Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as JP or Lok Nayak, is held in high esteem by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates. After all, he played a key role in mainstreaming these Hindutva organisations in the mid-1970s when they were treated as political pariahs. But do these Hindutva advocates know that JP was the original force behind including the word “socialist” in the ​Preamble of the Constitution – a word whose deletion from the document they have frequently demanded?

The latest Hindutva leader to call for the terms “secular” and “socialist” in the Preamble to be reviewed was RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale. These terms, he said in a speech on June 27, were added to the Constitution through an amendment during the Emergency in 1976 when “Parliament did not function, and the judiciary became lame”.

Ironically, the idea of introducing the word “socialist” into the Constitution had been championed by JP – who is regarded with admiration by the Sangh because he, perhaps unwittingly, offered it a path to rehabilitation from the contempt it had faced because the role it was seen to have played in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

When JP and others formed the Janata Party to stand against the excesses of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of the Congress, they asked the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – the predecessor of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a member of the family of Hindutva organisations headed by the RSS – to merge into it.

The arrangement, in hindsight, set the Sangh on the road to recovery and allowed it to champion its core idea of transforming India into a Hindu majoritarian state. Socialism is a concept that is anathema to its adherents.

However, people close to negotiations between Indira Gandhi and JP in the run-up to the Emergency ​​and a series of documents show that Narayan had championed the idea of introducing the word “socialist” into the Constitution as early as the 1940s – and kept bringing up the idea as late as 1974.

JP is even said to have suggested that Indira Gandhi insert “socialist” in the Preamble in return for mentoring her during the 1969 split in the Congress party that sparked a fierce struggle for supremacy. At the end of that power tussle, Gandhi emerged triumphant.

In this context, it is crucial to note an observation by scholar Rakesh Ankit of Loughborough University, who has studied the relationship between JP and Indira Gandhi: “Mrs Gandhi’s socialist steps like bank nationalisation and abolition of privy purses were a part of JP’s 14-point manifesto of 1953 to Nehru.”

Gandhi nationalised 14 commercial banks in 1969 and abolished privy purses for the former rulers of princely states in 1971.

But because she was part of a minority government until 1971, she could not keep the promise she had made to JP on introducing the word “socialism” into the Constitution, said Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad, whose father HY Sharada Prasad was one of Gandhi’s advisors. HY Sharada Prasad had often met with JP’s team during discussions.

He says, recalling what his father had to say: “In December 1976, Indira Gandhi more than kept her promises to Jayaprakash Narayan when she amended the Preamble to the Constitution to include the word ‘socialist’.” It was brought in through the controversial 42nd amendment to the Constitution.

Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad has reviewed papers by key negotiators (one of whom was his father and the other his maternal uncle KS Radhakrishna representing JP) involved in the Indira Gandhi-JP negotiations in the summer of 1974 to reach a political compromise amidst a standoff between the two.

JP’s Sampurna Kranti (Total Revolution) movement had resulted in widespread protests in Bihar.

Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad had written earlier: “All through the summer of 1974, Indira Gandhi and JP attempted to negotiate a compromise. Indira Gandhi’s negotiators were her principal secretary PN Dhar and my father HY Sharada Prasad.

“JP’s chief negotiator was my maternal uncle, KS Radhakrishna, head of the Gandhi Peace Foundation, who had been JP’s main advisor for decades. Radhakrishna was assisted by Sugata Dasgupta, head of the Gandhian Institute of Studies at Varanasi, retired justice VM Tarkunde, and JP’s old colleague in the Congress Socialist Party, Achyut Patwardhan.”

Narayan’s quest for a socialist state was, in fact, much older. As early as 1948, his Socialist Party had prepared a parallel draft Constitution for independent India, shortly after the first draft of the Constitution was made available to the public.

The Preamble suggested by the Socialist Party reads:

“We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to form a Sovereign Democratic Republic and to establish Democratic Socialist Order, wherein social justice will prevail and all citizens will lead comfortable, free and cultured life, and enjoy equality of status and opportunity and liberty of thought, expression, faith and worship, do hereby, through our chosen representatives assembled in the Constituent Assembly, adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution.”

JP and his party were equally committed to establishing a secular state. In his foreword to the “Socialist draft”, he urged the framers of the Constitution to insert the word “secular” as ​the character of the state.

The Draft Constitution of the Indian Republic, the first edition of which came out in early 1948, clearly advocates a secular India. It elaborates on the question of why secularism was non-negotiable:

“…In the Middle Ages the society was dominated by religion and so the state assumed theocratic character in some countries. The state was, thus, made subservient to the church and heretics were made to suffer inquisitions and persecutions. But the religious bond failed to stop internecine feudal wars, while crusades added to human misery. At the beginning of the modern age religious uniformity was regarded as essential for political and national unity. The idea forced nations to suffer civil wars and massacres and had ultimately to be discarded as unsound and dangerous. The political life is being increasingly differentiated from religion and has assumed a secular character.

Today in some European countries, like Great Britain, the state church is no doubt allowed to exist but mainly because it has ceased to count in matters of the state. Religious political parties are also to be found in some European countries, but their role has invariably been reactionary in character. Though in the past Indian society was largely dominated by religion, the Indian state remained largely secular in character…What we need most ​i​s the recognition of the territorial character of the state and complete differentiation of politics from religion. Even Gandhiji, essentially a man of religion, has begun to insist on the secular character of the state. Secularisation of politics is urgently needed and must be declared as our ideal.”

The document adds, “The constitution must, therefore, lay down that ‘the state is secular’.”

Ankit writes in a paper that “before their break, the socialist JP and the statist Indira Gandhi exhibited complementary stands on national issues regarding Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh. This national nearness complicates their later adversarial politics on domestic issues, adds dimension to our understanding of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, and contributes to contemporary understandings of their respective places in narratives of the state against society in India.”

Regardless, the talks between Indira Gandhi and JP failed due to a plethora of reasons, including efforts by her son Sanjay Gandhi to subvert any such negotiations. Teams from both sides used various ruses to avoid being seen in public. They pretended to be running into each other either in Delhi’s Connaught Place or Khan Market and then settled for a coffee or lunch, for fear of spies gathering information.

Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad had written about it in an article earlier: “To avoid Sanjay Gandhi’s ubiquitous informers, my father and my uncle would arrange to accidentally bump into each other while buying vegetables behind Khan Market or meet by chance during early morning walks in the Lodhi Gardens, where they would speak to each other quietly in Telugu under an isolated clump of trees.

But every time the negotiators thought that they had reached an agreement, JP would shift the goalposts. Radhakrishna and Dasgupta were never clear as to what JP expected them to achieve, let alone what he wanted from Indira Gandhi.”

JP finally came up with the demand that Indira Gandhi resign as prime minister. But the talks between the teams did not end until Gandhi complained that JP was getting very close to the RSS and he responded, “If the RSS are fascist, so am I.”

Historians have long documented how the RSS became the bone of contention between JP and Indira Gandhi, who had otherwise converged on many issues, except perhaps ​on institutionalised corruption.

Now, short of national icons in the pantheon of Hindutva political stalwarts, Sangh organisations have not wasted any occasion to praise the man who gave them their first opportunity to earn political legitimacy.

The Bharatiya Shikshan Mandal, a feeder organisation of the RSS, had not long ago demanded that Jawaharlal Nehru University be renamed after JP. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat himself has often invoked JP’s purported affinity for his organisation, recounting how when JP visited an RSS camp in New Delhi, the leader of the “Total Revolution” was deeply impressed with the discipline of its cadres.

As they clamour for the words “socialist” and “secular” to be erased from the Preamble, do the RSS and the BJP know that these were ideals dear to their beloved JP? Will they honour his wish?

The author thanks Rakesh Ankit of Loughborough University and Ravi Visvesvaraya Sharada Prasad, son of HY Sharada Prasad, the late civil servant and media adviser to Indira Gandhi, for valuable inputs for this article.

Ullekh NP is a New Delhi-based journalist and author. A version of this piece first appeared on his website.