BJP president Shah hails Jan Sangh founder as ‘a visionary’

NEWDELHI: More than six decades after he passed away, the BJP wants its cadres to discover a different facet of the Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee-as an educator. The BJP formed in 1980 is a successor of the Jan Sangh.

On Saturday, party president Amit Shah released a book that focuses on the early life of Mookerjee, unraveling his stint as an educator and the youngest vicechancellor of the Calcutta University. Shah used the occasion to stress the need for linking the country’s education system with its cultural ethos to remove distortions”.

“...All distortions in our education system will be removed and the entire system of learning will further improve if we connect it with our core values, with our cultural ethos,” he said. He also hailed Mookerjee as a “visionary” who “contributed to keeping Kashmir and West Bengal as an integral part of India.” The book, however, is an annexure to the government’s campaign to name schemes after its icons Mookerjee and Deen Dayal Upadhayay, which has exhibitions and programmes to advertise the life and times of these leaders infused.

Edited by Anirban Ganguly, director of the Shyama Prasad Mookerjee foundation and Avadesh Kumar Singh, the book titled ‘Syama Prasad Mookerjee, his vision of education’ includes not only his speeches and convocation addresses, but accentuates his contribution to popularising Indian languages, particularly Bengali and contributions in the sphere of education.

Mookerjee is known more as the politician who started the Jan Sangh with support from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1951, preceded by his breaking away from the more militant Hindu Mahasabha and his foray into electoral politics, winning a Lok Sabha seat in 1952.

“Mookerjee has been a multidimensional personality; before joining politics he was an educator, a thinker and an administrator. At the age of 33, he became the world's youngest vice-chancellor and held that position till 1938,” Ganguly told HT.

The book intends to introduce the reader to the “reforms” that Mookerjee orchestrated. It also makes an attempt to buttress the relevance of Mookerjee’s role as an educationist in the contemporary times.