Unforgettable statesman and scholar Syama Prasad Mookerjee
Syama Prasad Mookerjee founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh on October 21, 1951 in Delhi and became its first president. In the 1952 elections, the party won three seats in the Parliament including his own. He had formed the National Democratic Party within the Parliament. It consisted of 32 members of Lok Sabha and 10 of Rajya Sabha. However, it was not recognised by the Speaker as an opposition party. The Jana Sangh was created with an objective of nation-building and nationalising all non-Hindus by ‘softly hammering the traditional Indian culture' into their heads. The party was ideologically close to the RSS.
As circumstances would have it, Syama Prasad was made the Minister for Industry and Supplies in the Cabinet of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. But he resigned in protest against the Nehru-Liaquat Pact which he believed was against national interest.
Mookerjee was the true founder of the Bharatiya Janata Party. He was vehemently against a different flag for Jammu and Kashmir. He was in J&K to resolve several J&K issues. But he died there in June 1953 while in police custody.
Mookerjee's father Sir Ashutosh Mookerjee was a barrister and mother Jogmaya Devi a popular scholar. He studied at the Presidency College, Kolkata. He had studied law apart from obtaining a postgraduate degree in Bengali as well as one in English. In 1925, he went to England to study law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1927. He was the youngest Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta from 1934 to 1938. He had by now turned down all lucrative offers across the British empire because of his matchless scholarly status only to become the youngest Vice-Chancellor in India. It was during his tenure that Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore delivered the convocation address in pure Bengali.
Mookerjee joined the Bengal Legislative Council in 1929 representing Calcutta University from the Indian National Congress. However, he resigned a year later out of disgust for the wrong principles followed by the party. He was made the president of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha founded by Madan Mohan Malaviya but opposed the Quit India movement as he believed it was a timid way of exerting pressure on the British masters. He did not hesitate once to write tricky letters to the British Governor duping them to believe that the movement be thwarted with an ulterior motive of employing better indigenous methods to threaten the colonial rulers.
In 1946, Mookerjee demanded partition of Bengal as he did not want the Hindu-majority areas to be included in East Pakistan. He wrote to Lord Mountbatten on this issue. He was also opposed to the idea of an independent and united Bengal proposed by Subhas Chandra Bose’s brother Sarat Bose and Bengali Muslim politician Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy.
Mookerjee made significant contributions in the fields of education, politics, society and culture. He also championed the cause of J&K's complete integration with the Union of India. His death in Kashmir remains a mystery as some believe he was killed by detractors by guile or conspiracy.
It be mentioned here that Mookerjee's leadership qualities had come to the fore when he guided prominent institutions such as the Asiatic Society and the Indian Institute of Science. His first brush with electoral politics came in 1929 when he was elected to the legislative assembly as a Congress candidate representing Calcutta University. However, he resigned a year later only to get re-elected as an independent candidate after the Congress boycotted the Assembly. His first tryst with Hindutva politics came after he joined the Hindu Mahasabha. In 1944, he became its president. He was a member of Nehru’s Cabinet, but he resigned in 1950. And in 1951, he founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh after consultation with MS Golwalkar of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as neither did approve the way the Congress was lead by Nehru's extra-progressive principles that damaged the time-tested resilient fabric of India and diluted all age-old proven principles of peaceful coexistence.
Mookerjee's next area of focus was achieving Kashmir's total integration into India and he strongly opposed Article 370, the provision in the Constitution that assigned autonomous status to J&K. He was vehemently against a rule that required non-Kashmiris to have a permit to visit the State. To protest against this, he went to J&K and was arrested on May 11, 1953. He died under preventive detention on June 23, 1953 at the age of 51. His death remains controversial to this day.
Mookerjee's Bharatiya Jana Sangh later merged with other non-Congress parties to form the Janata Party, which later became the present-day BJP. The Janata Party Government fell in 1979. Lok Dal leader Chaudhary Charan Singh became the Prime Minister with the Congress’ support. The BJP as an independent political outfit was officially formed in 1980. The Janata Party faced a crushing defeat in the 1980 Lok Sabha elections. After this, a resolution was passed in the Janata Party executive meeting wherein any kind of association with the RSS was banned. Against this backdrop, the leaders who came from the Jana Sangh to the Janata Party charted a new political course. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani and other leaders of the Jana Sangh announced the formation of a political party called the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on April 6, 1980. Vajpayee became the first president of the BJP. The BJP's founder members were Vajpayee, Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Nanaji Deshmukh, KR Malkani, Sikandar Bakht, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Vijay Raje Scindia, Bhairo Singh Shekhawat, Shanta Kumar, Ram Jethmalani and Jagannath Rao. The election symbol of Jana Sangh was 'Deepak' or oil lamp while that of the BJP was 'Lotus'. The BJP founders made 'Lotus' the election symbol because this symbol was earlier used to revolt against the British Raj. Lotus is also considered very sacred in the Hindu tradition. Lotus is also the national flower of the country.
All this is history today. The BJP’s real founder Mookerjee is not revered like the present-day bosses like Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Hopefully, the colossal BJP outfit commemorates the 122nd birth anniversary of the unforgettable and least-sung great patriot of modern India. Today, on Mookerjee's 122 birth anniversary, the nation salutes the visionary a million times!