The body had fallen by the tracks, 100 yards from the station platform in Mughalsarai, a small town near Varanasi. It was 2:20 a.m. on 11 February 1968. An ankle was broken, the head injured, and right arm marked with blood. The clenched fist enclosed a five-rupee note. A body search revealed twenty-six more rupees and a watch. 1 It says something about the nature of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that most of its leaders were organizing at the time. M.S. Golwalkar was in Allahabad, 160 kilometres away, conducting an RSS shivir (camp) when he heard the news. ‘Guruji asked me to take a car and go to Varanasi, saying do not conduct [the] post-mortem without me,’ an RSS leader of the time remembers after all these years. ‘[Golwalkar] said I will finish the shivir and come.’ While the RSS men were in the trenches that morning, their legislative counterparts in the Jana Sangh, Balraj Madhok and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, were attending a parliamentary meeting in Delhi. They instantly left in an air force plane for Varanasi. From there, Madhok says he made his way to Mughalsarai, while Vajpayee, his rival within the party, disappeared on arrival. 2 The Jana Sangh deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh—the party was part of the state government by 1967—was in Lucknow when he heard the news. He pressed the entire state’s resources to solve the murder, straightaway flying a high-ranking official to Mughalsarai. 3 For the man killed was not ordinary. As the previous chapter showed, Deendayal Upadhyaya had run the Jana Sangh for the last fifteen years. Though president only briefly, his unchanging position as general secretary gave him power behind the throne. He had been travelling from Lucknow to Patna.

 When the train left Mughalsarai station at 2:10 a.m., he was not in his coach, and was noticed ten minutes later by the tracks. 4 Deendayal’s death was investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as well as a judicial commission. Both concluded that the murderers were petty thieves. 5 Balraj Madhok was having none of it. When he reached Mughalsarai that afternoon, he was shown the banian, kurta and woollen sweater that Deendayal was wearing at the time of death. Madhok saw no blood on the clothes. 6 The post-mortem was conducted that evening in Varanasi. Madhok later claimed he inspected the body there, and noticed a small bloodied clot behind the neck, which he interpreted as having been caused by a poisoned needle. 7 Adding two and two to make five, he announced to a baffled press that Deendayal Upadhyaya’s death was ‘cold-blooded murder’ and ‘politically motivated’. 8 Madhok claims that Vajpayee confronted him, saying: ‘Upadhyaya was a fighter cock. He must have got into a fight in the train . . . don’t call it a murder.’9 Madhok’s depiction is disputed not just by Vajpayee and government reports, but by the RSS leader who had been with Golwalkar in Allahabad and was now present at the post-mortem. ‘I went and saw the body. I don’t think there was any poisoning. I did not see any puncture marks in the neck. By evening, it had become quite dark when the post-mortem was conducted. By then, Guruji had come. Madhok was not present. I didn’t see Vajpayeeji either. There was no light, just one petromax [lamp] in the room. So I was tasked with lifting Deendayalji’s body to make sure that his face could be seen for the post-mortem. Seeing his face, Guruji said, “Hey prabhu, agar aapko unhe lena hi thaa, to diya kyun?” [Oh Lord, if you had wanted to take him, why did you give him to us in the first place?].’ The stench from this body would linger within the organization for decades, adding to a historical sense of Hindu victimhood. But the immediate effect was on the leadership of the Jana Sangh. Forever sensitive to organizational harmony, Deendayal had avoided naming an inheritor. As long as he was alive, the second rung he had built—K.L. Sharma, M.L. Sondhi, Nanaji Deshmukh, Vajpayee, and Madhok—had deferred to him. But with the patriarch gone in 1968, his children began to squabble. And the first stone was thrown by Balraj Madhok, who accused Atal Bihari Vajpayee of murdering Deendayal Upadhyaya

. * * *

 Balraj Madhok was born in 1920 to an Arya Samaj family based in Jammu. Like most other Hindu nationalists, he came from a lower middle-class, nonEnglish-speaking background. He had joined the RSS a few years before Vajpayee and Advani, and assisted Hindu refugees fleeing Pakistan in 1947, many of them Punjabis like him. Thin, with an elongated face, a pencil moustache, and eyes that looked hunted, Madhok was a mix of the eclectic and the dogmatic. He taught in Srinagar and later Delhi, and wrote on topics as varied as Syama Prasad Mookerjee, foreign policy, and the lack of Indianness among Muslims. When Vajpayee was still an editor with Panchajanya in 1951, Madhok was considered important enough in the RSS to be one of the gold coins loaned to Mookerjee to found the Jana Sangh. He had become president of the party in 1966, before Vajpayee was bestowed that honour. All this gave Madhok the sense that he was the natural inheritor to Deendayal’s legacy. But Madhok had missed the warning signs. After just a couple of years as party president, he had been replaced by Deendayal. L.K. Advani provides an explanation in his biography—Madhok’s tenure was so damaging that repair was needed.10 Balraj Madhok was too much of an individualist to fit into an organization that required sublimation of the self. His personality is best described by his associate Prafull Goradia. ‘Madhok was a very clean-hearted person. But he could put his own views above the organization. I don’t refute that. He was not a practical politician.’11 Govindacharya is a Tamil Brahmin whose father moved to Banaras to teach Sanskrit. Decades in the RSS and then BJP have given him an unmatched institutional memory. He remembers: ‘I really respected Madhokji. But he used to get “mood off” once in a while. He did not care about his language when shouting’ 12—behaviour that was rare within the sangh parivar.

 Nowhere was this more evident than in the days following Deendayal’s killing. Prafull Goradia recalls Madhok telling him: ‘It was Vajpayee and [senior RSS leader] Balasaheb Deoras who did it.’ When he met Govindacharya in Patna, Madhok floated a conspiracy that sounded like a Hindi film. ‘There was a meeting in Nepal. Murder plan was hatched to make Vajpayee the party president.’13 But Govindacharya, no admirer of Vajpayee, found that no such meeting had taken place. Govindacharya argued with Madhok, who replied angrily: ‘When you go to [the RSS headquarters in] Nagpur, they take the key from your brain, and throw it in the Naaga nadi’, a reference to the river running through the city. 14 On seeing Deendayal’s body in Varanasi that February, Madhok claimed that a crying Golwalkar had told him: ‘The responsibility of the Jana Sangh is now with you.’15 So imagine his astonishment when Vajpayee was unanimously elected president of the party just a few days later. The RSS also threw its weight behind Vajpayee. Golwalkar, who a few years ago had considered Vajpayee’s relationship with Rajkumari Kaul a liability, had come around. Soon after, for example, he wrote a solicitous letter to Vajpayee counselling him on his health, especially the ulcers in his stomach, and advocating ayurvedic instead of allopathic treatment. 16 When Deendayal’s body was brought back to Delhi, it was to Vajpayee’s official bungalow that the body was taken. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi came to pay her respects there, 17 with a sombre Vajpayee playing host. Advani was too junior to have to play politics at the cremation. He had the luxury of giving expression to his emotions by bursting into tears at the funeral. 18 Without this luxury, Vajpayee had to put on an act. In parliament on 12 February 1968, Vajpayee made sure that he was the one to pay the evocative tribute. ‘He was not a member of parliament, but if any one individual could be given credit for those Bharatiya Jana Sangh members of parliament who are sitting in this and the other House . . . it is Upadhyayaji.’19 And soon after the murder, it was only Vajpayee who was provided with a bodyguard—the imperial-moustachioed Shiv Kumar, who

While Vajpayee was subtly taking control of his party, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was less subtly doing the same to her own. Like Madhok, she too imagined enemies everywhere. As Vajpayee put it: ‘Whenever I met Smt. Indira Gandhi, I felt she was in the grip of some unknown fear. There was a deep sense of insecurity in some corner of her mind.’20 What Indira Gandhi had—but Madhok did not—was a preternatural sense of the national mood. Historian Srinath Raghavan says, ‘Indira correctly read the 1967 results as a mandate against the Congress establishment. So she began to place herself as an insurgent against that very establishment.’21 She did this by accusing the Congress of turning conservative and splitting the party in 1969. Painting herself as a messiah of the poor, Indira proceeded to nationalize banks, abolish privy purses and impose controls on economic production. Balraj Madhok wanted the Jana Sangh to respond with a frontal assault on Indira’s economics and merge with the pro-business Swatantra, the party beloved of maharajas and landlords who detested their property being redistributed. After a visit to the Tata factory in Jamshedpur, he had realized ‘that even in a socialist economy, private producers are profiteering and the loss-making factory’s loss is being transferred to the public . . . nationalization is not in everybody’s interest. Bureaucrats and politicians use this for themselves.’22 Madhok travelled to Germany in 1970, home of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Deendayal Upadhyaya’s ‘Integral Humanism’ had been lifted from Christian Democratic thinker Jacques Maritain’s 1936 book of the same name. 23 The definition too that Deendayal had taken—of the need for a spiritual counter to the materialism of capitalism and communism—had been concretized by Christian Democratic parties into policies that advocated a free market, welfare programmes and social conservatism. 

24Madhok saw the need for Integral Humanism to be similarly translated in India. He even met with Helmut Kohl, eventually Christian Democratic chancellor of a reunited Germany. Madhok says in his memoirs that Kohl told him: ‘Mr Madhok, based on my information, you are a leader of India’s Hindu Democratic Party . . . communist, socialist and liberal parties of different countries each have their own international organizations . . . Christian Democratic Party and Hindu Democratic Party should also form their own international organizations.’25 * * * Balraj Madhok was not the only one within his party critiquing state controls of the economy. By 1970, the economist Subramanian Swamy had been influenced enough by opposition leader Jayaprakash Narayan to give up a faculty position at Harvard University, and return to India. His essay in favour of India acquiring a nuclear bomb impressed the Hindu nationalists, for whom this had been an ideological fixture. 26 Just thirty-one years of age at the time, Swamy says he soon became beloved of the RSS, and was asked to draft an economic plan for the Jana Sangh. 27 His plan envisaged a reduction in state controls, but in a nod to the party’s indigenous hankerings, was called the ‘Swadeshi’ plan. In these early years, Vajpayee and Swamy were not the antagonists they would later become; it was Vajpayee who first taught the ‘foreign educated’ Swamy to wear a dhoti. 28 Swamy remembers: ‘In 1970 and [the] first quarter of 1971, Vajpayee couldn’t spend one day without calling me. He was living in 1 Feroze Shah Road. Mrs Kaul also liked me, because she was thinking, “Since he is from the West, he will understand our relationship.”’ 29 But Swamy’s rapid rise began to threaten a Vajpayee who was still consolidating his grip over the party. Vajpayee’s insecurities were heightened by Swamy’s tendency to speak rashly and promote himself relentlessly. Yet another factor pushing the Jana Sangh in favour of a strong line against Indira’s socialism were the Bombay-based industrialists who were now funding the party. They were culturally and financially unlike the shopkeepers and traders (and even Rajmata Scindia) who had funded the party in the 1960s. They were against Indira Gandhi’s economics, and had read the 1967 elections as heralding the Jana Sangh as a national alternative to the Congress. These Bombay corporates were, however, motivated by selfinterest rather than principle. While supporting free enterprise for domestic entrepreneurs like themselves, they lobbied to keep the external controls that prevented multinationals from entering.

 The credit for bringing these Bombay businessmen into contact with the northern Indian Jana Sangh lay with Chandikadas Amritrao ‘Nanaji’ Deshmukh, the incorruptible treasurer of the Jana Sangh. His legend was built on relentless pursuit of lucre for the party, including running on foot after a horse-riding prince to entice him to give money. Nanaji was also uncommonly honest, so much so that the party would send him alone to collect money. ‘After him, two people go now. To make sure,’ N.M. Ghatate says. ‘[But] with Nanaji there was never any doubt.’30 Through the early 1970s, Nanaji cultivated the Tatas, Mafatlals and other industrial houses. He also got to know R.V. Pandit. Pandit would himself part with much money for the party—cheque only, since he was against black money 31—and would become one of Vajpayee and Advani’s closest friends. ‘I used to give the cheque directly to Advaniji and Atalji and George and Jaswant,’ Pandit says, providing his bank statements as evidence for this. 32 Of all these patrician industrialists who gave money to the party, the most prominent was also the most unusual. At the time one of the richest groups in India, the Wadias were Parsis who had made their money during colonial rule. Their flagship Bombay Dyeing textiles was a household name. The scion of the Wadia group, Nusli, wasn’t just uncommonly rich, he was also the grandson of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The founder of Pakistan had disinherited his daughter Dina when she had married the non-Muslim Neville Wadia. When partition came, Jinnah had moved to Pakistan, leaving behind Dina and grandson Nusli. ‘As long as Nusli’s father was alive he forbade him from politics,’ a friend of Nusli Wadia says. ‘Basically, he [Nusli’s father] felt that one politician in the family had caused enough problems. But once he died, Nusli began links with [the] Jana Sangh.’ Nusli Wadia became acquainted with Nanaji in the late 1960s when they were introduced by a businessman friend.33 It was Nusli who then introduced Nanaji to J.R.D. Tata. 34 And by the 1970s, Jinnah’s grandson was funding large parts of the Jana Sangh. One illustration provides a sense of his influence. 

Nanaji Deshmukh understood early that newspapers and magazines could prove a potent weapon, since radio and television were controlled by the Congress government. The RSS already ran the Hindi weekly Panchajanya, the Marathi daily Tarun Bharat and the English fortnightly Organiser. But Nanaji was convinced that an English daily was required to reach the influential urban Indian who was repulsed by the Jana Sangh. Virendra and Coomi Kapoor were two of the first journalists to join this newspaper, Motherland, housed in the first two floors of the Deendayal Research Institute in north Delhi. Nanaji would live above the shop on the fifth floor, while K.R. Malkani edited the paper. Virendra Kapoor says: ‘A newspaper depended on patronage. No advertisement was possible since Congress was in power, and no industrialist wanted to cross them. But I saw Bombay Dyeing ads in Motherland, and I remember Nusli Wadia visiting the offices once before going up to see Nanaji.’ Kapoor says that it was brave to fund a Jana Sangh newspaper in those days. ‘Once, an industrialist offered to pay us cash. Malkani [the editor] said no, buy an advertisement. So he put an ad. A few days later, at a party, a Congressman said to him, “Oh! I remembered you the other day . . . when I saw your ad in Motherland.” The point was made. The industrialist never gave any more money to us.’35 * * * 

With pressure to oppose Indira’s socialism coming from Madhok and Subramanian Swamy within, and corporate funders without, it stands to logic that the Jana Sangh should have merged with the Swatantra Party and articulated a capitalist position. That this did not happen owes something to the class background of Hindu nationalists—lower middle-class men just one step removed from poverty and suspicious of unbridled capitalism. But the primary reason why the Jana Sangh declined to oppose Indira’s economics was neither ideology nor class background. As the party’s internal debate over bank nationalization shows, the answer was much simpler.

 By the late 1960s, India had several private banks, apart from governmentowned ones. For a variety of reasons, credit was scarce for rural areas as well as for small urban enterprises. Sensing an opportunity, Indira Gandhi began advocating state control over those private banks to extend credit to a wider swathe of Indians. When the bank nationalization bill came to parliament, Madhok opposed it, saying that ‘people taking loans will have to do bootlicking of officers’. 36 In the same parliament, Vajpayee was more conciliatory. ‘Sir, Bharatiya Jan Sangh is not opposed to nationalisation in principle. It can be done if it is in the public interest . . .’37 The Jana Sangh’s final resolution on nationalization strove for a middle path, supporting the principle but opposing a policy made without ‘due thought and without preparing any blue-print’. 38 And when the matter came up to vote, Jana Sangh members conveniently absented themselves. 39 An incensed Madhok gave a public statement questioning the Jana Sangh leadership 40—a not-so-subtle dig at its president. In refusing to oppose Indira’s economics, Vajpayee was joined by L.K. Advani, who since 1970 had become a parliamentarian in the Rajya Sabha or the unelected Upper House. Thus far, Advani had been Vajpayee’s devotee. But now, confronted by Madhok, Vajpayee needed more than just an admirer; he needed an equal partner. Joining them were many others in the party, who realized that bank nationalization was the consensus in parliament. An aide to Vajpayee says: ‘Atalji knew which way the wind was blowing. The Indian public supported Indira’s socialism. The Jana Sangh realized that.’ The party’s economic socialism at this time must be contrasted with Prime Minister Vajpayee’s market economics in the first decade of the new millennium, and Narendra Modi’s heavy-handed intervention in the economy in recent years. The ease with which Hindu nationalists can spout opposing economics suggests they do not have a principled view on the subject. And that their economics in the 1970s also went against their funders points to the fact that money power alone does not explain their policies. Instead, the deciding factor in choosing to not confront Indira Gandhi was an analysis of what it took to win elections. It was votes, not ideology or money, that shaped Jana Sangh economics.

 * * * 

The Jana Sangh’s reluctance to confront Indira Gandhi was borne out by the 1971 election results. The prime minister recovered her father’s mandate, which she had lost in 1967, gaining more than sixty-nine seats, and giving the Congress a commanding majority. The anti-Congress alliance, of which Jana Sangh was a part, was routed. The party itself was reduced to two-thirds of its previous tally—to just twenty-two seats. 41 One of those was from Gwalior, won by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. 42 Madhok lost his elections from Delhi. He attributed this to yet another conspiracy, this one hatched by Indira Gandhi, the Indian communists, the Soviet Union and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. 43 With his rival defeated, Vajpayee was once again elected head of the party in parliament in 1971. While Vajpayee had tactically become president of the Jana Sangh in 1968 to ward off the threat from Madhok, being its main spokesman in parliament was what he identified with more than anything else.

 * * * 

Indira Gandhi followed her electoral success in March 1971 with a calibrated war with Pakistan. India’s nemesis was at the time divided into two wings. As Bengali-speaking East Pakistan smarted under the dominance of West Pakistan and Punjabi Muslim troops committed atrocities, millions of Bengali Hindu and Muslim refugees fled for India. The crisis provided Indira the excuse to act. Her initial strategy was to train East Pakistanis to form a militia called Mukti Bahini. This militia would assist the Indian army’s eventual liberation of Bangladesh. It would also provide the Pakistanis with a model to train disgruntled Kashmiris in the early 1990s. 44 India’s 1971 victory not just redeemed its army after the loss of 1962 and stalemate of 1965, it split into half the religious logic for Pakistan. Vajpayee was all praise for Indira Gandhi—though, contrary to public belief, he did not liken her to Goddess Durga and had to spend much of his later life denying this. 45 Indira’s domestic dominance after the Bangladesh war, her populist turn and the 1971 election results had an acute impact on Vajpayee. He was taking control of the party at a time when the Jana Sangh’s rise in 1967 seemed to have tapered off. He thought deeply about the relationship between ideology and electoral victory. His conclusion, forged in this crucible, would shape Hindu nationalism for decades to come. Soon after the 1971 elections, an innocuous article appeared in an English newspaper, written by ‘A Swayamsevak’, a reference to a lowly RSS volunteer. 46 It said that there were two roads ahead for the RSS and Jana Sangh. They could remain an ideological party and become a pressure group. Or they could compromise on ideology, and come to power. So obvious was the actual author that Vajpayee was summoned by Golwalkar to a meeting at Hedgewar Bhavan in Nagpur. Asked to elaborate, Vajpayee explained that Hindus were moderates, and would not agree to an ideological party. Many in the RSS opposed this. Lunch was served, a vegetarian meal that was eaten in communion. 47 Guruji spoke after lunch. ‘I agree with Atalji that an ideological party will find it difficult to come to power and won’t come to power quickly. But I disagree that it will never happen.’ He gave the example of how ‘the Labour party came to power in England, despite a Westminster system made by conservatives’. But for the moment, Golwalkar and the RSS were willing to be led by Vajpayee and his ideological moderation. It is hard to overestimate the impact of this ‘deal’. For the next three decades, political Hinduism would run its politics based on this presumption —that while Hindutva would energize the cadre, the party needed to dilute its ideology to appeal to moderate Hindus and win power. Even when frustrated at this strategy, as the RSS and VHP frequently were, they would never overturn it. This was the strategy responsible for the first bloom of the Bharatiya Janata Party, expiring only after the 2002 Gujarat state elections, when, as we shall see later, Chief Minister Narendra Modi proved that it was possible to have your cake and eat it too.

 * * *

 The 1971 ‘deal’ between the RSS and Vajpayee ended any possibility of a free-market party line. And Advani, by now in thrall of his mentor, took Vajpayee’s side. Madhok, however, saw this not so much as a pragmatic choice, but as a sell-out. He turned to personal attacks. He complained to Golwalkar about the women in Vajpayee’s life. Golwalkar replied: ‘I know about the weakness and character of these people. But I have to run the organization. I have to take everyone along. Hence every day I consume poison like Shiva.’48 While Madhok was conjuring an array of reasons why Vajpayee was winning the ideological argument, the obvious one seems to have eluded him. Vajpayee’s easy charm drew more converts than Madhok’s intensity. As Congress politician Jairam Ramesh says: ‘Vajpayee was the only party figure acceptable to all factions of his party. He was also the only figure whom the entire opposition was comfortable with.’49 Vajpayee also knew how to ingratiate himself to the press in a way that Madhok did not. The journalist H.K. Dua was once travelling by scooter to the Jana Sangh office to attend a press conference thrown by president Vajpayee. On the way, he saw Vajpayee waiting outside his house in Feroze Shah Road for a taxi to take him to that very meeting. When Dua offered, Vajpayee happily rode pillion to reach the venue where he spoke, while Dua took notes. 50 Ullekh N.P. adds: ‘Vajpayee was very close to editors of sangh newspapers. So [during press coverage] for any sangh function, he would always get prominence in the reportage.’51 While Vajpayee loved this spotlight, he was careful to be seen as a team player, necessary to remain in Hindu nationalism. When he did not get his way—as his disagreement with his party on the Ayodhya movement or on Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s ouster will show—he would sulk on mute. When Madhok did not get his way, he saw conspiracies and voiced them to the press. Even Madhok’s friends could tire of him. Madhuri Sondhi remembers him coming over to talk with her husband M.L. Sondhi, eventually a Jana Sangh MP. ‘My husband would try to hide from Madhok. But he would find my husband in the house . . . and they would then have a discussion . . . It was like a joint family.’52 Madhok’s critics trace his individualism to imperfect socialization in the RSS. Govindacharya points to the fact that Madhok perhaps did not complete the OTC training, the three-step course where aspiring pracharaks are taught about team building and RSS ideology. 53 It is a charge his family denies. 54 As Madhok became progressively distanced from the Jana Sangh and RSS, he hung on, hoping that Vajpayee’s tenure as president would end soon. Madhok wanted Rajmata Scindia to be the next president. 55 Madhok must have calculated that the party under her would be more aligned to his beliefs. Imagine Madhok’s surprise, therefore, when Lal Krishna Advani’s name was floated in early 1973. Though he had been head of the Delhi metropolitan council and was at the time a Rajya Sabha MP, several others in the party were senior to Advani. He had also not distinguished himself as a parliamentary orator (unlike Madhok), as a national organizer (unlike Nanaji Deshmukh), or as a mass politician (unlike Rajmata Scindia). He looked every inch the common man from R.K. Laxman’s cartoons, an everyday spectator who silently took in the larger currents around him. Madhok referred to Advani as a ‘boneless wonder’ who ‘does not have his own character or opinion’. 56 There was nothing to recommend Advani as the head. Except for one attribute. By the early 1970s, Advani and Vajpayee were inseparable. The flamboyant Vajpayee enjoyed the company of the quieter man. They would go out to watch films, a shared passion, followed by pani puri. 57 Apart from personal chemistry, Vajpayee’s cultivation of Advani had a political end. A Jana Sangh leader at the time says: ‘Vajpayee picked Advani since he spoke good English, was trustworthy and perceived as a man who could never win a Lok Sabha election.’ Madhok was more direct. ‘Advani was very close to Vajpayee. He had no independent existence and he lacked confidence.’58 Advani later told an aide: ‘I was politically junior to several others, and I was not even an orator in public rallies. This is the most elementary requirement for a mass leader and president of a party. But Vajpayeeji told me: “You will acquire this.”’ Advani insisted that others be asked first—prominent amongst them Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia. But she refused, a reluctance to hold a post that would be her hallmark. Her contribution to the party far exceeded the vicepresidency she would eventually ascend to in 1986. When asked about her mother’s distaste for party posts, Vasundhara Raje smiles. She brings the fingers of her right hand together and points downwards in the gesture for giving. ‘She was used to doing this,’ she says. She then inverts her hand to form a begging bowl. ‘Not this.’ 59 With the Rajmata refusing, Advani agreed to be president. The public announcement was to be made in Kanpur in February 1973. It was perhaps the single most important session for the party. For it would mark the end of Madhok and the beginning of Vajpayee–Advani’s control.

 * * *

 The Kanpur session of the Jana Sangh was held between 9 and 11 February 1973. Like all sessions, arrangements were thorough but spartan. Even senior leaders would have to share tents or rooms, and hospitality was provided by local businessmen sympathetic to the Jana Sangh. Madhok was coaxed to attend—in what he later claimed was a set-up.60 At a private meeting just before the public session, Madhok was questioned about a twenty-two-page note he had circulated.61 Madhok was worried about a small cabal dictating policy—the RSS in cahoots with Vajpayee, Advani and Nanaji. He had wanted top party posts to be elected, and the ‘selection of party candidates should be made by a larger body’. 62 Madhok was particularly critical of what he considered the direct influence of the RSS over the Jana Sangh. Since all organizing secretaries up to the district level were appointed by the RSS, Madhok argued that they would not answer to the Jana Sangh leadership.63 Madhok’s concern is borne out by data. In a detailed survey of three constituencies conducted between 1968 and 1971, the scholars Walter Anderson and Shridhar Damle found that only 10 per cent of Jana Sangh posts were occupied by non-RSS men. At senior levels, in fact, there was no one without RSS links. 64 At the meeting, Madhok claims he was told: ‘Muslims don’t like you, are repelled by you, don’t want to join Jana Sangh because of you. In order to get them to join, you must resign.’65 Vajpayee asked that he resign from the party. 66 An angry Madhok made plans to leave Kanpur immediately. Aware that Madhok’s departure would be permanent, an RSS pracharak of the time remembers telling him to accept that his ideas had not found purchase, and remain through the session. It was the right advice, since Vajpayee would avoid expulsion from the party a decade later by protesting Ayodhya but never leaving in a huff. But Madhok was not Vajpayee. He left Kanpur for Delhi that very day, an event widely reported in the press. 67 At the start of the public session, outgoing president Atal Bihari Vajpayee criticized Madhok by name—unheard of in an organization that prided unity over all else. He said that Madhok was alone in the view that the party should ‘opt for a rightist front’. The Jana Sangh, he swore, was a ‘centrist forward-looking’ party and would not ‘function as a lobby for vested interests’. 68 Having rejected the challenge from Madhok, Vajpayee went on to seal his hold on the party. He announced—in what had only been a rumour until then—the name of Lal Krishna Advani as the new president of the party. Harin Pathak, the long-time MP from Gujarat, attended the Kanpur session. He remembers the reaction of the crowd to the announcement. ‘Everybody was shocked . . . Dada [Advani] was not so much popular among the people. Everybody was little bit astonished.’69 Noticing the disquiet, Vajpayee ended his speech by saying, ‘Today you say Atalji Atalji. One day, you will say Advaniji Advaniji.’70 Closing the session, Advani gave what was perhaps his first public speech. He left no one in any doubt about what the party stood for and who spoke for it. While attacking ‘monopoly houses’ and import controls, 71 he also referred to the upcoming Uttar Pradesh elections, and announced that Vajpayee would direct ‘the strategy and campaigning in the state’. 72 Soon after, Advani declared: ‘Presidents may come, presidents may go, but Atalji will always be our leader.’73 With the end of the session, the Jana Sangh was left to deal with the largest crisis since its creation. Unlike in the fractious Congress, no ranking leader had been threatened with disciplinary action, 74 let alone a co-founder and past president of the party. In a meeting that included the RSS, Madhok was accused of anti-party activities and expelled for three years. 75 Advani was uncomfortable, later telling his confidante Swapan Dasgupta: ‘I was forced to be the executioner.’76 He had no dislike of Madhok, and left to himself may not have taken this step. Madhok later wrote: ‘They [Vajpayee and Balasaheb Deoras] used Advani’s shoulder to put a gun and end my political career and planned my political murder. If Advani had some confidence and self-strength, he would not have played their game.’77 * * * The removal of Balraj Madhok was followed by M.L. Sondhi leaving the party. The Rhodes scholar and former diplomat had tried to contest against party president Vajpayee in 1971. Govindacharya says, ‘M.L. Sondhi did not know the grammar and dynamics of the sangh parivar relationship. Almost 85 per cent of Jana Sangh cadre were linked to the RSS. Only 15 per cent were like Sondhi, with no RSS connection. How could he win?’ 78 By 1973, Vajpayee had waded through the succession crisis created in the wake of Deendayal’s murder. He had outmanoeuvred two rivals; two more (Nanaji and Subramanian Swamy) would follow. It was never hardliners who made him insecure; he needed them to justify his own existence. It was the orators who could replace him in parliament who threatened Vajpayee the most. The expulsion of Madhok reveals another trait of Hindu nationalism: its reluctance to break organizational unity. It had taken the party a full five years after Madhok had accused Jana Sangh leaders of killing Deendayal to banish him. And when he was finally expelled, the bitterness created had the texture of a family drama. These years also reveal the conversion of a friendship into a partnership. Vajpayee and Advani never let the party presidency out of their hands from 1968 all the way to 1998, with only a two-year gap in between. Advani’s rise from a cautious backroom operative to head of the party was entirely due to Vajpayee, and Advani never forgot the favour. 

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The ascendancy of Vajpayee and Advani to power in the Jana Sangh coincided with a change of leadership in the RSS. In liberal circles, Golwalkar is known as a bearded fundamentalist given to racist writing. But those within the ‘family’ saw him as a gentle patriarch loathe to play personal politics. By June 1973, after thirty-three years of running the RSS, he lay dying of cancer in Nagpur. An assortment of politicians came visiting, including the Congress chief minister of Maharashtra. 79 Years later, Vajpayee would recall spending time with Golwalkar the day before his death. 80 Even in his last hours, Guruji was catering to his family. Golwalkar left behind a supple ideology and volunteer force, 30,000 of whom saluted at his funeral in Nagpur. 81 In his three decades as head, he had moved Hindutva from the sidelines it had been relegated to after Gandhi’s murder, to the middle of the national road. Guruji’s replacement could not have been better suited to this new reality. Along with his brother Bhaurao, Balasaheb Deoras had spent his life in the RSS. Like much of the founding families of the RSS, the Deorases were Brahmins from Nagpur, from the Deshastha sub-caste. Both brothers were easy to work with, an RSS pracharak says. ‘They knew how to work together in an organization. They were practical people . . . in that sense they were political animals, you can say.’ Another former pracharak, Seshadri Chari, does say: ‘Balasaheb Deoras believed that we cannot keep political calculations totally out of consideration while going about the day-to-day activities of RSS. This is starkly in contrast to Golwalkar.’82 Deoras had already set a precedent by being the first RSS leader to address the annual conference of the Jana Sangh. 83 He had also, as we read earlier in this chapter, played a role in Madhok’s ouster. Balasaheb Deoras was, like Vajpayee and Advani, a politician. By 1973, therefore, the leadership of the Jana Sangh and RSS had both gone to realists rather than ideologues. As the next three chapters will reveal, these leaders took their organizations on a particular trajectory from 1973 to 1984. But it might be interesting to pause for a moment to consider a counterfactual: What if Deendayal Upadhyaya had lived on, and, as some speculate, replaced Golwalkar as the head of the RSS? And what if it was Madhok who had grasped the leadership of Jana Sangh, rather than Advani and Vajpayee? The first departure would have been in ideological opposition to Indira Gandhi. Madhok would have merged the Jana Sangh with the Swatantra Party to create a ‘conservative’ coalition, one opposed to bank nationalisation and the abolition of privy purses, and advocating more open markets. He would have also followed a radical Hindu agenda, adopting the Ayodhya movement, or some such provocation, far sooner than Vajpayee did. In the short term, such a strategy might have hurt Hindu nationalists electorally. As we shall see in the next chapter, the opposition to Indira Gandhi took the form of a socialist alliance, and Vajpayee was prescient in moving his party in that direction. The 1970s were not a good time for Madhok’s politics. Yet, in a prophetic way, Madhok’s support for capitalism, his frontal assault on the Nehru–Gandhis, criticisms of Islam and his overtures to the US and Israel would resonate with a man versed with Madhok’s writings. When Madhok died in 2016, this man, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, would pay respects to his dead body in west Delhi. It would take Modi another four decades to dominate India. For now, it was Indira Gandhi who towered over her country’s politics. But though she was at her peak, the Congress’s long decline had begun. By 1973, gloom from the grassroots was coalescing, as were opposition parties. For Vajpayee and Advani, who had just manoeuvred their way to control their party, this turmoil provided them the opportunity to merge with other opposition parties—and finally gain the respectability they craved. But for this to happen, they would first have to go to jail.