Page 119 - Demo

It is also possible that in the 1940s, a young idealistic person bent on social justice may not have found too many options. The Congress party was seen to be controlled by big landlords and industrialists and was only paying lip-service to the ideas of social justice, while the Communists were seen as authoritarian and anti-democratic and apt to swing the pendulum back and forth in accordance with instructions from outside India.When PVG Raju was studying at Madras, JP's tour of Madras Presidency was being planned. PVG Raju expressed his intention of meeting JP and one of his friends suggested that he meet KP Menon, joint secretary of the Congress Socialist Party and in charge of all the tour arrangements of JP. The tour lasted all of seven days where PVG Raju drove JP around himself. Later, when JP visited Vizianagaram in 1946, PVG Raju joined the Socialist Party and donated a purse of rupees ten thousand to JP, another six thousand rupees for Jaya Bharath, a newspaper published by a follower of JP.Jayaprakash Narayan addressed a gathering where PVG Raju was also present and publicly asked him to give up the estate, because the aim of the Socialist Party was abolition of private property. Spontaneously, PVG Raju announced that he was willing to give up his zamindari without taking any compensation. This startled the audience and hit them like a bolt from the blue. The question one can ask in hindsight is whether the issue of 'zamindari and compensations' had been playing on his conscience. Though only 22 years of age, PVG Raju was a deep and sensitive thinker and carefully weighed his thoughts and actions. Interestingly many decades later, one of the letters that he kept with him, was the letter from JP on the occasion of his daughter's marriage, where he conveyed his warmest wishes to the family. That was the respect he had for JP. 109