Some months before Sardar Patel’s death, the recently resigned cabinet minister Syama Prasad Mookerjee travelled 1000 kilometres from Delhi to Nagpur. There he visited a bare brick-and-stone colonial bungalow that had previously lodged V.D. Savarkar. 1 Waiting at the house was the bearded chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Free India’s first elections were a year away, and Mookerjee asked M.S. Golwalkar for help to start a new party. It would compete for the Hindu vote against the Mahasabha, the party Mookerjee had left after it had refused to admit non-Hindus in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination. Golwalkar refused. ‘I warned him that [the] sangh will not become tail of any political party.’2 ‘[Golwalkar’s] aloofness from politics often bordered on aversion,’ L.K. Advani remembers. 3 Mookerjee was not discouraged. He knew that after the lacerations from the 1948 ban, there were enough within the RSS who wanted to buy ‘political insurance’. So confident was Mookerjee that he met the Mahasabha president and told him ‘to wind up the Hindoo Mahasabha and join his new party which he was going to establish under his own leadership with the help of Mr. Golwalkar of the [RSS]’. 4 Four months later, and spurred by the death of Patel, Mookerjee called a meeting to plan the new party. He took care to ensure that leaders from the RSS were present. 5 A note to the draft Constitution suggested that ‘Guruji [i.e., Golwalkar] should be persuaded to lend support of the organisation.’6 It also explained why: ‘The RSS has a strong volunteer organisation and a growing press under its management. It has a body of workers of startling

merit.’7 What is notable about this analysis, written in 1951, is that it continues to explain why the Bharatiya Janata Party needs the RSS today. In order to escape the factionalism native to Hindu society, the RSS had given its head supreme, unhindered authority. But Golwalkar’s order to stay away from politics was being flouted by his own deputies. In any other Indian group, such a rudimentary divergence would have resulted in rupture. But Golwalkar decided to forgo self for unity. He decided to support Mookerjee in forming a new party. ‘I will give you five gold pieces,’ he promised Mookerjee. Soon after, a few RSS leaders were deputed to the new party. These included Deendayal Upadhyaya, Sunder Singh Bhandari, Nanaji Deshmukh, Bapusaheb Sohni and Balraj Madhok. Vajpayee and Advani were as yet too minor to have their worth weighed in gold. At a meeting of 400 delegates a few months later, on 21 October 1951, the ‘Bharatiya Jana Sangh’ or ‘Indian People’s Organization’ was founded. The ‘fundamentals’ of the party manifesto promised ‘One country’, ‘One nation’, ‘One culture’ and ‘Dharma Rajya Not Theocracy But Rule Of Law’. 8 The election symbol was an earthen lamp with a burning flame. 9 Party president Mookerjee fuelled the fire in his presidential speech, holding that ‘the partition of Bharat was a tragic folly’ and blaming Jawaharlal Nehru. He took care, though, to deny the charge of communalism. Diverging from the Hindu Mahasabha he had abandoned in 1948, Mookerjee promised that membership of the new party would be open to all religions. 10 Syama Prasad Mookerjee was deliberately made the face of the party, so that the light would not shine on an organization still recovering from a debilitating ban. But behind the scenes, the RSS took care to retain enough power. The all-powerful general secretary soon became an RSS man— someone reedy thin, with a thinner moustache, thick glasses and a flair for logistics. This was Deendayal Upadhyaya, born in 1916 near Lord Krishna’s birthplace of Mathura to parents who were poor, religious and Brahmin. Deendayal had been orphaned young, and had since lost several blood relatives. 11 Faced with such tragedy, he had found a lasting family in the RSS

Unlike Mookerjee, Deendayal was uncomfortable with English, and unlike Vajpayee, he was uncomfortable with the limelight. And though he was a prolific writer, 12 he was not, as we shall see, an original one. What made Deendayal potent were not words or wisdom, but the discernment to spot and steer talent. It made him the ideal power behind the Jana Sangh throne. This dual power structure of the party at the national level—where Mookerjee was the narrator and the RSS’s Deendayal the scriptwriter—was mimicked at the regional level. A ‘general secretary’ was the formal head in the state. Technically below him, but in practice the holder of actual power, was the ‘sanghatan mantri’ or organization secretary. 13 This latter post was always held by an RSS man. For instance, L.K. Advani, the pracharak for Rajasthan, was given ‘organisational responsibility for the party in the state’. 14 The other feature of the new party was a restrained role for religion. Though pictures of gods were displayed on stage during the October inaugural, 15 the Jana Sangh preferred its Hinduism to be a silhouette identity rather than overt belief. Mookerjee ensured that the word ‘Hindu’ did not appear in the party name. These founding decisions caused ruptures, between Jana Sangh and RSS workers, between believers and atheists. Besides, there persisted within the RSS a strand that believed that Nehru would ‘live to regret the failure of universal adult franchise in India’. 16 What stitched these slits back into one piece was an ethos of compromise, an ideology in itself. The RSS took care to avoid swaying policy, and Golwalkar decided to play down his piety in these early years. This devotion to organizational unity meant that there were two kinds of politicians the new party did not need: prima donnas and ideologues. One would split the party through temperament, the other through theorems. On the other hand, it was clear from the opening pair of Mookerjee and Deendayal itself that there were two sorts of politicians they would need: orators who could pacify parliament; organizers who carry along the cadre. Vajpayee and Advani—yet to meet, yet to mature—would not have known it then. But their party was anticipating their dispositions

Four days after the founding of the Jana Sangh in October 1951, voting began for the first free elections in Indian history. 17 These elections were based on the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. The whole country was divided into constituencies, with parties selecting candidates for each of them. The candidate who won the most votes in each constituency would become its member of parliament or MP. The party with the most MPs could select the prime minister and form the government. Approximately 176 million Indians were eligible to cast their ballots in 224,000 polling booths supervised by 56,000 officers, 280,000 helpers and 224,000 policemen. 18 The Congress had its own lubricated vote-gathering machine built by Vallabhbhai Patel. But the face of the party was without question Jawaharlal Nehru. And with the death of Patel in 1950, Nehru’s vision for an Independent India—whether state-driven industrialization or the particular paranoia of the majority religion taking over the state—had become common sense in the central hall of parliament. Taking on Nehru’s Congress was Syama Prasad Mookerjee. His campaign speeches were able to draw crowds with his attacks on Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan. But he was well aware that the Jana Sangh, from an ideology tainted by the murder of the Mahatma, had to operate within the ‘Nehruvian mainstream’. His party paid lip service to peasants, women and Scheduled Castes, 19 and did not oppose state intervention in the economy. 20 Its opposition to cow slaughter 21 as well as to the Hindu code bill 22 were subdued. Since the average voter in the 1950s operated within Nehru’s idea of India, it made sense for Mookerjee to do so too. Where Mookerjee made less sense was when he spoke Hindi, a prerequisite to canvass in the cow belt. The bhadralok politician was, in fact, disdainful of the attitude that ‘India, that is Bharat, that is Uttar Pradesh’. 23 But UP was the heart of the Jana Sangh vote bank, and Deendayal Upadhyaya decided that Mookerjee needed a competent Hindi translator to accompany him there. His eyes fell on a twenty-seven-year-old currently editing an RSS magazine.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee had already distinguished himself as a Hindi orator, a skill he had picked up from his teacher father. His way with words had led Deendayal to place them on the pages of Panchajanya. And so it was that during the campaign for the 1951–52 elections, Vajpayee chaperoned Mookerjee as his Hindi translator. 24 This is why Vajpayee travelled by train with Mookerjee to reach Kota in Rajasthan at the height of the campaign. The RSS was the backbone of the Jana Sangh campaign. And so it was entirely expected that the pracharak coordinating the election campaign in the state received them at the station. 25 There was chemistry right away. This was the first time that Lal Krishna Advani met Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the twenty-five-year-old was straightaway smitten. Nearly sixty years later, Advani could still recall his first impression of ‘a poet who had drifted into politics . . . Something was smoldering within him, and the fire in his belly produced an unmistakable glow on his face.’26 It is telling that while Advani has discussed this first meeting in his biography, there is no record of Vajpayee ever having remembered it. Advani was still dealing with the demons of partition in the expanses of Rajasthan. Vajpayee, on the other hand, was naturally more outgoing and had not suffered the trauma of loss. His speech skills had made him the voice of the face of the movement. Advani would remain a star-struck fan for the rest of his life. * * * Vajpayee and Advani’s campaigning had little effect on India’s first election. They were an expected victory for Nehru’s Congress, whose MPs formed an easy majority in parliament. The Jana Sangh won only three of the ninety-four seats it contested. But the 3.06 per cent vote share it won gave it the label of a national party. This vote share was higher than that of the Hindu Mahasabha or the Ram Rajya party, establishing the Jana Sangh as the primary party of political Hinduism.

Though Vajpayee’s Hindi translations had not translated into many seats, Mookerjee kept him on, tasking him with parliamentary work and stenography. 27 While Advani continued operating in Rajasthani villages, Vajpayee’s entry into Lutyens’ Delhi had begun. Contrary to the expectation that Mookerjee would now retreat to parliament, he expended his energy on the street. In June 1953, he made yet another journey to Kashmir to protest what he deemed the non-applicability of the Indian Constitution to the state. Accompanying Mookerjee was a small group that included the by-nowindispensable Atal Bihari Vajpayee. When they reached the state border at Pathankot, Mookerjee was arrested.28 He probably thought that the arrest would be brief, and sent Vajpayee back to Delhi to continue the agitation. 29 Mookerjee was moved to a house on the outskirts of Srinagar. It was in this ‘house arrest’ that Mookerjee complained of feeling uneasy. He was admitted to a government hospital on 22 June. Mookerjee sent a telegram to his brother saying that there was nothing to worry about; ‘satisfactory arrangements had been made for his treatment’. 30 Had Mookerjee’s self-diagnosis been accurate, the fifty-one-year-old would have recovered and returned to parliament. Vajpayee would have likely remained his subordinate, with no opening presenting itself for at least a decade. Advani, on the other hand, could well have continued in Rajasthan, inching his way up the ranks. They may have continued to live parallel lives, and their ephemeral meeting in 1951 may have remained just that. All that changed on 23 June 1953, when Mookerjee’s weak heart stopped beating. * * * When Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s eighty-two-year-old mother heard of her son’s death, she fainted.31 The rest of his party reacted likewise. The death provided Hindu nationalism with yet another conspiracy to blame on Nehru. It also provided Vajpayee with the unexpected chance to succeed Mookerjee as the party’s voice in parliament

This opportunity first came a year later, in 1954, after Nehru’s sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit resigned as member of parliament from Lucknow in order to become India’s representative to the United Nations. Deendayal decided that the twenty-nine-year-old Vajpayee would contest on behalf of the Jana Sangh. It was a favour Vajpayee never forgot. The journalist and BJP politician Swapan Dasgupta says: ‘Atalji’s desk always had a photo of Deendayalji. I was very struck by that. Because Atalji would not normally do this kind of thing.’32 This first election of Vajpayee’s was a fiasco. Not only did he lose, he placed third.33 When Vajpayee heard the results, however, he chose to grieve by cycling to a nearby theatre to watch a film with his friend.34 Deendayal was as unfazed. Vajpayee had spoken hypnotically in that failed campaign, and Deendayal decided to redeploy his words throughout the Hindi heartland. Old-timers recall how, in these years, Vajpayee made a name for himself as a speaking replacement for Mookerjee. 35 And when the next general elections were scheduled for 1957, Vajpayee was given three Lok Sabha tickets to contest from: Balrampur, Lucknow and Mathura. 36 Though he lost from the latter two, he won Balrampur, formerly a princely state ruled during British times by a Hindu king. 37 It was a constituency where the landlords were Muslim, the peasants Hindu. 38 The man who would eventually cultivate a secular persona owed his first election victory to these realities of religion. Vajpayee entered the Lok Sabha aged thirty-three. 39 Though three other Jana Sangh candidates had won, it was Vajpayee whom Deendayal made leader of the party in the Lok Sabha. It was a position that Vajpayee would most identity with for the next fifty-two years. He did not care who ran the party; he only cared that he spoke for it in parliament. In his brief time in the Jana Sangh, Syama Prasad Mookerjee had demonstrated the value of parliamentary erudition. But Mookerjee had also revealed the merit of another trait: he was a westernized English speaker who could parlay with the media, with foreign diplomats, with those politicians who did not speak Hindi, and with Jawaharlal Nehru. An RSS man active during that period says: ‘There are two types of Indians. Those

who use Western toilets and those who use Indian toilets. We use Indian toilets. [But] we need some people who use Western toilets.’ If Vajpayee was an orator in Mookerjee’s mould, L.K. Advani was very much from the cosmopolitan world of Karachi. Deendayal had always noticed this about Advani, and so, soon after the 1957 elections, Advani was moved to Delhi. 40 His job was to help the new parliamentarian Atal Bihari Vajpayee navigate the English-speaking elite of Lutyens’ Delhi. This was their first sustained interaction, and one that set the terms for the next six decades of their relationship. Vajpayee was already a star, someone who had become the face of the movement at an unusually early age. The thirty-year-old Advani, on the other hand, was a political nobody. He had never given a public speech, and doubted he ever could. He was in awe of Vajpayee’s talent, and anxious about the lack of his own. He was the ideal foil, Watson to Sherlock Holmes. Advani first moved into Vajpayee’s whitewashed government bungalow on 30 Rajendra Prasad Road near parliament and began to spend time with the new MP. They were joined by a twenty-year-old N.M. Ghatate, who was from RSS blueblood. While lowly swayamsevaks emerged from a variety of backgrounds, the RSS leadership tended to come from a closely knit circle of lower-middleclass clans from the Nagpur region. Most of these families were not just Maharashtrian Brahmins, they were from the two specific sub-castes of Deshastha and Karhade. Ghatate’s father, a Deshastha Brahmin, had been an RSS and Hindu Mahasabha pioneer. His family was held in esteem by the sangh parivar, the constellation of organizations around the RSS. And so it was but natural that when Ghatate left Nagpur to study law in Delhi in 1957, he was asked to meet the brand-new Jana Sangh member of parliament. Vajpayee and Ghatate became immediate friends, at the very time Vajpayee and Advani were getting to know each other. It was a relationship that would last six decades; two of them politicians, one of them their lawyer, three of them friends. Advani eventually moved to a modest room near the BJP office by the Ram Lila ground,41 but continued to meet Vajpayee every day. ‘They were

softies at some level,’ a family friend says. ‘They understood this about each other.’ ‘From then on,’ a later associate of Vajpayee and Advani, Sudheendra Kulkarni, says: ‘I’ve heard from Namita [Vajpayee’s daughter] that they were so close that hardly a day would pass without them speaking to each other on the phone.’42 Their relationship bloomed, even as it remained lopsided. Vajpayee was the guru, Advani the devotee. And friends they might be, but there was a spoken hierarchy between them that would persist through their six decades of camaraderie. * * * With just four of them in parliament, Jana Sangh MPs were allotted seats at the back, from where it was hard to catch the Speaker’s eye. They were also entitled to minimal speaking time. Vajpayee bristled at these limitations; when once denied the chance to speak entirely, he told the Speaker: ‘I am walking out as a protest.’43 But in the few times that Vajpayee did get to speak, Advani remembers that he raised the profile of the Jana Sangh beyond its numbers. 44 The new member of parliament developed a reputation for repartee. In an early speech he gave, Vajpayee began by attacking the left: ‘Mr Speaker sir, the deputy leader of the communist party professor Hiren Mukherjee, for whom I have great respect . . .’ Some MPs sarcastically interrupted him: ‘Since when.’ Without missing a beat, Vajpayee replied, ‘For his learning and not for his views.’45 His biographer Ullekh N.P. has studied his speeches before and after he entered the Lok Sabha. Ullekh says, ‘After Vajpayee began to attend parliament, the nature of his speeches changed. He began to speak in more parliamentary ways. The effect of parliament on his thinking was clear.’

46 When parliament was on, Vajpayee would spend evenings at home waiting for the uncorrected script of that day’s parliamentary session to arrive on motorcycle. From the moment Vajpayee heard the motorcycle stop outside,

usually around 5:30 p.m., all activity in the house would cease while Vajpayee rectified the script. 47 A reputed Hindi poet judges Vajpayee’s own poetry to be mediocre. ‘But he had a sense of the sound of sentences [that was] better than politicians. So even though his poetry was not good, his speech was very good.’48 Just a year after Vajpayee entered parliament, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru replied to Vajpayee’s foreign policy opinions in Hindi, singling him out for praise. 49 When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visited India around then, Nehru made sure to invite Vajpayee. When Nehru was introducing Vajpayee, he said: ‘This is one of our future prime ministers.’ Khrushchev replied: ‘Then what is he doing here? In our country, we send them to the Gulag.’50 Advani, meanwhile, was assisting Vajpayee research his speeches as well as working with the Delhi unit of the Jana Sangh. He saw how the party of Hindus entered into an alliance with the communists for the 1958 Delhi municipal elections. 51 From being used to the certitude of the field, Advani was learning the give-and-take of politics. Some of Vajpayee’s outlook was also rubbing off on the stolid Advani. When they lost that election, they decided to go see a film starring Raj Kapoor and Mala Sinha named Phir Subah Hogi or ‘Morning Will Dawn Again’. 52 It is unlikely that the political theme of the film—the lead song, by Sahir Ludhianvi, was a critique of the unfilled promises of Nehruvian India—was why they chose to see it. The more likely explanation was that of two friends relishing an evening out, taking pleasure in other’s company. While films were a pastime for Vajpayee, they were a passion for Advani. In 1960, K.R. Malkani, the editor of Organiser, asked Advani to review films for the magazine. Advani would analyse Hindi films under the penname ‘Netra’ or ‘Eye’. Even here, politics would intrude. ‘Netra’, for instance, expressed disapproval at Nehru’s encouragement of the British producer Richard Attenborough’s attempts to make a film on Gandhi (released in 1982, the film would eventually win eight Oscars). ‘Netra’ saw this as a slight on Indian film makers: ‘Distrust of local talent and a fawning,

unreasonable reliance on “foreign” experts has been the bane of all activities of our government.’53 This was the first time that Advani was earning a salary, a princely sum of 350 rupees a month. 54 To make up for abysmal pay, senior journalists were eligible for housing assistance from the Nehruvian state. It was thus that Advani was allotted a small apartment in R.K. Puram under the quota for journalists. After he had fled his mansion in Karachi thirteen years ago, this was Advani’s first real accommodation. His neighbour was R. Rangarajan of The Indian Express. Every morning, Advani would drive his scooter to the RSS city headquarters in Jhandewalan, while Rangarajan rode pillion up to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. When Rangarajan got a car, his son, the historian Mahesh Rangarajan, says, ‘The roles were reversed and the film critic got off and took a bus to Jhandewalan.’55 * * * The third general elections in India were scheduled for February 1962. Vajpayee contested from Balrampur once again, and was pitted against the Congress candidate and freedom fighter Subhadra Joshi. But Vajpayee’s real opponent was the colossus of parliament, who travelled all the way from Delhi to Balrampur to give a speech. Nehru’s words ensured that Vajpayee lost his Lok Sabha seat by a narrow margin. 56 His career was rescued once again by Deendayal, who gave Vajpayee a Rajya Sabha ticket, ensuring his unbroken presence in parliament. Meanwhile, tensions between India and China, simmering for a while, had begun to boil. 57 Border fisticuffs between the two through the summer of 1962 expanded into a full-blown invasion by China. The result was defeat for the Indian army—unprepared, outmanned, and ill-led. The RSS cast the response to the invasion as a ‘dharmayudh’, i.e., a religious war to recover India’s holy lands. 58 It triggered the RSS’s instinct for ‘defensive violence’, which, along with Hindu unity, had been its founding rationale. When Nehru dismissed the loss of territory with, ‘we have only lost some rocks, not fertile land,’ Vajpayee replied, ‘our country is

not a piece of land, it’s a living breathing national person’. 59 And when China tested its nuclear bomb a few years later, Vajpayee declared: ‘What is the answer to the atom bomb? The answer to an atom bomb is an atom bomb, nothing else.’60 The war, a threat to Hindutva’s holy map, proved a blessing to its legitimacy. The RSS had supported the war effort, even offering its cadre to assist the troops. As reward, Prime Minister Nehru did the unthinkable by permitting uniformed RSS cadre to march on Rajpath as part of the 1963 Republic Day parade. 61 As the Organiser reported, ‘More than 2,000 Swayamsevaks in Delhi, in their full organisation uniform, white shirt, khaki knickers, belt, black cap and full boots took part in the parade and formed the major highlight of the Delhi Citizens group.’62 Contrary to those who see the 1975 Emergency as the mainstreaming of the RSS, it was the 1963 Republic Day that did that. The Congress party understood this then itself, as a meeting held soon after makes clear. To irate Congressmen, Nehru replied generically that all citizens had been called upon to participate and so the RSS also took part. A senior Congressmen asked: ‘Why did not the Delhi Congress seva dal also take part in the parade?’ The reply: ‘Well, we had just 250 uniforms, and knowing that the RSS strength would be much greater, we thought that, in contrast, the seva dal would make a poor showing?’ 63 The increasing acceptance of Hindutva by Nehruvian India was spurred by the China war, no doubt. But it was also because the Jana Sangh had taken care to stay within the political consensus of the period. There were three core beliefs on which they would not compromise: Hindu demographic concerns (in Assam), threats to religious territory (represented through Pakistan and China), and worries of unequal political rights (in Kashmir). Other than these, their guiding aim was to appeal to the average voter. 64 Even as the Jana Sangh was moving closer to the prime minister, the seventy-four-year-old was moving closer to death. Nehru finally died in May 1964, of ‘an internal haemorrhage, a paralytic stroke, and a heart attack’. 65 Vajpayee’s condolence speech was pointed: ‘The loss to Parliament is irreparable . . . In spite of a difference of opinion we have nothing but

respect for his great ideals, his integrity, his love for the country and his indomitable courage.’66 The voice was Vajpayee of course, but the brain was Deendayal Upadhyaya. Without his concurrence, the RSS would never have allowed the Jana Sangh to project such a moderate air. Advani watched and took notes. As Sudheendra Kulkarni says, ‘[Advani] worked very closely with Deendayalji. He saw how Deendayalji had changed over the years. Advani used to very often refer to a book by the American academic Craig Baxter 67 that aggregation and social integration were as important as being an ideological party. He learnt [these views] by watching Deendayalji.’68 By 1964, therefore, the Jana Sangh was behaving less like a movement and more like a party, alive to the compromises that expanding a coalition demanded. The bleak nationalism of Savarkar and Golwalkar was concerned with what connected Hindus to each other. But it had never mapped out views on governance and policies once it came to power. Now, with its popularity rising, the time had come for it to articulate a governing ideology. And that articulation took place for the first time in the southern town of Vijayawada, where Deendayal Upadhyaya referred to the phrase ‘Integral Humanism’. * * * Few present at the Jana Sangh’s conclave that January 1965 grasped that the phrase would one day become its official ideology. ‘I was present in Vijayawada. I was a sanghathan mantri,’ M.G. Vaidya remembers. ‘At the time, I didn’t realize that it would be such a big thing.’69 That realization would come three months later, when Deendayal gave four speeches in Bombay between 22 and 25 April, explaining exactly what ‘Integral Humanism’ meant. Three features are noteworthy. First, he makes an earnest attempt to appear non-communal. ‘There is freedom to worship according to one’s religion . . . We called it a “Secular State” to contrast it with Pakistan.’ He also dismisses the argument that India should uproot a thousand years of Muslim and British

rule: ‘The task of turning the waters of Ganga back to some previous point would not be wise.’ A second feature of Deendayal’s concept is that it is acrobatic on policy particulars. Deendayal is critical of the Congress ‘system’ with its multiple ideologies: ‘If there can be a magic box which contains a cobra and a mongoose living together, it is Congress.’ But his own definitions have room for the entire animal kingdom to reside within. The third feature of ‘Integral Humanism’ is its belief that a set of cultural norms (what Deendayal calls ‘chitta’ or soul, based on dharma) predate the Indian state and the individual. It is these norms that bound Indians together. The title and ideas in Deendayal’s four speeches bear remarkable resemblance—without attribution—to a book published in 1936. It was titled Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom by the Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain. 70 While Maritain’s ‘Integral Humanism’ has since become the guide for the Christian Democratic parties of Europe, Deendayal’s ‘Integral Humanism’ is the stated ideology of the BJP. Its flexibility in justifying any policy makes it the ideal election manifesto. * * * When he heard Deendayal Upadhyaya mention ‘Integral Humanism’ in Vijayawada in January 1965, Lal Krishna Advani was a thirty-seven-yearold bachelor. It is unlikely that those words left much of an impression, since Advani had something else on his mind. At the end of the session, he left Vijayawada for Bombay, not his home in Delhi. It was about a girl. 71 Advani had fled Karachi aged nineteen, when men of means of the time considered marriage. He had spent the next decade in Rajasthan’s villages and small towns, with neither means nor inclination. And as long as Advani was a pracharak, marriage was out of the question. But he had since moved into active politics in a large city, and now possessed an apartment, a salary and a position. His younger sister, who lived in Bombay, was keen that her brother get married. And since, as

Advani put it, ‘I had never befriended any lady in my life’, his sister suggested a young girl from south Bombay. The Jagtianis, like the Advanis, were a wealthy family from Karachi who had fled to Bombay during Partition. Their daughter, Kamla, was forced to work in the local post office. This was the story of many Sindhis, and it gave Lal and Kamla a shared identity, hardened by expulsion, even before they met. When they did meet, they hit it off. A common friend who knew the Jagtianis at the time says: ‘Kamla liked Advani for his sincerity. He came across as naïve . . . for a politician.’ Advani was attracted to Kamla’s matter-of-fact worldliness; she was the kind of sturdy harbour that could shelter a bobbing boat. They were married that very month, with a reception held on the terrace of the Sindhi-owned K.C. College near Churchgate railway station. 72 For a man who has railed against special laws for minorities, there is some irony that L.K. Advani’s wedding reception took place at a constitutionally sanctioned ‘minority’ educational institution. Kamla would continue to work for the next few years in Delhi, and would be the dominant figure in Advani’s life for the next fifty-one years. She was the primary breadwinner in those early years, while also bringing up their two children, Jayant and Pratibha. ‘She would always refer to her husband as “Advani”. It was an equal relationship,’ says the journalist Karan Thapar, who knew the family well. 73 The BJP’s Harin Pathak says: ‘Mrs Advani kept all the accounts, all the income tax returns.’74 He adds: ‘I remember, there are so many photos in Advani’s house. There is one on the dining table where Mrs Advani is staring at Advani, with piercing eyes. When guests would come, Advani would say, “If you see this photo, you can see whose raj runs in this house.”’ 75 Advani’s marriage—a steady, monogamous partnership—says much about the man. Vajpayee’s personal life similarly says much about him. As Vajpayee himself put it, ‘Mein avivahit hoon, kunwara nahin.’ 76 I am a bachelor, not a celibate.

Soon after he became a Lok Sabha MP, Vajpayee was invited to Ramjas College by some RSS students to give a talk. Present in the audience was a middle-aged philosophy professor, Brij Nath Kaul, along with his younger wife, Rajkumari. As we read earlier, Rajkumari and Vajpayee had been classmates in Gwalior in 1941, but the attraction had fizzled and they had lost touch for the next sixteen years. The Ramjas talk rekindled the flame. From then on—and through the 1960s—the Kauls and Vajpayee were constantly in each other’s homes. When B.N. Kaul became warden of Ramjas hostel, students would know that Vajpayee was visiting by an official black Ambassador car parked outside. 77 Kaul’s children soon became Vajpayee’s. He developed a special affection for the younger daughter, Namita, who was called Gunnu. Rajkumari Kaul acquired a reputation for helpfulness even then. When there was a milk shortage and MPs had extra coupons, ‘Mrs Kaul gave the coupons to my wife for my children,’ N.M. Ghatate remembers. ‘She would also help with medicines and recommending doctors.’78 The journalist Virendra Kapoor, who was then a student at Ramjas, says: ‘I remember a young Ashok Saikia spending the money his father gave him on alcohol, so he didn’t have enough for his fees. When Mr Kaul threatened to remove him, it was Mrs Kaul who gave him money to pay his fees.’ Another former student remembers Gunnu learning to walk, waddling barefoot in the corridors of the hostel. Years later, when he spoke sharply to Gunnu about her influence in Prime Minister Vajpayee’s office, she retorted, ‘You don’t see me as an adult. You still think of me that way [as a child].’ The heart of the relationship between Vajpayee and Rajkumari was intellectual. From a provincial north Indian milieu, Vajpayee was both perplexed by as well as attracted to an educated woman who could hold her own. Friends remember Rajkumari arguing with Vajpayee on politics, her persistent yet soft sentences a contrast with Vajpayee’s commanding words. Rajkumari was fluent in English, well read and, unlike Vajpayee, came from an urbane family. As a Kashmiri Pandit in the Delhi of the 1960s, she had got to know the ‘Kashmiri Mafia’, i.e., the Pandit bureaucrats and officials who

surrounded first Nehru, then his daughter—Rajkumari Kaul was after all a blood relation of Indira Gandhi. All this added up to a confident liberal. This presented the RSS with a hurdle. As a family friend of the Kauls says: ‘The RSS had a huge problem with aunty Kaul. Vajpayee was a showboy and they were proud of him. But they were very scared of aunty Kaul. Aunty Kaul had a huge influence on Vajpayee. She was a very, very powerful woman. She also made Vajpayee far more mellow, secular, cosmopolitan than he initially was. He was quite a provincial politician before he met her.’ If Mr Kaul had an objection to the relationship, he never articulated it. ‘He was a philosopher . . . self-absorbed,’ another family friend says, ‘[he made] hardly any conversation, he had a wry sense of humour. He was always very proper.’ While Mr Kaul raised no objections, the party did. Balraj Madhok, whom we shall read about in the next chapter, claims that he called Vajpayee to his room in the 1960s after another Jana Sangh leader complained about the women in Vajpayee’s life. Madhok was a founder of the Jana Sangh and considered himself Vajpayee’s senior. Madhok claims he told Vajpayee: ‘You should marry, otherwise you will be defamed and the image of Jana Sangh will also take a hit.’79 Sometime around 1965, Golwalkar travelled by train from Nagpur to Delhi, headed straight to the RSS office in Jhandewalan, and called a meeting with one item on the agenda: What was to be done about Mrs Kaul? Bhausaheb Deoras, the UP pranth pracharak, voiced his opinion: ‘As long as there is no publicity, it’s ok.’ Jana Sangh treasurer Nanaji Deshmukh disagreed, saying, ‘He [Vajpayee] should marry Rajkumari Kaul.’ Nanaji had separately told Vajpayee this at a hotel in Patna. ‘Nanaji was a matchmaker. He liked match making,’ R.V. Pandit, a long-timer donor to the Jana Sangh and BJP, remembers. ‘He had introduced Shatrughan Sinha to his wife Poonam. He did this all the time.’80 Golwalkar listened to these opinions before pronouncing his own. He told Vajpayee to break off the relationship with Mrs Kaul. ‘Vajpayee, to his credit, refused to do so,’ Dattopant Thengadi, who was present, later told an aide. Faced with a choice, Golwalkar decided not to punish Vajpayee. A

Yadav politician from Bihar says: ‘Vajpayee was let off because he was a Brahmin. Only Brahmins are allowed to break brahminical rules.’ But it was also decided that Vajpayee would be removed from the inner circle of the RSS. Until now, Vajpayee had always done what the RSS had asked of him. But from now on, they would be at arm’s length, each needing the other, each never trusting the other. Vajpayee’s political journey from here on would be in tension with the sangh; sometimes that strain would be managed, sometimes it would cause rupture. As a pracharak says: ‘This was the beginning of Atalji getting a psychological distance [from the RSS].’ * * * It is perhaps no coincidence that just at the time Golwalkar was handling Vajpayee’s non-traditional lifestyle, he was also thinking deeply about the virtues of traditional Hinduism. As we read earlier, the RSS was a radical break from Hindu custom. But the former Ramakrishna Mission monk was shaped by a religious world view. Aware that the Jana Sangh needed to appear Nehruvian, he had not imposed this world view thus far. But Golwalkar now felt that perhaps Hindutva needed more of Hinduism. He also had a sweet spot for the Hindu sadhus and peeths that the RSS had shied away from. And starting from the mid-1960s, Golwalkar began to introduce them to Hindu nationalism. Powai today is a temple of modern India, home to an Indian Institute of Technology, Internet start-ups, a civic movement trying to clean the lake and pimpled eruptions designed by the architect Hafeez Contractor. But on 29 August 1964, it hosted a very different vision of India. It was on this day that Golwalkar and Chinmayananda—the men who ran the RSS and Chinmaya Mission respectively—called a meeting along with S.S. Apte, to set up a World Hindu Council. In Hindi, it would be known as the Vishva Hindu Parishad. VHP. The VHP’s core mission was ‘to bring sadhus, sants and mahatmas of various sects on one platform’, 81 thus uniting all those ‘sampradayas [religious denomination and sects] that originated in India’. 82 Like with

Savarkar’s formulation of Hindutva, this included traditional Hinduism as well as Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism, but excluded Christianity and Islam. The aim was to solve the problem of ‘authority’ in Hinduism by creating, for the first time, a Hindu Vatican. The Vishva Hindu Parishad resolved, at this very first gathering, that the ‘ancient glory and social standing [of temples] be restored’. 83 While that resolution would take two decades to morph into the Ayodhya movement, more immediate was the VHP’s resolution to push the government to pass a law banning cow slaughter. Such a demand had been made in a muted manner for some decades. But it was the creation of the VHP—with its consolidation of religious heads—that gave this movement fillip. The apogee of this anti-cow slaughter movement was a march on parliament two months later, on 7 November 1966, by over three lakh people. 84 These included members of the Jana Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha mingling with saffron-robed sadhus and Arya Samajis. The mob turned violent, burning cars, setting fire to government buildings and attempting to storm parliament. 85 The police opened fire, killing seven people and injuring over a 100 outside parliament. Inside parliament, Vajpayee played the part of a defence lawyer, a role he would re-enact after 6 December 1992. When a Congress MP alleged that the demonstrating leaders had incited the crowd to burn ministers for not protecting the cow, Vajpayee was ‘quick to refute his allegation’. 86 The agitation ended soon, but its legacy persists to this day. The protests changed the original character of the party, since the RSS and Jana Sangh worked with religious figures and institutions for the first time. This union not only provided the palette for a new shade of saffron, it also offered a model for the movement that would one day pickaxe the Babri Masjid. * * * The Jana Sangh fought the 1967 elections on the tailwind of the anti-cow slaughter agitation—perhaps the first time it was stepping outside the Nehruvian consensus. Vajpayee contested from Balrampur against Subhadra

Joshi, whom he had lost to in 1962. This time, Vajpayee made sure to deploy the ‘cow issue and appeals to the sentiment of the people’. 87 What added ballast to this religious rhetoric was the entry of Vijayaraje Scindia into the party. The dowager queen of one of India’s largest princely states, Gwalior, was a pious Hindu, constantly fasting for one vrat or the other. 88 She would soon become a trustee of the VHP. The queen of Gwalior brought with her money the extent of which the Jana Sangh had never seen before. Her daughter Vasundhara Raje says: ‘In the late 1960s, she was the single biggest funder. She is the one who gave money to Nanaji.’ Another source says: ‘The 1967 campaign was paid for by Vijayaraje. Without her, the results would have been different.’ The invigorated Jana Sangh was facing a Congress in coma. After twenty years of dominating Indian politics, the Congress ‘system’, wracked with infighting, was malfunctioning. Nehru’s death had eventually brought his daughter to power in 1966. But the new prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was unable to deal with food shortages, the aftermath of an inconclusive war with Pakistan, and, above all, factions within her party. She had yet to discover her populist touch. Her party sought to counter the Jana Sangh with smear rather than substance: ‘Vote nahin denge hum, Gandhi ke hatyaaron ko.’89 We will not give votes to the killers of Gandhi. When the results were announced in February 1967, the Congress seats in the Lok Sabha had reduced by seventy-eight to 283. In the state elections held in parallel, the Jana Sangh had won an estimated 266 MLAs from over sixteen states. 90 Their thirty-five members of parliament included Vajpayee, who had won Balrampur, as well as his competitor for the number two spot in the party, Balraj Madhok. While the campaign against cow slaughter seems to have anticipated the national mood, the more pertinent reason for the Jana Sangh’s success is showcased in how they were able to form the government in Madhya Pradesh in 1967. Vijayaraje Scindia had woven an anti-Congress coalition for the state elections. But the Congress still won a comfortable majority. What should have been an easy return to power, however, was stymied by infighting.

Incensed with the chief minister-designate D.P. Mishra, Congressman Govind Narayan Singh—the dynastic son of a former Congress chief minister—left the party along with thirty legislators. Though Vijayaraje could have laid claim to chief ministership, ‘she told Govind Singh to become the CM in order to form a stable government’. 91 Twenty months later, Singh would rejoin the Congress on condition that he remain chief minister. 92 Vijayaraje, on the other hand, would remain in the Jana Sangh, continuing to finance and campaign for it, continuing to abjure power. Their contrasting sense of loyalty showcases the organizational difference between the Jana Sangh and the Congress party. * * * While 1967 was an ambiguous year for Vajpayee—winning him a Lok Sabha seat but also increasing competition from within—it was an unambiguous triumph for Advani. Under his supervision, the Jana Sangh had swept the three near simultaneous polls held in Delhi: for the Lok Sabha, for the municipal corporation and for the metropolitan council (deemed a state legislature, since Delhi was not technically a state at the time). 93 Forty-year-old Advani was elected chairman of the council, in effect the Speaker of the Delhi assembly. For a man who, only a decade ago, had been a lowly secretary to a first-time MP, Advani had come a long way. He shifted to a comfortable government house in Pandara Road,94 in what would become his perch in Lutyens’ Delhi for the next several decades. Lal Krishna and Kamla Advani began to develop their own circle. Visitors would include Deendayal Upadhyaya, Dattopant Thengadi, Rajendra Sharma, N.M. Ghatate and his wife Sheela. 95 The most frequent visitor, of course, was Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Though Vajpayee still treated Advani as a subordinate whose company he enjoyed rather than an equal whose skills he needed, he had taken care to develop a cordial relationship with Kamla Advani. Their common friend R.V. Pandit says: ‘Kamla Advani played a big role in solving tensions. She was the dominating figure in the Advani household, and she was an admirer of Atalji

Advani’s sudden rise mirrored his party’s. The Jana Sangh was now the second-largest party in parliament by vote share, the third-largest by seats. But it was facing the challenges that come with political success. At the ideological level, the Jana Sangh had to choose whether to continue within the Nehruvian consensus, or to follow a more strident Hinduism. This ideological schizophrenia translated into a simmering personal feud between the Indira-leaning Vajpayee and the right-leaning Madhok. At the level of organization, newly gained power threatened an ethos of abnegation in a way that struggling in the margins never had. The discipline of its thirty-five MPs and 266 MLAs risked being corrupted. And, an ailing Golwalkar meant that changes in the RSS were in the offing, and with it, changes to the Jana Sangh. What held all these tensions together was Deendayal Upadhyaya, unquestioned arbiter of political Hinduism. His personal integrity aided his acceptance as the sangh parivar’s referee. An old-timer remembers meeting Deendayal in late 1967 and watching him waving his kurta in the wind. Deendayal explained that he had just two kurtas, and had spilt coffee on one of them. He needed to wash and dry that kurta straightaway to ensure he had something to wear the next day. It was this very Deendayal who had delicately displaced Madhok as party president in December 1967. As long as the harmonizing fifty-one-year-old was in control, the unity of the party seemed assured. That is, until one cold morning two months later, when a dead body was found near Mughalsarai station