Independent India’s first elections were held from October 25, 1951 to February 21, 1952. To commemorate that monumental exercise, The Wire is publishing a series of articles exploring various aspects of the first ever general election in independent India. Read it here.
Why did the Jan Sangh fail to make electoral inroads in the aftermath of Partition? This is a legitimate question which has not been publicly answered, as far as I know. The simple explanation is that it was a bad idea to float a brand new outfit in order to contest the first general elections in 1951-52.
It was in October 1951 that M.S. Golwalkar and Syama Prasad Mookerjee met in a house on Kolkata’s then Cornwallis Street. The main agenda was – why not start a new party in the shadow of M.K. Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948 and in the light of the scheduled general elections. Mookerjee’s proposal was that the RSS should promote a political party. Golwalkar’s response was that the Sangh was essentially a socio-cultural organisation and to bring it into politics would disturb its idealistic focus.
But Golwalkar was open to the idea of Mookerjee, already a known political figure, starting a party, to which the RSS would nominate two of its tried workers for each province (now state), to set the ball rolling. Mookerjee had resigned from the Hindu Mahasabha on the morrow of Gandhiji’s assassination nearly three years earlier, and did not have a team large enough for an electoral battle as well as development work thereafter. An agreement was reached between the two Hindu leaders and work began promptly.
Mookerjee was a scholar and a gentleman. At the age of 33, he was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta. Incidentally, his father, Ashutosh Mookerjee, and had also been vice-chancellor.
Mookerjee knew only the grammar of fair and square play. Neither the rough and tumble, nor the astuteness of realpolitik, were his cup of tea. The death of Gandhi, he felt, must be mourned in all its completeness. On the defensive, he quit the Hindu Mahasabha, to which it was alleged that Gandhi’s assassin belonged. In Bengal, Gandhiji did not evoke the same following, owing largely to his perceived discomfort with Netaji. Yet, Dr. Syama Prasad responded with actions which were politically not essential.
To contest a national election, central as well provincial simultaneously, within four months of a party’s founding was a tall order. Appropriately, from an organisational viewpoint, Mookerjee should have returned to the Hindu Mahasabha which was a readymade entity, set up in 1915. It already had about 35 years of experience and a solid brand value behind it. To ask people who were not exposed to such an election to vote for a party they had not heard of was taking on a tough challenge.
The Congress, on the other hand, was an all-embracing mammoth. Moreover, there were socialists called the Praja Socialist Party, Ram Manohar Lohia’s Socialist Party, the Communist Party et al. Mookerjee needed to offer something distinct; what, if not the Mahasabha?
Also read: How Communist Party of India Emerged as Largest Opposition to Congress in 1951-52
Strangely, the new party was not projected clearly as a Hindu platform. The wounds of Partition were still raw. But the word “Hindu” was deliberately avoided by the leaders; Jan Sangh was a nondescript name, certainly so in Bengal where my family had settled. I was only 15 at the time but this was the feedback I recall my father brought back from his work place.
Mookerjee fought from the Rash Bihari Avenue or South Calcutta constituency where we lived; and where his residence was also situated. I saw him campaigning in an open lorry once. He was highly respected and won easily. But only two other Jan Sangh candidates won in the whole country. Had he led the Hindu Mahasabha, not less than about 40 Lok Sabha seats should have been certain. Partition had just happened; the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of 1950 to protect minorities had irked Hindu sentiment and the inflow of Hindu refugees had begun from East Pakistan.
Mookerjee had quit the Nehru cabinet over the Pact. The deluge of refugees from the Punjab, alive, bleeding or dead, was fresh in public memory and even after two years they were still unsettled. The absence of the word “Hindu” in the name of the party and public unfamiliarity with the name of the new party took its electoral toll. The name “Jan Sangh” was akin to a lion in Bengal without its claws.
The new party and its members did not have any great legacy of experience. Their interaction with experienced politicians came with the formation of the Janata Party to oppose Indira Gandhi and her Emergency. After its members were forced out from the Janata Party in the early 1980s, the graduation of the Jana Sangh had begun. Even then, the new ideology they embraced called “Gandhian Socialism” was an act of amateurism, a mixture of two unmixable elements.
The maturity of their political education was achieved only after 2013, when the campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections began. The Bharatiya Janata Party was able decisively to connect with the masses, helped in part by its forward thinking flexibility and absence of rigidity, something that hobbled Soviet Communism.
Prafull Goradia was a Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP.