trend towards redistribution. There was at the time much concern among
Indian anti-communists as well as US India-watchers (a growing breed,
with the beginnings of Cold War-related ‘area studies’ soon to swell their
numbers further) that India might be headed in a communist direction:
the CPI was the second-largest political party in Parliament and some
of the socialists like Jayaprakash Narayan, a former member of the
Communist Party of the USA, were far too militant for comfort. What
most observers neglected to mention was the poor quality of much of the
land, and in some cases the uncultivable land that had been donated.^31
But the legitimating possibilities of such donations were not lost on the
donors, as they had not been lost on other opportunist donors to Gandhian
causes before.
There then occurred a most unexpected political event: in 1953,
Narayan, along with several prominent socialists from the PSP, withdrew
from formal politics to pursue the Gandhian route of ‘work amongst
the people’, joining Vinoba Bhave’s bhoodanmovement. As he retrospec-
tively described it in 1957, in his narrative of a pilgrim’s spiritual and
intellectual progress, Narayan was getting increasingly frustrated by
the politics of independent India, which he believed to be too centralised,
and based on the passive participation of ordinary people, leading to their
becoming ‘politically emasculated’. He moreover had come to believe, he
said, that ‘morality’, as offered by the Gandhians, was a powerful incentive
for human behaviour, and that Gandhians could educate the people ‘about
a balanced or whole view of life’ and disciplining the bodily appetites,
thereby enabling ‘socialism’ to ‘merge into sarvodaya’ (the uplift of all). He
declared that he had made a ‘final break with Marxism’.^32
These shifts in political allegiances muddied the political waters.
Were the Gandhians to be regarded as agrarian conservatives or Tolstoyan
socialists? (Gandhians would, indeed, crop up right across the political
spectrum thereafter, from the ‘Gandhian socialists’ of the strange con-
stellation now developing, to the right-wing and pro-US SwatantraParty- the name, ironically, is loosely translatable as ‘self-reliance’ – in the
1960s.) Although Narayan himself was cautious to point out that he was
not simply advocating ‘indigenist’ solutions and declaring all ‘foreign’
forms of socialism evil, an ‘indigenist’ rhetoric was now amplified and used - although more subtly – by those who used to be its biggest opponents,
reflected in the Hindi neologisms that came to dominate political life:
‘rajniti’ (‘power politics’) was to be replaced by ‘lokniti’ (‘the politics of the
196 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55