The Early Years, Emergency Era and Tryst with Civil Services

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN1kPu5pTzk Duration: 481.8s

Jayaprakash Narayan (00:05): Yes. I grew up in a village in circumstances that are anything but privileged. You know, an ordinary village school, Telugu medium, primary school, the, what we call high school of tenth grade. Then went to plus two to a Jesuit college at Loyola. And then medical school because if you’re supposed to be a reasonably bright kid, you know, your family has ambitions for you and you look at medicine and engineering, that’s the normal trajectory in India, particularly in those days. I really had no understanding of society or politics beyond what I could read in textbooks or other things. So because I had tremendous curiosity, though the access was limited, and therefore, I would read everything that is printed anywhere that I could access. But slowly, by about nineteen seventy one, seventy two, seventy two, I was 16 years old, I began to seriously explore, understand what’s happening in our country and the rest of the world. Probably by about ‘73-‘74, I was one of the best informed persons in the world among young people. I spent about six to eight hours, ten hours a day listening to BBC. Almost anything that happened anywhere in the world at any point of time, was instantly aware and I was discussing, debating, analyzing, thinking, studying, so on and so forth. That’s the backdrop. By nineteen seventy two, seventy three, the first flush of enthusiasm about the freedom of India started diminishing because people were recognizing that we were shortchanged. We were not getting what we expected. The opportunity for all people or a decent government or corruption free services, you know, and of course, and poverty, the whole thing. And as a medical student, one advantage that I had related to my compatriots in other branches of learning is now most education in India is isolated. It’s very little to do with the society, sadly. But medicine, by the way of training, you have to deal with patients. Even if you don’t go to society often, the society comes to you every day. So you understand intuitively and instantly what is happening to their lives, the suffering, the sickness, the links between the living conditions and the sickness, between poverty and the disease, and their own lives, so on and so forth. And then there were two developments, parallel developments. One in India, the movements that arose out of the anger against the misgovernance and failed governance and missed opportunities resulted in Nav Nirman Samiti in Gujarat, then Lok Nayak JP movement, Chhatra Sangharsh Samiti in Bihar, and the emergency that those things led to. Unfortunately, the elites of India, the governance system, instead of creatively engaging with the people and figuring out what are the changes required, has dealt a body blow to democracy and freedom. Remember, 1978 is when China has actually changed course in terms of economic freedom and opportunity and so on and so forth. This was in nineteen seventy four, seventy five. Our elites in a democratic society with far greater exposure to the rest of the world should have seized that opportunity to change course and figure out where we have gone wrong. Instead, they doubled down and imposed emergency, incarcerated a 100,000 people, converted the whole nation into a jail, so to speak, extinguished all liberties. And that was extremely, extremely distressing to many, many of us. Tens of thousands of young people. I was one of those. If Lok Nayak JP or somebody said, you jump off from the 3rd floor hospital of yours, and that’ll help the country in some way or the other, I would have gladly jumped off. We were that angry, that emotional, that excited, and that charged and that committed. And on the other hand, around the same time in the United States, Watergate, a mighty president was felled by the institutional strength of American democracy because of relatively minor infractions. You know? When you look back what Nixon had done, they were pretty trivial offenses by contemporary American standards, let alone Indian standards, what Donald Trump is doing today in America, for instance. I mean, there’s no comparison at all. And, of course, India was a different world altogether. And yet, the system rejected a powerful president who otherwise served the nation pretty well. The contrast between the two, though, notionally, are democracies, both have written constitutions, both swayed by rule of law and accountability and so on and so forth, that was one of the most powerful impressions on my mind. I remember writing an editorial in the college magazine. I was editor of the English section of the college magazine in those days. And if I look back and read that editorial, if I can find that, I’m pretty certain what I feel and believe today are very much the beliefs and my feelings in 1974. That was August 11. I wrote the edit piece two days after Nixon resigned. And in a broad sense, my worldview has not changed except that I acquired knowledge and understanding after I joined civil services and a depth and experience that certainly enhances your ability to impact. But the broad worldview is fundamentally shaped then. Then the angst, you know, post emergency, they were all rejoicing that Janata Party came to power. We thought there was a Gandhian revolutionary dawn. Those are the times when we still believed that an election actually meant a revolution. Now I know it doesn’t really matter. It’s just the change of players. It’s what they do that matters. But in those days, now I still remember on the 21st of March 1977, literally dancing with joy. I don’t know how to dance, but the ecstasy quickly gave way to agony. Well, the freedom was restored. Nothing much has changed. And from that angst came the decision when a friend of mine suggested you’re already deeply distressed about the country. Why don’t you join the civil services? Around the same time, doctors who were earlier foolishly banned from joining the civil services were allowed. You know, the Kothari Commission they appointed, and they recommended among other things the doctors should be allowed to join civil services. So my journey into civil services was accidental. It was not aspirational in a creative sense. It was not premeditated. It was at the late stage in my internship, house surgeoncy as we call it in India. I finished my medicine and acquired my degree, and the path for most medical doctors from my college in most parts of India those days is pretty well laid out. You do a post graduation, practice medicine in a country which is desperately in need of health care providers. Or as my college contemporaries did, about 80% or so, 50 to 80% moved for the registration in next six months to one year. Opportunities are there all over the world. But I never opted for that. I was clear in my mind that I had to do something in this country. And it should be about democracy, and it should be about the fruits of democracy reaching the people. So for me, it is not merely a notional thing, and it’s not merely freedom but without any opportunities. It has to be freedom. It has to be opportunity. It has to be fairness and justice. It has to be harmony in society. It has to be better living conditions for everybody.