In history
Jayaprakash Narayan
1902–1979
Congress socialist, then Gandhian, then the man who called for Sampoorna Kranti at Patna's Gandhi Maidan in June 1974 and became the Emergency's most prominent prisoner. His life's argument was against concentrated power in any form — party, state or centre.
Furthest from the middle on Authority, toward Civil liberties.
Where they stand
Jayaprakash Narayan on each of the seven scales, from one pole to the other.
Welfare
−6.0Expansive state provisionMinimal/targeted provisionMarkets
−3.0State-led developmentMarket-led developmentRecognition
+2.0Formal equalityGroup remediesNation
−6.0PluralistMajoritarianAuthority
−9.0Civil libertiesStrong stateCulture
+1.0Personal autonomyTraditional normsFederalism
+9.0CentreStates
The record, axis by axis
Every placement is scored on what was said and done — manifestos, legislation, the governing record — and calibrated against the same trade-offs the quiz asks about.
Founded the Congress Socialist Party in 1934 and led the All India Railwaymen's Federation from 1947; his Sarvodaya turn moved the burden from state to village, to voluntary Bhoodan and Gramdan land transfer, without abandoning the demand for economic equality.
Marxist in the 1930s, Gandhian decentralist after 1954, he ended rejecting both private capitalism and centralised state socialism for a village-scale economy — leaving no clean position on ownership as this axis frames it.
The Janata government he midwifed constituted the Mandal Commission in January 1979, and the socialist stream he came from carried the special-opportunity plank — but his own 1974 movement ran on anti-corruption, democratic-restoration ground with a largely upper-caste student base.
Served on the 1964 Nagaland Peace Mission and pressed a Kashmir settlement that took Kashmiri opinion seriously, at real political cost — while bringing the Jana Sangh and RSS inside the Janata Party in 1977 and publicly vouching for them.
Founded the People's Union for Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights on his 1976 release; detained at Chandigarh from June 1975 until kidney failure forced release, having called on police and soldiers to refuse illegal orders — the demand Indira Gandhi cited to justify the Emergency.
Sarvodaya asceticism and the Gandhian moral frame, with no personal-autonomy programme; most of this axis's issue space was not live in his lifetime
'A Plea for the Reconstruction of Indian Polity' (1959) is the fullest decentralisation text of independent India: partyless communitarian democracy built upward from the gram sabha, with parliamentary centralisation named as the wrong model for a country this size
And where do you stand?
Answer the same trade-offs yourself and get your seven readings, on the scales you just read.
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