â
Narayan was manhandled by the police while on his way to a public meeting in Patna. While warding off a baton, he stumbled to the ground; the picture was splashed across the newspapers the next day. He was an old man as well as a sick one (he suffered from diabetes), and although the injuries were slight the indignity provoked much outrage. The Bihar administration was compared to its colonial predecessor â as one journal somewhat hyperbolically wrote, âJP was, for the first time in free India, a victim of police repression.
â
â
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)