The Brotherhood in Saffron by Walter Anderson & Shridhar Damle

Author:Walter Anderson & Shridhar Damle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353055318
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

THE JANA SANGH IN THE 1970S: THE PARTY TURNS TO POPULISM

The Jana Sangh leadership, having established a firm organizational base, was also laying a programmatic groundwork for a ‘party of the common man’, a phrase used by some advocates of the new approach. This approach was opposed by a conservative section led by Balraj Madhok. However, it was more in tune with the world view of the RSS, with the pracharak network and probably with the class background of most swayamsevaks. This approach also offered greater prospects for expanding the party’s mass support base, and party leaders already envisaged the Jana Sangh becoming a major all-India party.

The Jana Sangh went into the 1971 general elections linked to the ‘grand alliance’, There was considerable grass-roots apprehension regarding this alliance and its ability to put up a viable contest against a prime minister whose slogan was ‘the elimination of poverty’, Many of the cadre were dismayed both by what they considered to be the blatant opportunism among the ranks of the alliance partners and by the rightist image of the ‘grand alliance’.

The results of the 1971 parliamentary election seemed to add substance to the fears of the cadre, though the Jana Sangh did make some scattered gains. In Bihar, it continued to do well and won one additional parliamentary seat. In Madhya Pradesh, the Jana Sangh, with the help of the former rulers of Gwalior,82 increased its parliamentary representative from 10 to 11 and polled over one-third of the vote. The Jana Sangh and a Jana Sangh-supported SSP candidate won all but one of the parliamentary seats in the Madhya Bharat region of Madhya Pradesh. The party also managed to win 4 seats from Rajasthan, one more than in 1967. Maharajkumar Brij Raj Singh and Raja Homendra Singh, members of the Kota and Udaipur princely families respectively, won 2 of the party’s 4 seats in Udaipur division. The party also did quite well in Rajasthan’s city elections which were held several months before the general elections. It ran 803 candidates in 103 towns where it won 252 seats, not counting the 33 independents backed by the Jana Sangh. It won a majority of the seats in 12 towns and emerged as the largest single party in Jaipur, the state’s capital city.83

Everywhere else, the results were a disappointment. The Jana Sangh lost its seats in Punjab and Chandigarh, and barely managed to retain one seat in Haryana. It lost every parliamentary contest in Delhi by substantial margins,84 and its representation from Uttar Pradesh dropped from 11 to 4. With 22 seats in the parliament, the Jana Sangh still remained one of the larger opposition parties. Among the opposition parties, only the Congress (0) with 10.42 per cent of the popular vote out-polled its 7.35 per cent. Only the Jana Sangh and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) managed to maintain their 1967–69 voting strengths, perhaps indicating greater partisanship among supporters of these two ideological parties.

When the general council of the Jana Sangh met at Jaipur, the leadership came in for severe criticism from the party cadre.

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