cal identity. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that the other major
opposition groups, the Socialists and the Communists, were in total agreement
on this framework with the Nehruvian Congress. In a more organizational
context, too, the Mahasabha was at a disadvantage; its lack of mobilizational
capacity, its dependence on certain elite groups, its lack of grassroots support,
all told against it everywhere but in certain strongholds in central India.
Nehru was not only successful in constitutional terms, by making secularism
the norm of political activity. He was also successful within the Congress in both
limiting the influence of Hindu traditionalist leaders, who may have had goals
similar to the Hindu Mahasabha, and in developing a party system tied to a
machinery of state-derived power and patronage that dissuaded even those
unsympathetic to his ideals from leaving Congress.
In sum, Hindu nationalism could not make any headway in the politics of
newly independent India. But there was to be some hope for it in the formation
of a new party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, although it came to very little in the
first two decades of its existence. The history of the Jana Sangh and its rela-
tionship to the RSS is important for what it tells us about the nature of Hindu
nationalism and the conditions that led to the eventual re-formation of the
Jana Sangh as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It was the BJP that eventually
gained a measure of success in using the appeal of religion to gain power in
government.
S. P. Mookerjee, a Hindu traditionalist in Nehru’s original cabinet, found
himself so much in disagreement with government policy, especially with regard
to (Islamic) Pakistan, that he began to liaise increasingly with Golwalkar and the
RSS. Eventually, he left to start the Jana Sangh. From the beginning, the rela-
tionship between the explicitly party political Jana Sangh and the “cultural” RSS
was complicated. On the one hand, there was the consideration that by giving
ideological and – more directly – organizational support to a political party, the
RSS could hope to transform society through the political process while itself
remaining outside of it. On the other hand, there was the more austere concern
to remain untouched by political considerations in the pursuit of the ideal of
sociocultural transformation. Eventually, the continued marginalization of
Hindu traditionalists within Congress seemed to Mookerjee to open up the pos-
sibility of a Hindu nationalist opposition to Congress, and Golwalkar softened
his suspicion of involvement with a political party.
The formation of the Jana Sangh did not lead to any significant impact
by Hindu nationalism on the Indian polity, because of the combination of
Nehruvian strategies mentioned above and the sheer personal authority of
Nehru in removing nonsecular alternatives from serious political influence.
Mookerjee’s straightforward political aim of developing an alternative to the
Nehruvian conseus therefore did not succeed, and in any case was always seen
at odds with RSS ideals. However, the search for immediate political impact
was rejected by the Jana Sangh after 1954, under the leadership of Deedayal
Upadhyaya. The Jana Sangh began to espouse, in effect, the RSS goal of an
ultimate transformation of the Hindu nation. Political activity was to be
contemporary political hinduism 533