Ever since the Narendra Modi government assumed office in May 2014, there has been a plethora of programmes named after Deendayal Upadhyaya.
Ever since the Narendra Modi government assumed office in May 2014, there has been a plethora of programmes named after Deendayal Upadhyaya.
This year, the Centre is planning to celebrate his birth centenary in a big way. This is to promote his ideals, encourage research, documentation and popularisation of the man as a new icon of modern India.
For those outside the Sangh Parivar, Upadhyaya is an unknown entity.
The detractors of Prime Minister Modi will now accuse him of trying to impose a new icon on the national psyche.
Maybe due to the simple life he lived or because of the reticence of the Sangh Parivar, the man who gave the slogans “charivedi, charivedi (move on, move on)”, and “Har haath ko kaam, har khet ko paani (work for every hand, water for every field)” remained oblivious to the general public.
The stranglehold of the Congress and the Left on the academic institutions and the media was such that this man and his concept of integral humanism, which could envisage remedies for the post-globalisation maladies of the world was kept out of all intellectual discourse.
He was not given recognition in the legion of post-Independence political thinkers.
He was in obscurity but for some schemes named after him by the BJP governments.
But for Upadhyaya, the BJP may not have been what it is today. It is natural that the Modi government is going gung-ho over his legacy. His death anniversary was on February 11.
He died under mysterious circumstances at the age 52, barely few months after he took over as Jana Sangh chief. His body was found lying in a pool of blood, that day in 1968, by a railway man on the track near Mughalsarai railway junction.
Initially, nobody recognised him. The police would have buried him as unidentified but for a Jana Sangh worker in the crowd that collected around the corpse yelling “It’s Deendayalji”.
He lived at a time when the distinctiveness of ideological sharpness was getting blurred in the market of political pragmatism.
The historic and political significance of the massive mandate the BJP won in 2014 is yet to be fully analysed.
And the role Upadhyaya’s strategic formulations and theoretical compass that laid the foundation for this will be aspects of focus in this centenary celebrations.
This will be an occasion to recast, to reinvent the canvas on which the BJP ideological format was designed. Upadhyaya conceived a classless, casteless and conflict-free social order.
He stressed on the ancient Indian wisdom of oneness of the human kind. For him the brotherhood of a shared, common heritage was central to political activism.
He emphasised on coexistence and harmony with nature. Not sustainable development but sustainable consumption was his advice to planners.
He conceptualised an alternative approach which was free from the dialectics of competition and envy.
A third way from the inertia of capitalism and communism.
RSS ideologue and BMS founder Dattopant Thengadi used to talk of three kinds of politicians. “One, pure and simple politician. Two, essentially a politician, incidentally an idealist. Three, essentially an idealist, incidentally a politician.” He has also defined the characteristics of each category of politician.
Upadhyaya clearly belonged to the third category.
He was a reluctant politician. Politics was not his fist love. As an RSS pracharak he was eager to continue in the same field.
But on the formation of the Jana Sangh he was given the charge of organising the new party and after the martyrdom of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the entire responsibility of building it fell on him. Upadhyaya was a pioneer of many political experiments.
He was the architect of the first coalition phase in Indian politics. The Samyukta Vidhayak Dal experiments of the post-1967 election when the Congress was routed in every state from Punjab to West Bengal.
Upadhyaya, along with Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, worked to unite all anti-Congress parties and form alternatives in state after state.
During that period, the Communists also joined his campaign and shared power in Bihar with the Jana Sangh.
The point is, Upadhyaya was an innovative politician and he created a paradigm for future politicians to follow.
He believed in self-sustaining autonomous units, more power to states and decentralised and competitive federalism, solidly cemented on the cultural mosaic of our tradition, heritage and experience of the past.
No other contemporary of Upadhyaya has left such a lasting trail on the politics as he did. This mainly was because he attracted the attention of thousands of youngsters who worked tirelessly to carry on the legacy. Perhaps, it was rooted in the Indian ethos or because it was further moulded, chiselled and shaped; reinterpreted, reviewed and researched by a number of eminent social and political leaders and thinkers in the country.
His basic tenet was that the cadre should not become comfort-loving and the leadership status-conscious. Till date he is the most iconic personality produced by the Sangh school of thought and his basic effort was to establish the role of ideology in electoral polity.
The author is a former editor of the RSS journal Organiser
