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 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. 

* * * 

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.

 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

 Elections to the central assembly, precursor to today’s parliament, were scheduled for December 1945. Forty-eight seats were for ‘NonMohammadan’ voters and candidates and thirty for ‘Mohammadan’. 1 In the elections to provincial assemblies (such as Bombay Presidency and the United Provinces) to be held a month later, seats were reserved for Muslims, non-Muslims as well as for Scheduled Castes. As these elections came near, every party knew that the results would determine which of their ‘ideas of India’ the departing British would leave behind. The Congress had by then conceded to some of the Muslim League’s demands. These included near parity between India’s 75 per cent Hindus and 25 per cent Muslims, and an exceedingly federal structure with all-powerful states and a crippled Centre. 2 This was as far as the Congress was willing to go; they refused to countenance a partitioned subcontinent. But for the British to agree to this, the Congress needed to demonstrate that it spoke for all sections of the country. And for this, it needed to win not just an overall majority, but a lion’s share of the general (i.e., non-Mohammedan) constituencies, the Scheduled Caste seats and among Muslims. In each of these segments, the Congress faced challenger parties, each with their own ideas of Independence. It was battling for Muslim seats with the League, which had a single-point agenda of Pakistan. It was competing with B.R. Ambedkar’s party for Scheduled Caste seats. And for the caste-Hindu seats, the Congress was pitted against the Hindu Mahasabha. The face of the Mahasabha campaign was V.D. Savarkar, now sixty-two years old. His writings and lengthy incarceration had made him, as we read

earlier, the ideologue of Hindu nationalism. Joining him was a younger Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the son of a knight and high court judge. At the age of thirty-three, Mookerjee had become the youngest vice-chancellor in the history of Calcutta University. The Congress should have been the natural home for such a Macaulayputra. But Mookerjee had left the Congress, joined the Hindu Mahasabha and, by 1945, was one its most prominent politicians along with Savarkar. The urbane Bengali and unbending Maharashtrian may have come from unalike social worlds, but their views on the Muslim question echoed the party line. Their Hindu Mahasabha was opposed to Pakistan of course, but also to any Congress concessions that ‘deprive[d] the Hindus as Hindus of their due representation to such an extent as to compel three Hindus to have but one vote, while they offered one Muslim three votes’. 3 Realizing the importance of these elections, the Mahasabha requested help from the RSS network of volunteers. The RSS refused.4 An insider says: ‘This was Golwalkar’s biggest mistake. He continued to dislike Savarkar . . . He wanted nothing to do with politics.’ Golwalkar ensured that the eighteenyear-old Advani and the twenty-one-year-old Vajpayee—who were yet to meet each other—were kept away from campaigning. It is not clear if either of these two even voted. What is known is that many in the RSS voted for the Congress as the party of Hindus. The Mahasabha was ignored. When the results were announced, the Congress had swept the ‘general’ seats, winning 923 of 1585 seats in the provincial legislatures and fifty-nine out of 102 of the central seats. This latter figure included victories in all forty-nine caste-Hindu constituencies. 5 The Hindu Mahasabha did not win a single seat for the central assembly or the provincial assemblies. 6 Even B.R. Ambedkar’s Scheduled Castes Federation was thoroughly defeated by the Congress. 7 Gandhi’s Congress could reasonably claim that they, not Savarkar and Ambedkar, were the sole spokesmen for Hindus high and low. Where this claim could not extend was to Muslims. Of the thirty seats reserved for them in the central assembly, the League had won every single one. 8 Of the roughly 500 Muslim seats in the provincial assemblies, the

League had gained 425.9 Since the franchise was limited to those with property, money, or education, over 86 per cent of adult Muslims did not have the right to vote. 10 But the Muslim League interpreted the results conveniently. All Muslims, it declared, were behind its demand for Pakistan. * * * Vajpayee had continued studying law in Kanpur through this tumult. But soon after these elections in 1946, Vajpayee was asked by the RSS to leave his education and set up a Hindi newspaper in the United Provinces. 11 It meant leaving his father for the new paternal authority in his life. That same year, Advani completed his third Officer’s Training Camp in Nagpur; he was now a full-grown functionary. 12 He returned to Karachi and was appointed city secretary of the RSS. 13 Meanwhile, a national government had formed in New Delhi. But squabbles between the Congress and the League paralysed any chance of governance. The British prime minister declared that they would leave India no later than June 1948.14 Realizing that time was not on his side, Jinnah called on ‘Direct Action’ by Muslims on 16 August 1946 to force partition. He proclaimed that we shall have ‘either a divided India or a destroyed India’. 15 He almost got both. Hindu–Muslim violence flowed across India, especially Calcutta, where more than 7000 died in just a few blood-splattered days. 16 The RSS analysis of the violence was predictable. Golwalkar told Hindu merchants: ‘The disunity of the Hindus in Punjab was the cause of the present calamity. The Sangh should unite the Hindus and the capitalists should help by funds.’17 As the violence peaked in June 1947, delegates of the five Muslim-majority provinces left the constituent assembly. The British, desperate to leave, saw how Jinnah had proved his theorem on the ground: Hindus and Muslims were nations unto themselves, incapable of living in peace. A new viceroy had been appointed in March of that year. Louis Mountbatten, the foppish nephew of the King of England, decided, in June

1947, to advance Independence by almost a year—from June 1948 to August 1947. Just two months remained.18 He also announced the final plan for Independence. The British would leave behind two sovereign states. The Muslim-majority provinces in the west would be part of Pakistan, while the religiously mixed states of Bengal and Punjab would be divided. The princely states would have the freedom to decide which country to join. 19 The plan pleased no one. Congress had fought against partition its whole life, while Jinnah was enraged at the ‘mutilated, moth-eaten’ 20 Pakistan he would inherit. But such was the hurry produced by the baffling British decision to flee in two months that the Muslim League formally acquiesced to the partition plan on 9 June 1947,21 and the Congress six days later. 22 Wobbled by a turn of events they could not influence, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS seethed on the sidelines. Syama Prasad Mookerjee wrote in the RSS journal: ‘We have virtually given up a portion of our sacred territory without a fight . . . The Anglo-Muslim League conspiracy outmanoeuvred the Congress and the latter surrendered almost without a protest.’23 On 5 August, partition less than two weeks away, Golwalkar travelled to Karachi. 24 Advani received him at the railway station, and was part of the assembly of 100,000 jittery Hindus listening to the RSS chief speak. Advani was in charge of the 10,000 uniformed RSS men who marched to patriotic songs to calm the crowd. Advani’s loyalty to Hindu nationalism would forever be bought by this show of support. Nine days later, Pakistan was created as a Muslim-majority country, with Karachi as its capital. Advani remembers sweets being distributed; Hindu children refused to eat them. 25 India became independent the next day. ‘What an accursed fate mine is,’ the nineteen-year-old thought. He had looked forward to this day for the past five years, 26 only for his Sindhi soul to be partitioned into two. Through the next seven decades, through grassroots work, party-building, journalism and government service, Advani would remain haunted by the ghosts of partition. His life would be a quest to bandage himself back together.

That very day, 15 August 1947, the RSS launched a Hindi monthly called Rashtradharma in Lucknow. The twenty-two-year-old Atal Bihari Vajpayee was appointed its first joint-editor. 27 A few months later, he joined the weekly Panchajanya as editor. 28 He had finished his third Officer’s Training Camp by then, and had even worked as a pracharak in Sitapur in the United Provinces. 29 But Vajpayee was unused to the hardships of this life. And his talent for Hindi ensured that he was soon moved to desk work. Though he did not know it then, he was already being marked as a communicator, a role he would play for the next six decades. The Panchajanya of these months railed against partition, the culpability of the Muslim League and the connivance of the Congress. As editor, Vajpayee was well aware of the arguments. But sitting 800 kilometres from the international border, partition was a headline rather than a horror. Meanwhile, an estimated 14.5 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were being forced out of their homes to migrate to a new country. 30 More than ten million were rendered homeless. 31 As much as 2.7 million hectares of land were abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab, with 1.9 million hectares abandoned by Muslims in East Punjab.32 The other macabre statistic was on sexual violence: 50,000 Muslim women were abducted as they attempted to flee, while for Hindu and Sikh women the number was 33,000.33 The dead alone crossed a million. 34 Advani recalls motorcycling around Karachi soon after partition. ‘I saw the body of a man who had been stabbed to death. A small distance ahead, I saw another corpse, and then a third . . . This was unusual and disturbing for me as it was the first time in my life that I had seen corpses lying on the street.’35 The emblems of this violence were trains—motifs of modern India— carrying refugees to the other side of Punjab. These trains would be stopped before the border, and the passengers methodically murdered. The trains would then chug along to the other side, delivering their silent cargo. The Hindus of Karachi were sheltered from much of this initial violence. The family of Kamla Jagtiani—who would marry Advani in 1965—remained

in Karachi for almost a year. She would tell a friend: ‘I remember leaving Karachi only in 1948, and that too when we saw the gurudwara in front of our house burning.’ On Advani’s side, some relatives migrated to Mumbai, while his father moved to Kutch, across the border from Sindh. The cosmopolitan trader, owner of a palace, game room and horse carriage in Karachi was now reduced to working with the Sindhu resettlement corporation. 36 Advani himself left Karachi for Delhi in September 1947, one of the few refugees who came by a propeller aircraft of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. 37 The loss of home and dispersal of family had traumatized Advani. But his RSS work had given him an extended family in India. He was taken care of by his new clan. Two months on, he paid a visit to V.D. Savarkar in Bombay. Advani had been shaped by Savarkar’s Great War of Independence as well as his essay on Hindutva. And in the aftermath of partition, Advani perhaps saw Savarkar as a clairvoyant whose decades-long warnings against Congress policies had turned out true. Advani remembers: ‘As I sat in awe of his magnetic presence at his Shivaji park residence he asked me about the situation in Sindh and the conditions of Hindus after partition.’38 This awe did not extend to joining Savarkar’s party. It says something about Advani’s personality that faced with the suffering that turned others to street violence or hard-hitting politics, Advani chose quietism. He remained loyal to the RSS, to its anti-political ethic and to its emphasis on social change. This trait would remain with Advani through his life. The emotions that people ordinarily suffer—jealousy, anger, exuberance—would, in Advani, remain bottled up as silent stoicism. Advani was soon sent to work as a pracharak in Rajasthan. His job was to supervise existing shakhas as well as standardize new ones. Given that shakhas bloom organically, have autonomy and even control their own bank account, Advani’s role was that of a quality inspector ensuring a homogenous product. He would spend his day travelling from village to village, sometimes by bus, sometimes by cycle, sometimes by camel. 39 It was his way of making the subcontinent whole again.

Meanwhile, a national unity government had been formed in India. Gandhi had overruled the Congress cadre to anoint the ‘foreign-educated’ Jawaharlal Nehru, son of a Congress president, to be India’s first prime minister. The cadre’s preferred choice, ‘Sardar’ Vallabhbhai Patel, was made home minister and India’s first deputy prime minister. Gandhi had also insisted that the first cabinet represent all parties, not just the dominant Congress. B.R. Ambedkar was made law minister, Syama Prasad Mookerjee industry minister. For those Muslims who remained, partition had proved a cataclysm. From a confident minority being able to demand concessions, they were now evermore outnumbered, evermore fearful and wholly dependent on the Congress for protection. The RSS saw this as yet another ploy. In December 1947, Golwalkar told a meeting of 200 RSS full-timers that the remaining Muslims should quit India, whereas ‘Mahatma Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India so that the Congress may profit by their votes at the time of elections . . .’40 But with this Muslim percentage halved and waves of Hindu refugees flooding into India, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS were witnessing a boost in their popularity. The former BJP member of parliament Prafull Goradia says: ‘Many of us thought that with partition, we had a clear Hindu majority, and with partition violence, there would be a lot of sympathy for Hindu grievance. The moment seemed ripe for Indian people accepting Hindutva.’41 All that changed at 5:17 p.m. on 30 January 1948 when a Hindu Mahasabha member who had worked in the RSS pumped three bullets into Mohandas Gandhi’s ches

Nathuram was born Ramachandra Godse in 1910 in Pune district. Three male children before him had died, and to ward of this curse, his parents brought him up as a girl for the first few years, even piercing his nose with a ‘nath’, the Marathi word for nose-ring. The teenage Nathuram Godse had been enamoured of the Mahatma, wore a Gandhi cap and shouted satyagrah

slogans. But when his postmaster father was transferred to Ratnagiri in 1930, he came into contact with V.D. Savarkar. 42 Godse’s bearing—chin shaven, eyes intense—began to mimic Savarkar’s, as did his world view: the belief that Muslims were dividing Hindus, and that the Congress along with the British was assisting them. Godse, like Savarkar, was jealous of Gandhi’s political skills in attracting Hindus to the Congress over the Mahasabha. It was envy mixed with the rage that Gandhi was blinding Hindus to their own interests. Godse coupled this with a critique of caste divisions. In his own words: ‘I openly joined [the] RSS wing of anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus were of equal status as to rights, social and religious and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession.’43 Where Godse differed was in his penchant for violence. The RSS’s preoccupation was Hindu unity. Its support for violence was, conceptually at least, only as a defence mechanism to protect Hindus during riots. But for Godse, pre-emptive violence was sometimes necessary. For the RSS, the lesson of Shivaji was that he had consolidated power by uniting Hindus. For Godse: ‘It was absolutely correct tactics for Shivaji to kill Afzal Khan as the latter would otherwise have surely killed him.’44 Gandhi was not just another politician leading Hindu voters astray, his non-violence mirrored the historic weakness of Hindu society. In 1943, Godse started a Marathi paper, Agrani. The paper had a photograph of Savarkar on its masthead (in return, perhaps, for Savarkar’s 15,000-rupee seed money). 45 The Agrani was critical of Gandhi’s concessions to the Muslim League. It also had another, more unexpected, target. ‘Godse used to abuse us,’ the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s M.G. Vaidya says, ‘he saw us as too slow and gradual.’46 L.K. Advani later claimed that Godse’s criticisms in these pages ‘show how bitter he was to the RSS’. Godse felt that ‘. . . the RSS had sublimated the “militant spirit” among the Hindus making them incapable of aggressive action’. 47 The partition of India’s religious territory radicalized Godse further. On 12 January 1948, Gandhi announced another fast, to prod India to pay

Pakistan its share of British India’s finances. 48 This was the last straw for Godse: ‘The accumulating provocation of 32 years culminating in his last pro Muslim fast at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhiji should be brought to an end immediately.’49 Soon after, Nathuram Godse, along with his Agrani co-editor Narayan Apte and a Punjabi refugee called Madanlal Pahwa, decided to act. On 20 January 1948, Pahwa ignited an explosive at Birla House in Delhi where Gandhi was staying. 50 The explosion did no damage and Pahwa was let off. Ten days later, Godse and Apte went to Birla House. Godse was carrying a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic 

51 that had belonged to an employee of the Maharaja of Gwalior.

 52 The judge who heard Godse’s crime describes what happened next: ‘The prayer meeting had not yet started, but a crowd of about 200 persons was awaiting the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi. Godse was moving among the people apparently unconcerned. Suddenly, there was a stirring in the crowd, and everyone stood up to form a passage for Mahatma Gandhi, who was seen coming up slowly with his hands resting on the shoulders of two girls who were walking by his side. As he raised his hands to join them in the customary greeting, Godse took a quick step forward, pushed aside the girl on Gandhiji’s right and, standing in front of him, fired three shots in quick succession at point-blank range.

’53 Gandhi’s last words were ‘Hey Ram, Hey Ram’.

 54 Godse was arrested along with nine others. 

55 These included Narayan Apte and Digambar Badge—the latter helped the government’s case against the others. It also included the pioneer of Hindutva, V.D. Savarkar. The trial was conducted at the Red Fort in Delhi. The seat of Mughal power was chosen to signal continuity with the past as well as new India’s secular credentials.

 56 One hundred and forty-nine prosecution witnesses testified over a ten-month period. The judge convicted Godse and Apte and sentenced them to death. The others were sentenced to life in prison. Savarkar alone was let off for lack of evidence. 

57 Godse was hung from Ambala jail on 15 November 1949. He walked to the gallows clutching a copy of the Bhagavadgita.

 There is no mystery about why Godse killed Gandhi. He provided a ninety-three-page explanation in court. 

59 Apart from criticizing Gandhi’s nonviolence, Godse advocated his own vision of a Hindu state. It is an elected state based on what he termed ‘joint electorates’, i.e., one-person-one-vote. He was even willing to agree to ‘the temporary introduction of separate electorates since the Muslims were keen on them’. He however ‘insisted that representation should be granted in strict proportion to the number of every community and no more’. 

60 His fury with the Mahatma was that he had bowed before the Muslim League’s demands, in effect reducing the voting power of India’s 75 per cent Hindus. Godse was only mouthing the demographic anxieties born out of electoral competition that had plagued Savarkar, the Mahasabha and the RSS. There is no mystery about Godse’s motives; they are the motives of Hindu nationalism. More debatable, however, is the identity of all those who helped Godse kill Gandhi. Did it include the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha and Savarkar? Investigations revealed no link between the RSS leadership and Godse. A 1966 commission re-examined the conspiracy by scrutinizing 101 witnesses and 407 documents; it cleared the organization of any connection with the crime.

 61 The most incisive critic of the RSS’s role is the legal scholar A.G. Noorani. Even he says that the claim that the organization killed Gandhi is a straw man. The valid accusation, he says, is that Godse ‘was a member of the RSS and shared its ideas’.

 62 That Godse had at one time been an RSS member is undisputed. It is less clear whether he was a member when he killed Gandhi. He himself denied it, as did Golwalkar. 

63 The most detailed biographer of Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha, says that Godse had left the RSS by the time. 

64 In 1992, L.K. Advani claimed that ‘we have had nothing to do with Godse’.

 65 In response, Gopal Godse said that his brother had never formally quit the RSS. 

66 The status of Godse’s link to the RSS at the time he killed Gandhi will forever be debated. What is undebatable is that Godse did not share all of the ideas of the RSS. Far from supporting political violence, the RSS had wanted nothing to do with politics during this period. This is why Savarkar

and Godse had publicly criticized the RSS through the mid-1940s. It is fair to conclude that the RSS played no institutional role in Gandhi’s death. The relationship of the Mahasabha to the killing is more convoluted. Gandhi’s great-grandson, who has written a book on the assassination, says: ‘Of the seven attempts on Gandhi’s life, five involve the Pune unit of the Hindu Mahasabha.’67 Immediately after the murder, Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Syama Prasad Mookerjee: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that the extreme section of the Hindu Mahasabha was involved in this conspiracy.’68 Godse and Apte were party members, and Savarkar was a former president. The current president spoke of a ‘feeling of shame and humiliation, as the alleged assassin belonged to the Mahasabha’. 69 Yet, the Mahasabha was not banned after the killing. Nehru and Patel had realized that those involved were a splinter group unconnected with a Mahasabha leadership that included their own cabinet colleague. What to make, however, of the role of Savarkar? Unlike the RSS and the Mahasabha, Savarkar was ‘charge-sheeted’ for the murder, i.e., the police and magistrate thought there was a strong enough case against him. Through the trial in the Red Fort, 70 he sat in the dock in the back row, avoiding Godse’s eyes. The prosecution tried to establish that Godse and Apte had met Savarkar while planning the murder. But what was discussed remains unknown. When the judge asked Godse whether he was acting under the advice of Savarkar, Godse rejected this ‘unjust and untrue charge’. 71 The prosecution case tying Savarkar to the conspiracy hinged on a single incident. Digambar Badge, who had turned ‘approver’ for the prosecution, told the court that after a meeting with Apte and Godse three days before the attempt on Gandhi’s life on 20 January, Savarkar saw them off at the entrance with the Marathi words: ‘Yashasvi hovun ya.’72 Come back victorious. But no witnesses could corroborate this. Savarkar was declared not guilty and spent the next eighteen years in Bombay. His family remained close to the Godses; his niece married Godse’s nephew. After Savarkar’s death in 1966, a government-appointed commission reinvestigated Gandhi’s murder. Savarkar’s secretary and bodyguard testified that he had met Godse and Apte just before Gandhi was killed. This

testimony had not been produced in the original trial. The commission concluded: ‘All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.’73 This was only a commission finding, not a court judgment; Savarkar remains legally innocent. When the Supreme Court was asked to reinvestigate the murder fifty years later, the court-appointed lawyer examined the evidence and concluded: ‘Since the late Vinayak D. Savarkar had been acquitted, at this stage, it would neither be advisable/desirable nor possible to come to a definitive finding with respect to Vinayak D. Savarkar’s role in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.’74 In the immediate aftermath of the murder in January 1948, however, these fine distinctions were yet unknown. Apart from arresting Savarkar and eight others, the government turned its attention on the shadowy group that Godse had once been a member of. This organization had so far avoided politics, refusing to develop a theory on the state. But now, after the murder of Mohandas, it was the state that was developing a theory on the RSS. * * * M.S. Golwalkar was organizing in Madras when news reached him of Gandhi’s death. 75 He immediately sent a wire to Nehru and Patel in Hindi. Golwalkar called Gandhi a ‘great personality’ and an ‘unparalleled organiser’. He asked all RSS shakhas to observe a thirteen-day grieving period.76 The next day he wrote to Nehru and Patel: ‘My heart is filled with worries thinking of the future.’77 He was prescient. On 3 February 1948, the RSS leadership in Nagpur sent a terse message to shakhas across India: ‘Guruji interned. Be calm at all costs.’78 The next day, the government banned the RSS and arrested 20,00079 of its five million members, 80 including almost every pracharak. 81 The RSS remembers this ban—which would last for the next seventeen months—as its most traumatic period. M.G. Vaidya, who was a member then, recalls: ‘Everyone was against the RSS—janata, sarkar, akhbar [the people, government, press].

’82 Ordinary Indians began to attack RSS men, burning their houses, vandalizing their offices. Irate crowds surrounded the RSS office in Delhi. Among those participating was the Congressman Jayaprakash Narayan, 83 who would ally with the RSS three decades later. The police even had to declare a curfew in Poona 84 to protect the RSS from an outraged mob. The Brahmins, who were seen as associated with the RSS and Godse, were specifically targeted. In Nagpur, a horde swarmed the office of an RSS weekly newspaper and smashed furniture. The Hindu Mahasabha office was also ‘rifled’ through. Another thousand-strong mob marched on the RSS headquarters and house of Golwalkar. Local Congress leaders had to intervene to protect them from physical harm. 85 Its workers went into hiding. M.G. Vaidya remembers doing underground work—printing pamphlets, cyclostyling material—during the ban. ‘I used to wear a necktie. The police did not think anyone with a necktie will be doing sangh work. So I was not suspected.’86 Another RSS worker can still remember the ordeal. ‘I was pracharak in what is today Washim zilla [district]. I was harassed. I found it hard to get food and drink as pracharaks depend on local people for that. So I ate sev-chiwda for four months. I did not even have a cycle. People were afraid to call me home for food since I was a sangh ka aadmi.’ L.K. Advani was in Alwar at the time. He was among the ‘tens of thousands of RSS swayamsevaks, including most pracharaks [who] were put behind bars’. 87 Like the rest of his tribe, Advani had opposed Gandhi’s negotiations with the Muslim League. But Gandhi’s ‘absolute honesty and the purity of his personality’ 88 resonated with Advani. He spent the next three months in Alwar jail. Advani was only allowed three thick rotis and tasteless dal, served just twice a day. 89 On release in August 1948, he spent the next several months moving from house to house to avoid detection. Advani’s ordeal during this ban would mirror his tribulations the second time the RSS was banned, during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977. Vajpayee’s whereabouts during this ban would similarly echo his experience of the Emergency. The young editor was not arrested. It was just

as well; unlike Advani, the epicurean would probably not have been able to survive the chunky rotis and insipid dal. By February 1949, it was clear to the government that the RSS had no role in the killing of Gandhi. The ban was lifted in July 1949.90 As barter, the government required the RSS to write a Constitution where it pledged loyalty to the Indian Constitution and flag, and vowed to remain apolitical. 91 The RSS adopted a Constitution two months later. It reiterated its original aim: ‘unification of diverse groups within Hindu samaj’, based on ‘dharma’ [religion] and ‘sanskriti’ [culture]. 92 The RSS Constitution also stressed its aversion to politics. But privately the RSS was rethinking this disavowal. Its leadership had noticed that few politicians had defended the RSS after Gandhi’s death. Ravindra Bhagwat comes from an RSS family; his brother is the current head. He says: ‘What I have heard is that after the illegal 1948 ban, there was not a single person in parliament talking against the ban.’93 Another RSS member points to another lesson learnt. ‘We noticed that the Mahasabha was not banned.’ This was despite Savarkar, Godse and Apte having been more active in the Mahasabha compared to the RSS. The reason for this, the RSS concluded, was that the Hindu Mahasabha had a footprint in parliament and the union cabinet. Political presence had protected the Mahasabha, while political absence had made the RSS vulnerable. The RSS’s turn towards politics was also being aided by changes in the Congress. Gandhi’s death had left his party in the hands of his two lieutenants. Though sharing many dreams for a new India, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel had contrasting instincts towards Hindu nationalism. The RSS watched. Whose impulse triumphed would dictate whether the RSS would be content with being a social organization, or whether it would need a party of its own. * * * Born into a landowning family in Gujarat in 1875, Vallabhbhai Patel rose up as a lawyer in the judicial bureaucracy. He worked as a district pleader in

Godhra, where a hundred years later, a burning train would end Vajpayee and Advani’s careers and bring to life Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s. Older than Nehru and less anglicized, the balding Patel rarely smiled and only spoke after weighing his words. He enjoyed organizational work and had the devotion of the cadre. 94 As India’s first home minister, Patel integrated the 500-plus princely states into India, earning him the praise of Hindu nationalists still scarred by the partition of their sacred land.95 Most of these states were ones where the ruler and the ruled were of the same religion, making it easy to integrate them into independent India. Three states, however, posed problems. Hindumajority Hyderabad and Junagadh were ruled by Muslim kings. Kashmir on the other hand was a Muslim-majority province ruled by a Hindu king. Unlike the other two, Kashmir was also contiguous with West Pakistan. The logic of the two-nation theory dictated that it go to Pakistan. That the Congress had reconciled itself to this can be seen from Patel’s ‘firm assurances’ to Mountbatten, just before partition, that ‘if [the Maharaja of Kashmir] acceded to Pakistan, India would not take it amiss’. 96 In a speech after independence, Patel said: ‘Pakistan attempted to set off Kashmir against Junagadh. When we raised the question of settlement in a democratic way, they (Pakistan) at once told us that they would consider it if we applied that policy to Kashmir. Our reply was that we would agree to Kashmir if they agreed to Hyderabad.’97 Had Pakistan given up Junagadh and Hyderabad state, the new Indian government would likely have accepted Pakistan’s claim on Kashmir. What surprised both Nehru and Patel was that on 15 August 1947, the Nawab of Junagadh, an eccentric devoted to his 400 dogs, announced that he was joining Pakistan. More infuriating for them, Pakistan accepted, even though Junagadh was a Hindu-majority province with no land connections to Pakistan. Meanwhile in Kashmir, worried that the Hindu king would accede to India, Jinnah sent irregular troops to take over the state. A terrified Maharaja signed the accession treaty with India on 26 October 1947, and Indian troops pushed back the Pakistani irregulars. They soon seized Junagadh, as well as

Hyderabad state. Jinnah’s craving for all three princely states meant that he ended up having none. What gave credence to the Indian claim on Kashmir was of course the agreed-upon partition principle that gave princes the power to decide for their state. But what lent legitimacy to the annexation was that Kashmir’s most popular leader, Sheikh Abdullah, was in favour of India. The matter could have ended there, but for two decisions whose consequences play out to this day. The most important of these was the government’s choice, prodded by Mountbatten, 98 to agree to a ceasefire (Indian troops stopped at what is now referred to as the line of control) and ask the United Nations to mediate. UN Security Council Resolution 47, adopted in April 1948, provided a threestep process to solve the dispute, culminating in a plebiscite. 99 Both India and Pakistan rejected the UN resolution, 100 which has never been implemented. India argues that the conditions for a plebiscite have changed, and Pakistan never followed the first step, i.e., the withdrawal of its armed nationals from its part of Kashmir. Pakistan continues to insist that a plebiscite take place. The other decision that has kept Kashmir unresolved was once again a choice by India’s first prime minister. A scholar who has examined the original instrument of accession signed by the Kashmir king says: ‘Every one of the 140 princely states that signed IoAs with the Dominion of India agreed to the same terms and conditions as J&K’. 101 These legal terms under which Kashmir acceded to India was under the Indian Independence Act and were not unique. What was singular was that the Nehru government thought that Muslim-majority Kashmir required constitutional provisions to protect its status. Nehru discussed the matter at length with his cabinet, and then the constituent assembly. The result: Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. 102 The import of this article was to hold that Indian laws applied to Kashmir only with regard to defence, foreign affairs and communication. Like with some select parts of the country, Indians from other states required a special permit to enter Kashmir in the early years, and were banned from buying

property in the state. 103 And unlike anywhere else, the state was allowed its own Constitution, prime minister, laws and flag. These compromises were distasteful for a man who had effectively integrated all the other princely states into India. As Patel said in a speech in 1948: ‘We have seen what price we have paid in Kashmir by going to that [United Nations] organisation.’104 His biographer Rajmohan Gandhi says: ‘Patel was unhappy with many of India’s steps over Kashmir, including the offer of a plebiscite, the reference to the UN, the ceasefire that left a fair part of the State in Pakistani hands and the removal of the Maharaja. But though occasionally dropping a remark or a hint, he never spelt out his own solution.’105 The Hindu nationalists, on the other hand, spelt out their solution then, did so in manifesto after manifesto for the next seventy years, and finally got it written down in 2019. That was the year the Narendra Modi government used its parliamentary majority to pass legislation ending this special status for Kashmir. * * * If Kashmir showcases one disagreement between Nehru and Patel, their reactions to rebuilding the Somnath temple demonstrate another. The temple was located in the princely state of Junagadh and had been ravaged by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century. How critical this wound was to Hindu consciousness is contested.106 What is clear is that K.M. Munshi’s book on the ruin of Somnath, written in the early twentieth century, provided a rising Hindu nationalism with a parable to hold on to.107 With Junagadh annexed by November 1947, Somnath was now under Indian sovereignty. Patel travelled there three days later and declared that the Somnath temple would be rebuilt. 108 Nehru was uncomfortable with a secular state participating in a religious project. Funds for the reconstruction were collected privately and with help from the RSS. Yet another ‘Hindu’ issue on which Nehru and Patel argued was the Babri mosque, built in 1528 by a courtier to the Mughal emperor who named it

after his master. It was located in Ayodhya, which is revered in Hindu tradition as the birthplace of the god Ram. 109 Since at least the nineteenth century, there are records of violence between local Hindus and Muslims, with Hindus claiming the mosque stood atop a Hindu temple that marked the birthplace of Ram. Now in 1949, a Hindu group placed idols inside the mosque. 110 A ‘disturbed’ Nehru demanded, via telegram, that the state chief minister ‘undo the wrong’. 111 Patel saw the telegram and wrote his own letter to the chief minister. Though he deplored any use of force, Patel wrote: ‘I realise there is a great deal of sentiment behind the move which has taken place.’112 Fifty years later, Advani would depose before a judicial commission on the charge of obliterating the Babri mosque. He would stress this phrase in Patel’s letter, adding: ‘I would endorse every word of what he had said.’113 A final issue on which Nehru and Patel adopted opposing approaches was the question of Hindu refugees from East Bengal. Unlike Punjab where the ethnic cleansing of minorities on both sides was near total, there continued to be eleven million Hindus in East Pakistan (around 28 per cent of the population), while the five million Muslims in West Bengal constituted 24 per cent of the population. 114 Violence eventually flared up. In just the month of February 1950, anti-Hindu riots in East Pakistan killed 10,000. An estimated 860,000 Hindus crossed over, 115 while 650,000 Muslims left West Bengal for the other side. 116 Patel warned Pakistan: ‘If you are determined to turn out Hindus, you must part with sufficient land to enable us to settle down.’117 Nehru on the other hand advocated a ‘long distance dispassionate view . . . Any claim for territory is completely unreal.’118 In the end, it was Nehru who won, avoiding war and signing an agreement with Pakistan’s prime minister that listed mechanisms for both sides to protect minorities and stem the flow of refugees. 119 Industry Minister Syama Prasad Mookerjee saw this as a sell-out. He had resigned from the Hindu Mahasabha over his party’s reluctance to admit nonHindus soon after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Now, in April 1950, he resigned from Nehru’s cabinet. The Mahasabha congratulated its prodigal

son, as did the RSS. But even they realized that with Mookerjee’s exit, their influence over the government was diminished. This fear was amplified eight months later, when the seventy-five-year-old Vallabhbhai Patel died of a heart attack in Bombay. Patel had always been more sympathetic to the RSS than Nehru. He saw them as ‘patriots who love their country. Only their trend of thought is diverted.’120 Months before his death, he had ensured that the Congress passed a resolution allowing RSS workers to join. It took Nehru’s personal intervention to scuttle the plan. 121 The historian Ramachandra Guha writes: ‘Nehru and Patel were colleagues not rivals, co-workers not adversaries. Working individually, and together, they united India and gave it a democratic template.’122 But these differences on the RSS, Pakistan, Kashmir, Somnath and Ayodhya have led Hindu nationalists to see Patel as the first prime minister India never had. Advani, who would eventually occupy Patel’s office, would imitate India’s first home minister. Vajpayee, on the other hand, would model himself after India’s first premier. As we shall see through this book, he would maintain a distance from the RSS, and would follow his idol in making the most concessions any prime minister has made to Pakistan and Kashmir. All that would come later. For now, with his deputy gone in December 1950, the prime minister was unfettered to shape his party, his government and his country. And he wanted that shape to be in opposition to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha. Faced with an unconstrained Jawaharlal Nehru, the RSS needed a new insurance policy.