Jayaprakash Narayan

Jayaprakash Narayan refused every office he was offered and then, at seventy-two, led the movement that ended Indira Gandhi's Emergency. He studied in the United States from 1922, working in fields and factories to pay for it, and came back a Marxist; he founded the Congress Socialist Party inside Congress in 1934. In 1942 he escaped from Hazaribagh jail over the wall on the night of Diwali and organised armed resistance against the British from Nepal, which made him a legend and which Gandhi did not endorse. After independence he refused cabinet posts, left party politics in 1954 for Vinoba Bhave's land movement, and worked on Kashmir and on the surrender of the Chambal dacoits. In 1974 he took up the student agitation in Bihar and called for total revolution; Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in June 1975 and jailed him among thousands. He came out with damaged kidneys, and the opposition he had assembled won the 1977 election. He was known simply as JP. In the United States he worked in the Iowa cornfields, a Chicago slaughterhouse and a garage while studying at Berkeley, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio State, and read Marx there. His wife Prabhavati lived at Gandhi s ashram for years under a vow of celibacy taken without consulting him, which he accepted. He mediated with the Naga rebels and persuaded five hundred Chambal dacoits to surrender in 1972. The Janata government that took office in 1977 was assembled largely on his authority and collapsed within three years. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1999.

• Lived: 1902 CE – 1979 CE
• Nationality: Indian
• Roles: activist