opposition. When the Emergency ended and she boldly decided to go to the
people on her record in the Emergency, a new political topography shaped up.
The opposition to her had come from across the political spectrum and, indeed,
had been the prime cause of her extreme and undemocratic reaction. Jaya
Prakash Narayan, the Gandhian reformer, had sought before the Emergency to
develop an idealistic oppositional front to Indira Gandhi. This value-based ideal
was predictably transformed into a highly political strategy (although much to
his acknowledged discomfort). When the post-Emergency election was declared,
an extraordinary political creature was born: the Janata Party, consisting of
the Socialists, the Congress (the breakaway party of the 1960s), more recent
Congress dissidents, some others – and the Jana Sangh.
The Janata Party was to be the Jana Sangh’s means of entry into legitimate
political power, and as such, the latter accepted the terms of its participation in
the government the Janata Party formed after Indira Gandhi’s defeat.
The RSS equivocally supported the Jana Sangh’s strategy of engaging in poli-
tics with secularist parties. Its grassroots mobilization was crucial, but it refused
to formalize any amalgamation into the Janata Party, firmly asserting its self-
conception as a cultural guide that stood “above” political activity. In any case,
there were strong internal differences of opinion within the Janata Party about
the RSS, as the Socialist wing took the RSS to be against everything it stood for.
This suspicion of the RSS was a feature of the Janata Party during its brief and
unstable period in power.
The point to note about Hindu nationalism’s first taste of national power
was the extent to which its engagement with the political process depended on
uneasy alliances with non-Congress parties. The same parties that, from the late
1960s, had drawn Hindu nationalists into opposition to Indira Gandhi felt it
more rational to oppose them when power became an actuality. A common
enemy was insufficient, outside times of crises, to keep secularist parties allied
to Hindu nationalists, despite the claims of pragmatists within the Jana Sangh
- like Atal Behari Vajpayee, External Affairs Minister in the Janata government
- that they had set aside their original ideological goals in favor of the social
reform agenda of the Janata Party. By the time of the next election, Indira
Gandhi’s use of secularism as an ideological counter-strategy had made non-
Jana Sangh groups within the Janata Party appear antisecular – appearing to
subordinate them to Hindu nationalism. After electoral defeat, the break-up of
the Janata Party was inevitable, for its internal contradictions were insuperable.
The BJP and the Sangh Parivar
In 1980, the Jana Sangh refounded itself as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
This party was going to take a very different course through the Indian political
landscape. The RSS under Deoras was emphatic that the Jana Sangh had failed
in its strategy of integrating with other parties primarily because it had not kept
its ideological purity, a purity that could take the party to political power only
536 c. ram-prasad