Strip away the headlines of a ‘Naxal-mukt India’, and one discovers that the six-decade insurgency was once upheld by individuals who embodied the Republic’s highest ideals.Among them was a man regarded as the conscience-keeper of independent India, who posed the most profound challenge to India’s first prime minister and later his daughter – and on whose shoulders Jana Sangh, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s precursor, rode to acquire its political legitimacy.Delivering the recent Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reminded the August audience that the founder of The Indian Express had won a Lok Sabha election on Jana Sangh ticket in 1971. Modi could have also underlined that Jana Sangh secured its first foothold in the Union ministry solely through a leader who, in the Parivar’s lexicon, could aptly be described as ‘urban Naxal’.The great movement of the 1970s that brought the first non-Congress government at the centre was led by Jaya Prakash Narayan (JP). He firmly opposed the Sangh’s divisive agenda, but allowed the saffron group a little space in his movement against Indira Gandhi. A decision that altered the political history of India.In the history books they now rewrite, the Parivar can include a chapter: how Jan Sangh piggybacked on an ‘urban Naxal’.This can begin with a speech JP delivered in the Gandhi centenary year. Two years after the violent uprising in Naxalbari in the summer of 1967, JP spoke before the National Conference of Voluntary Agencies. It was June 8, 1969. He underlined the growing inequality that led to the emergence of the Naxals.“They are violent people. Alright. But I have sympathy because they are doing something for the poor. If the law is unable to give to the people a modicum of social and economic justice, what do you think will happen, if not violence erupting all over?”JP had lived through several ideological streams, but eventually came to repose his faith in Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence. But now he spoke in a different tone. “With all the programmes and activities in this Gandhi Centenary Year, if the problems of the people are not solved democratically, what other recourse do the people have except violence?” In June 1970, he visited Musahri town of Muzaffarpur which had witnessed the killings of several zamindars by Naxals. Accompanied by his wife Prabhavati, a lifelong Gandhian who had been close to both Gandhi and Ba, JP visited rural families to understand the unrest.Admitting that he ‘had not buried’ himself earlier in rural areas, JP found the ‘the socio-economic reality ugly’. “My first reaction in coming face to face with the reality was to realise how remote and unreal were the brave pronouncements of Delhi or Patna from the actuality at the ground level. High sounding words, grandiose plans, reforms galore. But somehow, they all, or most of them, remain suspended somewhere in mid-air…In the end what meets the eye is utter poverty, misery, inequality, exploitation, backwardness, stagnation, frustration, and loss of hope.”His support wasn’t limited to ground visits. On December 23, 1970, he issued a statement condemning the death sentence awarded to four Naxalite leaders of Andhra Pradesh and Orissa – Nagbhushan Patnaik, Narela Sekhar, G. Paidayya and L. Lachhanna. He even sought to compare them with Bhagat Singh and Rajguru. He said, “I hold no brief for Naxalites or Naxalism, but I certainly would not lump them together with ordinary criminals… Gandhiji was not an admirer of violence… but he spared no efforts to save Sardar Bhagat Singh and his two fellow soldiers of freedom, Shri Rajguru and Shri Sukhdev.” One of the founders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Nagbhushan Patnaik was sentenced to death in December 1970. Awaiting his execution, he wrote to the jail superintendent his will in a letter, which should stir many souls even now:“Dear Superintendent,Central Jail,Rajahmundry,I want to ensure the best utilization of my body. Your government merely wants to end my life. But you can remove all my organs before my death and use them for medical purposes. I dedicate my body for such purposes. Remove all my organs, blood, skin, skull and all the bones while I am alive….Squeeze out all the blood from my body, remove my eyes, cut out the other organs, and finally, remove my lungs, liver and heart before you declare me dead. All my organs should be preserved for people who require transplantation.If the officers don’t accept the above option, and want to follow the superficial meaning of execution by hanging, I have another suggestion for them. Squeeze my blood out and remove my organs to the point that I remain alive enough to stand on the scaffold, so that my execution order can be implemented and I am hanged from the noose until I die. After the orders have been followed, remove all the organs that can still be put to use.I am providing a list of people who have a right over my organs, blood and skin – labourers, landless farmers, masons, students, schoolteachers, revolutionary intellectuals, small merchants, vendors, the exploited proletariat, beggars.”Nagbhushan Patnaik Prison Number 2760Central Jail, RajahmundryEastern Godavari districtJP was among the eminent personalities who wanted his release, but Patnaik refused to sign his mercy petition.Meanwhile, Naxal guerrillas had been spreading to new territories in Bihar. Now JP took a stand that stunned even his supporters.“My Sarvodaya friends and my Gandhian friends will be surprised to read what I publicly say now. I say with a due sense of responsibility that if I myself am convinced that there is no deliverance for the people except through violence, then Jayaprakash Narayan will also take to violence. If the problems of the people cannot be solved democratically, I will also take to violence.”He had been a leading figure of the Sarvodaya movement, instrumental in bhoodan and gramdan. And yet, he now seemed to have altered his stance in favour of a different mode of resistance. In an October 1972 letter to the villagers of Musahri, he admitted that the portentous Sarvodaya movement had failed to address the raging agrarian crisis and landlessness.JP now talked about the root-cause of violence. “It is not the so-called Naxalites who have fathered this violence, but they who have persistently defied and defeated the laws for the past so many years— be they politicians, administrators, landowners, moneylenders. The big farmers who cheated the ceiling law through benami and fictitious settlements; the gentlemen who grabbed government lands and village commons; the landowners who persistently denied the legal rights of their share-croppers and evicted them from their holdings and who underpaid their labourers and threw them out from their homesteads; the men who by fraud or force took the lands away from the weaker sections; the so-called upper-caste men who looked down upon their Harijan brethren and ill-treated and socially discriminated against them; the moneylenders who charged usurious interests and seized the lands of the poor and the weak; the politicians, the administrators and all the others who aided and abetted these wrongs—it is they who are responsible for the accumulated sense of injustice, grievance and hurt among the poor and downtrodden that is now seeking its outlet in violence.”If these words seemed lifted from a Naxal manifesto, his challenge to those who questioned the constitutionality of violence would appear even more radical. “There were no such questions raised, no hue and cry about land grabbers, no “democracy in danger” slogans when the stronger elements in the villages illegally and stealthily stole hundreds of thousands of acres to which they had no right whatsoever.”These are just a few of his speeches over a decade, from the emergence of the Naxalbari movement till his death. Throughout this period, the Jan Sangh conveniently followed him in his agitation against the Congress. The Parivar knew that JP alone could lend them respectability, and he did.At no point did JP support the Parivar. He always spoke against its communal agenda. But in a curious irony of the Sampoorna Kranti movement, he allowed the Sangh space under his tent, even as several of his allies cautioned him.As history would have it, without the support of an ‘urban Naxal’, the Parivar might have had a completely different trajectory.The irony is reborn 50 years later when a Sangh flagbearer takes to the lectern to sermonise Goenka’s successors about ethics in public life.