JP as PJ.

When I was 14 or 15, one of my favorite authors was Arthur Koestler who had visited India in the mid Fifties and who had befriended Jayaprakash Narayan of whom he formed a high opinion. Indians my age, however, had a very low opinion of JP because he and Kripalani had chosen Morarji Desai to be PM in 1977.  Indeed, JP remains, to my mind, the most useless and shitty politician since the Maha-crackpot. 

Sill, now the Marxist JVP has come to power in Sri Lanka, the Print.in, has decided to republish this address given by JP in 8 June 1969, to the National Conference on Voluntary Agencies at the Gandhi Peace Foundation.

What are the revolutionary changes that have taken place in India since independence?

It had become unable to feed or defend itself or even avoid Dynastic rule because its Civil Service and Police had become corrupt and sycophantic while its politicians had become criminalized. True, these were gradual or 'evolutionary' changes. India hadn't had a revolution- like Russia or China- and, since it wasn't a Communist country, qualified for US aid- including food aid- which is why fifty million people hadn't starved to death

Only two changes have seeped down to the roots of the Indian society.

Gandhian stupidity- e.g. 'bhoodan'- was getting competition from Maoist stupidity. 

One is the abolition of princedom

& the rise of the dynastic politician or gangster 

and the other the abolition of the zamindari system.

which was fine if it was accompanied by a 'Green' revolution- i.e. investment leading to higher productivity- but not fine at all if it just meant more and more Malthusian involution such that farmers received free food so as not to starve.  

Zamindari has been destroyed from the roots.

Sadly, in JP's own natal Bihar, what had been destroyed was clear or secure title in agricultural land. Theft was property. Bakunin had been reversed. The question was, could JP's re-entry into electoral politics produce a 'sampoorna kranti' or 'total revolution'. Sure- for the fucking worse! JP opened the door to Lalu's 'Jungle Raj' when kidnapping became the main industry in Bihar. 

But for the rest, feudalism has firmly entrenched itself

JP had an American MA in Sociology. Thus he did not understand that 'feudalism' means there is a King whose vassals hold land in return for military service. No such thing had obtained in India for many centuries.  

especially in ex‑zamindari areas

What he meant was that land had not been collectivized. But Russia and China had to backtrack on collectivization. It was a stupid idea.  

and a capitalist society has come into being,

No. A shitty type of Socialist society had come into being. Capitalism had retreated.  

in spite of all the talk of socialism and communism.

Or all the talk of 'bhoodan' or 'sampoorna kranti' or anything at all which emerged from JP's lips or anus.  

Though the roots of feudalism have been destroyed

they were destroyed centuries prior to the arrival of the British- unless they never existed in the first place.  

with the destruction of the princely order and the zamindari order,

Did JP think Princes and Zamindars had been executed or exiled? Perhaps. He was as stupid as shit.  

no socialist society has come into being during the past twenty-two years.

But the Hindus had established hegemony. Muslims piped small or ran away. As for Socialism, who cared if the Kayastha who was CM of Bihar was a Gandhian or a Marxian or a fucking Coprophagous self-sodomizer? What mattered was to get Forward Caste bums out of the CM seats so equally shitty OBC bums could soil them. 

Feudalism is entrenched in the rural society.

JP was entrenched in the rural society. He genuinely didn't understand that bhoodan was a fraud. It was the Naxals who opened his eyes. It turned out that a guy who said 'I donate 100,000 acres of my land to the poor!' didn't own shit and even if he did, he was careful not to actually sign over title.  

It is everywhere—in U.P., in Bihar—except, perhaps, in the ryotwari areas where it takes a different form.

that of a cat which was also an elephant. But did that cat say 'Mao, Mao!' as is required to properly uproot feudalistic Capitalism and Fascist Self-Sodomization of the Subaltern? No! Ryotwari Cat was saying 'miaow! miaow!' not 'Mao! Mao!'.  

But it does exist there too, though not in the same virulent form as elsewhere.

Why had the peasants not taken the land for themselves? The answer is that other peasants wanted it. There just wasn't enough land. If you could protect your own land, you could also grab the land of your weaker neighbors. Nobody explained this to JP when he was at Uni in America.  

Even if you nationalise, capitalism is there.

Not if you are nationalizing 'sick' (i.e. loss-making) units which will require subsidies to stay afloat. This isn't Capitalism. It is a stupid type of charity.  

In nationalising, what do we do?

piss money against the wall.  

Is there any basic fundamental change in the public sector except the change in ownership and, therefore, in the distribution of surplus or profit?

What fucking surplus? Suppose a gangster says to you 'if you buy any smartphone other than the shitty one I am selling for $ 1000, I will kill you' then what the gangster is gaining is not 'profit' but the fruit of extortion. That was what India was doing. 

Except for that, what is the status of labour?

Irrelevant. Most Indians did not receive a wage at that time. 

What about industrial relations?

Nutters like JP could worsen them- that's true enough. But if the Government had already ensured they couldn't be profitable then this scarcely mattered. To be fair, back then, it was the Commies in West Bengal who did a better job chasing away industry. 

This is not socialism. This is bureaucratism.

Stalin and Mao pretended they were bureaucrats- 'General Secretaries'- of a boring type. The question is, can there be any large organization- public sector, private sector, voluntary sector, political, religious, etc- which does not have a bureaucracy? Still, we can't say that Stalin or Mao's rule was 'bureaucratic'. It was highly autocratic and capricious in the extreme. 

Perhaps JP believed in worker's control of industry. But for large enterprises, there would still be a bureaucracy.  

There is no fundamental change.

India hadn't been conquered or suffered population collapse due to starvation. But that was Uncle Sam's fault.  

I have begun to doubt very seriously whether any government is going to bring about a radical social revolution in India through democratic means.

What 'radical social revolution' is possible where most people don't have enough to eat? JP didn't understand that Marxism is an economic theory. Political revolutions occur because of changes in productive relations. If productivity stagnates, politics stagnates. You may have plenty of factionalism and internecine conflict.  

When the first non-Congress Government came to power in Bihar,

but still with a Kayastha as CM. 

I made some proposals to those people.

 JP was Kayastha. Sadly, the OBCs had lost patience with the Kayasthas. The next CM was a Koeri and he was followed  CM by a Yadav. When he resigned to become an MP, a Dalit finally got the chance to become CM. That was revolutionary. JP, being Kayastha, didn't notice. I suppose JP and Lohia were useful in two ways- firstly they helped OBCs take power and secondly they enabled the RSS/Jan Sangh to gain experience in coalition government- something which is coming in useful now. 

During those ten months, not an inch of progress was made towards any of these things.

To be fair, it was a miracle the coalition hung together for ten months. The next CM lasted only 4 days.

Take the case of share-croppers.

Whose condition has worsened relative to the owners who are able to corner all the Government benefits available to agriculturists. Still, if they have the sense to emigrate then their kids life-chances will soon be better than that of the peasant proprietor's progeny. 

We hear about the Naxalites. I have every sympathy with the Naxalbari people.

But none for 'Capitalists' who create jobs and who don't kill people.  

They are violent people.

Unless they were killed with vim and vigor in which case they became sweet and nice or ran far far away. 

But I have every sympathy with them because they are doing something for the poor. 

They are ensuring that their numbers will increase. The CPI(ML), which started off as an anti-Lin Biao splinter group- has 2 MPs and 12 MLAs in Bihar.  

There is some limit to the patience of the people.

They lost patience with Morarji & the Janata party quickly enough. Thankfully, JP did not live to see Indira return to power. 

Why cannot the question of share-croppers be settled?

Because you need a competent administration to maintain a land registry and ensure tenants have documentary evidence regarding their rights in the land. JP didn't get that his and Bhave's 'bhoodan' scheme was bound to fail because nobody bothered with such 'bureaucratic' details.  

The law gives them certain rights. After they cultivate a piece of land for so many years, they get occupancy rights and they cannot be evicted. But in Bihar and Bengal the landowner is free to evict them, and he does evict them.

Why evict when you can kill? No wonder, JP sympathized with the Naxals. True revolution means the very very poor kill the very poor. Then everybody starves to death. 

What do you think is happening in Purnea and other areas?

Nothing good, if JP had a hand in it. 

Thousands of share-croppers are being evicted because the landowners have the right to resume the land; because these poor people do not have even a chit to prove that the land was in their cultivating possession.

Because JP and his ilk's 'bhoodan' movement was utterly useless. Why couldn't the cunt have gotten behind a land registration drive? The CPM would do so in West Bengal at the end of the Seventies. This kept them in power for 30 years. 

They cannot prove it in a court of law.

Hilarious! As if 'courts of law' in Bihar mattered in the slightest. 

These things are happening today and the law is absolutely impotent to help these poor people.

Because they would stay poor no matter what happened. JP didn't understand that raising productivity is the only way to raise living standards. Even if tenants weren't evicted, they would not be able to feed themselves.  

If the law is unable to give to the people a modicum of social and economic justice,

because the country was too poor to enforce the law. You have to feed officers of the state out of the surplus food grown by the farmers in an agricultural country.  

if even whatever is on paper is not implemented,

because of low productivity leading to lack of resources 

what do you think will happen if not violence erupting all over?

Violence can be countered by violence. Instead of growing the economy, people kill each other to get a big enough slice of the cake to be able to survive- till it is their turn to get killed.  

Do you think that mere mantras of shanti are going to save the situation of the political parties which are responsible for this legislation?

Such mantras had proved useless from 1922 onward.  

The very people who pass these laws have seen to it that the laws are not implemented.

by ensuring that productivity could not increase. India was a Socialist country. 

I find that the people are losing hope and they feel that nothing will come out of any government.

JP reentered politics so governance could get worse. 

When I see the situation of Bihar I also begin to share their feelings.

He was Bihari. He hadn't noticed that the long years he had spent on bhoodan had been completely wasted. The whole of Bihar had been gifted away- Bhave called this 'Bihardan'- and thus, according to this fairy story, everything belonged to everybody and no distinction between rich and poor was possible.  

One after the other changes in the government have taken place but nothing has changed.

Nitish Kumar set up the Bandhopadhyay Commission in 2007 so as to bring about the sort of change his mentor, JP, had spoken off forty years previously. Quite predictably, it changed nothing. Ten years later another Commission was set up which identified Bhoodan land for redistribution. Currently, the Bhoodan board is suing the State Government for payment of salary to its employees. The State says this is not true though, quite gratuitously, it has been funding those useless shitheads.

With all the programmes and activities in this Gandhi Centenary Year, if the problems of the people are not solved democratically, what other recourse will the people have except violence?

What alternative had the Government against Naxalites save violence? Of course, if the Naxals stood for elections, they would become just another political party with their own thugs and splinter factions and pre-poll pacts with other caste based parties. 

Therefore I say, what India needs today on her political agenda is non-violent social revolution.

What India needed was an export led growth strategy based on cheap labor. Increasing agricultural  involution by further subdividing small plots of land amongst a peasantry fed by PL480 food would only mean increased dependence on International donors- i.e. not just US food aid but also European Union food aid. Indian independence would mean Indians being feed by the charity of White people. Obviously, this would be unsustainable. Whites must also wipe the bums of darkies. Otherwise, they would be bound to turn violent. 

Not only from the moral point of view but also from the practical point of view, this is one of the essential items on the political agenda of India today.

JP was too stupid to understand that, since 1937, land was a State subject. Bihari land reform was only on the agenda of Bihar.  

Otherwise, violence will grow.

As will kidnapping, extortion and various other types of crime. 

I don’t care about the Naxalite movement.

They could either be killed or used to split the CPM vote. On the other hand, if their taxes were lower than that of the State, why not accept their rule?  

This is going to grow.

It was going to decline. Why confine yourself to killing Naxals when you can kill people who look like they might become Naxals? 

I have been a student of revolutions because I was a Marxist myself.

He should have stuck with Marxism. His mistake was to embrace Bhave's stupid 'bhoodan' fraud. 

My interest in the history of revolutions is as keen today as it ever was.

His brain was as shitty as it ever was.  

My conclusion after a study of violent revolution is that a violent revolution does bring about a revolution in the sense that it uproots the old social order and destroys it from its foundation. Therefore it is looked upon as a successful revolution. But it fails in achieving the objectives for which the revolution is made.

The American Revolution and the British 'Glorious Revolution' succeeded.  

The French Revolution was a great revolution. After that many revolutions have taken place. There was the American Revolution.

It preceded the French Revolution.  

Undoubtedly the feudal system was destroyed from its roots.

The Brits got rid of its last vestige in 1660.  

As a result of the experience of democratic societies in other parts of the world and of democratic government in our own country, I have begun to doubt on the one hand whether social revolution can be brought about by democratic means

The nutter thought the rich landlords would just hand over land to the poor and then everybody would cuddle and kiss. What he didn't understand that India was poor because it had very low productivity. Raising productivity by shifting rural girls into giant factory dormitories so as pursue export-led growth was the only way forward. It didn't matter whether this was done by a dictator or a democracy. It simply had to be done or else agricultural involution would lead to a Malthusian disaster. LBJ, somewhat reluctantly, had saved JP's Bihar from a big famine in the mid-Sixties. JP didn't notice. He truly was as stupid as shit. 

and, on the other, I reject violence as only half the revolution.

It isn't even that. The fact is the lesson of the Telengana uprising was that the Army is better at killing people than so called 'revolutionaries'. It was a different matter that some parts of the country weren't worth governing. The Naxals were welcome to hole up in such places.  

The more important half of it is the betrayal of the people.

By nutters like JP. Why did he choose Morarji- the one man everybody hated?  The answer is obvious. He thought he'd be pulling the strings. But his health had been ruined in Indira's jails and, in any case, Morarji was an obstinate man. He knew his two rivals within the Janata party hated each other more than they hated him. So, he prematurely announced JP's death. Ultimately, Charan Singh was only able to bring him down with Indira's help. After she pulled the rug from under his feet, she returned to power with her son, Sanjay, as her anointed heir. 

I don’t want power for myself; I want power for the people.

But the people were ignorant and stupid. They needed good leadership which would raise their productivity so that they would stop being so fucking poor. JP and his chums could offer no such thing.  

Therefore, I cannot support the Naxalites and I hope to persuade them at some point of time or the other.

JP was so utterly useless that the governing class had not option but to support the Dynasty. What we often forget was that Nehru and Indira were slightly less shit than any Socialist or Gandhian alternative. 

If they want power for themselves and/or the Communist Party, Marxist-Leninist, then it is all right and let them do what they wish. But I would not agree with this.

JP understood that he would be shot as a counter-revolutionary.  

Shri Jyoti Basu said at a recent workers’ meeting in Calcutta: ‘I want factories to be given to the workers.’

He was a politician. Politicians want to give the moon and the stars to their voters.

I would like to know in which Communist country the factories belong to the workers.

There were Capitalist countries where workers' cooperatives ran factories. Fagor, the consumer appliances brand launched by Mondragon in Franco's Spain, did pretty well in the Seventies and Eighties.  

Not a single factory belongs to the workers in any Communist country except, in some respects, in Yugoslavia which the other Communists do not accept as a proper Communist country.

Socialist self-management was pretty corrupt and inefficient, but that may have been a reflection of Socity at large.  

The factories belong to the state. They dupe the workers.

No. Workers know if they are working in a nationalized industry. Generally, this means they don't have to do much work.  

They say, ‘the state belongs to you’, as if the workers can do anything with the state.

Why not say 'the whole state of Bihar has been gifted away in 'bhoodan'. Thus all Biharis own everything in Bihar'? That's what Bhave was saying.  

This is the kind of dictatorial set-up that we find in the Communist countries. Where do we go? It is here that Gandhi had something to say.

Sadly, it was nonsense. The truth is spinning cotton on the chakra makes it unusable. Weavers want mill yarn. Also, nobody wants a 'sampoorna kranti' revolution which consists of replacing a bunch of elected 'Gandhian-Socialists' with another bunch of slightly more senile and shitty 'Gandhian-Socialists'. Still, JP- a Kayastha- did pave the way for OBC leaders to take over Bihar. He also helped the Jan Sangh to get a seat at the top table. Thus both Nitish and Narendra Modi owe something to him. However, it was Indira who benefitted most from that crazy coots antics. After she returned to power, Buta Singh put the boot into the Gandhi Peace Foundation. This was a good thing. Money that they used to waste went to slightly less crazy NGOS.  In end, I suppose, JP, who had sold hair straightener to 'Negros' to finance his studies in America, was a PJ- a poor joke- that the University of Wisconsin (also the alma mater of the nutter Hafizullah Amin who destroyed Afghanistan) played upon the people of India.