69. For a report of the meeting, see Organiser, 19 September 1955. It was claimed that the delegates represented 56,000 workers. According to BMS leader G. S. Gokhale, this figure is very much inflated. Interview with him in Bombay, on 14 January 1969.
70. For an analysis of its geographic distribution, see Organiser, 4 September 1971.
71. The best sources for Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh theory are: G. S. Gokhale, M. P. Mehta and D. B. Thengadi, Labour Policy (Nagpur: Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, 1967–1968); D. B. Thengadi, Focus on the Socio-Economic Problems (New Delhi: Suruchi Sahitya, 1972); and D. B. Thengadi, Why Bharatiya Sangh? (Pune: V. R. Shingre, 1959).
72. Why Bharatiya Sangh? pp. 1–34.
73. Ibid., p. 63.
74. Interview with G.S. Gokhale on 22 November 1969, at Bombay.
75. The slogan of the Mazdoor Sangh is, ‘1. Nationalize Labour; 2. Labourize the Industry; and 3. Industrialize the Nation.’
76. For a good discussion of the theory, see Gokhale at al., Labour Policy, pp. 344–56.
77. Interview with Gokhale on 22 November 1969 in Bombay.
78. On most labour issues the Jana Sangh relied heavily on the advice of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, and the Jana Sangh consistently defended labour’s right to strike and to bargain collectively. While the Jana Sangh supported ‘labourizing’ industry, the party opposed extending the principle to agriculture on grounds that it was impractical and that it would increase social tension in rural India and would enable an exploitive government bureaucracy to become more powerful. To underscore Jana Sangh opposition to cooperative farming, the party organized an anti-cooperative conference in Bombay in 1959. Reported in Organiser, 21 December 1959.
79. Organiser, May 1982.
80. Thengadi, Why Bharatiya Sangh, pp. 81–83.
81. Ibid., p. 46.
82. An alternative name for the god is Twashta.
83. For details of the BMS role in the 1974 railway strike, see D. B. Thengadi, Railway Karmachariyon ki Hartal (Nagpur: Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, 1974), in Hindi. According to Gajanan Gokhale, a senior BMS official at the time of the railway strike, the BMS drafted the unions’ negotiating document. Interview with him on 26 April 1983, at Pune.
84. He was selected general secretary of the Lok Sangarsh Samiti in November 1976, after the arrest of Ravindra Verma who had in turn replaced Nana Deshmukh when Deshmukh was arrested.
85. For details of the merger negotiations, see D. B. Thengadi, Vichar Sutra (Pune: BMS Research Institute, 1980), in Hindi.
86. There was total agreement on the independence of the projected united union, and a consensus on replacing ‘class struggle’ with ‘struggle against injustice and exploitation’, and on observing both Vishwakarma Day and May Day. Ibid., p. 123.
87. Organiser, 12 April 1980.
88. Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, BMS Souvenir (New Delhi: BMS, 1980), p. 14.
89. These goals are noted in the ‘General Secretary’s Report’, in the Souvenir Volume published on the occasion of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s annual meeting at Allahabad in late January 1966, pp. vii–viii.
90. Hindu Vishwa 5 (March 1970), p. 43.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid., December 1969/January 1970, p. 63.
93. Later in 1977, the VHP turned over its work among tribals to the Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, a national coordinating body established in 1977 to coordinate work among tribals.
94. Hindu Vishwa (November 1981), pp. 11, 33, 36.
95. The VHP collected the money in about four months. Interview with Lala Har Mohan, general secretary of the Parishad, on 23 May 1983, at New Delhi.
96. Hindu Vishwa (July 1981), p. 3.
97. Hindu Chetana (April 1986), p. 27, in Hindi.
98. Some 3 crore rupees (30 million) was raised according to India Today (30 November 1983), p. 34.
99. Statistics from Sangh Sandesh (8 April 1984), the official organ of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh in England.
100. India Today, International edition (28 February 1986), p. 66.
101. Hindu Chetana (April 1986), p. 6, in Hindi.
102. India Today (31 March 1986), pp. 30–39.
103. Dharma Sansad (New Delhi: Vishwa Hindu Parishad, 1982), p. 14, in Hindi.
104. Ibid., pp. 36–63.
105. Interview with Mahesh Mehta, general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, on 10 September 1985, at Chicago.
106. Hindu Chetana (April 1986), p. 7, in Hindi.
107. There are VHP branches in Canada, England and several East African countries. The information on its activities in the United States is taken from a brochure published by the American branch.
108. Interview with Mahesh Mehta on 18 July 1986 at Boston, Massachusetts.
109. The VHP is the only affiliate in which the chief of the RSS is a trustee. Because of ill health, Moropant Pingale, a member of the RSS national executive and one of the most respected pracharaks, was appointed by Deoras as an additional trustee to represent RSS interests.
110. The book is Swami Vivekananda’s Rousing Call to the Indian Nation (Calcutta: Swastik Prakashan, 1963). This book contains a number of aphorisms used frequently in the RSS.
111. The events leading up to the formation of the Vivekananda Lay Order were provided by Eknath Ranade in an extensive interview with him on 1 January 1970 at Kanyakumari.
112. The village has a Christian majority; most of its inhabitants are Roman Catholic fishermen.
113. The total cost for the elaborate memorial was approximately 12 million rupees (approximately $1.5 million) most of which was collected by the time the memorial was dedicated in 1970. A general body, consisting of some of India’s leading politicians, businessmen, educators and journalists, set the general policy. In fact, it was controlled by Ranade and a small group of full-time workers, most of whom were swayamsevaks. RSS members (and others) are encouraged to visit the site, which consists of a large structure housing the statue of Vivekananda, prayer rooms, and an assembly hall, as well as a separate structure housing the footprint of the Devi Kumari.
114. The curriculum of the six-month training includes a mix of religious philosophy, classical languages, social science theory and history.
115. The Kendra set the goal of 20 million rupees (approximately $2.5 million) to launch the order, and the first class of fourteen trainees assembled at Kanyakumari on 30 August 1973. The trainees were selected from some 700 applicants and came from eight Indian states and Union territories. All were unmarried and below thirty. They were all college graduates and none had family commitments. The first class had twelve men and two women.
116. Interview with G. Vasudevan, organizing secretary of the Kendra, on 27 June 1983, at Delhi.
117. The General Secretary’s Report for 1982 (p. 3) noted that it had received 3.2 million rupees in 1982–83.
118. Relief work is not new for the RSS. It has been engaged in relief work since the 1930s. What was unique about the projects begun in late 1977 in Andhra Pradesh was the incorporation of economic development.
119. See report in Organiser, 19 December 1979.
120. For a description of its original objects, see J. P. Mathur, ed., Jana Deep Souvenir (Delhi: Rakesh Press, 1971), pp. 13–14.
121. See report of the DRI’s development activities in Andhra Pradesh in Organiser, 5 November 1978.
122. Information taken from pamphlet Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (Bombay: Kalyan Ashram, 1984).
123. For information on the BVKA’s aggressive outreach programme, see Sangh Sandesh (January 1985), the newsletter of the RSS affiliate in England.
124. Organiser, 28 October 1979.
125. See report of this new missionary venture in Organiser, 1 August 1982.
126. Information from an interview with Har Mohan Lal, VHP general secretary, on 23 May 1983, at New Delhi.
127. Organiser, 12 April 1983.
128. In previous years, only senior pracharaks had met together at the national level in N
agpur at the time of the annual Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha meetings.
129. Senior Jana Sangh figures, however, continued to meet on an ad hoc basis with RSS leaders. Information regarding the samanvaya samitis in an interview with Murli Manohar Joshi, all-India secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party on 9 August 1983 in Delhi.
130. Deendayal Upadhyaya represented the Jana Sangh at the annual Nagpur meetings until his death in 1968. After him, Nana Deshmukh and Sunder Singh Bhandari attended. Interview with J. P. Mathur, BJP member of the Rajya Sabha, on 26 July 1983, at New Delhi.
131. For example, senior BJP figures in Maharashtra attended a state level samanvaya samiti meeting at Pune in June 1985. See Divakar Deshmukh, ‘Maharashtra Kuthe Chalaya’, in Dharmabhaskar (15 July 1985), pp. 44–46, in Marathi.
Chapter 5: The RSS in Politics
1. While Bhai Mahavir had little practical experience in politics, he came from a politically active family. His father, Bhai Parmanand, had participated in revolutionary activities during his youth and had become a leading spokesman of the Arya Samaj in Punjab. Parmanand also played an active role in the Hindu Mahasabha.
2. For a very good discussion of this manifesto, see Baxter, Jana Sangh, pp. 83–9.
3. The concept of a unitary state, which was not mentioned in this manifesto, later became a central plank in Jana Sangh manifestos. In the place of the existing states, the party proposed the creation of smaller janapads as regional administrative units exercising powers delegated to them by the Central government. This proposal was to receive considerable attention after the decision was made by the government to reorganize the states on a linguistic basis in the mid-1950s. Both the RSS and the Jana Sangh opposed unilateral states, claiming they would undermine national integration by encouraging regional sub-nationalism and political separatism.
4. The cow, as a symbol of the divine mother, evokes a powerful emotional response from members of the RSS. Those who would do damage to this symbol are considered enemies of Indian culture. Both the Jana Sangh and the RSS have periodically participated in agitations aimed at forcing the government to ban cow slaughter. The largest single RSS effort was a nationwide cow protection campaign in late 1952. It was reported that sane 54,000 RSS swayamsevaks visited 85,000 villages to generate support for the movement. The RSS organized a conference in November 1953 to mobilize political support behind the campaign. Mauli Chandra Sharma, the Jana Sangh president, and several other prominent Jana Sangh leaders took an active role in that conference. See report in Organiser, 2 November 1953.
5. By receiving 3.06 per cent of the vote, the party was entitled to the exclusive use of a particular symbol. It used the deepak (the traditional lamp) as its symbol after the first general election.
6. Mookerjee won from the South-east Calcutta constituency, and Durga Charan Banerji, the second Jana Sangh member from West Bengal, won the Midnapur seat. The party’s third member of parliament was Umashankar Muljibhai Trivedi, who won the Chittor seat in Rajasthan. Trivedi was to play a leading role in the early development of the Jana Sangh.
7. Organiser, 25 February 1952.
8. See Baxter, Jana Sangh, pp. 107–16.
9. Deendayal Upadhyaya, an RSS pracharak, had been the joint organizing secretary of Uttar Pradesh RSS when Golwalkar loaned him to the Jana Sangh. He was appointed secretary of the Uttar Pradesh Jana Sangh. At the Kanpur annual session he was appointed one of the two general secretaries, a position he held until 1967 when he became party president.
10. This proposition was suggested to us by Vasantrao Krishna Oke in an interview with him on 4 September 1969 in Delhi.
11. How seriously Chatterjee was considered is not clear. Some Jana Sangh informants claim that Chatterjee was not a serious candidate. Indeed, some claim that he was never even offered the position.
12. Interview with N. C. Chatterjee on 29 May 1969 at Calcutta. Much of the material in the discussion of a new party president is taken from that interview.
13. Myron Weiner interviewed Chatterjee soon after the talks, and he reports that Chatterjee told him of a meeting in his New Delhi home in which Jana Sangh and Mahasabha leaders discussed four options: The first proposed that the three Hindu-oriented parties (the Jana Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Ram Rajya Parishad) disband and reorganize as a single party. The second proposed a merger of the three, but with the provision that the Mahasabha continue to exist as a purely cultural organization. Another proposed an electoral alliance between the Mahasabha and the Jana Sangh, with each retaining its own organizational structure. The fourth proposed the amalgamation of the Jana Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha into a new political body. See discussion in Myron Weiner, Party Politics in India: The Development of a Multi-Party System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 206. In our interview with him, Chatterjee claimed that he personally supported the second option.
14. If as Chatterjee asserts the second option of the four discussed was the one he personally favoured, V. D. Savarkar had good cause to doubt if the Hindu Mahasabha could exert influence within the proposed political arrangement. The RSS would surely have had far more influence. Considering his views towards the RSS, Savarkar could not have relished the prospect of the Mahasabha operating in the shadow of the RSS.
15. Organiser, 8 February 1954. The previous August, Madhok wrote in Organiser, that ‘the successor of Dr Mookerjee must have that quality of carrying the workers with him . . . that demands perfect coordination between the Jana Sangh and the RSS. There can be persons who may like to disturb this coordination in the name of self-aggrandizement. Such people will be the worst enemies of these organizations and they will be betraying the sacred trust of Dr Mookerjee.’ Ibid., 16 August 1953. Considering subsequent events, it is clear that Madhok used this forum to advise Sharma to take the RSS cadre into his confidence.
16. Interview with Mauli Chandra Sharma on 18 August 1969 at Delhi.
17. Interview with Vasantrao Krishna Oke on 4 September 1969 at Delhi.
18. Interview with Eknath Ranade on 29 December 1969 at Kanyakumari.
19. Interview with Sharma on 18 August 1969 at Delhi.
20. The usual RSS interpretation of Oke’s rebellion is that he lost the ‘egoless’ qualities necessary for a worthy swayamsevak. Oke has since recanted and the RSS has again given him work.
21. Interview with Sharma on 18 August 1969 at Delhi. Sharma claims that he tried to raise money ‘to put the party on a sound financial footing’.
22. Oke realized the cause was doomed, and according to informants, he said nothing during the proceedings to defend his views.
23. The Jana Sangh constitution did not give the organizing secretaries the right to interfere in the party’s decision making, but their influence among the swayamsevak participants provided them the de facto power to exert significant influence over the cadre. Indeed, the Jana Sangh constitution did not even describe their duties, specifying only that they would be appointed by state working committees, and that their duties would be established by these committees. Jana Sangh constitution (amended by All-India General Council session, Bhagalpur, 5–7 May 1972), Art. 13, para. 6.
24. This factional struggle in the Delhi Jana Sangh reported extensively in Hindustan Times (Delhi), 4–5 November 1954.
25. These manouevres are reported in Organiser, 8 November 1954.
26. Ibid.
27. The next plenary session of the party was held at Jodhpur in late December 1954, and the party leaders selected Prem Nath Dogra president. Dogra, a former RSS sanghchalak in J&K and founder of the Praja Parishad, could be relied upon to cooperate in purging the party of its ‘undisciplined’ elements. Few of the legislative members of the new Jana Sangh were RSS members, and many deserted it during the struggle for control of the party. Most of its legislators in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Rajasthan were either expelled or switched party allegiances. A group of Jana Sangh dissidents in Delhi organized the National Democratic Front. This group, some
times referred to as the Democratic Jana Sangh, also received some scattered support in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. However, the new party could generate little enthusiasm and, as the 1957 elections approached, many of its active participants drifted into other parties. A discussion on this splinter party, see H. D. Malaviya, The Danger of Right Reaction (New Delhi: Socialist Congressman Publication, 1965).
28. Even the Jana Sangh constitution stipulated that the president would choose the general secretary, this ‘selection’ was never in doubt after 1954. Upadhyaya was annually ‘chosen’, and he was recognized as the de facto leader of the party.
29. This manifesto is discussed in Baxter, Jana Sangh, pp. 141–42.
30. Loyalty to party principles played more of a role in candidate selection than in 1952. Consequently, few candidates chosen in 1952 were again nominated in 1957 and a larger number of RSS members were awarded tickets.
31. Of the assembly constituencies Baxter defines as rural, the Jana Sangh contested 334 seats in the 1957 elections in Uttar Pradesh, receiving 15.5 per cent of the vote, though this still did not measure up to the 22.69 per cent of the vote it won in the 34 urban constituencies it contested. He also pointed out that its ‘rural’ vote increased 78 per cent between 1957 and 1962, while the ‘urban’ vote increased only 26 per cent. Baxter, Jana Sangh, pp. 235–36.
32. Those cities are Agra, Allahabad, Benares, Kanpur and Lucknow. Figures from Organiser, 9 November 1959.
33. See Wayne Wilcox’s discussion of Madhya Bharat in ‘Madhya Pradesh,’ in Weiner ed., State Politics in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 132–37.
34. Prabhakar Balwant Dani, one of the most successful RSS organizers, established RSS work in Madhya Bharat in the 1930s. After serving there, he was chosen the RSS general secretary in 1946, a post he held until 1956. He also served as general secretary between 1962 and 1965. Biographical data on Dani in Organiser, 31 May 1965.
35. Lawrence L. Shrader discusses these elections in ‘Rajasthan’ in Weiner, State Politics, pp. 329–37.
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