Entrenched in Indian Ethos

We shall briefly interrupt our many-sided exploration of a unique movement of thought, culture and social transformation that the RSS is on the occasion of another momentous historical milestone that we ought to recall and commemorate. One cannot de-link the RSS from this watershed event because, like a number of fields of activities which have been shaped or given direction by the individuals or group of individuals inspired/driven by the RSS, this historic occasion too was the result of the exertions of an RSS pracharak who had taken a lifelong vow to see India recover her deeper cultural and civilisational self. It was in 1965 that Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya enunciated his political philosophy of “Integral Humanism” in a series of four lectures that he delivered in Mumbai between April 22 and 25. 2025 heralds its 60th anniversary.

It will be useful to have a look at Deendayal Upadhyaya’s organizational association and of his ideological and philosophical orientation and shaping. His first contact with the RSS was made in Kanpur sometime in 1937 when Upadhyaya came for his Bachelors study. We are told that it was in Kanpur that he first met Doctorji. In a sense it was here that his public life began. While studying in Kanpur and Prayag, Upadhyaya joined the Sangh Shiksha Varg of 40 days, during the summer break and completed his first years’ training in 1939 and the second in 1942. His initiation thus, into the Sangh, was made in the presence of two of its most defining shapers and icons - Doctorji in 1939 and Sri Guruji Golwalkar in 1942.

Kanpur was significant in Deendayal’s life. He was initiated into the RSS in Kanpur, and years later, he was appointed national general secretary of the newly formed Bharatiya Jana Sangh in its first national convention held in the city in December 1952 under the presidentship of its founder president Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee. Upadhyaya, Dr Mookerjee’s leading understudy, would occupy this crucial organizational post for the next 15 years till 1967, when he was elected the 10th national president of the Jana Sangh. Dr Mookerjee is said to have once famously remarked, that if he had two Deendayals he would have altered the course and schema of Indian politics.

After his studies and on the completion of his second year of the Sangh Shiksha Varg, Deendayal pledged to become a pracharak. Interestingly, from 1942 till 1967, Upadhyaya is said to have attended the Sangh Shiksha Varg every year. His addresses in these Vargs are unarguably the richest expositions of his cultural and philosophical thoughts that await exploration.

As a political activist, Deendayal Upadhyaya was perhaps the best articulator of the Sangh’s philosophy and worldview, and admirably described its deeper raison d’être. He embodied the core attributes of the Sangh, and exuded its essence, which was intrinsic to his persona and actions. His writings and talks are replete with assessments of the Sangh and expositions of its essence and of its purpose.

For instance, speaking at the RSS’s Bauddhik Varg on the occasion of Vijayadashami in October 1952, Upadhyaya spoke of the need to revive and to preserve the instinct to win, which he saw as essential to our national life. As long as this instinct was alive in Indian life, argued Upadhyaya, “our nation strode the path of progress. We reached and permeated all corners of the world. Our civilisation reached the lands of Siam, China, Malaya. Ramlila is celebrated even today in many parts of Southeast Asia. Our forefathers crossed deep and seemingly bottomless oceans; boundaries failed to hold them back. Our merchants and entrepreneurs carried our victorious flag. We crossed the near impassable Himalayas to reach Central Asia and as far as Japan…”

This spirit and instinct had depleted, it needed to be rekindled, “there is no shortcut to inculcating this spirit and developing it. Power is indestructible in its original form. Just as electricity can energise a powerhouse, so too can the collective energy of individuals of a nation lead it to progress and advancement. It is on this basis that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been established.”

For Upadhyaya, national regeneration meant the capacity and ability to “transcend boundaries and venture into unknown territory to achieve victory and increase the frontiers of our knowledge.” The RSS was established to “revive this very spirit of transcending boundaries.” Power, Upadhyaya argued, “arises out of its cultivation and sustained, positive pursuit,” and this was “part of our culture and tradition” but the milieu had become one of “laziness and inaction.” Upadhyaya saw no shortcut “through this miasma of all-round decadence; only penance and effort” would help attain the objective of rekindling that instinct. “The founder of our Sangh wished to see the attainment of this objective in his lifetime…”

Deendayal Upadhyaya’s persona was uniquely multidimensional. A polymath and polyglot, with an encyclopedic reading, an iconic thinker who spoke and wrote prolifically, an organiser who built from the foundational depths, one of the most formidable political organisations of free India, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The leaders that Deendayal nurtured and mentored went on to keep that political movement alive, eventually making it the mainstream.

Upadhyaya’s writings can be categorized in three segments: the immediate political and polemical responses, the suggestive and prescriptive dimension and the far-seeing and perennial aspect. Through the third segment he engaged deeply with India’s civilisational and cultural dimensions and foundations.

The Ramnarain Ruia College, on the premises of which Deendayal Upadhyaya delivered these historic lectures in Mumbai, was founded in 1937 and still stands as the physical edifice which witnessed the formulation of the first political philosophy to be articulated in post independent India. Why do I say the first political philosophy to be articulated in post independent India?

The Congress of yore, like the Congress of today, had no binding political philosophy. It was driven by the sole objective of seeing India free and therefore welcomed in its rank activists and leaders of varied political hue and ideology. Even later, the Congress leadership came out with catchy political claptraps but no enduring philosophy. The communist and the socialist parties were driven by a political philosophy which was not indigenous to India and had not grown on a foundation of Indian thought or philosophical quest. It was Marxism, and later Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism, all foreign thought-imports, which had shaped the Indian communists’ politics and political direction.

When it was formed in 1951, Jana Sangh was the only national political party to be formed after independence and that too by an Indian, of Bengal vintage, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee. It was the only party to have a political philosophy that was formulated in free India. It had not imported its thoughts or its icons. “Freedom, after all, is the collective name of those elements that lead us to self-realisation”, Upadhyaya wrote in a treatise, as early as 1949. A leader, thinker and activist who was rooted in the foundational ethos of India, could alone express and articulate such a profound line in such simple terms. Upadhyaya was firmly entrenched in and was himself a product of that ethos.

The writer is a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC), BJP, and the Chairman of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation. Views expressed are personal