I
t’s pathetic to see the plight of the socialists of yore, what with the current goings-on in George Fernandes’s life and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s politics. Without miring this column in these controversies, we take the opportunity to see why the socialists failed to fulfil their promise in an evolving Indian democracy through the 1950s to the mid-1970s. After independence, the Socialist Party, led by the relatively younger stalwarts of the freedom movement, like Jayaprakash Narayan, Narendra Dev, Achyut Patwardhan and Ram Manohar Lohia, was viewed as the Congress’s major challenger. Unlike the RSS-Jan Sangh and the Communists, the socialists had inherited the halo of the freedom struggle and challenged Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru on his own ideological turf with an alternative roadmap of decentralisation, language nationalism and subversion of the caste pyramid. Before feminism made the principle “personal is political” famous in metropolitan India, Lohia, the sharp socialist, insisted on it as practice, though without enunciating it in those words and in that order. Such was his insistence on the principle that, in 1950, he demanded the resignation of Pattom Thanu Pillai, his own Praja Socialist Party colleague, from the chief ministership of Travancore-Cochin, holding him personally responsible for the death of seven people in a police firing. Moreover, in a very conservative social-political milieu, he had publicly and without hypocrisy argued that any relationship between man and woman was legitimate as long as it was not based on inducement or force. As if on cue, young men and women of the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini phase of the post-JP movement encouraged live-in relationships and court weddings as part of their politics.