36. In the first three elections, the Jana Sangh won assembly seats in eleven districts of the state, all but one in the eastern districts.
37. We are referring here only to those districts included within the present state of Punjab. The party has received rural support in the Hindi-speaking districts of the southern part of Punjab, which are now included in Haryana.
38. The Jana Sangh’s opposition to Maha Delhi (greater Delhi) was linked to its opposition to the division of Punjab. The Congress unit in Delhi, until 1967, had consistently advocated the creation of an expanded Delhi state that would include the Hindi-speaking districts of southern Punjab. The Jana Sangh in Delhi vehemently opposed the idea. An expanded Delhi might lead to a dilution of its support in Delhi as well as in Punjab.
39. See discussion in Baldev Raj Nayar, ‘Punjab’, in Weiner, State Politics, pp. 449–56.
40. Ambala Tribune (Ambala), 3 November 1960 reported Golwalkar’s comments.
41. Ibid., 20 October 1960.
42. Times of India (Delhi), 9 November 1961.
43. Balraj Madhok won a seat in the New Delhi constituency in a 1961 bye-election. This seat was lost the following year in the 1962 general elections.
44. For a discussion of that factional conflict, see Mahender Kumar Saini and Walter Andersen, ‘The Congress Split in Delhi: The Effect of Factionalism on Organizational Performance and System-Level Interactions’, Asian Survey 9 (November 1971): 1084–110.
45. Puri, Balraj. ‘Jammu and Kashmir’. State Politics in India, ed. Myron Weiner, pp. 224–38. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
46. The Parishad’s percentage of the total vote in the two elections was a respectable 28.44 per cent in 1957 and 24.45 per cent in 1962.
47. The Jana Sangh general secretary reported that party membership in Maharashtra had fallen off considerably between 1957 and 1960, declining from 45,000 to 10,000. Reported in Organiser, 1 February 1960.
48. RSS leaders opposed the creation of linguistic states, arguing that unilingual states were likely to create separatist sentiment. Despite this, the Jana Sangh organization in Maharashtra and Gujarat joined electoral alliances whose major objective was the division of Bombay state on a linguistic basis.
49. For a discussion of her Congress party critics, see Zareer Masani, Indira Gandhi: A Biography (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1964), pp. 154–76.
50. For a critical account of the RSS participation, see D. R. Goyal, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (New Delhi: Radhakrishna Prakashan, 1979), p. 106.
51. Senior party leaders had met in the late 1950s to consider an ideological statement, but the party remained without one until Deendayal Upadhyaya formulated his views on Integral Humanism.
52. Upadhyaya,Deendayal,IntegralHumanism(Bombay: Bharatiya Jana Sangh, n.d.).
53. Quoted in Walter K. Andersen, ‘Political Philosophy of Deendayal Upadhyaya’, in Raje Sudhakar, ed., Destination (Delhi: Deendayal Research Institute, 1978), p. 47.
54. These resolutions printed in Bharatiya Jana Sangh: Resolutions passed by the Bharatiya Karya Samiti at the Twelfth Session, a Jana Sangh pamphlet.
55. Resolution passed at 15 January 1966 Kanpur session of the working committee.
56. Resolution passed at 30 April, 1 May 1966 working committee session at Jalandhar.
57. Resolution passed at 12–13 July 1966 working committee meeting at Lucknow.
58. Deendayal Upadhyaya, who remained general secretary, was still the dominant figure in the central executive. Madhok was a logical choice as president because he had a reputation as a dynamic articulate politician. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a skilful parliamentarian and orator, remained leader of the Jana Sangh parliamentary group.
59. Organiser, 8 May 1966.
60. The analysis of the Jana Sangh’s urban vote is taken from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s Fourth General Elections: An Analysis (Faridabad: Thompson Press, 1967), p. 251.
61. Yogesh Puri, ‘An Analysis of Jammu and Kashmir Elections’, Indian Political Science Review 1 (April–September 1967), pp. 239–50.
62. See Baxter’s analysis of the urban vote, Jana Sangh, pp. 288–89.
63. Four of the winning parliamentary candidates were, in fact, members of the Scindia Rajmata’s group and did not formally register themselves as Jana Sangh members in parliament.
64. Fourth General Elections, p. 179.
65. Interview with Golwalkar on 26 February 1969 at Delhi.
66. Hindustan Times (Delhi), 23 April 1967.
67. Organiser, 9 April 1967.
68. Ibid., 21 September 1967.
69. Many Jana Sangh critics interpreted the party’s shift as more a rhetorical than a real commitment to a radical change in policies. However, the pressure of the party’s delegates on the leadership to change the party’s policies do indicate real popular support from the cadre for its new policies and tactics.
70. Upadhyaya, during his fourteen years as general secretary, had remained in the background, devoting his efforts to building the organizational structure of the party. He began to prepare for his new and more public role by running unsuccessfully for the Jaunpur parliamentary seat (in Uttar Pradesh) in 1964.
71. The working committee at its 7–8 September 1969 meeting at Indore supported the strike. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh helped organize that strike.
72. See reports of the conflict in Hindustan Times (Delhi), 21 and 26 September 1968
73. Indian Express (Delhi), 10 September 1969.
74. Statesman (Delhi), 3 September 1969.
75. Ibid.
76. Reported in Northern India Patrika (Allahabad), 1 March 1967.
77. Reported in Statesman (Delhi), 30 January 1967.
78. Statesman (Delhi), 2 September 1969.
79. A summary of the talks in Hindustan Times (Delhi), 30 May 1969.
80. Reported in Times of India (Delhi), 17 September 1969.
81. Ibid., a good summary of events leading up to agreement, 26 January 1971.
82. In recognition of the importance of the Scindia family’s influence in Madhya Pradesh, the Jana Sangh included Madhavrao Scindia on its working committee in 1971. His mother, Vijaya Raje Scindia, the politically astute head of the family, formally joined the Jana Sangh in October 1972. Madhavrao and his mother have fallen out politically. Madhavrao left the Jana Sangh during the 1975–77 Emergency; he joined Mrs Gandhi’s Congress party. His mother remained a senior figure in the Jana Sangh and now in the BJP, serving as vice president from 1980 to 1986.
83. Results reported in Organiser, 7 November 1970.
84. One month after the general elections, Delhi had municipal corporation elections. The Congress in Delhi was deeply divided and the Jana Sangh retained control of the corporation with an even larger majority than in 1967.
85. Reports of the criticism in Organiser, 17 July 1971 and Hindustan Times (Delhi), 4 July 1971.
86. Reported in Jana Deep Souvenir, ed. by J. P. Mathur (Delhi: Rakesh Press, 1971), p. 3. Vajpayee did not need much convincing because he already believed that the party should portray itself as a representative of the ‘common man.’
87. For a study of the political influence of Rajasthan’s princely order, see Kusum Bhargava, ‘Rajasthan Politics and Princely Rulers: An Analysis of Electoral Processes’, Indian Journal of Political Science 33 (October–December 1972), pp. 413–20.
88. Organiser printed a surprisingly frank report, indicating the depth of feeling among the cadre. Organiser, 12 May 1972.
89. The Rajya Sabha is India’s Upper House of parliament, somewhat analogous to the British House of Lords.
90. The party had already moved to implement this decision in 1971 by selecting Sheikh Abdul Rahman to its working committee, the first Muslim to be chosen to it. Sheikh Rahman was the most prominent party activist from the Muslim community in Jammu and Kashmir. He bolted the party in 1974 to join the Bharatiya Kranti Dal.
91. Quoted from a party pamphlet reportin
g his speech to the Bhagalpur annual session held during 5–7 May 1972.
92. Advani served as secretary of the Rajasthan Jana Sangh, 1952–57; secretary of the Delhi Pradesh Jana Sangh, 1958–62; vice-president of the Delhi state unit, 1965–67; assistant editor of Organiser, 1960–67. Before joining the party, he served as an RSS pracharak; among other offices, he was a secretary of the RSS unit in Karchi and an organizing secretary in Rajasthan. Vajpayee continued to serve as leader of the parliamentary wing of the party. Party informants suggest that Vajpayee himself wanted to reduce the scope of his duties, preferring to concentrate on legislative activities.
93. The party’s 1967 election manifesto also stated that Rs 2000 per month was the maximum expendable income, but it did not specify if this was family or individual income.
94. Parts of that speech printed in Organiser, 17 February 1973.
95. Reported ibid., 23 April 1973.
96. The first significant example of agitation employed by the Jana Sangh was its participation in Jaya Prakash Narayan’s anti- corruption drive in Bihar. Both the Jana Sangh and the RSS supplied cadre to this movement, which emerged in early 1974 from a student-led protest against inadequate university facilities and quickly escalated into a major confrontation with the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
97. Madhok, in proposing such changes, misread the mood of the grass-roots cadre. Events were to show that they did not favour his conservative approach.
98. Reported in Indian Express (Delhi), 14 March 1973.
99. Reported ibid., 30 March 1973.
100. Vajpayee took his MA in political science from the D. A. V. College in Kanpur where he was actively involved in the communist-affiliated Students’ Federation. He later joined the RSS as a pracharak. Vajpayee was assigned to serve as private secretary to Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and was involved in the party’s organizational work until his election to parliament in 1957. Biographical material from a Jana Sangh pamphlet brought out on the occasion of the fifteenth annual Jana Sangh session at Bombay in April 1969.
101. After leaving the Jana Sangh, Madhok established the Lok Tantrik Jana Sangh, which merged with the Bharatiya Lok Dal in 1974. Refused a ticket by the Janata alliance in the 1977 election, he established his own Jana Sangh party.
102. The RSS also loaned workers to Narayan’s movement in Bihar.
103. Vajpayee and other Jana Sangh national leaders advocated closer cooperation among the opposition parties for the sixth general elections scheduled for early 1976. They proposed that the parties jointly run candidates under a common electoral symbol.
104. The Jana Sangh won 18 of the 40 seats assigned to it by the Lok Sangharsh Samiti, though it received about the same percentage of the vote as in the 1972 elections (approximately 9 per cent).
105. This data was collected during 1968–1971 by Walter Andersen and included in his unpublished doctoral dissertation submitted in 1975 to the University of Chicago, ‘The Jana Sangh: Ideology and Organization in Party Behavior’. In one of the three parliamentary constituencies included in this study, the zilla level was above the nagar in the party hierarchy, and we have taken this into account in preparing the tables.
106. Amitai Etzioni, for example, notes that strong personal bonds between leaders and followers is likely to generate congruency between the views of followers and leaders, resulting in stronger group cohesiveness. See his Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations, pp. 187–89. In a study of small groups in the military, Shils and Janowitz discovered that commitment to Nazi ideology was higher in those units where officers with Nazi beliefs developed strong personal relations with the enlisted men, regardless of group cohesiveness among the enlisted men themselves. E. A. Shils and M. Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II’, Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948), pp. 280–315. Similar conclusions on group cohesion and loyalty were found in studies of American soldiers. See Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 414–20; Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 324–61.
107. Even when an individual swayamsevak has no great conviction about RSS goals, loyalty to the RSS organization is likely to remain strong if the small subunits of the shakha are able to stimulate group loyalty among the participants. The influence of small groups on larger group loyalties is discussed in Morton Grodzins, The Loyal and the Disloyal: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Treason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 43–47.
108. The Jana Sangh had annual party elections for organizational positions.
109. Etzioni, Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations, p. 182.
110. The Jana Sangh favoured a system of proportional representation as one means of overcoming its mobilization problems. Because it had difficulty in accumulating enough support in a single constituency to win elections, the party’s percentage of seats at both the state and Central level was consistently lower than its percentage of vote.
111. See his discussion of this proposition in Myron Weiner, The Politics of Scarcity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 26–30.
Chapter 6: The Triumph of Activism
1. As the generation of swayamsevaks trained during the period of Hedgewar passes from the scene, the ranks of the traditional element within the RSS are being depleted. The younger generation tends to be on the activist side.
2. Deoras’ address mentioned in an 8 January 1979 interview with Guru Vaid Dutt, former member of Jana Sangh national executive, reported in Geeta Puri, Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Organization, and Ideology, Delhi: A Case Study (New Delhi: Sterling, 1980), pp. 46–47.
3. Organiser, 9 April 1967.
4. Madhok was not opposed to alliances per se, but to alliances with parties of the left. Regarding alliances, the united fronts both at the state and national levels between 1967 and 1971 convinced many Jana Sangh workers that alliances could not be sustained unless the participants first agreed on a common ideological framework. For example, see article on the subject by J. P. Mathur, the all-India secretary of the Jana Sangh, in Organiser, 20 October 1973. The question of alliances has remained a controversial one in the Jana Sangh and remains so in its successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party. Many Jana Sangh workers doubted that an alliance strategy could ever work because other politicians did not share the political culture of the Jana Sangh. The Jana Sangh cadre thought of themselves as members of a community, and they were so largely because of their common RSS background. On the other hand, the party is not large enough in most places to assume power on its own and can aspire to a governing position only if it works with other parties.
5. See Why Emergency? (New Delhi: Government of India, 1975).
6. From an editorial in Organiser, 21 September 1974, commenting on a Jana Sangh study camp.
7. Organiser, 7 December 1974.
8. See a discussion sympathetic to the RSS’ reaction to Narayan’s Total Revolution in Dina Nath Mishra, R.S.S.: Myth and Reality (Ghaziabad: Vikas Publishing House, 1980), p. 43.
9. Organiser, 15 March 1975.
10. Organiser, 24 May 1975.
11. For a comprehensive chronology of the events leading up to the Emergency of 26 June 1975, see Why Emergency?, Ch. 10.
12. Madhavrao Mule, the general secretary of the RSS, became acting head of the RSS following the arrest of Deoras. This follows the precedent of the 1948–49 ban when Prabhakar Balwant Dani, the RSS general secretary, became acting chief in the wake of Golwalkar’s arrest.
13. However, none of the RSS-affiliates was banned.
14. Most of the information regarding the reaction of the RSS to the ban is taken from an interview with Rajendra Singh, general secretary of the RSS, on 16 July 1982 at Chicago, Illinois.
15. Ranade was given a similar responsibility during the first ban in 1948–49.
16. Statement of then gen
eral secretary, Madhavrao Mule, reported in Organiser, 4 June 1977. See a description of the RSS activities in The Economist (London), 4 December 1976, pp. 67–68.
17. Quoted in Organiser, 28 May 1977.
18. Ibid. The RSS claims that over 100,000 of its members participated in the satyagraha. The ‘family’ of organizations was expected to contribute participants to the satyagraha as well. For example, the Vidyarthi Parishad contributed 12,000 and the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh some 10,000. Interview with Yeshwantrao Kelkar, former president of the Vidyarthi Parishad, on 14 July 1983 at Bombay. Dina Nath Mishra points out that many swayamsevaks argued that only violent methods would convince the government to change its policies, but that no national RSS leaders supported such a move and that the satyagraha was a visible sign of their commitment to non-violence. Mishra, R.S.S.: Myth and Reality, p. 46.
19. Organiser, 28 May 1977.
20. The talks broke down, according to Moghe, when the government failed to agree to such RSS conditions as the full release of all RSS prisoners and the return of all RSS property. Organiser, 8 August 1977. When news of such talks became known, critics of the RSS inside the Janata Party charged that the RSS was more concerned with protecting itself than with assisting the underground effort. To buttress the argument, they pointed out that Deoras himself had written two letters in November 1975 to Prime Minister Gandhi, requesting a removal of the ban on the RSS. Deoras admits to writing the letters, but he argues that they were intended only to open a dialogue. Organiser, 25 March 1979. Dina Nath Mishra claims that the letters ‘were written with the specific purpose of replying to the criticism of the Sangh by the government . . .’ Mishra, R.S.S.: Myth and Reality, p. 50
21. In 1971 the Jana Sangh campaigning alone won 22 seats, and in the 1967 national elections it won 35 seats. The Janata Party partners in 1977 were the Congress (0), the Socialist Party, the Bharatiya Lok Dal, and the Jana Sangh. The four merged on 1 May 1977. A fifth group, Jagjivan Ram’s Congress for Democracy, which worked closely with the alliance during the 1977 campaign, merged with the Janata Party on 5 May 1977.
The Brotherhood in Saffron Page 30