Jayaprakash Narayan and the politics of reconciliation for the postcolonial state and its imperial fragments

Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan was an activist, politician and political thinker who attempted to use peace negotiations on India’s borders to renegotiate the postcolonial Indian state. This article tracks JP’s efforts to find non-national vehicles for regional nationalist demands through his positions on the contentious political questions of a Nagaland in India, and a Tibet in China. It locates JP within the Anglophone international peace movement that transitioned from support of Indian independence to a critique of the state violence of the Indian government, and traces JP’s thinking and work in support of some degree of autonomy for Tibet and Nagaland. Finally, this article connects these projects to JP’s non-statist critique of Indian state sovereignty, arguing that through a more decentralised and inclusively organised India, JP sought to re-organise what decolonisation had wrought