There are moments when the best way to assess the present is to look back at the political lives of those who inhabited a very different public culture. Jageshwar Mandal, who died on September 9, 1988, belonged to that generation. His life raises a question that contemporary Indian politics rarely asks with sufficient seriousness: What is politics for?
For Mandal, the answer was not difficult. Politics was a means of public service, social transformation and democratic participation. Office was incidental; public responsibility was not. At a time when political success is often measured by electoral victories, organisational control, visibility and proximity to power, his career offers a different measure of political legitimacy: credibility among citizens.
Born on July 1, 1911, in Bhikhanpur village of Shahkund in Bhagalpur district, Mandal emerged from a rural setting but built a public career that traversed education, the freedom movement, cooperatives, Panchayati Raj and electoral politics. His trajectory is significant precisely because it does not fit neatly into the contemporary template of a career politician. He was a teacher, institution-builder, organiser, satyagrahi, legislator and minister, but none of these identities completely defined him.
Education was among the earliest foundations of his public life. After completing his matriculation in the first division from District School, Bhagalpur, in 1931, he pursued higher education, obtained a B.Ed. from Patna Training College and studied law at Patna Law College. He taught mathematics at Sharda Pathshala and became headmaster of Kahalgaon High School in 1938. He later served as secretary of Kahalgaon College and Naugachhia College and was associated with the Senate and Syndicate of Bhagalpur University.
The significance of this educational journey lies not simply in his qualifications. Mandal saw education as a form of social empowerment. For him, the classroom and the political arena served a common purpose: creating citizens capable of participating in public life. In an era when education is increasingly treated as an individual investment for employment, this broader conception of education deserves reconsideration.
His entry into the Congress in 1939 coincided with the final phase of the freedom struggle. In 1942, responding to Mahatma Gandhi's call to "Do or Die", he joined the Quit India Movement. He went underground alongside revolutionaries such as Siyaram Singh and Parshuram Singh and gave up government employment.
That decision is important not because sacrifice automatically confers political virtue, but because it reveals the cost that political conviction once demanded. Government employment represented security and status. To surrender it for an uncertain underground struggle was to place principle above personal advancement.
The real test of such a political ethic, however, came after Independence. Freedom from colonial rule did not, in Mandal's understanding, end the need for democratic resistance. In December 1972, he was arrested in Patna while participating in a satyagraha and sent to Hazaribagh Jail. During the 1974 movement, he became a MISA detainee along with several other activists, including Prof. Ramji Singh, Sudha Srivastava, Harivansh Mani Singh, Sitaram Kishorpuria, Vijay Mitra, Balaram Ghosh, Krishna Mitra and Meera Ghosh.
The political significance of Mandal's participation in the 1974 movement lies in the continuity of his democratic commitments. The movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan challenged corruption, administrative failure and the erosion of democratic accountability. Mandal's involvement suggested that, for him, Independence was not the end point of political struggle. The defence of democratic institutions remained an unfinished task.
His opposition to the Bihar Press Bill of 1982 makes the point even more sharply. The Bill, introduced by the government of Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra, was criticised by journalists' organisations and political activists as a potential threat to press freedom. Mandal joined the agitation against it. In 1984, he went to a camp jail in Bhagalpur along with nearly 1,400 satyagrahis.
This is perhaps one of the most relevant aspects of his political legacy today. A politician who had fought colonial authority in the name of freedom did not assume that every government in independent India was automatically entitled to public trust. He recognised a distinction that modern political discourse often blurs: loyalty to democracy is not the same as loyalty to the government of the day.
His political associations were correspondingly wide. He had contact with leaders across ideological and organisational boundaries, including Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Jagjivan Ram, Jayaprakash Narayan, K. Kamaraj, Morarji Desai, Ashok Mehta, Chaudhary Charan Singh, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Shri Krishna Singh, Anugrah Narayan Singh and Karpoori Thakur, among others.
He travelled with Abdul Ghaffar Khan in campaigns for communal harmony and undertook a padyatra with Vinoba Bhave as part of the Sarvodaya movement. Such associations reflected a political culture in which ideological differences did not necessarily destroy the possibility of dialogue.
That is another lesson worth recalling. Democracy requires disagreement, but it also requires the ability to converse across disagreement. The political generation to which Mandal belonged often disagreed intensely, changed political affiliations and fought bitter electoral battles. Yet political opponents were not necessarily treated as enemies of the nation or enemies of society.
Mandal's commitment to cooperative institutions provides another window into his political thinking. He helped build the Bhagalpur Weavers' Cooperative Society, served as secretary of the Bhagalpur Central Cooperative Bank, became a director of the Bihar State Cooperative Bank and later served as vice-president and president of the Bihar Cooperative Federation. He was also associated with the Land Development Bank, Bihar Housing Cooperative Federation and Bhagalpur Cooperative Milk Union.
His involvement in the cooperative sector was not a diversion from politics. It was politics understood differently. The objective was to give farmers, weavers, workers and small producers greater collective economic strength.
This distinction matters. Political democracy can give citizens a vote without necessarily giving them economic power. Mandal's cooperative activism reflected an understanding that democratic participation becomes fragile when economic dependence remains entrenched. Panchayati Raj and cooperatives were, in his conception, complementary institutions: one decentralised political power, while the other built collective economic capacity.
Between 1952 and 1964, and again from 1966 to 1977, Mandal served in the Bihar Legislative Council. After the formation of the Bhagalpur Zila Parishad in 1964, he became its first chairman. In 1977, he was elected from Sultanganj and joined Karpoori Thakur's Janata Party government as Minister for Cooperation, Rural Development and Excise.
His role in moving Bihar towards complete prohibition in 1979 is part of that record. The effectiveness and consequences of prohibition remain subjects of legitimate debate. But the episode illustrates something about Mandal's political priorities: public office, in his view, had to produce social consequences beyond the accumulation of political capital.
After leaving ministerial office, he continued to work through institutions associated with agriculture, rural development, land, tribal welfare, labour and public health. He served on the Bihar Land Commission and was associated with the Santhal-Paharia Seva Mandal in Deoghar, the Bharat Krishak Samaj, the Leprosy Prevention Centre in Bhagalpur and the Bhagalpur Labour Assembly.
His political affiliations also changed over time. He was associated with the Congress (Organisation) and later with the Janata Party, Janata Party (Secular), Dalit Mazdoor Kisan Party and Lok Dal, among others.
It would be easy—and historically superficial—to describe this simply as political instability or party-hopping. The politics of the 1960s and 1970s was marked by the fragmentation of Congress dominance and the emergence of competing socialist, peasant, Gandhian and non-Congress formations. Mandal's movement across these political spaces reflected, in part, that larger ideological transition.
The more revealing question is not how many parties he belonged to, but what remained constant despite those changes. His commitment to cooperatives, rural development, decentralisation, social justice, civil liberties and public participation provides that continuity.
This is also why his association with writing and publishing matters. He was connected with the editing of Gaon and contributed to publications on Panchayati Raj and cooperatives. He understood that democracy requires more than elections. It requires an informed public, institutions capable of resisting arbitrary power and citizens who understand their own rights.
Mandal died in 1988, but the questions his life raises have not disappeared. If anything, they have become more urgent.
Indian politics today possesses resources and technologies that Mandal's generation could scarcely have imagined. Campaigns are professionally managed, political communication is instantaneous and the machinery of elections has become vastly more sophisticated. Yet the expansion of political technology has not necessarily produced a corresponding expansion of political accountability.
This is where Mandal's legacy becomes uncomfortable.
Can a politician disagree with his own government when democratic freedoms are at stake? Can public office be treated as a temporary responsibility rather than a permanent entitlement? Can political opponents remain legitimate participants in the democratic process? Can cooperatives become instruments of genuine economic decentralisation rather than bureaucratic or political extensions? Can Panchayati Raj mean an actual transfer of power rather than merely the transfer of administrative responsibilities?
And perhaps the most fundamental question: Can politics once again be judged by the quality of public service rather than proximity to power?
Mandal's life does not provide a romantic answer. His career had its complexities, and his political choices belonged to the circumstances of his time. But the larger principle remains remarkably clear. He belonged to a generation that learnt politics through struggle rather than public relations, through institutions rather than image management, and through engagement with citizens rather than permanent campaigning.
His most enduring contribution may therefore not be any particular office he held or any particular political formation he represented. It was his conception of public life.
He demonstrated that simplicity need not mean political irrelevance; dissent need not mean disloyalty; and service need not be subordinate to power.
Remembering Jageshwar Mandal on September 9 should consequently be more than an exercise in political nostalgia. It should be an occasion to ask whether the republic still expects something more from its politicians than winning elections.
His life suggests a simple test: if politics is ultimately about the people, then the distance between political power and public service should never become too wide.
That is perhaps the most contemporary lesson that Jageshwar Mandal leaves behind.
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*Senior journalist
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