How Nagpur and the RSS shaped the birth of the Jana Sangh, forerunner of the BJP

The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was founded in Delhi on October 21, 1951. Dr Syama Prasad Mukherjee announced the new political party in a small hall of the Raghumal Arya Kanya Vidyalaya in Delhi. Although the documents were being prepared in Delhi, the ideological and organisational energy behind the organisation had its power house in Nagpur, Maharashtra, hundreds of kilometres away. Looking at the party's journey on its foundation day, the story seems incomplete without Maharashtra and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The same story also lies at the foundation of the rise of today's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

After resigning from Jawaharlal Nehru's Cabinet in 1951, Dr Mukherjee was looking for a political alternative that could give a strong voice to cultural nationalism against the Congress's policies of appeasement. He had stature and vision, but not an organisation spread across the country.

It was at this point that the Maharashtra connection emerged. Mukherjee met M S Golwalkar (Guruji), then the RSS sarsanghchalak, in Nagpur. Guruji backed his idea of nationalism and sent some of the Sangh's ablest and most energetic pracharaks to work in politics. They included Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, who was later called the guide of the Jana Sangh and the originator of Integral Humanism. Nanaji Deshmukh, born in Maharashtra's Hingoli district, was given the responsibility of establishing the Jana Sangh in Uttar Pradesh and rural parts of the country, which he discharged well. The third name was Bhaurao Deoras, who worked behind the scenes to build the new party's organisational backbone.

After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the then Union Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Syama Prasad Mukherjee on May 6, 1948, holding the RSS responsible for the killing. Golwalkar is said to have remarked at the time that this one incident had set the RSS back by 50 years.

It is said that Golwalkar was initially opposed to the idea of the Jana Sangh, but Babasaheb Ghatate persuaded him again. The early meetings on the founding were held at Ghatate's house in Nagpur, where Mukherjee met RSS leaders. Even so, the Jana Sangh's growth remained limited until 1967.

In 1967, Nanaji Deshmukh, the Jana Sangh's organising secretary, said in an interview that he had found the reason why the Jana Sangh was not getting public support. According to him, people believed that the RSS and the Jana Sangh were Gandhi's killers, and that the country would never support Gandhi's killers. Nanaji later said that this was why he tried every kind of approach and moved closer to Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan. According to him, only after these two accepted them did the rest of the country begin to accept them.

In the 1950s, after its founding, the Jana Sangh faced its first big challenge of establishing an identity in Maharashtra itself. The Samyukta Maharashtra movement was under way at the time, and Marathi-speaking people were on the streets demanding a separate state. The Jana Sangh gave the movement strong support. Early leaders such as Jagannathrao Joshi and Uttamrao Patil travelled across the state and strengthened the party's ideological base.

When the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency on the country in 1975, Jana Sangh leaders went to jail. To restore democracy, the Jana Sangh dissolved itself in 1977 and merged into the Janata Party. But the experiment did not last long. A dispute arose within the party over "dual membership", that is, being a member of both the RSS and the Janata Party.

After this dispute, former Jana Sangh leaders decided to regroup in Delhi. On April 6, 1980, senior leaders such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Madan Lal Khurana founded the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Feroz Shah Kotla ground in Delhi. Vajpayee became the party's first national president. At the first session, held at Shivaji Park in Mumbai, he said, "The darkness will lift, the sun will rise, the lotus will bloom."