s conversion to theosophy, Narendra Dev’s sage-like neutrality
all were achieved partly due to the seeds of confusion sown by Nehru. His dominance over the
Congress, his hold over the government, and an all-pervading charisma of his personality
helped Nehru in lording over the socialists and draw their covert admiration. Beneath their
socialist veneer, they sometimes openly, but mostly in their privacy, admired him, each of them
wanted to be what Nehru was, a dashing prince with women swooning around him; he was
winning world with his charm, seeming to vanquish poverty, establishing a new secular ethos,
much above the sectarian divides of caste and creed; he was a socialist in true sense: in the eyes
of the world he was the chosen one and in the eyes of his opponents, stealthily admired so.
Peaceful class struggle as the principal means of achieving Socialism
Lohia seemed to be constantly reading the country through his indefatigable tours. He
constantly collected his impressions and then spoke about them providing completely different
and ingenious perspectives; Lohia had a sharp intellect; he could quickly grasp real intentions
behind a statement or an action, and therefore he was first to caution his political colleagues,
belonging either to his own party or to other opposition parties, about the behind-the-scene
meanings of a particular governmental move. Lohia’s unquenchable curiosity matched his
immense love for the country. He was little impatient with his colleagues; although the Socialist
82
Party had a number of intelligent and hard-working political activists, ‘quite often he would
throw his hands in exasperation and would exclaim what sin I have done to attract such dumb
colleagues’.
Struggle for and achievement of Social Justice and Economic Equality were the ideas that
inspired political goals of generations of Indians. Each successive generation claimed to have
found a more radical means to achieve the ends on which there was, at least notionally,
complete unanimity; not the ends but the means that were contentious and divisive. Another
issue on which there was near complete unanimity was the cause of ruination of India’s
economy and consequent improvisation of its people: it was the British colonial rule over India
that had brought its disastrous consequences; anyone or group that in anyway was seen as
supportive, however feebly, however circumventing, of the British rule attracted immediate
and all-round censure. So, whereas nationalism was a glue to create an Indian monolith against
the British masters, and those who behaved recalcitrant were intercepted and disgraced and
exiled from the Indian mainstream, within the nation competing creeds were allowed to flourish
and circulate. It was in this evolving national perspective that whereas Socialists were not just
allowed to propagate their ideas but also exist within the larger Congress umbrella till the
attainment of the freedom, the Communist, owing to their internationalism, were always
confronted with trust-deficit and
Both Socialism and Communism in India had the same ideological source of Marxism to
branch out from. It was due to this ideological affinity that time and again, both during the
freedom struggle and after the attainment of the independence, a common platform or front
adhering to left was thought to be possible or was brought on the anvil. Yet, time and again,
the effort was thwarted and only outcome of the exercise was more bitterness and estrangement
so much so that in 1955, Lohia was issuing press-note that the ‘communists were worms that
bred on the dung-heap of the Congress. Without destroying the dung-heap,
Failure of civil-disobedience movement and the inability to reach any conclusive constitutional
settlement as per the proposal of the nationalist leadership at the two Round Table Conferences
(breakdown) gave rise to some disillusionment about Gandhian politics; out of this
disillusionment, two streams emerged: they were path of constitutionalism and council entry,
and demand to further radicalise the Congress by broadening its base and adoption of more
militant policy; the latter stream was collectively called Socialists but had ideological strands
emanating from Gandhian, Marxist and Social Democracy thoughts; Asoka Mehta (1911-…)
was a Social Democrat, Jai Prakash Narayan (1903-19..) and Narendra Dev (1889 - …) were
die-heart Marxists, and Achyuta Patwardhan (1905-…) and Lohia with tilt towards Gandhian
thought and techniques; most of the Socialist adherents were closely associated with Nehru and
his Congress: JP was made responsible for the Labour Department of the AICC, Achyuta
Patwardhan in 1936 became youngest member of the CWC, Lohia was put in-charge of the
newly constituted Foreign Affairs Department of the AICC, Narendra Dev was closely
associated with Nehru in UP politics and was proposed for the Congress President; Asoka
Mehta in 1949 founded the HMS; Nasik Group members were Asoka Mehta, Achyuta
Patwardhan, M R Masani, S M Joshi, and NG Goray; Lohia ‘lacks discipline and the ability to
work harmoniously with others…his extreme individualism has proved to be crippling liability
to the socialists’.
Meeting Markrandey Singh of Banaras at GPF, introduced to me by Surender Kumar, the
GPF’s secretary. He took me to Beni Prasad Verma, present Congress MP living at 3, Kushak
Road government bungalow. Verma had been with Mulayam Singh and, according to
Markrendey, left Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party to join Congress when Mulayam brought Amar

83
Singh in the Party. Even Janeswar Mishra (Chote Lohia) contemplated parting of the ways but
could not collect courage to do the inevitable.158
Markrendey, now with the Congress, was president of the BHUSU in the year 1970, he was
with Socialist block and worked in close proximity with Rajnarayanan; they both come from
the same village in Varanasi.
‘In November 1934, at Patna’s Anjuman Islamia Hall some hundred people met to discuss
establishment of the Congress Socialist Party, a party within a party. Acharya Narendra Dev
presided over the deliberation. The Congress Socialist Party however got formally launched at
Bombay in the same year when people with socialist leanings within the Congress gathered
under the convenorship of Sampurnanand. In 1942, some of the critical leaders of the CSP such
as JP, Lohia and others skipped the Bombay session of the Congress in August that under
Gandhi’s leadership gave a call of ‘Do or Die’ for Indians and ‘Quit India’ ultimatum to British
rulers of the subcontinent. Instantly, a government engaged in a life and death battle in ongoing
world war in one big scoop arrested all the big and middle level leaders of the Congress. The
CSP leaders having abstained at the Bombay session and thereby having avoided the
debilitating arrest took up the leadership of the ‘Quit India Movement’ launched under the
Congress auspices. JP and others not only avoided arrest for a long time by directing the
movement from underground but also escaped jail by scaling the walls of the prison at
Hazaribagh. Their daring exploits fired the imagination of the people and gave them a popular
acceptance. Some among the CSP leaders having seen the mass adulation for their feet in 1942
began to nurture dreams of taking over Congress to foist their agenda. They even thought, some
insinuate, that they had begun to think that the it was under their militant leadership that the
country finally won the freedom.
Soon after the independence, in 1948, after Gandhi’s death, at the Avadi session of Congress,
the CSP still being a part of the Congress proposed ideas on economic reforms that was opposed
by a section of the Congress. Sardar Patel, then the uncrowned king of Congress, asked the
CSP people to form a new party and fight elections and bring about the change they desired
through a parliamentary process. Taking a cue, most socialists broke away from the Congress
and forged their own independent Socialist Party. Although, the impulsive decision to break
away from the parent Congress party was not unanimous. There were some like Lohia (?) who
continued to think that break as a historical blunder.
George Fernandes was against such an alliance with Jan Sangh (and is said to have given a
speech in which he said, pointing at Lohia’s Grand alliance idea, that those who say such things
should have their face blackened). In the by-elections held in 1963 to three constituencies saw
many of the opposition stalwarts entering into parliament for the first time. Lohia won from
Farrukhabad, Acharya Kripalani won from Amroha, Minoo Masani of Swatantra Party won
from Rajkot. In 1964, the SP and the PSP again merged to form a new Sanjukta Socialist Party
(SSP). The SSP held its first convention at Banaras. The SSP then was led by S M Joshi,
Kapoori Thakur, George Fernandes and others. A small faction from within PSP of N G Gorey,
Prem Bhasin retained the party name but was slowly marginalized into oblivion. The SSP
became the dominant socialist group.
PSP’s trade union was named Hind Majdoor Sabha. In Bombay, D’ Mello mentored GF to be
trade unionists. GF was brought into HMS. After the formation of SP in 1956, Lohia also forged

158
June 16, 2010

84
a new trade union under the name of Hind Majdoor Panchayat. After his initial apprenticeship
with D Mello, George left HMS to join Lohia’s HMP.
Before Independence, the frontal organizations such as student or labour wings were one and
the same for all the parties. In 1942, Rajnarayanan helped forged Students Congress when then
recognized body of Students Federation of India (SFI) got communist dominated and asked
students not to take part in 1942 movement. Rajnaryanan was also the first student leader to
lead a student’s rally, almost the first in the country in defiance of the government’s measure
of arresting all the congress leaders in the wake of ‘Quit India resolution’ at Bombay. It is said
Dr. Radhakrishnan, who was the vice-chancellor of the BHU, was delivering his weekly lecture
on Gita when a student hearing over the All India Radio about the arrest of Gandhi and other
Congress leaders handed over a chit to Rajnaryanan who was among the audience.
Rajanaryanan immediately rose at his position and urged the VC to allow students to bring the
teaching of Gita into action. Rajnarayanan decrying government’s action led an instant
procession of students of the BHU till the gate of the campus. Later, Rajnarayanan who was
close to Acharya Narendra Dev, who also had been the VC of the BHU, and considered the
Acharya to be his mentor in socialist movement invited Madhu Limaye (who had been expelled
by the Bombay branch of the Praja Socialist Party) to inaugurate Gazipur convention of the UP
socialists. Narendra Dev who was the national president of the PSP abstained himself from the
convention to protect himself from the embarrassing position. Rajnaryanan was born
Bhumihar-Brahmin at Gangapur village near Varanasi. When Lohia severed ties with PSP to
establish Socialist Party at Hyderabad, Rajnarayanan was his close comrade.
In the mid-year, his reputation was in shreds;
June 17, 2010
Even when he was in Indira’s cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister, Desai’s son had been his
liability and increased his political vulnerability; the PSP man Chandrasekhar who had joined
Congress was used by Indira to raise the bogey of corruption against Desai and encircle him;
Sadashiv Kanoji Patil: ‘affluent-looking S K Patil from the rich mill area of Bombay
Once before, when Indira Gandhi placed an economic programme of bank nationalization and
other things in a CWC meeting at Bangalore in 1969 during presidential election intransigence,
an exasperated Kamraj had said ‘Who stops her from implementing it? She heads the
government.’ (P32); Something similar was being asked by JP and others in 1975, after the
imposition of emergency and her arguments that emergency was necessitated by the
Opposition’s behaviour towards her policy. (J P’s letters) But second time, her tactics would
not work; she had more credible personality to wrestle with than in her struggle within
Congress when she had to take on the syndicate by claiming that they were hampering her
resolve to introduce more radical economic programmes.
On socialists on China.
The socialists in India were always interested in the Chinese. Their interest in it increased
manifold after the Chinese attack on Indian border in October 1962. By then socialists were
divided into two camps, one camp was called the Praja Socialist Party and other was under the
leadership of Lohia and was simply called the Socialist Party. India’s crushing defeat at the
hands of Chinese army also inaugurated a new aggressive politics of non-Congressism. Lohia
was its prime mover. His grievances were deep and wedge wide. In the aftermath of Chinese
defeat, he called the Nehru government as a government of ‘national shame’. And, he said its
removal was must for the national resurgence. He fomented the idea of non-Congressism, much

85
against wishes of his own party colleagues, leave alone other left proponents in the party
system. It was a system of electoral adjustment to defeat the Congress. They used the
opportunity provided by India’s defeat to deepen their critique of the Nehru government, which
in Lohia’s view, was a government of just fifty lakh people to the exclusion of thirty-three and
half crore, which was the total of Indian population in 1961 census. George who was to take
over the party reign in post-Lohia scenario was much influenced by Lohia’s thoughts over the
India-China relationship.
During my research into socialist history, I was asked by political activists who were active in
sixties and seventies of the last century to explore two important questions. They were: a)
whatever happened to all the gold-laden mules that came into India along with Dalai Lama’s
migration into India from Tibet; b) why socialists did not develop any policy on India’s
Himalayan frontier? Lohia perhaps was one politician who had some originality about the
Himalayan frontier and regions of India on the border. He was the first politician who was
extremely uncomfortable with the acronym NEFA and he and Madhu Limaye wrote many
letters indicating its meaningless depth to the Prime Minister. It was he who began calling
NEFA Urvasam, later, in 1972 it was renamed, to be called Arunachal Pradesh that was made
into a separate state of the Indian Union in 1987.
In 2001, George spoke about China in an interview to press. He as Defence Minister of India
vented that China was India’s number one enemy. At least that is the way media projected his
comment. He later explained he hadn’t said so. Many yeas ago, in 1959, George had led a
group of socialist workers for a protest at Bombay’s Chinese consul. Restrained from
presenting a memorandum to the consul authorities, protected by a police-ring, George and his
protesting comrades vented their anger by throwing rotten tomatoes and blowing eggs on a
poster of Mao-Tse-Tung. The insult was not taken kindly to by the Chinese who complained
to Nehru. The Indian Prime Minister wrote a letter to the Chinese Premier explaining how in
Indian democracy such occurrences are normal.
Socialist attitude towards Mao-tse-tung is a mixed baggage. Obviously, they are impressed by
the scale of change wrought by the cultural revolution led by Mao. But at the same time they
also nurture some ambivalence towards his. In 1959, George led a protest to Chinese consul in
Bombay and when he discovered the gates of the consul were shut and petitioners were not
allowed in, he asked a poster to be pasted on the gates of the consul and then along with his
agitating comrades threw rotten eggs and tomatoes on the smiling photo of Mao. The act so
infuriated the Chinese that they complained to the Prime Minister Nehru about the insult. The
Prime Minister wrote back to the Chinese how a democratic India has no-hold barred freedom
to insult its leaders. Again in 1974 December he led a protest march of the AIRF, of whose
President he was then, to the Chinese embassy. In 1975, when Indira Gandhi imposed
emergency in the country and a White Paper titled Why Emergency? was published and
presented to Parliament, George role as President of the AIRF in carrying the celebrated
railway strike of May 1974 was mentioned in it. The report maintained that the railway strike
was meant to bring chaos and hunger in the country. But what really hit his credibility hard
was when report said George wrote a letter to Mao, bringing to his notice how Indira Gandhi
had suppressed railway strike of May 1974. George was then in underground and was naturally
elated by Indira Gandhi devoting a full chapter of the White Paper on railway strike and holding
him responsible for the onset of emergency in the country. This singling out of him from the
plethora of opposition leaders did quite good to his political image, when he after he was
defeated in 1971 election, he was no more a MP. I believe India’s seventies did not belong to
Indira Gandhi but it belonged to three socialist politicians. If Raj Narain by his election petition
against Indira Gandhi had set in train events that were to bring emergency, and Madhu Limaye
86
played crucial role in bringing the Janata Government of 1977 down, it was George who had
played a vital role in organizing one of the world’s largest labour action in the form of 1974
railway strike, but more than that his role in the anti-emergency underground resistance was of
crucial importance. In the twenty-one months that emergency was in force in the country,
George spent close to one year in the underground and about nine months in jail after he was
caught and charged with sedition. During the time he was in underground he wrote circulars
that were cyclostyled and circulated to wide ranging audience. They created stirs by their bold
content and anti-Indira Gandhi rhetoric. In one of the circular he answered Indira Gandhi’s
charge that he canvassed Chinese support for his political activities by writing to Mao. He
wrote he had written to Mao protesting against its repression of their striking railway workers.
But after spending a year or so in the underground he was caught and charged with attempts to
overthrow and overawe a lawfully elected government. During the time he spent in jail, details
of which I would not like to mention, you must buy a copy of my book when it is published,
he wrote many pages of diary. One such page was written on the day Mao died.
Years later, while living in the underground, escaping the police pursuit under Indira Gandhi’s
Emergency regime, he would write to her, reminding her, ‘I am the same George Fernandes
about whom your father publicly apologised to China’s Prime Minister Chou En Lai’. The
White Paper on the India-China dispute contained Jawaharlal Nehru’s letter to the Chinese
Premier.159
September 10: Mao is dead. Mao’s place in history, his relevance to the contemporary and
future world are not going to be affected by the kindergartenish sullenness of the Indian dictator
or by the calculated insult of the Soviet Czars. Though about twenty years younger to them,
Mao was with Mahatma Gandhi and V I Lenin, the man of destiny as no one else was in the
last one hundred years. Mao was more fortunate than his two older contemporaries. Firstly, he
survived for twenty seven long years to guide the state that he founded. Secondly, he trained
an entire new generation in the theory and practice of the revolution. Thirdly, he was able to
rectify the errors that crept in in the course of building a new society in China. Mao was godless.
But even in his godlessness, he tried to build a society where man reflected the image of God
more than the God mongering materialist in many parts of the world. Mao was ruthless, a
quality that is not necessarily the monopoly of Communist rulers . All despots everywhere and
many genuine democrats too are afflicted by the virtue of ruthlessness. While most of them
practiced ruthlessness to ensconce themselves and, like in India, their families in power and
splendour and to indulge in aggrandisement, Mao’s ruthlessness was rooted in his total
commitment to the rebuilding of a nation of slothful opium eaters into the third most powerful
nation in the world. More likely than not, Mao’s death will prove a turning point in the history
of our planet.
The succession struggle in China could turn out to be long, bitter and divisive. The ambitious
of men coupled with the ideological differences will set in motion a struggle of power whole
repercussion will be felt far outside the frontiers of China. Will the new leaders of China make
up with Russia? That is the question whose answer will affect the destiny of mankind. A
rapprochement between China and Russia will have incomprehensible consequences for the
future course of peace in the world. It may not and need not mean a war between the
Communist and non- Communist blocs. But it will definitely strengthen the Communist
movement all over the world. India’s fate may be the most tragic of all. A united Communist
movement backed by both China and Russia will make the dictator turn to Washington for
succour which will only mean that both in the short run as well as in the foreseeable future

159 Letter to Mrs Indira Nehru Gandhi, July 27, 1975 (File: 1975)
87
India will have to be a vassal state of one or the other power blocs. My own assessment is that
any serious mending of fences between China and Russia must be ruled out for the present. But
if the power struggle should develop too many internal strains, the Chinese may find it useful
to go in for some diversionary activity among her neighbours.
The news of the death of Mao has brought to mind memories of Edger Snow the man through
his “ Red Star Over China “ first introduced Mao to the world outside China and who forecast
the ultimate triumph of Mao and his Communist when the rest of the world was almost
oblivious of their existence , what to speak of their potential. I met Edgar in his beautiful chalet
high up in the Alps in May 1965 the International Labour Organisation (ILO) had invited me
to Geneva as one of the fifteen experts representing government, management and labour from
all over the world to prepare a report on the conditions of work of urban transport workers. A
Parsi girl from Bombay(I think her name was Roshan Merchant- her father was an official in
the Times of India) who was employed at the ILO headquarters and I became friend and
knowing my political background, she suggested a meeting with Edgar Snow who had just
returned from a visit to China. Roshan, an American girlfriend of hers and her child (who was
very fond of white mice and showed me a vast stable of these cute animals at her home) and I
drove to Edgar’s Alpine villa through the international border with France . We reached his
home around tea time, stayed on for dinner and left his home in the early hours of the morning.
Edgar undoubtedly is one of the most exciting people I have met in my life and I have seldom
been charmed by a woman so much as by his lovely wife. We mostly talked about India and
China. My own unadulterated patriotism made me proclaim that at some point of time we
would be able to score a military victory over China and reclaim Aksai Chin and other Indian
territories forcibly occupied by China and also liberate Tibet. Edgar could not visualise the
emergence of such a scenario. When I persisted with my reasoning and insisted that relations
between China and Russia were bound to reach a point where war between them was a distinct
possibility affording then an Opportunity to India to settle scores with China, Edgar was visibly
distress at my chauvinism. He went on to speak of the Asian personality, that China was an
Asian power, while Russia was a European power and that India and China together could
rewrite world history, while if we choose to fight each other , the only beneficiaries would be
the European powers. But if China that is spoiling for a fight and if Nehru was responsible for
India’s humiliation at China’s hands, some day, there would be another set of Indian leaders
who will avenge this defeat, I had attested. At this point, Edgar made a startling suggestion to
me. After reiterating that he did not share my views on India being able to take on China
unilaterally , now or ever, he said; there can be a settlement on the border dispute. You cannot
get back Aksai Chin , but you can have the east flowing Brahmaputra as the border between
India and China. I sat with a bold and asked him if I had heard him correctly he said ;yes, the
east flowing Brahmaputra can be the border but you must forget Aksai Chin. I asked him if he
knew that that was the proposal made by Dr. Lohia, though in a slightly different context.
Lohia’s position was either free Tibet between India and China and the East flowing
Brahmaputra should be the border between the two countries. He express amazement that
Lohia should have been saying this. Anyway, he said you convey this proposal to the leaders
of the Government of your country. I asked him if the Chinese concurred with what he was
saying. He said don’t worry about the Chinese; if your government should accept this proposal
, there can be a settlement between India and China . Back home I told Dr. Lohia about this
conversation , spoke about it in my meetings and wrote an article in Blitz outlining these
proposals . The matter was raised in Parliament by Lohia, but the leaders of the government
for some reasons I still not been able to fathom, pooh-poohed the proposals and the matter
ended there. In Geneva in early August in 1971 with my wife I tried to meet Edgar but learnt
from his wife that he was in Roam bringing out a special edition of some journal on China. By
88
now Nixon had made his trip to China and Edgar, who had been consulted by the American
State Department on China and its leaders had suddenly become a respectable person in the
eyes of all those who one derided him as a Chines agent only because he dared to speak the
truth. On my return to India, I wrote to Edgar expressing my delight that he had be vindicated,
and got a long and warm reply from him. A few months later, he was dead of cancer. Bu it was
in Geneva in 1971 that Harish Kapoor, an old friend and an Edgar fan who asked me to go to
China. All arrangements will be made, you pack your bags and go to China for a few days he
pleaded. This was in the first week of August. August 9 was the set date for the merger of the
SSP-ESP-ISP in New Delhi and as the General Secretary of the SSP, I had big stakes in
bringing about that merger. I used that as an excuse to disguise my inability to make up my
mind to take the risk of going to China. Harish was plainly disappointed as I let go an
opportunity of perhaps, participating in an important chapter of history. Later when I had
picked up enough courage to take the risk(in 1972), the Chinese were plainly not interested in
having me over. (With marriage on 21st of July 1971, and George and Laila being in Geneva
in the first week of August 1971, the couple was on honeymoon in Europe. What other
countries they must have visited?)
September 15: I really have no idea where Leila and Sonny Boy are today – On Leila’s birthday.
Perhaps in Geneva, may be in France. Wherever they may be, I hope, Leila will have had a
birthday celebration. I was up at 3 a.m. today and prayed for her. The Indian Express has a
delightful like..... .... from Peking. The Chinese have refused to accept the condolence message
from the ..... Good for you, comrades. In a world so full of hypocrisy, that’s a whiff of fresh air
from China. Reminds of Jayaprakash Narayan returning the ... cheque for rupees 90,000 to buy
a dialyzer for him. That was some check on the ... of the woman. First she tries to kill ..., and
when he survives the attempt, she ... him money for his treatment was I furious with..... for
issuing a ..... Statement thanking the dictator for the ‘gesture’! had sent him a stinker from the
...... filling him that ..... like him would thank the murderer for being generous in making the
funeral ....of the victim of his murderer. The dictator is still doing a lot “Kaha” in the south.
Nothing new, the same old bull.
‘Sino-Indian relations: I have been shouting about these matters since 1949, when the
communist revolution conquered in China. We were the first to warn the nation about the
disastrous consequences of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. In 1952, when even people like
Acharya Narendra Deva were supporting the Nehru line on China, I had an angry exchange
with the Acharya on this question. In 1954, I asked the country not to be deceived by
Panchasheela but remember that China was part of a power-bloc and that it would be mutual
aid pact with our neutral neighbours.160
Now about the various proposals made by us to make our war effort effective. I am not making
a plea for a quantitatively big army. I only want a sufficiently large army and a militia to
supplement it. But I would like it to be raised on the basis of conscription, however limited.
The principle has social implications. Unless the nation drafts both the rich and the poor for
the purpose of defending the nation, equality of sacrifice will be an empty slogan. The
economic counterpart of this is a drastic reductio in the superfluous consumption of the rich.
The war with China can be a spur to social revolution and patriotic fervour can be utilised to
make the sacrifices this revolution involves more palatable to the people. An India which has
undergone or in process of such a revolution alone can successfully repel the Chinese
aggression on our soil.’

160
Madhu Limaye to Suresh Vaidya, Delhi, January 17, 1963

89
Lohia on Tibet: ‘The Dalai Lama and the Government of Tibet should be considered
inseparable under the present circumstances and accorded due recognition. There are about
eighty thousand Tibetans in India and the neighbouring areas like Nepal. As far as possible, all
of them should be converted into soldiers for the liberation of Tibet.161
Objectives of the Study
Parliamentary interventions by Socialist Politicians and members of parliament shall also be
looked into.
To create a national history of Socialist Movement an extensive country-wide field visit has to
be made to collect oral testimonies of the still active or dormant socialist activists.
To build a catalogue of available literature and other resources on the Socialist Movement in
India
To chart historical and turbulent trajectory of the Socialist movement in India from its inception
as a formal political group within Congress to the eventual merger of the socialist stream into
the Janata Party cauldron in 1977
To build a biographical portraits of its various leaders from early on such as JP, Narendra Dev,
Lohia and others to Madhu Limaye, George Fernandes and Raj Narayanan and to assess their
individual contribution in the national politics
The research shall try to find answers for the growth of casteism and communalism in India.
The project will also help us analysing personalities Gandhi, Narendra Dev, Lohia, Yusuf
Mehrually, Nehru, Patel, JP, Asoka Mehta, Rajnarayan, Limaye, S M Joshi, Goray, George
Fernandes and others from the perspective of socialist movement.
To catalogue, analyze and bring into historical perspective the policies, programmes and the
manifestos of the various socialist political groupings at the various stages of its evolution
To assess the political role played by the Socialist groups in the post-independence history of
India
To evaluate their economic agenda, their social programmes, their language, industrial and
agricultural policy, their trade union activism, their attitude towards the biggest political parties
of India such as the Indian National Congress, the Communists, the Jan Sangh, and their idea
of India
Place of Socialist Opposition; in its numerical terms, in the ideological terms, and in the
profundity of its impact;
Interdisciplinary relevance: the study has an interdisciplinary relevance, as its focus is
multidimensional and multidisciplinary encompassing contemporary history, political science,
social exclusion, and policy research. The study will also throw light on perspectives on social
movements, grassroots mobilization, and politicization of livelihood concerns and governance.
International Status: the Indian Socialist Movement was inspired from international
happenings in Europe and America.
Lohia’s historical narrative of Socialist movement, into three phases
Policy on caste
Antagonism to Nehru; potential to devour the ideology and organization
Policy towards Communist:
Policy towards Jan Sangh
Fissures and fusions of socialist streams

161
Mankind, February, 1966
90
Electoral Outcome
Towards China
Methodology
The project intends to study the manifestos and actions of politicians in the non-Congress
opposition parties during the decades of 50s, 60s, and 70s. The project shall undertake to scan
print-media of those times, study the parliamentary debates and the contributions of opposition
politicians in them. The project shall attempt to juxtapose the workings of the opposition parties
and politicians with that of government plan and progammes. For this, we shall have to study
not just the plan processes for its participatory mechanism and contribution from opposition
politicians, but also the results of planning process.
The project shall involve intensive literature surveys, personal interviews, looking into archives
of socialist political activists, understanding Lohia’s ideology or Gandhian idealism that
inspired socialist activities.
Additionally, one needs also to explore private papers of contemporary politicians such as
Lohia, Limaye and others to build the story. These papers exist in NMLM.

Plan of Chapters
Go to the foundation of Socialist Party and throw some light on changing nature of tumultuous
Lohia
Go to 1942 activities of Socialist, Nepal arrest of Lohia and escape from jail; to make a ground
for GF’s similar activity in 1975-76; in detail bring out motivations, escapes, underground
activities, leadership
Come to difference between Congress and Socialists and also confusion among the cadres and
leaders alike about the inherent differences;
Come then to silent fissure lines drawn between various leaders so as to bring in continuous
fission among the socialists: silence and withdrawal of JP; separation of PSP and SP; leaving
of Asoka Mehta group from PSP for Congress; simultaneous history of PSP/SP,
characterization of some leaders for future implication, describe main twists and turns
engineered in its successive conferences and conventions; issues and arrests mainly of Lohia;
Lohia’s first response to Nehru within the parliament premises when he won the seat for the
first time in 1963; Congress and socialists, communists and Socialists, communalists and
socialists;
Begin from Lohia’s victory in Farrukhabad, what GF wrote to Madhu on Doctor and other
related aspects about SP; go to the history of SP since its inception and bring close to Lohia’s
death
Do deal with Narendra Dev, JP, Asoka Mehta, Lohia, Madhu Limaye, S M Joshi, Raj Narayan,
in a purposeful delineation of their personality, their work and their contribution, make an
assessment. 9.2.1929: Narendra Dev’s letter to Jawaharlal Nehru asking Swaraj to be defined
as a package of programmes rooted in the welfare of the common people;
But it has to be dialogic and full of anecdotal incidents that says hidden ideological leanings;
use more of interview materials and anecdotal stories, biographical tales, to bring forth what
you think will say much about Socialist Party and their tumultuous existence on the Indian
political firmament;

91
Although, Goa came to be liberated from its Portuguese suzerainty in 1961, just on the eve of
third general election, by Nehru’s army, it was Lohia who had first brought the Goan issue in
the consciousness of the Indian public by his arrest by the Goan authorities in 1946.
Also try and cull out a definition of Socialist by Faniswar Nath Renu and other literary creations
of the times, if possible;
SP/PSP electoral performances and its meanings;
Ideological Doctrine, political line and party organization
A set of ideological delineation relevant from the point of view of George story; Socialist
ideology, policies and history as seen from the angle of Lohia; history of mergers and splits;
taking on the Congress and yet trying to also show filial fidelity; basically drawn from
conferences speeches, and writings of Lohia, Madhu Limaye;
Layout and construction: Ideological Doctrine, political line and party organization
A set of ideological delineation relevant from the point of view of George story; Socialist
ideology, policies and history as seen from the angle of Lohia; history of mergers and splits;
taking on the Congress and yet trying to also show filial fidelity; basically drawn from
conferences speeches, and writings of Lohia, Madhu Limaye;

Chronology
The National Scene: A Chronology
1947: 15th August: India’s Independence Day
1948: 30th January: Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi; Formation of the Socialist Party by
severing CSP’s ties with the Congress
1955: At its annual session at Avadi (near Madras), Congress announced that its aim was to
establish ‘a socialistic pattern of society’. Recommendations of States’ Reorganization
Commission
1957: first communist government formed in Kerala
1959: After U N Dhebar, Indira Gandhi became Congress President; under her stewardship
communist govt. dismissed in Kerala, Bombay divided into two states;
1960: May 1: Bombay was divided bringing Gujarat and Maharashtra into being; President’s
rule imposed in Kerala and fresh election ordered;
1962: October: the Chinese attacks
1963: February 28: Rajendra Prasad dies at Patna; founded in: Swatantra Party, founded
by C Rajagopalachari, to oppose the Congress party for having fallen from its ideals of
service and selflessness
1964: May 27: Death of Jawaharlal Nehru; July: CPI (M) breaks away from CPI
1965: War with Pakistan
1966: January 12: Death of Lal Bahadur Shastri; January 14: succession/accession of Indira
Gandhi as Prime Minister of India; bifurcation of Punjab;
1967: 4th General Election saw Congress decimated but Indira retaining Prime Ministerial
position; syndicate in disrepute as most seniors lost their elections; Jan Sangh in north,
Hindi speaking states and CPI (M) in Bengal and Kerala get ascendance. Professor
92
 Humayun Kabir, after being defeated by Jyoti Basu, had left the Congress and joined
Opposition in a bid to topple Mrs Gandhi; critical drought years; Nijalingappa takes
over as Congress president from Kamraj;
1969: 3 May: Death of incumbent 3rd President Zakir Hussain; November: face-off between
Syndicate and Indira; Giri elected President; split in Congress; Pro-left SSP and PSP
supported nationalization policy of Indira, done to clinch initiative from syndicate in
the face of presidential election;
1970: 27 December: Dissolution of Parliament, fresh election ordered;

Five-Year Plan
First Five Year Plan: 1951-56: Cowdung stage:
Second Five Year Plan: 1956-61: emphasis over industrialization, socialistic pattern, ‘core’
industries; remarkable US support in the shape of P L 480 deposits; but mostly Russian
support to build basic industries
Third Five Year Plan: 1961-66; trade unions in the public sector proved to be a major alibi for
its negative performance and loss;
Fourth Five Year Plan: 1969-74; its preface was written by Indira who mildly intoned labour
to work harder;
Congress Socialist Party
30s: squirming under Gandhian umbrella; founder leaders and founding ideology; initial
relationship with Gandhi and Gandhian influence on the party that began with Marxist ideology
as its core political theme; Socialist Party, the first independent socialist party in opposition to
the Congress in the post-independence immediate years;
1938, at Lahore, the CSP held its party conference; Last conference held before Kanpur
conference in 1947;
50s: groping for independent existence;
1952 General election and dawning of the first streak of political maturity among the socialists
as exemplified in their effort to consolidate their political strength by merging with Kripalani’s
Majdoor Kisan Praja Party to establish Praja Socialist Party:;
Nehru-Jayaprakash negotiations, its failure, its reminder again to JP when he was imprisoned
by Indira in the post-emergency period and 20-point programme foisted over the country by
the regime of totalitarianism;
PSP: Betul churning and Asoka Mehta’s thesis on ‘political compulsions for a backward
economy’ as an effort to veer the socialists again towards the Congress; PSP meet at Betul
(1953) Source: Report of the Special Convention of the Praja Socialist Party, Betul (Madhya
Pradesh), 14-18 June 1953; Bombay: R P Parusuram of PSP
PSP1955 break up induced by Lohia after Kerala firing, the CM joining the Congress and made
governor of Punjab;
Congress meet in 1953: at Awadi: resolution on Socialism; political irrelevance and non-
congressism;

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Narendra Dev, Chairman of the PSP, died on February 26, 1956: ‘noblest of Socialists in the
country’, ‘father of Indian Socialism’,
60s: momentarily turning tides amidst fratricidal and friendly turmoil;
Sources: Why Praja Socialist Party? By N G Goray and Surendranath Dwivedy; Popular
Prakashan, before 1967 general election
at Bhopal (1963),
Socialist party like Bhagat Singh group was Marxist in ideological leanings but non-communist
groups; Communist party of India was established in 1925;
9.2.1929: Narendra Dev’s letter to Jawaharlal Nehru asking Swaraj to be defined as a package
of programmes rooted in the welfare of the common people;

1931 Karanchi convention of the Indian National Congress, Resolution on

Fundamental Rights

1934 Patna Founding Conference

January Meerut Thesis

1936

December Faizpur Thesis (further elaboration of Meerut Thesis)

1936

1938, A Congress Socialist looks at World-politics , by S S Batliwala

March

1938 at Lahore, the CSP held its party conference; next conference was held nine
years after in Feb 1947 at Kanpur

1938 Communist Plot against the CSP, (photocopy available)

40s: show of potential;

At Patna: It was emphatically reiterated: democratic transition to socialism in India

1944 A Brief Memorandum outlining A plan of economic development for India,

(Bombay Plan ) (Available: Archive)

1946 Narendra Deva, Socialism and the National Revolution, (Available: Archive)

February, Nine years after its last Lahore conference in 1938, the CSP held its sixth annual
1947 conference at Kanpur; rejected totalitarian communism as practiced in Soviet
Russia; choose democratic way to capture the state power as against the
insurrectionary method; dropped prefix ‘congress’ from its name and threw
open door of the party to the non-Congressmen

94
 1947 Policy Statement of the Socialist Party

October Programme, Socialist Party,

1947

January National Executive Meeting, Bombay, concern over Gandhi’s fast; ‘Will the
10-13, Socialist leave the Congress?’ JP’s article on continuing dilemma;
1948

February Resolution and Statement, National Executive Meeting, New Delhi, Feb 20-22,
20-22, 1948 (…on assassination of Mahatma Gandhi) (Photocopy available)
1948

1948 Report of the Sixth Annual Conference of the Socialist Party, held at
Kotwalnagar, Nasik: terminated its fourteen year old connection with the
parent Congress Party(Photocopy available)

December Jayaprakash Narayan, Structure of the Socialist Party: Draft Proposals,

1948 Mahabaleshwar Tracts, No. 1

1949 Rohit Dave, 1949, The Way Out: Being the diagnosis of the economic malaise
afflicting the country and the cure suggested by the Socialist Party, Bombay:
Socialist Party(Photocopy available)

March, Report of the Seventh Annual Conference of the Socialist Party, at Patna, 6 –
1949 10 March, 1949, (Photocopy available)

July 1949 Kamla Devi, Socialists “A Bunch of Reactionaries”? Reply to pandit Nehru,
Hyderabad: Chetna Prakashan (DONE)

July 1949 Asoka Mehta, Economic Consequences of Sardar Patel, Hyderabad: Chetna
Prakashan (DONE)

1949 Resolutions passed by the National Executive at Lucknow, 29-31 Dec, 1948 (?)

1949 Why A Mass Party? (Available: Archive)

50s: groping for independent existence;

July 1950 Presidential Address of Asoka Mehta to the Eighth National Conference of
the Socialist Party, Madras, July 1950 (photocopy available)

1950 Rammanohar Lohia, 1950, The Programme to end Poverty, Bombay: Socialist
Party(photocopies available)

July 1951 We build for Socialism, Platform of the Socialist Party (photocopies
available)

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1951 Communist Party: Facts and Fiction by Madhu Limaye, (Available: Archive)

March 1952 Left Socialist Group, Policy Statement (Available: Archive)

May 1952 Report of the Special Convention held at Pachmarhi, MP, 23-27 May, 1952,
presided over by Lohia (photocopy available)

August Asoka Mehta, The Political Mind of India, (Available: Archive)

1952

1952 Theories and Practice of the Socialist Party of India, by Ajoy Ghosh, General
Secretary, CPI, PPH, Bombay

August, The Political Mind of India, by Asoka Mehta, an analysis of the results of the
1952 First General Election 1951-52; (Available: Archive)

1952 Madhu Limaye, 1952, Evolution of socialist Policy, Hyderabad: Chetna

Prakashan Ltd. (Available: Photocopy)

1952 Ajoy Ghosh, Theories and Practice of the Socialist Party of India, (Available:
Photocopy)

1953, June Report of the Special Convention of the PSP, Betul, June 1953; Asoka
Mehta’s thesis on ‘political compulsions for a backward economy’ as an effort
to veer the socialists again towards the Congress; (Available: Archive)

1953, PSP First Annual Convention, Presidential Address by Kripalani; (Available:

December Photocopy)

1953 Congress meet at Avadi: resolution on Socialism; political irrelevance and

non-congressism;

December, Presidential address by Acharya Narendra Deva to the Second National

1955 Conference of the Praja Socialist Party, Gaya, December, 1955; (Available:
Photocopy)

December Socialist Party, Foundation Conference Hyderabad, Lohia’s Presidential

1955 Address, Hyderabad, December 28, 1955, (Photocopy available)

1955 Facts relating to Lohia’s attempt at disrupting the PSP: A PSP Publication,
1955; (Available: Photocopy)

1956 A Report, Ram Manohar Lohia, April 1956, Socialist Publications series No.
3 (Available: Photocopy)

1956 Policy Statement (adopted by the Second National Conference of the PSP held
at Gaya, 26-30 December, 1955)

1956, Socialism to Sarvodaya, by JP; (Available: Archive)

November
96
 1956 Political Outlook in India, Pre-election study (Available: Archive)

1957 Pomp and Poverty, J B Kripalani, speeches in parliament (Available:

Archive)

1958, May Report of the Fourth National Conference of the PSP, Poona, May 25-28,
1958; (Available: Archive)

1959 EMS Namboodiripad, Twenty-eight months in Kerala: A retrospect,

(Available: Archive)

60s: momentarily turning tides amidst fratricidal and friendly turmoil;

In February 1964, PSP terminated Asoka Mehta’s primary membership; debate on relevance
of party itself and also on consolidation of socialist forces within or with out Congress;

1961 Is India a Party-state? Nehru’s correspondence, (Available: Archive)

1961 The Shame of Free India, A study of Social and Economic Disabilities of
SC/ST, (Available: Archive)

1961 The Sino-Indian War, by Madhu Limaye, (Available: Archive)

1962 The Bombay Municipal Corporation: an election study (Available: Archive)

1963 Socialist Unity: Another attempt fails, A Praja Socialist Publication, (Available:
Archive)

1963, Report of the 6th National Conference of the PSP, Bhopal, June 8-10, 1963;
June (Available: Archive)

1966 EMS Namboodiripad, Problems of National Integration, (Available: Archive)

1967 Why Praja Socialist? By N G Goray, Surendranath Dwivedy, (Available:

Archive)

1967 The fateful period by Prem Bhasin, PSP publication, (Available: Archive)

70s: mergers and marginalization; increasingly pushed into periphery: turning of Gungi Gudia
into rampaging Durga; politically suicidal alliances and cry in wilderness;

January Sonepur Special Convention: Resolution and Documents; Samyukta Socialist

1970 Party (SSP) (Available: Archive)

8-10 Jan, Political Resolution adopted at Special Convention, Sonepur, SSP, (Available:
1970 Archive)

1971 Towards Socialist Transformation, PSP Election Manifesto, (Available:

Archive)
97
 1972, May What Ails the Socialists, by GF; (Available: Archive)

72-73 Socialist Party Election Manifesto, The Annual Register of Indian Political
parties Volume I, (Photocopy available)

73-74 The Socialist Party, The Annual Register of Indian Political Parties,
(Photocopy available)

1975, Why emergency? (a response), (Available: Archive)

October

Anatomy of a Dictatorship, (Available: Archive)

January Fight for people’s rights: democracy and elections, (Available: Archive)
1977

September Indian Nuremburg Trial for Political Traitors, (Available: Archive)

1977

Reference
EMS Namboodiripad, 1966, Economics and politics of India’s socialist pattern, Delhi: PPH
Madhu Limaye, 1986, The Age of Hope: Phases of the Socialist Movement, Delhi: Atma Ram
& Sons (Photocopy available)
Madhu Limaye, 1991, Politics after Freedom, Delhi: Atma Ram & Sons, (Available: Archive,
from Parliament library)
Hari Kishore Singh, 1959, A History of the PSP, (Available: Archive)
Facing the Challenge, (Chinese aggression and PSP response), PSP publication, (Available:
Archive)
Socialism and Communism in India, Sankar Ghosh, (Available: Archive)
S M Joshi, Socialist’s Quest for the right path, (1963-71) (Available: Archive)
M R Dandavate, 1964, Evolution of Socialist Policies and Perspective (1934-1964), Bombay:
Lokamitra Publications, (Available: Photocopy)
Myron Weiner, 1957, Party Politics in India, London
Hari Kishore Singh, 1959, A History of the PSP, (Available: Archive)
The Other Side, July 1989, had a full issue dedicated to the forthcoming International
Convention on Tibet that George had organized in Delhi.
April 1994, the Other side, World Parliamentarian Convention on Tibet
At personal archive
Mankind162 (December 1956; March; April, August, September, October, November,
December, 1958; January, February, March, April, June, July 1959; August-September 1960;

162
Mankind was launched as a socialist journal of thought with Ram manohar Lohia as the Chairman of the
editorial board in 1956 from Hyderabad. It ceased publication in 1961, was revived again in February 1966.
98
February, August-September 1961; July-August 1966; March 1969; December 1970) / at
personal archives
Mankind (January-February; April; May 1969); Scanned and Photocopied from 3 Murti
Jan (August, September, October, November-December 1958; January-February 1959;
February, March, September, October, December 1966; May 1967) at personal archives
The New Socialist (November, December, 1957; January, February, March, April, May, June,
July, August, September, October 1958;) at personal archives
Dr Sampurnand (1890-1969), 1962, Memories and Reflections, Delhi: Asia Publishing House,
(relevant chapter on socialists is available is photocopy)
Dr Sampurnand, 1970, Samajvad, Prashasan aur Hum, Delhi: National Publishing House,
‘There was a furious fight at Gaya between the protagonists and opponents of Council Entry.
The session went on far beyond the scheduled time and almost all the arrangements made by
the Reception Committee broke down. The centre stage was taken by Muslim divines. They
would go on quoting Quran and its commentaries, the burden of the song being that Council
entry was sinful. We were surprised at the ingenuity with which the texts, obviously intended
for a different purpose, were tortured to anathematise membership of the legislature. The
torrent stopped when after several days and nights of apparently endless religious sermonising,
one of us with a show of seriousness suggested that no decision should be taken without first
ascertaining what the Pundits of Banaras had to say about the matter from the standpoint of
Hinduism. It was then realized that religion had had too much of a say in the matter and we
should come down to secular arguments.’163 (p41-2)
‘Seminar’, April 1966, contained essays by political personalities on non-congressism;
Madhu Dandavate, 1986, Yusuf Meherally: Quest for New Horizons, Bombay: Popular
Prakashan
‘Will the Socialist leave the Congress?’ JP’s article on continuing dilemma
Svetlana and Lok Sabha (vol6; p 600)
An editorial in Jan’s 1966 issue gives inkling into Lohia’s evolving political ideology of
dislodging the Congress from its pre-eminence. An article in Mankind in March 1966 under
the section Notes and Comments articulates similar version in English (possibly, translated).
September 1966 issue of Mankind has Lohia’s speech on ‘History, Historians and
Historiography’. November 1966 issue contains a letter from George that hits at the miser
patriotism of the rich of Bombay.
The article entitled ‘The Hand of the Assassin’ has been adapted from the original Hindi speech
given by Ram Manohar Lohia at Kota where SSP’s Annual Conference was held in April,
1966.164

163
Dr Sampurnand (1890-1969), 1962, Memories and Reflections, Delhi: Asia Publishing House,
164
Mankind, September 1966, original Hindi version published in Jan of the same month; at Archive; along with
original version in Hindi on History writing; ‘Note and Comments’ section in Mankind, September 1966 is
important; October, 1966 has an article on ‘Militancy in Parliament’ by Pranab Chathopadhaya, refers to British
MP Aneurin Bevan; Characterizing Indira Gandhi as a liar was a Socialist trait. As early as 1966, Vinayak Purohit
published an article in Mankind (November 1966) titled ‘A Little Liar Rules the Land’ in which he poked holes
in the Prime Minister’s claims about her family, her role during the freedom struggle, her relationship with Gandhi;
99
Why Socialism?165
Dainik Bhaskar: wanted to do stories on old memories, last concerns of Geroge, Vajpayee, and
Dileep Kumar; Leila refused to talk to him;
(talk to Kamlesh to get more on Lohia’s love life and Rama Mitra and George’s initial
infatuation with other women, and Leila)
Rama Mitra published her correspondence with Lohia, a precedence that Jaya is going to soon
follow by publishing George’s letters to her.

‘India is a big country. It does not deserve to be ruled by a little lair’. In the same issue, an article on ‘Asian
Socialist Parties and Non-alignment’ talked of the foreign policy of socialist parties in India.
165
Volume 2, in Bimal Prasad (Ed), 2001, Jayaprakash Narayan, Selected Works, Volume Two (1929-35), New
Delhi: Manohar, p1-89.
100