When Sadhus Promoted Five-Year Plans

Excerpted with permission from Nikhil Menon, Planning Democracy: How A Professor, An Institute, and An Idea Shaped India (Penguin Viking, 2022).

A temple in Delhi to the god Vishnu and goddess Lakshmi hosted an unusual meeting on 19 February 1956. Ministers, parliamentarians and fifty holy men gathered at Birla Mandir around a curious idea. They were discussing a proposal for sadhus—Hindu ascetics who have renounced family and materialism for austere spirituality—to promote the Five-Year Plans….

The Bharat Sadhu Samaj (Indian Society of Ascetics) received enthusiastic backing from religiously minded national figures such as President Rajendra Prasad and, especially, the Minister for Planning Gulzarilal Nanda. Apart from helping establish it, Nanda would subsequently serve as the chairman of its central advisory committee…. So close was Nanda to this venture that a cartoon in Shankar’s Weekly after the Birla Mandir meeting depicted the Minister of Planning as a sadhu—bare-chested, ribs protruding, loin-clothed, hair bound in a top-knot.

The government’s recruitment of sadhus was based on the belief that these holy men—numbering in the millions according to the 1951 census—could convey the Plans to the unlettered and religious millions in familiar idioms. In his speech at the Birla temple, Nanda spoke of the influence sadhus wielded and asked them to create an upsurge in favour of the Second Five-Year Plan. Soon after, he recommended that the sadhus organize themselves into a formal society, which became the Bharat Sadhu Samaj. The document announcing its birth decried India’s drift towards materialism under colonial rule and urged the country’s holy men and women to ‘help a free government and a free people’. Tukdoji Maharaj, the spiritual leader presiding over the meeting, implored those in attendance to blend devotional practices with national development and preach the message of work to their vast following.

After the temple gathering, the fifty ascetics representing the newly formed Bharat Sadhu Samaj paid a visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan. While the President of India is usually the person conferring distinctions on Indian citizens, the roles were reversed this time. The sadhus bestowed on President Rajendra Prasad the tile of ‘Sant’ (saint) while chanting sacred Sanskrit mantras. They sprinkled in some flattery as well, likening the President of India to King Dasharatha from the Ramayana and themselves to the sages who advised the legendary royal court in Ayodhya. The mutual regard wasn’t unexpected. An uncompromisingly religious man, Rajendra Prasad had only a few years earlier deferentially washed the feet of 200 Brahmin priests in Benares, anointing their foreheads with sandalwood paste, garlanding them and handing each eleven rupees in dakshina. The President had also inaugurated the rebuilding of the Somnath Temple (attacked during medieval raids by Mahmud of Ghazni and Alauddin Khilji). He did this despite the Prime Minister’s alarm about the President associating himself with a sensitive religious symbol while the wounds of Partition were still raw. Like the planning minister, India’s first President wasn’t bashful about appearing to be a patron of Hindu causes.…

Also read: We Need a Campaign to Demand the Planning Commission’s Revival

In independent India, the saga of the Sadhu Samaj illustrates the lengths to which Plan publicity went, the difficulties inherent in combining technocratic planning with its democratic imperative and the unlikely pairings this produced. The Five-Year Plans were painted saffron and disseminated through a religious vehicle, driven by men and women who embodied material renunciation. This episode, with its ripples through politics in the ensuing decades, offers a different vantage from which to observe the enmeshing of politics and religion in modern India. The secular discourse of planning was pried open by the Congress government to admit the participation of Hindu ascetics in the process of Plan propagation. Once granted official legitimacy however, the Congress Party would find it difficult to control sadhus who had their own commitments such as cow-protection and building a Hindu temple at the site of a medieval mosque in Ayodhya. In this instance, it was the Congress that knotted the secular and sacred, a gamble that eventually benefited its future rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Bharat Sadhu Samaj’s recipe, combining the spiritual and material, proved irresistible to the American press. It played into the stereotype of India as an exotic ancient land and offered a lurid drama of a new nation scrambling to be modern while straddling several centuries. The New York Times’ India correspondent, A.M. Rosenthal, reported a piece titled ‘India’s Holy Men Get Worldly Job: Wandering Sadhus Asked to Say a Good Word for Goals of the 2nd Five-Year Plan’. The point, he reported, was to have hundreds of thousands of sadhus ‘put in a good word wherever they go for the goals of the five year plan’. Even the modest Battle Creek Enquirer from Michigan reported that India’s planning minister was trying to ‘shake this country’s half million Hindu holy men out of their spiritual world into the material world of five-year development plans’.…

Two months after the inaugural temple meeting, 500 holy men gathered on the banks of the Ganga, at Rishikesh, on the auspicious occasion of the Ardh Kumbh Mela. A reporter for the Washington Post observed that ‘India’s shaven-headed, saffron-robed Sadhus (Holy Men) are to help preach the virtues of the five-year plan to the people… They have decided to leave the isolated retreats where they lead lives of renunciation and meditation to support national development.’ Those pledging their support to the Plans included ‘Sadhus from the south, semi-naked saints from Himalayan caves, ash smeared wandering mendicants with their begging bowls and the heads of famous hermitages in the Himalayas’…

The government’s involvement with this band of holy men did not go unnoticed in Parliament. Bhakt Darshan, a writer and Congress MP, sarcastically asked the planning minister in Hindi if the Sadhu Samaj was an official fundraising enterprise. Was the aim ‘for Indian citizens to take inspiration from these sadhus, adopt lives of hardship and austerity, so that they could save money and contribute to programs of national development’? Another Congress parliamentarian, Mulla Abdullabhai, asked if there was to be a Muslim equivalent of this body. Would, for example, maulvis also be asked to help through a joint ‘Bharat Sadhu Maulvi Samaj’? The left-wing Hari Vishnu Kamath raised an important concern: what assurance could the Congress Party provide that the Bharat Sadhu Samaj would not be used for partisan ‘political propaganda especially as the vote-catching season approaches?’…

The president of the Bharat Sadhu Samaj told the press in late June 1956 that they had launched a mass-awakening programme for the success of the Plan. It also requested a grant of Rs 15,00,00,000 from the government to be used for constructive activities and propaganda towards the Second Plan. Two months later, Gulzarilal Nanda managed to usher the Sadhu Samaj’s representatives into the Prime Minister’s office for a meeting. That December, they convened an All India Sadhu Sammelan in Rajasthan; a thousand holy men and women gathered in Nathdwara, an ancient town ringed by hills. Predictably, Gulzarilal Nanda opened the meeting, and messages of goodwill poured in from politicians including Nehru, K.M. Munshi and Morarji Desai. The Prime Minister’s message expressed his happiness about the Bharat Sadhu Samaj taking part in the work of national reconstruction: ‘In this way much assistance could be given for the success of the Five-Year Plan.’…

When construction began on the Sadhu Samaj’s New Delhi headquarters in Chanakyapuri’s Diplomatic Enclave—on government-allotted land at a projected cost of Rs 5,00,000—both the President and Vice President of India officiated the foundation ceremonies. J.B. Kripalani saw the influence of Gulzarilal Nanda behind the Samaj being granted this plot. The Praja Socialist Party leader would lament the sort of ascetics who traded their humble ‘kutiyas’ (huts) in order to move into a ‘palatial house’ in one of Delhi’s ‘most fashionable quarters’. The link to the government and ruling party was so evident that the Hindu Mahasabha dismissively referred to those in the Bharat Sadhu Samaj as ‘Congress sadhus’.

Nikhil Menon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Notre Dame.