The mentor of Modi’s BJP
Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee is the avuncular man with the balding pate and luxuriant moustache, looking out into the right in posters showing Hindutva’s pantheon. The “Dr” is because of an honorary doctorate, but one does not doubt that had Mookerjee (whose illustrious father apparently chose this particular anglicised spelling for the family) wanted, he could have got himself a proper PhD.
He was a clever man and has been well biographed here by Tathagata Roy, who is also of Hindutva persuasion, as users of Twitter may know. Mookerjee is the man who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in the early 1950s. This party later became the Bharatiya Janata Party, retaining its Hindutva essence as developed in the years before and just after Partition.
Mookerjee was also associated with the Hindu Mahasabha, but left it after he was put off when one of its members carried out Gandhi’s assassination.
We can divide Hindutva leaders broadly into two categories. Those who are or pretend to be inclusive (Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani) and those who deliberately exclude minorities (Narendra Modi and Amit Shah — under whom we have over 1,400 MLAs across India of whom four are Muslims, and 282 Lok Sabha MPs of whom none is Muslim). Mookerjee was, earlier on at least, the first sort of Hindutva leader. His break with the Mahasabha also happened because he felt it was exclusive and needed to bring in non-Hindus. The other thing that shows us that he was not a bigot was his working relationship with Fazlul Haq, the leader of Bengal in a coalition that included Mookerjee.
The third thing that this book tells us is
that Mookerjee was actually a Congressman for some time. Jawaharlal Nehru had no problem absorbing individuals from outside the Congress, meaning either the party or the Congress nationalist mindset, if he thought they had talent. Both B R Ambedkar, who was law minister, and Mookerjee, who was minister for industries, were brought into the Cabinet in this fashion. Both men soon left, Ambedkar in 1951 over the Hindu Code Bill and Mookerjee the year before. His problem was something else and we’ll get to that in a moment.
The biography has been arranged in chronological fashion, starting in the years that open the 20th century. Mookerjee’s father Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee came from a family many generations literate, and himself had a sterling career in academia, being appointed to several terms as vice chancellor of the University of Calcutta (a position his son also held at a very young age).
Syama Prasad was the third of seven children and grew up in a family that was quite close. He married when very young, and had access to a fine education and made the best of it.
In his twenties, he went to England
where he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn (where Jinnah had been a few decades before him). When in England, Mr Roy writes, Mookerjee became friendly with Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Mookerjee “took part in theosophical exercises like playing planchette with (Doyle).” One guesses that this was purely to indulge Doyle because Mookerjee does not come across as a kook.
The passing of his father afforded Mookerjee the opportunity to run for a position on the university senate and he won. Of his brilliance and drive there seems to be very little doubt and the author does well to not push his opinion on this too much, given that the facts are self-evident.
The turning point appears to come because of the happenings in Pakistan. The Partition of India was essentially the partition of two states: Punjab and Bengal. The other provinces remained in the same position they were after 1947. Much of the focus of Partition history has been in the West. But Bengal also saw a lot of violence and it is fair to say that in much of it the Hindus were at the receiving end.
Mookerjee was very influenced by this
and incensed by what he saw as Nehru’s softness towards Pakistan (this is why he quit the Cabinet). This was particularly so when there was continued violence and expulsion after Partition in East Pakistan, whose Hindu population began to shrink. There were two things that Mookerjee did as a result, both of which concern us today and, therefore, should be examined carefully.
The first is his conviction that India needed a “Hindu” political party. He put together a coalition of like-minded people, of whom the most important was M S Golwalkar, head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Golwalkar wanted to keep the RSS apolitical but lent this fledgling political party some of the RSS cadre, including a young man named Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The second is that Mookerjee determined that the issues that were of importance to his party were those that concerned India’s Muslims. The Hindutva focus on Muslim personal law and Article 370 comes to us because of him.
There is some element of mystery over the death of Mookerjee, in 1953, during captivity in Jammu and Kashmir. He was
entering during a protest and was kept in a cottage by Sheikh Abdullah, where he died after a few weeks (the author refers to his death as a martyrdom).
Mookerjee was overweight and kept poor health but had a reasonably active schedule. As such, it is not difficult to see why he died when only in his early fifties. To be fair, this book does not press the issue beyond a point.
The early chapter on the family and his upbringing is fairly unreadable because of too many names and nicknames and a meandering narrative. It required tighter editing. On the whole, the book is balanced and worth reading and it is recommended to those who want to know the intellectual genesis of the BJP and how it came to be the party of Narendra Modi.