Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya went on to become one of the ideologies and was the twelfth President of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, a precursor of the present-day Bharatiya Janata Party. He was born in a poor family in Nagla Chandrabhan village near Mathura, UP, on 25 September, 1916.
As a child, Deendayal had to face the profound grief of several deaths in the family. Deendayal moved from place to place and completed his master’s degree. Deendayal was a prolific writer and a successful editor. He wrote a number of books including Samrat Chandragupt and Jagatguru Shankaracharya, and an analysis of the Five Year plans in India.
In 1942, he joined RSS as a full-time worker, called Pracharak. There, he met the founder of the party, KB Hedgewar, underwent a 40-day camp in Sangh Education and a second-year training in the RSS Education Wing. After this, he became a lifelong pracharak of RSS — first for Lakhmipur district and then as the regional organiser for UP. He was regarded as an ideal swayamsevak of the RSS.
Deendayal Upadhyaya first started the monthly Rashtra
Dharma from Lucknow in the 1940s, meant for spreading the ideology of Hindutva
nationalism. Later on, he also started the weekly Panchjanya and
then the daily Swadesh.
He edited the weekly and daily from Kanpur itself; wrote a Hindi drama on
Chandragupta Maurya, a biography of Shankaracharya, and translated
a Marathi biography of Hedgewar.
He was deputed to work in the Jana Sangh by Shri Golwalkar when the party was founded in 1951 by Dr Syama Prasad Mukherjee.
Deendayal was seconded to the party by the RSS, bestowed with the responsibility of moulding it into a genuine member of the ‘Sangh Parivar’. Then, he was appointed as General Secretary of the party’s Uttar Pradesh branch, and later as the all-India General Secretary. From then till 1967 he remained the Jana Sangh All India General Secretary.
It was during this time that he propounded the political philosophy of Integral Humanism. It is now 50 years since the Jana Sangh adopted Integral Humanism as its political-economic manifesto.
Upadhyaya conceived a classless, casteless and conflict-free social order. He stressed on the ancient Indian wisdom of oneness of the human kind. He emphasised on coexistence and harmony with nature. For him, the brotherhood of a shared, common heritage was central to political activism. He was a pioneer of many political experiments. He was the architect of the first coalition phase in Indian politics.
For India, he visualised a decentralised polity and self-reliant economy with the village being the core basis — which thought of India as an independent nation which cannot rely upon Western concepts like individualism, democracy, socialism, communism or capitalism.
A pool of doubt surrounds the mysterious death of the political leader. Travelling in a train to Patna, a year after he was elected in 1967 as the president of the Jana Sangh, he was allegedly murdered. 10 minutes after the train’s arrival at Mughalsarai station, his body was found near it clutching a five-rupee note in his hand. Reportedly, last he was seen alive was at Jaunpur after midnight. The cause of death was identified as theft, however, without evidence. Hence, the problematic case has been looked into by several judges and has seen demands made by several MPs, politicians and family members to be reopened.
On 11th February 1968, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya passed away, leaving behind a pioneering legacy of social service and an ideological vision that continues to inspire many people across India even today.
The initiatives started in his name
The Centre government’s schemes like Jan Dhan Yojana, Mudra Yojana, Ujwala Yojana, to give free LPG connection to five crore BPL families, Gram Jyoti Yojana, to electrify the last of the 75,000 villages, toilet for all and house for all are all inspired by this vision.
In recognition of his leadership, various institutions have been named after him. These include: the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya hospital in West Delhi; the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya University, in Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh; and the Pandit Deen Dayal Petroleum University, in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.
On 11th February 1968, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya passed away, leaving behind a pioneering legacy of social service and an ideological vision that continues to inspire many people across India even today.
