Yogendra Yadav
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A profile
India Today, April 13, 2015
Asit Jolly
Undaunted by his near-ouster from AAP, Yogendra Yadav is determined not to leave public life, however difficult its relationships
Just 14 years old and driven by his academician father's loathing for the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, he vividly recalls "euphoric scenes of collective ecstasy" on counting day in March 1977, when the BBC's Hindi Service first informed India of the Congress party's electoral debacle. It was his first experience of "democracy at its unbridled best". Mrs Gandhi had been toppled in her impregnable bastion of Rae Bareli. Her son and political heir Sanjay Gandhi had also lost. But he also remembers his sense of betrayal and disgust as he witnessed the disintegration of the Janata Party. The squabbles and intrigue that resulted in the collapse of the first real chance for political change since Independence.
Over three decades later, that boy, Yogendra Yadav, is 52 and cringes at the thought that thousands of young people who contributed to the dizzying success of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) are feeling let down just like he did when Morarji Desai's government fell. Ousted from any relevance within AAP, in what some see as a purge by party convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to bury dissent, Yadav says he is troubled because "in the current story we are the betrayers. We stand where the Desais, Charan Singhs, Raj Narains and Chandra Shekhars were in 1979".
An affable and soft-spoken politician, the unruffled Yadav manages to present an equanimity that makes you want to trust him. Besides what he describes as "a most platonic home environment" while growing up, he derives his calm from the composure that came from three decades of teaching and supervising research. Despite his current troubles within the AAP, he does not plan to quit politics. "My life so far was a preparation for exactly what I am doing today. And this is certainly not something I intend giving up any time soon. Definitely not because of the present setback," he says, adding that he has already extended his sabbatical from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies by another year.
As an academic, Yadav had immersed himself in social and political movements while shuttling between lecture rooms and TV studios. "I've always been a political person who strayed into the world of political science for far longer than I would have preferred," he says. At Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1983, he became actively involved with the Samata Yuvjan Sabha associated with Kishan Patnaik, a socialist from Odisha and a member of the Socialist Party under Ram Manohar Lohia. In 1995, when Patnaik formed a political party, Samajwadi Jan Parishad, Yadav helped draft its policy document.
"Politics is what Yogendra had always aspired to do," says Rajiv Lochan, a history professor at Chandigarh's Panjab University (PU) who was a close friend during his years in PU's political science faculty. Lochan remembers that rather than living on campus, Yadav chose to stay in a slum colony in Daddu Majra, a village near Chandigarh, because he wanted to live among "real people".
But it was his decision to join the Aam Aadmi Party that brought him full-time into politics. This, Yadav reveals, was despite several early differences with Kejriwal and others. "Right from the foundation of the party, I had a distinct sense that Arvind was uneasy about my presence," he says, bringing up Kejriwal's decision to trash an AAP vision document Yadav was asked to prepare for the launch in 2012. Also, Yadav's suggestion of a nationwide yatra to mark AAP's formation was scuttled without assigning a reason.
Kejriwal, he suggests, had a problem with Yadav's insistence on being 'procedurally correct' on key decisions within AAP. Their mutual disagreement grew sharper over time, reaching the first flashpoint in the wake of AAP's Lok Sabha debacle, when Kejriwal was keen to renew his alliance with the Congress for a second shot at forming a government in Delhi. Yadav says that despite the move being defeated within AAP's Political Affairs Committee in May 2014, Kejriwal insisted because he believed the only way to counter Narendra Modi and the BJP was to recapture power in Delhi by any means. "Arvind declared: 'I am the leader. I will decide'," Yadav says.
Though the tie-up with Congress did not finally happen, Yadav's relationship with the Kejriwal camp became difficult and tense. "In the case of Prashant Bhushan, it became impossible," he says. But he insists that he wanted prolong the association, at least past the February assembly polls, where the psephologist in him could see that the party was heading for a certain victory. In fact, several of his friends, including Lochan, believe that Yadav has been hasty in staging an exit from AAP's central think tank.
Yadav rejects the suggestion that things could get lonely for him outside or on the fringes of AAP. "Both Prashant and I made the choice to be pushed aside. We always had the wonderful option of keeping quiet. That would have brought us some decent rewards. No?" He and Bhushan do not have complete clarity on the road ahead. Yadav says he is against seeking legal recourse because, "We just cannot turn this into a battle between Sher-e-PunjabDhaba and Asli Sher-e-Punjab Dhaba, even though I believe the movement has been hijacked and its original spirit has been crushed."
On April 14, Yadav and Bhushan plan to engage in Gurgaon with a group of "stakeholders", including AAP volunteers and activists who have been supporting the party but have been cagey about joining it. "The challenge is to establish that alternative politics, the kind we dream about, can remain alternative while being viable."
In 1993, Yadav resigned his faculty position at Panjab University with the intention of returning to live and work in his village, Saharanwas in Haryana's Rewari area, but he never made it home. This time however he is intent on staying where he believes he was meant to be-among the people.
Role in academics
Avijit Ghosh, May 11, 2020: The Times of India
Yogendra Singh played a seminal role in reorienting and modernising Indian sociology as a discipline and authored the pathbreaking and bestselling Modernization of Indian Tradition.
“He was intellectually alive till the very end. On Saturday night he told us about the need to come up with new concepts to study post-industrial society in a post-Covid19 world. He said it is a new challenge for social scientists and they must develop new tools to analyse the problem without ideological bias,” his daughter Neerja Singh told TOI on phone. The cardiac arrest happened around 10 am. “He was gone in 10 minutes,” she added. Due to the coronavirus restrictions, only family members attended the cremation at south Delhi’s Lodhi Road.
“Indian sociology was for quite some time under the shadow of British social anthropology. He extricated it from that orientation and made it what we call modern sociology in the Indian context,” said eminent sociologist and colleague TK Oommen.
“He helped create a new post-graduate syllabus where theory, methodology and Indian social reality became integrated with the subject,” Oommen added.
Historian Mridula Mukherjee said, “He was a crucial figure in the construction of JNU’s egalitarian culture in teacherteacher, student-teacher relationships. His home was always open to students.”
Singh set up JNU’s Centre for the Study of Social Systems in 1971. Among his areas of expertise were social stratification, social change and sociological theory. “But not many know that he was equally knowledgeable in literature, popular science and nutrition or that he turned down various offers of vice-chancellorship in different universities,” recalled former Jawaharlal Nehru University professor KL Sharma, also his student.
Singh’s magnus opus Modernization of Indian Tradition was published in 1973. “It has been reprinted multiple times. The book is also sought-after among civil service aspirants,” he said.
Singh was born in Chowkhara village in east Uttar Pradesh’s Basti district. He went to Lucknow University and taught in Rajasthan before moving to JNU, where he retired as professor emeritus. His long list of students include Dipankar Gupta and Pradip Bose, wellknown academics in their own right.
From all accounts, Singh was a hugely popular teacher whose lectures were often attended even by students of economics and history. He lived with catholicity, taught with relaxed calm and expounded dense theories with lucidity.
“When he taught Marx, you thought he was a Marxist. When he taught Weber, he sounded like a liberal ideologue in German tradition,” said Sharma, also former vice-chancellor Rajasthan University.
Singh’s former student Suman R Timsina wrote on Facebook, “There is no reading on modernisation of society where I do not think of his lectures.”
Now he is gone. But a generation of JNU students and others he interacted with would always remember the ease with which he explained complex sociological concepts and that ever-present twinkle in his eyes. As Mukherjee said, “His death marks the end of an era.”
