On July 2, 1956, three years after the death of Jan Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Sangh chief Guru Golwalkar wrote an article in Panchjanya. In this, perhaps for the first time in a public forum, he wrote about his meeting with Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in 1951 regarding forming a political party (Bharatiya Jana Sangh). Jan Sangh was being promoted as a political organization of the Sangh, in this article Guru Golwalkar tried to answer the questions that people were asking as to what was discussed between Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and Guru Golwalkar for the establishment of Jan Sangh.
According to this article by Guru Golwalkar, when Shyama Prasad Mukherjee asked for Sangh volunteers for his organization Jan Sangh, he told Mukherjee that the Sangh cannot be dragged into politics. The Sangh cannot be controlled by any political party because no organization can achieve national revival by becoming an instrument of any political party. Therefore it is impossible to use the Sangh as a tool. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee accepted this. He also had experience of this reality himself. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee also said that no political party can remain under the control of any other organization. According to Sangh chief Golwalkar, in this way a harmony was reached between the two regarding the mutual relations of the Sangh with this proposed political party.
Now the second problem was what should be the objective of this political party? The goal and methodology of the Sangh were already clear. Therefore, it was also clear that if the new party expects cooperation from the Sangh volunteers, then its ideals should be like those of the Sangh. Dr. Mukherjee also accepted this factual basis. In such a situation, another question was raised that the youth and senior volunteers of the Sangh are working in many organizations, some of which are public organizations. While some are limited to specific areas. Some new organizations may also emerge in the future. If the question of relations between new and old organizations arises with the Sangh, Guru Golwalkar’s answer serves as a guideline.
The Sangh chief said that wherever the Sangh sent a worker, he remained steadfast and brought a new change in that area, the Sangh volunteers have behaved in the same way in the past and continue to do so even today. Whatever work a Sangh volunteer does, he tries to bring those workers, its policies and objectives in line with the ideology of the Sangh and dedicates himself to making it stand at the grassroots level.
It was not that efforts to bring the Sangh into politics had not been made before, during Dr. Hedgewar’s time, seeing the increasing power of the Sangh, his colleagues in different parties had been making such efforts continuously, but Dr. Hedgewar, despite being a veteran Hindu Mahasabha like Malaviya ji, Dr. Munje, Savarkar brothers, Bhai Parmanand and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, did not understand the need for any other organization which would adopt the political path to oppose the policies of Muslim appeasement. Once Shyama Prasad Mukherjee himself had suggested him to form an organization like Hindu Defense League, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose wanted to meet him to form an organization like Azad Hind Fauj, but the meeting could not take place. Savarkar, through his associates, had got Dr. Hedgewar’s name associated with the Hindu security group Shri Ram Sena formed under the banner of Hindu Mahasabha without his consent. But Dr. Hedgewar was not a supporter of tampering with the original form of the Sangh until it reached adulthood and expanded throughout the country.
Why did Guru Golwalkar agree to Jan Sangh?
Even Guru Golwalkar was not agreeable, that is why when Shyama Prasad Mukherjee met him in 1943 with the suggestion of a political organization, Guruji repeated to him Dr. Hedgewar’s statement that one should stay away from everyday politics. At that time, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee did not seem to agree with him because he had seen with his own eyes the atrocities being committed on Hindus under the Muslim League government in Bengal. In such a situation, when the Sangh was banned over Gandhi’s assassination, Guru Golwalkar along with thousands of Sangh workers were also put in jail. The Nehru government tried to end the Sangh by banning its activities by stopping its activities for 1.5 years without any evidence. Due to this, pressure started building up within the Sangh that in order to respond to the political enemies, there should have been an organization friendly to the Sangh with its ideas. Anyway, after the death of a well-wisher like Patel, Pandit Nehru had complete control over the government as well as the Congress organization.
Mukherjee resigns first from Hindu Mahasabha, then from Nehru government
Here, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee had become a non-Congress minister in Nehru’s interim government in 1947. After Gandhi’s assassination, the way Savarkar’s brother was mob lynched and then the anger of the Hindu Mahasabha also came to the fore. Due to this, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee felt that Hindu Mahasabha should either behave like a political party, or leave politics and become a completely religious-cultural organization. The leaders of the Mahasabha did not agree with him, Mukherjee resigned at the Madurai session in December 1948. After that, he stayed in the government and started working on the problems of refugees and Kashmir problem after partition. Since he was a resident of Bengal, he understood the plight of the minority Hindus of East Bengal, which had then become Pakistan. Even after being in the government, he could not stop some provisions of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact. In this agreement, the minorities were completely left at the mercy of the government of that country, it was said that that government would take care of them. Also, the visa system was implemented in place of the free pass that the refugees were getting at that time to come to their country of origin.
Every story of this special series related to hundred years of RSS
As soon as the Nehru-Liaquat Pact was announced on 8 April 1950, on the same day Syama Prasad Mukherjee resigned from the Nehru cabinet. Now he neither had a government nor a party.
In those days the debates in the Constituent Assembly were going on. The Constitution of the country was formed and came into force on 26 January 1950. In such a situation, for some months the government was busy in implementing all those provisions and in the problem of refugees etc. After the implementation of the Constitution, the first general elections in the country were to be held in 1951-52. It is from here that the idea comes to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee’s mind that an organization should be formed which would become the voice of Hindus in place of Hindu Mahasabha. In such a situation, he again thought of the Sangh because he had been a fan of the people of the Sangh for years due to their character and service work. Then he met Guru Golwalkar, Bala Saheb Deoras, Bhausaheb Deoras etc. They probably met at the house of Nagpur Sanghchalak Babasaheb Ghate in April 1951 and the discussion that took place between them in that meeting was narrated by Guru Golwalkar himself in his 1956 article. In this way, Bharatiya Jana Sangh had come into existence from 21 October 1951.
Those five diamonds of Guruji, two of which became Bharat Ratna.
When Bharatiya Jan Sangh was established, Guruji assigned five serious and senior preachers to him in the first batch of volunteers. No one had thought at that time that these five diamonds of the Sangh would be so famous in the future. One of them, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, became the Prime Minister of the country thrice. Two got Bharat Ratna, that is, along with Atal ji, Nana ji Deshmukh also got it. Nanaji Deshmukh, born in Parbhani district of Maharashtra (then Hyderabad state), is today also known as the founder of Vidya Bharati and Chitrakoot Gramodaya University. The third was Sunder Singh Bhandari. He was a resident of Udaipur, later became the Governor of Bihar and Gujarat. Also elected to Rajya Sabha.
The fourth name is of that person, with whom both Jan Sangh and Sangh later broke ties. This was Balraj Madhok. Madhok, a resident of Jammu, once ran his own party, Jammu Praja Parishad. He started the Delhi and Punjab units of Jan Sangh and was the President of Jan Sangh. Got maximum 35 seats in 1967 elections. Became MP from Delhi, but later due to some objections he was removed from Jan Sangh. The fifth name is of the person who is given more credit than Shyama Prasad Mukherjee for setting up the Jan Sangh. Today BJP also puts his picture with Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. He was Deendayal Upadhyay, who became the first General Secretary of Jan Sangh. Deen Dayal, the father of ‘Integral Humanism’, started magazines like Rashtradharma, Panchjanya and Swadesh for the Sangh. The mystery of his dead body found on the railway tracks near Mughal Sarai in 1968 remains unsolved till date.
These were the first three MPs of Jan Sangh
When the results of the first general elections came, Bharatiya Jana Sangh got a total of three seats. Hindu Mahasabha also got four seats but in terms of voting percentage, Jan Sangh was at fifth position in the country and almost 4 times that of Hindu Mahasabha. Mahasabha got a total of 0.95% votes, while Bharatiya Jana Sangh got 3.06%. However, Bharatiya Jana Sangh was able to field candidates only on 49 seats. Of the three seats won, two were in West Bengal and one in Rajasthan. Among these three MPs, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee himself won from Calcutta seat, Durga Charan Banerjee won from Bankura and Umashankar Trivedi won from Chittorgarh in Rajasthan.
At the time of elections, Guru Golwalkar went to Shivaji’s fort.
Ranga Hari gives an interesting information in the biography of Guru Golwalkar, according to him, in December 1951 itself, Guru Golwalkar and prominent officials of the Sangh like Bhaiyaji Dani and Bala Saheb Deoras etc. had gone to the famous Sinhagad Fort of Shivaji Empire. At that time the country was in the war of election campaign. There is also the historic bungalow of Lokmanya Tilak in the periphery of Sinhagad Fort near Pune, in which he and Gandhiji had a discussion in 1915. Everyone stayed in that bungalow from 25 December to 18 January 1952. He also celebrated the Makar Sankranti festival of the Sangh in the same fort that year with the descendants of Maval soldiers. He stayed with the same soldiers for four days.
Back story: When RSS celebrated the birthday of its Sarsanghchalak for the first time, the festival lasted for 83 days.
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