A battle over meanings: Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia and the trajectories of socialism in early independent India

Abstract

This article will argue that during the 1950s and 1960s a battle over the meanings of socialism took place in India. Exploring the ways in which the contending conceptions of socialism defended by Rammanohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan intersected and drifted apart during these decades, and the ways in which these were shaped in response to the gradual adoption of socialism by the Nehruvian state, it will be shown that during these years socialism emerged at the same time as a central part of the roadmap for socioeconomic development of the national state as well as a central category for doctrines and practices of protest and contestation. For this, it will focus on Narayan’s insistence on a politics of the people, or lok niti, and his equating of socialism and Sarvodaya, as well as on Lohia’s doctrine of equal equidistance and his critique of Third Worldism and the Nehruvian state. Moreover, it will be argued that this battle over meanings crated a space for the emergence of original conceptions of socialism wholly unrelated to anything known elsewhere by that name, and inaugurated a set of political trajectories central to the contemporary political horizon in India.