Episode 3: MN Roy

Transcript

Host: One night in July 1931, the Bombay police received a thrilling tip-off. One of their oldest and most elusive adversaries was back in the city, under cover. He was reportedly sheltering in a flat in Byculla, in central Bombay. His name was MN Roy, and he had been on the run for more than two decades. 

First wanted for a series of violent attacks in the early nationalist movement in Bengal, MN Roy had flitted across the globe, through Java, China, Japan, the US, Mexico, Germany and the USSR. In the early 1920s he had, from afar, allegedly helped Indian communists plot a violent revolt against the colonial government. In 1930, he had finally returned to India  using elaborate disguises and a fake passport. The police had tried to apprehend him across Karachi, Lahore and Delhi. After seven months of failed attempts and botched leads, they believed they finally had him. 

On that rainy July night, three CID officers undercover as “mavaalis” set up watch-posts outside the house where he was thought to be staying. Around midnight, they saw Roy enter. Their superiors were informed. At 5am, a police party showed up at the door of the third floor flat. A domestic worker answered the door and tried to bar their entry. They forced their way in and marched into the next room. There was Roy, fast asleep in his pyjamas. Upon being shaken awake, he refused to give his name or answer any questions. The police searched and seized his papers and Roy was arrested. 

Gautam Pemmaraju: So it was literally an operation that lasted a very, very long time, given that attempts to arrest him previously had failed. The fact that he remained at large for seven months itself was extraordinary. 

Host: That’s Gautam Pemmaraju, a writer and filmmaker we will be hearing more from. Pemmaraju is working on a book on MN Roy, the man at the heart of this episode. 

Gautam Pemmaraju: Well, he was really quite a unique figure, you know, who sort of transformed from militant revolutionary to cosmopolitan intellectual. So he had grand visions for his homeland… Unlike national leaders like Gandhi, Nehru, Bose and others who opposed British rule overtly, Roy operated covertly in the shadows. 

Host: MN Roy was many things through his lifetime. He was first an armed revolutionary fighting British rule, then an avowed Marxist befriended by Lenin, then a Congressman, and finally the founder of a philosophy called radical humanism. Wherever he went, Roy courted drama and intrigue. He’s at the heart of a historical mystery: did he help shape the fundamental rights we enjoy today? That’s the claim made by some associates, as well as British intelligence. He drafted his own version of a Constitution long before the actual Constitution writing process began. It’s fair to say that as a political thinker in the 1930s and 1940s, MN Roy developed a vision for India that differed from the mainstream. This vision never came to pass. But through his life and work we see glimpses of roads not taken and ideas floated ahead of their time, ideas about power and freedom and radical democracy. In today’s episode we look at the tumultuous life and revolutionary work of MN Roy. I am Raghu Karnad and this is Friend of the Court. 

<INTRO MUSIC>

<Clip from a 1959 British show, ‘Time to Remember’ on World War I>

“Europe in 1914. It’s about the Archduke of Austria and his wife. It seems they arrived driving through the streets of Sarajevo in Bosnia and somebody in the crowd shot them both. French marching, Serbs marching, Russians marching.”

Host: In 1914, brutal conflict unfolded in Europe. Major powers were divided into rival blocs: England and France against Germany in the bloodiest war the world had yet seen. Though much of the fighting took place in Europe, the war cast a shadow over colonies across the world. In Bengal, a violent revolutionary movement against the British had already taken hold. These revolutionaries terrorised the colonial establishment with robberies, sabotage and assassinations. When war broke out, Germany seized the opportunity and offered to help them weaken the British in India. Assured of German support, Bengali revolutionaries started planning an armed uprising. Their plans hinged on the delivery of German firearms. But there was one condition: the cache had to be collected from a port in present-day Indonesia. The man selected for this job was MN Roy or Narendranath Bhattacharya as he was known then. Roy was born in 1887 into a priestly family in Bengal, and took to politics as a teenager. 

Aditya Nigam: So there was a rise in a number of small terrorist groups, those were called the revolutionary terrorist groups, those days. Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti being the two very big ones. Roy became associated with one of them.

Host: This is Aditya Nigam. 

Aditya Nigam: I retired recently from the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. And I’m basically a political theorist.

Host: Aditya Nigam also happened to grow up in the Dehradun house where Roy had once lived. Nigam’s father knew and socialised with Roy in his final years. As Nigam tells us, Roy joined a revolutionary group; and by 1916, he had gained the respect of the revolutionary leadership – enough to be entrusted with the mission to collect the German firearms. 

Aditya Nigam: And once he leaves the country, basically he left to get out, to arrange for arms that had to arrive from Germany. He goes to Java, the arms didn’t arrive. The police got wind of him and he had to escape. 

Host: Roy found himself in Java without the promised weapons, and the police hot on his heels. For the next year-and-a-half he criss-crossed China, Japan and Southeast Asia, on the hunt for resources, arms, or just on the run from the British. His short-term goal was survival. His longer-term plan was to head to Berlin, where some Indians had gathered to steer the revolutionary movement with German help. In the summer of 1916, he set sail for the US, arriving in San Francisco under the alias Father Charles Martin. He still hoped to eventually make it to Germany. 

Aditya Nigam: Then he lands up in Stanford. That’s where he is given the name Manabendranath Roy, to escape the police he kind of assumed another name. His original name was Narendranath Bhattacharya. So from then he becomes MN Roy. And for the first few years, he was interacting there with all kinds of people, anarchists, revolutionaries, US revolutionaries, but also with many Indian expatriates. 

Host: At Stanford, Roy fell in with a lively set of bohemian activists and expats. The campus was alive with debates about communism and the war in Europe. Here, he met Evelyn Trent, a Stanford student drawn to anti-colonial and communist politics. She would soon become his first wife. [lively, Bohemian music, sounds of chatter]

Gautam Pemmaraju: Roy was really tall, he was 6’4, 6’5 and really kind of, he was very good looking and very charismatic and incredibly intelligent. You can sense that from his writings, you know. One of course is how prolific he was, but it’s not just that he was prolific that he was constantly writing these manifestos and sharing these political ideas.

Host: This is Gautam Pemmaraju.

Gautam Pemmaraju: I’m a Mumbai-based writer, researcher, and filmmaker. And I’ve been researching Indian anti-colonial figures for the last 10 years.

Host: Pemmaraju has spent time in the archives in Germany and India working on his book on Roy. 

Gautam Pemmaraju:. But, I mean, he seemed to have the tirelessness both in his political life and his personal life, he conducted his relationships with great warmth, and great affection.

Host: Even before Roy arrived in the US, Indians in exile had begun to lay the ground for a resistance movement from foreign soil. They were receiving funding and support from the German Foreign Office for  an armed uprising in India. Lala Lajpat Rai, another Indian nationalist,  was also in the US at this time — he was trying to educate Americans and lobby public opinion about India’s suffering under colonial rule.

Lajpat Rai and MN Roy frequently met in New York, where Roy had moved with Trent in the autumn of 1916. In his memoir, Roy writes that Lajpat Rai was thrilled when Roy cooked Indian food for him. One day Lajpat Rai asked for roshogullas, but the ingredients were not available in “the land of civilised barbarism,” as Roy put it. He still managed to whip something up, to Lajpat Rai’s delight.

In New York, Roy’s worldview began to shift to the left. Until then, he had been consumed with ideas of nationalism and political independence. His encounters with American socialists now provoked him to think about the rights of workers and peasants. A lightbulb moment came during one of Lajpat Rai’s public lectures. Here’s senior advocate and one of Roy’s followers, ND Pancholi, explaining what happened next, in the Lok Sabha TV programme “Pages from History:” 

<Clip from “A Page from History”>

ND Pancholi: “And in a meeting, socialist of the Americans, they invited Lalaji and Lalaji gave a long discourse on how Indians are being exploited. Now, at the end of that discourse, one socialist put a question to Lala Lajpat Rai. Lalaji, you tell us, what is the economic policy of the Indian National Congress? Lalaji was not able to answer immediately. Then he answered, let us bring, let us get freedom first. Then we will decide. Then the second question that the socialist asked: Would you like to be exploited by your British or foreigners or your own people? What difference does it make? Then he could not answer. Then he immediately after some time said that it makes a difference when your own brother slaps you or an outsider slaps you. It changed the whole idea of MN Roy.”

Host: In his memoir, Roy wrote that he left the hall “still quite confused in my mind, but vaguely visualising a different picture of freedom.” Roy began to read Marxist literature. But world events would soon force Roy to move once again.

<Clip of the United States of America joining World War I>

“April 6th 1917, and the United States took up arms (to support) the Allies. Recruits came: bankers, bakers, men from every walk of life.”

Host: In 1917, the US entered the war against Germany. At home, US authorities began arresting and cracking down on Germans and their suspected collaborators. This was bad news for Indian nationalists in the US. Roy evaded arrest and escaped with Evelyn Trent to Mexico, which was in the middle of a decade-long revolution against the dictatorial and feudal rule of long-term president Porfirio Diaz.

Host: In Mexico, Roy continued to use an alias but for the first time he was free of police surveillance. The revolutionary Mexican government protected him, and he found company in a cosmopolitan group of activists and academics. Roy began writing about the struggles of the non-Western world in a local newspaper, and soon gained a following. Within a year, he joined other socialists to form the Socialist Workers Party. Just in time for another cataclysmic event on the European continent, which would change the course of his life. 

<Clip of Lenin’s speech in Russian>

Host: In Russia, Vladimir Lenin led a workers’ revolution and established the world’s first Communist state. This electrified Marxist movements across the world, including in Mexico. Roy was swept up by the excitement and jumped, as he wrote, “from die-hard nationalism to Communism.” He renamed the Socialist Workers Party as the Mexican Communist Party. The party itself had little influence on Mexico’s fractured political landscape but as the first Marxist party in Latin America, it caught the attention of the Soviets. Lenin, in particular, was deeply impressed by Roy.

Aditya Nigam: And that was why he was actually approached by the Comintern and by Lenin to attend the second Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, as a representative of the Mexican Communists. 

Host: The Communist International or the Comintern, was a wing of the Soviet Communist Party that involved itself in left-wing movements and revolutions elsewhere in the world. Roy and his wife Evelyn Trent travelled to Moscow to attend its second Congress in 1920. The discussions there were centred on the approach to global anti-colonial struggles. Roy was one of the few non-Europeans at the event. He emerged as an important voice and soon became the chief strategist of the Comintern’s activities in Asia. Most nationalist movements at the time were too bourgeois, he said, and they had narrow aims. Colonies would need home-grown Communist movements to pose a more radical challenge to the colonisers. The Comintern sent Roy and Trent to Tashkent with money and weapons to help advance this vision. With Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Delhi relatively close, Roy now hoped to make inroads into India. One of his first achievements was establishing a Communist Party of India in Tashkent itself. But a party without a cadre was no  party at all –– and, Roy realised, there was no better moment to cultivate communist workers on Indian soil. 

<Clip from film on the Non-cooperation movement produced by the Films Division of India> 

“Gandhiji moved a resolution that there was no course left open for the people of India but to adopt a policy of progressive non-violent non-cooperation until the Punjab wrongs were righted and swarajya established… It was passed by an overwhelming majority.”

Host: In 1920, India was in the throes of its first mass agitation, the non-cooperation movement, led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Roy could see that the peasantry and the working classes joined the movement because they were suffering exploitation. But, he noted that the movement’s potential was greatly limited by what he thought were narrow aims: self-reliance and boycotting of British goods. Roy was convinced that the political fervour in India could be channeled towards something more revolutionary like Communism. Pemmaraju tells us more:  

Gautam Pemmaraju: Right from the very start from the point Roy became the leader of a revolutionary Bolshevik group, anointed by Lenin in 1920 and following infusion of funds from the Comintern, Roy was regularly sending propaganda material through his associates and through the post and other means, through couriers to India. All of these documents and manifestos and letters, pamphlets were intended to strongly advocate Roy’s position and official position of the Comintern in the early years, which is 1920 onwards to 1926-27.

Host: In 1922, Roy moved to Berlin since it was easier to maintain contact with his Indian followers from there. Around this time, the British caught wind of Roy’s activities and restricted the circulation of his writings in India. He was now what the colonial government perceived as the greatest threat to imperial stability – a communist revolutionary.   

Gautam Pemmaraju: The threat perceived by the British Empire, on the influence of Comintern and other revolutionary factions, particularly with regard to the amount of resources and manpower that was being that became evident, as in the Comintern’s policies in trying to foment unrest in India. And that became more and more apparent, the British Empire and the administration and the intelligence services and the police geared up to counter this threat, which was an existential threat in every sense of the word. 

Host: Despite the scrutiny, Roy was able to create from afar a small band of communists in different parts of the country. In 1921, some of Roy’s trainees from Tashkent sneaked back into India; they were promptly arrested. The police labelled them Bolshevik agents and charged them with sedition and conspiracy. These came to be known as the Peshawar conspiracy cases. In the following years, many of Roy’s other Indian contacts were arrested and tried in similar conspiracy cases.  

<Clip from film by Films Division of India titled “Poorna Swaraj – The Freedom of Struggle”>

“31 leading members of the party including some Englishmen were arrested in March 1929. They were tried at Meerut on the charge of conspiring against the king emperor.”

Host: In one of them, the Kanpur Conspiracy case, an arrest warrant was issued against Roy himself, after he was named as one of the masterminds.

<beat>

These weren’t the only setbacks he suffered at this time. 

<Clip from Lenin’s funeral plays>

Host: After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin took over as the leader of the Bolshevik party and brutally purged it of rivals and critics. Roy, who refused to toe Stalin’s line, met a similar fate in 1929. Nigam tells us more:

Aditya Nigam: The expulsion from the Comintern has to do with Stalin’s growing desire for control. So 1928 -29 is the time when, four years after Lenin died, for five years, Stalin was basically consolidating his… not consolidating but basically tightening his control over the Soviet Communist Party also and over the Comintern. 

Host: Overnight, Roy became persona non-grata in the international Communist movement. By 1930, his marriage to Evelyn Trent had also fallen apart.  Some say she turned out to be a British agent while others say it was because of Roy’s many affairs. Roy found himself at a dead end, both politically and personally, in Europe. But things in India were looking promising once again. Nine years after Gandhi called off the Non-cooperation movement, he launched the Civil Disobedience movement. This movement had a list of eleven demands which included abolishing the salt tax, imposing import duties on British cloth, and reducing land revenue. But these were still too tepid for Roy. He figured this was a new opportunity to infuse the movement with revolutionary ideas and returned to the country for the first time in 14 years. 

Gautam Pemmaraju: Roy returned secretly to India in December of 1930. Despite the protests from his colleagues and his friends, who were very concerned that he would be arrested immediately on his return, he came secretly… 

Host: Roy embarked on a long journey with a fake passport travelling from Berlin through Istanbul and Baghdad to finally reach Karachi.  He never wrote about his return to India or his activities immediately after. But his associates, like the journalist Sunder Kabadi of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, say that Roy continued writing pamphlets for his followers. Roy’s writings outlined his ideas about a ‘minimum programme’, which included nationalising industries, minimum wages, eight-hour work days and giving peasants control of the economy.

Meanwhile, in March 1931, as the Civil Disobedience movement was reaching critical momentum, Gandhi shocked everybody by calling it off. He struck a deal with the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, which came to be known as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. It promised to grant India dominion status, or limited autonomy under the empire. These terms upset the left-leaning wing of the Congress led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose. A year earlier, the Congress had already declared total independence and not dominion status as its leading demand. The tensions bubbled to the surface at the Congress session in March 1931 at Karachi. 

<Clip of newsreel from the Karachi Congress, 1931 plays> 

“The great National Congress is about to start and they’re waiting for Gandhi to show up. The crowd’s uneasy. There’s trouble in the air and they’re afraid Gandhi might get mixed up in it. There he is! See his bald head.” 

Host: That black-and-white newsreel narrated by an excited broadcaster captures the national tumult before the Karachi Congress of 1931. Pemmaraju paints a picture of the session for us:

Gautam Pemmaraju: Nehru represented the younger left wing faction of the Congress, which was often in disagreement with Gandhi, in particular, at the time, on the suspension of the civil disobedience movement, and the terms of the Gandhi Irwin pact or the Delhi pact as it was known… There was a sense that Nehru and Bose may block the ratification of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact at the session. 

Host: But Nehru and Bose had a bigger agenda. The two men were a generation younger than Gandhi and held different ideals for the freedom movement. For years, they emphasised the need for a social and economic policy for the Congress. In Karachi, they offered to back the pact if Gandhi supported their resolution on what they called fundamental rights. This resolution not only envisioned civil and political rights for all Indians, but also social and economic rights. 

<Clip of newsreel from the Karachi Congress, 1931 plays> 

“At the Congress, the awakened spirit of the people was very much in evidence. It adopted a charter of fundamental rights embodying Gandhi’s 11 points and a few more introduced by Jawaharlal Nehru enumerating civic liberties, universal adult suffrage, free and compulsory education and nationalisation of key industries and stressed the secular character of the state. Thus the Congress took a step in the Socialist direction to lessen the burden of the poor.”

Host: Gandhi endorsed the resolution, and for the first time, there was a clear vision for a charter of rights for free India. But there is another version, one where Roy appears as a driving force, working behind the scenes. The JNU professor and political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, has considered this theory in her book Citizenship and its Discontents. She tells us more. 

Niraja Gopal Jayal: It was a speculation that was common at the time, but that was because the views represented by the Karachi resolution were interpreted as being far to the left. And that was the real reason. And therefore, it was assumed that MN Roy could have had an influence in the drafting of this. 

Host: This theory partly germinated from British intelligence reports. Pemmaraju tells us more:

Gautam Pemmaraju: What is interesting and contentious and is a matter of inquiry and scholarship to numerous people, including myself is: what was Roy’s role and presence here? British intelligence had noted rumours of Roy’s presence at the Karachi annual session of the INC. He was present there as Dr. Mahmood, one of the several aliases that he had adopted to come back to India. And he was attending the session on the invitation of Nehru. 

Host: Roy’s aides like Kabadi and the trade union leader VB Karnik claimed that Roy and Nehru toured the United Provinces together before the Karachi session. Nehru never confirmed this. Kabadi and Karnik also claimed that Nehru drafted the fundamental rights resolution in consultation with Roy. Again, Nehru denied this. But British intelligence reports from the time were rife with speculation: 

Gautam Pemmaraju: And this of course, is the assessment of British intelligence in finding that parallel between the minimum programme or the manifesto that Roy had presented to his colleagues and to other political groups in India. What is the relation that that minimum programme has to the draft resolution presented at the annual session?

Host: Pemmaraju is referring to the economic demands that appeared in Roy’s writings. Roy’s own writing deepens the mystery of the role he played in Karachi. In an article he wrote shortly after the session, he claimed that the fundamental rights resolution was a watered-down version of a proposal he had presented to the Congress. He does not say if he himself presented it at the session or dispatched it through an emissary. Nearly a hundred delegates signed his resolution, he wrote, but it was never discussed. Instead, the Congress adopted the fundamental rights resolution. It left out his more radical ideas, such as abolishing landlordism and the Princely States, and settled for limited working hours, minimum wages and the right to form unions. Jayal tell us more: 

Niraja Gopal Jayal: Roy himself distanced himself from it. He said he had nothing to do with it. He in fact criticised it as being kind of pandering to imperialism and to native feudalism, as he said. And Nehru himself also debunked the speculation about Roy being its author.

Host: The evidence is conflicting. Many historians have concluded that Roy had nothing to do with the Karachi resolution in its final form. 

<brief transition>

Host: Roy’s clandestine life as a communist ideologue came to an end after the Karachi session. As his associates had feared, the arrest warrant in the Kanpur case came back to haunt him. In Karachi, the police had launched a special operation: His photographs had been circulated within the force and there were orders to arrest him. But he merged easily into the sea of Congress delegates in his white kurta-pyjama and Gandhi cap. When Roy travelled onwards to Bombay, however, his luck did not follow. 

Gautam Pemmaraju: His identity, his secret identity, which remained secret, even then, to most people who attended, who used to attend these sessions was outed by Sarojini Naidu’s younger brother, Harendranath Chattopadhyay who recognised him from a previous encounter in Berlin. Thereafter, news of Roy’s presence leaked and the authorities had already had some intelligence about the possibility of his return to India.

Host: As we heard at the start of this episode, Roy was finally nabbed in that Byculla flat in Bombay and taken to prison. He was charged with sedition and tried as the prime accused in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case. He received a 12-year prison sentence, which would later be cut down. [sounds of being locked in] In prison, Roy spent time thinking and writing at length—letters, articles, a 3,000 page treatise called The Philosophical Consequence of Modern Science. And even a 100-page philosophical discourse called “Memoirs of a Cat.” Nigam tells us more about his evolving views. 

Aditya Nigam: The period of five years in prison was very transformative for him and by the time he came out, here and actually, like, he spent his time mostly reading and writing and thinking and one of the key conclusions, he came to both considering both the global scenario as well as the struggle in the situation of the national struggle inside India, that no long lasting social transformation, political and social transformation can take place without the cultural and intellectual background for it being the groundwork for it being prepared. 

Host: In prison, Roy drifted away from Marxism. He was starting to believe that meaningful political change would come only after a cultural, social and spiritual renaissance swept the nation. 

<Clip from interview with VB Karnik at the oral history archive from University of Cambridge plays>

VB Karnik: “Roy had stated even in 1921 that without a philosophical revolution, no political revolution can take place. And the main difficulty with India was that India had not passed through Renaissance and there was no philosophical revolution and that therefore the political movement was also exceedingly weak.”

Host: That was Roy’s old associate, the trade union leader VB Karnik. The clip we just heard is from an interview stored in an oral history collection at the University of Cambridge. A few years into the prison sentence, Roy’s health began to deteriorate. He wrote to Congress leaders, including Nehru, for help to win an early release. 

On appeal, his sentence was cut short. Roy walked free on November 20, 1936 [gates creaking sound]. 

<Clip from interview with VB Karnik continues>

V. B. Karnik: “As soon as he was released from prison, he decided to join the Congress because he had come to the conclusion that it was only through the Congress that a mass movement could be organised.”

Host: The Marxist revolutionary who had gone into prison was not the man who walked out. Previously, Roy had found the Congress too bourgeois and dominated by the elite. But as we have seen before, with his conversion to Communism, Roy was ever-willing to change his mind when he found a better idea presenting itself. By formally joining the Congress party he hoped to push it, from within, in a left-ward direction.  

A month after emerging from jail, Roy attended the Congress’ annual session at Faizpur. Discussion about demanding a constituent assembly to write the Constitution for a free India, dominated the session. 

<Clip from Faizpur congress, 1936 plays>

Host: It was now 1936. Roy had proposed a Constituent Assembly as far back as 1928. His idea centred on strengthening workers and peasant movements and creating mass-based groups that would seize power to write a Constitution. He never explained how this should be done and the idea had no takers anyway. But this was now a different time. At the Faizpur session, for the first time, the Congress made an official demand for a Constituent Assembly. Several leaders, including Roy spoke on the topic. From here on it became a popular idea and a key part of the Congress plank. By the end of the 1930s, debates about the Constituent Assembly dominated political discourse. But all this chatter took a backseat when—

<Clip of World War II commencement plays>

“The fateful hour of 11 has struck and Britain’s final warning to Hitler having been ignored, a state of war once more exists between Great Britain and Germany…”

Host: The Second World War in Europe began in 1939. This presented the Indian national struggle with a new dilemma: Should the movement against colonial rule continue, or should it support the British against Nazi Germany? Unlike his contemporaries in India, Roy had lived in Berlin and seen the rise of fascism in Europe first-hand. He was convinced that the Nazis were the greater threat. Here is his associate VB Karnik again: 

<Clip from interview with VB Karnik plays>

V. B. Karnik: “Roy’s feeling was and he succeeded in persuading most of us to accept that point of view as a result of the discussions lasting about a couple of months that Indian independence would be in jeopardy if England was defeated but that Indian independence would be easily available if democratic powers succeeded in defeating Hitler. These ideas were naturally very unpopular and more particularly because the Congress had adopted an anti-war stand and later under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi the Congress began in 1942 the Quit India struggle.” 

Host: Roy’s view was that a victory for the fascist powers would be the death of democracy everywhere. That, he argued, meant that India would never become independent; the country could only gain independence in a free world. The Congress had only been prepared to support the British in the war in exchange for political concessions and rapid progress toward independence. Roy’s all-out support of the Allied effort was a minority view. He resigned from the party in 1940.

Gautam Pemmaraju: And he kind of transformed into a political philosopher rather than a politician or a mass leader. He was certainly not a mass leader. (47:56 to 48:00) So after 1940, I think his relevance sort of diminished very quickly. 

Host: Over the next four years, as war ravaged the world, Roy started refining a new philosophy that would become his enduring intellectual legacy. It was called Radical Humanism. Radical humanism placed individuals, not societies, classes or nations at the heart of social change. It rejected religion and superstition. Roy was also disenchanted by the excessive focus that Communism placed on collectivism, as it neglected the individual and their needs. His new philosophy rejected the idea of class struggle and working class revolutions, but chose instead to focus on slow revolution through education and spiritual development. Around the same time, he came up with a radical democratic vision for independent India. In 1944, he published “Constitution of Free India: A Draft.” It was released for public discussion by the Radical Democratic Party which Roy had founded after leaving the Congress. It was one of many contending proposals about the Constitutional design of the future Indian state. 

Niraja Gopal Jayal: Now we have an emerging body of scholarship, which suggests that even as a Constituent Assembly, operating upon and drafting the Constitution, the process of Constitution making was actually multi-sited, more consultative than we have so far acknowledged to be. 

Host: That’s the political scientist and JNU professor Niraja Gopal Jayal again. 

Niraja Gopal Jayal: There were letters, petitions, memoranda coming from a range of public and private bodies, from Chambers of Commerce and Industry to linguistic groups to minority groups and so on. 

They were drafted by politically engaged citizens as well as political parties. And we must remember that they were being printed and circulated in the public sphere. 

Host: Individual citizens and political parties came up with at least 50 versions of a Constitution. The Hindu Mahasabha, the Socialist Party, Gandhians and retired civil servants and advocates also published their drafts. Roy’s Constitution was among the first. In 137 articles spread over 13 chapters, he presented a radical democratic vision which he described as  “an organised democracy as the source of all constitutional authority.” The chapter titled “Declaration of Rights and Fundamental Principles,” recognised the freedom of religion, right to privacy and gender equality. Roy also explicitly wrote of the rights of workers.  

Niraja Gopal Jayal: He also spoke about adequately remunerative employment or relief as a right of citizenship. There were rights also to the statutory provision of social security for those who were sick or elderly or physically incapacitated, the right to fixed hours of work, one month’s leave with full pay to every worker. 

Host: While many of his contemporaries also spoke of social and economic rights of workers and peasants, Roy took it a step further. For him, workers’ rights were as fundamental to citizenship as political rights. Roy also recognised the right of the people to revolt against authoritarian rule.

Niraja Gopal Jayal: Supreme sovereignty would vest in the Indian people, so the state would be identical with the people. They would have the inalienable right to alter and to modify the way in which society was politically organised. And their right to revolt against tyranny and against oppression would be sacred.

Host: Then, Roy laid down a decentralised, federal system of government. He proposed a network of “People’s Committees” as the building blocks of the political system. These were envisaged as  local governments elected by citizens. The people’s committees would then send representatives to a higher body called the People’s Council at the provincial level, which would further vote candidates to the Federal Assembly at the Centre. Roy’s Marxist influence echoed in his chapter about economic organisation. He spoke of reorganising the economy to ensure that every citizen would have “adequate leisure for cultivating the finer aspects of life.” The state would take control of economic planning and ensure that goods were produced to meet people’s needs. Jayal says Roy’s economic vision ran counter to his hyper-decentralised political system. 

Niraja Gopal Jayal: But as you see it very much also in the idea that the planning of production, the planning of distribution is the job of the state, right? So what he proposed in sum was a highly centralised state, ostensibly tied to the people as the source of power, the people expressing their will through people’s committees and then upwards.

Host: Roy’s vision of a radical democratic system had few takers outside his own following. There were others, like the Gandhian Shriman Narayan who proposed similar political systems. But the Constituent Assembly of India adopted the familiar parliamentary system and the radical democratic visions of Roy and others fell by the wayside.  

Roy himself became an even more marginal figure in Indian politics after his party was wiped out in the 1946 elections. He was left with no political power or influence for his Constitution to even be seriously considered. In 1948, he left active political life, choosing instead to promote his philosophy of radical humanism. With his second wife Ellen Gottschalk, a Jewish German communist whom he had met in Berlin, he set up the Indian Renaissance Institute in Dehradun. But his philosophy would remain a pipe dream. He died in 1954, in the same house where Aditya Nigam later grew up. Nigam tells us how Roy’s ideas echo today. 

Aditya Nigam: I think, where it’s important as a political thinker, is his attempt to find a decentralised democracy. Right now what we have are two options or two alternatives. One is liberal democracy, which we see has completely become, it’s led to a fiasco across the world. These days, in fact, all the work which is coming out, people are talking of electoral oligarchies, elected oligarchies, rather than democracies. 

Host: Two decades after Roy’s death, his ideas animated one of the largest anti-government protests in the history of our republic. His ideas were championed by the socialist politician Jayaprakash Narayan, or JP as he was popularly known. JP, who counted both Gandhi and Roy among his influences, carried forward their critique of parliamentary democracy into post-colonial India. Even during the 1950s and 60s, when the customs and conventions of constitutional democracy were taking root, JP wrote that electoral democracy had become a top-down affair that made voters feel left out. He said that voting gave people representation, but did not assure any participation in the lawmaking process. In the early 1970s, he became the face of the movement against the Indira Gandhi government. He called for a “total revolution” which, at first, entailed a complete rejection of electoral democracy. He put forth a political alternative, one where janata samitis or people’s committees at the local level could pass legislation and control office-holders in higher bodies – a call back to the political vision that Roy laid down in his draft constitution. The Indira Gandhi government accused JP of fomenting trouble through unconstitutional means. But JP actually represented a rich tradition of radical democrats who rejected the idea that the Parliamentary system was the best for Indian democracy. 

Roy’s ideas continue to resonate in independent India. The range of his experiences and the breadth of his thinking made him a national leader with a truly Renaissance spirit. By engaging with his Constitution against the one we eventually adopted we can see an alternative vision for India, one that places citizens at the centre of power.