Modi rehab for a Rajiv-backer
RADHIKA RAMASESHAN
New Delhi, Sept. 13: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to resurrect a Sangh maverick who took a blow to save Jaya Prakash Narayan and later issued an appeal in favour of Rajiv Gandhi.
Nanaji Deshmukh was a forerunner to Atal Bihari Vajpayee as an exponent of the politics of coalition and consensus. He was among the first in the parivar to respond to JP’s call for “total revolution” in the 1970s, once bruising his arm by jumping in front of a police baton aimed at JP.
He eventually became one of the architects of the Janata Party government. But his habit of rubbing the Sangh-BJP leadership the wrong way kept him out of the pantheon featuring ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya and Jana Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mookerjee.
On October 11, Modi will release a six-volume compilation of Deshmukh’s writings in the presence of Sangh joint general secretary Dattatreya Hosabole at an event hosted by the Deendayal Research Institute, founded in 1968 by Deshmukh.
In 2016, the institute, in conjunction with the Centre, will celebrate the centenaries of both Deshmukh and Upadhyaya.
Born Chandikadas Amritrao, “Nanaji” (grandfather) is remembered as one of the parivar’s ablest organisers. In 1967, he forged an alliance with socialists Charan Singh and Ram Manohar Lohia, facilitating the Jana Sangh’s participation in a coalition government in Uttar Pradesh.
His “supreme folly”, an old-timer said, was issuing an appeal before the 1984 elections in support of Rajiv Gandhi. “It was the work of a renegade. Coming from as senior and respected an individual like Nanaji, it confused the cadre and most of them voted for the Congress,” he recalled.
In an article in Pratipaksh, a Hindi weekly edited by George Fernandes, Nanaji had saluted Indira Gandhi as a “great lady” who was “able to take the country forward like a colossus for over a decade”. [. . .]
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