Jivatram Kripalani

Azad, Jivatram Kripalani (third from left), Patel
and other Congressmen at Wardha.

Acharya (scholar) Jivatram Bhagwandas Kripalani (1888-1982) was an Indian politician, noted particularly for holding the presidency of the Indian National Congress during the transfer of power in 1947.
Kripalani was Gandhian Socialist, environmentalist, mystic and freedom fighter.
He grew close to Gandhi and became in time one of his most ardent disciples. Kripalani was a familiar figure to generations of dissenters, from the Non-Cooperation Movements of the 1920s through till the Emergency of the 1970s.

Early life

Jivatram (also spelled Jiwatram) Bhagwandas Kripalani was born in Hyderabad in Sindh in 1888. Following his education at Fergusson College in Pune, he worked as a schoolteacher before joining the freedom movement in the wake of Gandhi’s return from South Africa.
Kripalani was involved in the Non-Cooperation Movement of the early 1920s. He worked in Gandhi’s ashrams in Gujarat and Maharashtra on tasks of social reform and education, and later left for Bihar and the United Provinces in northern India to teach and organize new ashrams. He courted arrest on numerous occasions during the Civil Disobedience movements and smaller occasions of organizing protests and publishing seditious material against the British raj.

Congress leader

Kripalani joined the All India Congress Committee, and became its General Secretary in 1928-29.
Kripalani was prominently involved over a decade in top Congress party affairs, and in the organization of the Salt Satyagraha and the Quit India Movement. Kripalani served in the interim government of India (1946-1947) and the Constituent Assembly of India.

As Congress President and the election of 1950

In spite of being ideologically at odds with both the right-wing Vallabhbhai Patel and the left-wing Jawaharlal Nehru - he was elected Congress President for the crucial years around Indian independence in 1947. After Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948, Nehru rejected his demand that the party’s views should be sought in all decisions. Nehru, with the support of Patel, told Kripalani that while the party was entitled to lay down the broad principles and guidelines, it could not be granted a say in the government’s day-to-day affairs. This precedent became central to the relationship between government and ruling party in subsequent decades.
Nehru, however, supported Kripalani in the election of the Congress President in 1950. Kripalani,supported by Nehru was pitted against against Patel’s candidate Purushottam Das Tandon. Tandon defeated Kripalani.
Bruised by his defeat, and disillusioned by what he viewed as the abandonment of the Gandhian ideal of a countless village republics, Kripalani left the Congress and became one of the founders of the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party. This party subsequently merged with the Socialist Party of India to form the Praja Socialist Party.
For a while it was even believed that Nehru, stung by the defeat, was considering abandoning the Congress as well; his several offers of resignation at the time were all, however, shouted down.[citation needed] A great many of the more progressive elements of the party left in the months following the election, however. Congress’s subsequent bias to the right was only balanced when Nehru obtained the resignation of Tandon in the run up to the general elections of 1951.