For the Bharatiya Janata Party, the 1984 Lok Sabha polls were disastrous as it won only two seats. It remains an open question if the party could have survived politically had Ashok Singhal, steering the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to new heights, not created sufficient opportunities for the BJP to use religious discourse and mass-scale ritual actions in the political arena.
And it remains a mystery as to why the BJP has failed to acknowledge the contributions of Singhal, who died on Tuesday after a prolonged illness. Even the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, despite holding Singhal in high esteem and hailing him as the architect of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, has refrained from openly crediting him with the BJP’s political successes.
The rath yatra
Researchers are unanimous that Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra in the 1990s – considered the turning point for the BJP – would not have been successful had the VHP, transformed as it was by Singhal, not played the role of a catalyst and worked with ever-increasing vigour to catapult the saffron party into a major political force in the country.
Professor Richard H Davis, the noted Indologist, captured the VHP part of the BJP’s rath yatra quite vividly in his incisive essay titled The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot.
By calling Singhal the architect of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, the Sangh Parivar tends to conceal the critical contribution he made to the growth of the BJP. It restricts him to the VHP, and does not explain the role his massive exercise played in making the rath yatra a turning point. That credit has always been reserved for Advani, the BJP leader who sat on the rath. This is despite the fact that it was primarily Singhal’s efforts that allowed the BJP – as Davis noted so aptly in his essay – “to disavow the more militant imagery as originating from the VHP and so attempt to maintain its electoral respectability, while at the same time profiting from the undoubted power and commitment that militant imagery evoked for some”.
Relaunching VHP
Singhal was actively associated with the RSS since 1942 and became a full-time pracharak after his graduation in 1950. For the next 30 years, he worked in various locations around Uttar Pradesh and served as "Praant Pracharak" for Delhi and Haryana. In 1980, the RSS deputed him to the VHP and made him its joint general secretary. In 1984, he was made the VHP’s general secretary, and soon thereafter he became its president, a post he held till 2011.
During the pre-Singhal decades after its formation in 1964, the VHP had miserably failed in creating religious imagery that could have been exploited politically by the Sangh's first political outfit, Jan Sangh and its successor, the BJP.
However, things started moving fast, not just for the VHP but also for the BJP and their parent body RSS, once Singhal got the reins of the VHP. It was under his leadership that the VHP was virtually relaunched in 1984 with the Ramjanmabhoomi issue as its prime objective. Through a series of mass ritual actions, use of religious imagery and conclaves of Hindu religious leaders, Singhal created over the course of the next six years a condition that could easily be exploited by the BJP for political gains.
Thus, while the rath yatra of 1990 was formally an exercise of the BJP, informally it was all about the VHP. The transformation of the BJP from a weakling to a political force could not have been possible had Singhal’s six years of effort not gone into making Advani’s rath yatra a success. That would also not have happened had Advani not tried to represent all that the VHP stood for as he led the yatra.
The conversion of the BJP and the VHP which was achieved thus continued rather openly for almost a decade. The series of political events carried out by the BJP-VHP combine culminated ultimately in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6,1992, gradually setting the ground for the saffron party’s political growth at the Centre.
Peter Van der Veer, another Indologist closely watching the VHP’s growth under Singhal, concludes in his book Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India that “the political success of the BJP depends squarely on its alliance with two Hindu nationalist movements, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organisation of religious leaders, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant youth organisation”.
Singhal never openly complained against the silent attempts to deny him the status of the BJP’s father figure. But after his death, especially since the BJP has secured an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, shouldn’t the saffron party be introspecting whether Singhal be granted what he was denied all his life?
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And it remains a mystery as to why the BJP has failed to acknowledge the contributions of Singhal, who died on Tuesday after a prolonged illness. Even the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, despite holding Singhal in high esteem and hailing him as the architect of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, has refrained from openly crediting him with the BJP’s political successes.
The rath yatra
Researchers are unanimous that Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra in the 1990s – considered the turning point for the BJP – would not have been successful had the VHP, transformed as it was by Singhal, not played the role of a catalyst and worked with ever-increasing vigour to catapult the saffron party into a major political force in the country.
Professor Richard H Davis, the noted Indologist, captured the VHP part of the BJP’s rath yatra quite vividly in his incisive essay titled The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot.
“Yet the procession was planned jointly, with the VHP leadership setting the stage and offering strategic advice behind the scenes. What is most interesting from an iconographical point of view is the way in which this double agency engineered a two level message throughout the event. 'Hard-core' and 'soft-core' imagery occurred side by side. The hard-core imagery, for which the VHP and related groups were primarily responsible, was religious, allusive, militant, masculine, and anti-Muslim. Making much use of Rama as paradigm, it played out themes inherent in the primary terms of mobilisation. The BJP and Advani placed themselves often in the position of trying to reframe this imagery or put a softer spin on it.”
By calling Singhal the architect of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, the Sangh Parivar tends to conceal the critical contribution he made to the growth of the BJP. It restricts him to the VHP, and does not explain the role his massive exercise played in making the rath yatra a turning point. That credit has always been reserved for Advani, the BJP leader who sat on the rath. This is despite the fact that it was primarily Singhal’s efforts that allowed the BJP – as Davis noted so aptly in his essay – “to disavow the more militant imagery as originating from the VHP and so attempt to maintain its electoral respectability, while at the same time profiting from the undoubted power and commitment that militant imagery evoked for some”.
Relaunching VHP
Singhal was actively associated with the RSS since 1942 and became a full-time pracharak after his graduation in 1950. For the next 30 years, he worked in various locations around Uttar Pradesh and served as "Praant Pracharak" for Delhi and Haryana. In 1980, the RSS deputed him to the VHP and made him its joint general secretary. In 1984, he was made the VHP’s general secretary, and soon thereafter he became its president, a post he held till 2011.
During the pre-Singhal decades after its formation in 1964, the VHP had miserably failed in creating religious imagery that could have been exploited politically by the Sangh's first political outfit, Jan Sangh and its successor, the BJP.
However, things started moving fast, not just for the VHP but also for the BJP and their parent body RSS, once Singhal got the reins of the VHP. It was under his leadership that the VHP was virtually relaunched in 1984 with the Ramjanmabhoomi issue as its prime objective. Through a series of mass ritual actions, use of religious imagery and conclaves of Hindu religious leaders, Singhal created over the course of the next six years a condition that could easily be exploited by the BJP for political gains.
Thus, while the rath yatra of 1990 was formally an exercise of the BJP, informally it was all about the VHP. The transformation of the BJP from a weakling to a political force could not have been possible had Singhal’s six years of effort not gone into making Advani’s rath yatra a success. That would also not have happened had Advani not tried to represent all that the VHP stood for as he led the yatra.
The conversion of the BJP and the VHP which was achieved thus continued rather openly for almost a decade. The series of political events carried out by the BJP-VHP combine culminated ultimately in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6,1992, gradually setting the ground for the saffron party’s political growth at the Centre.
Peter Van der Veer, another Indologist closely watching the VHP’s growth under Singhal, concludes in his book Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India that “the political success of the BJP depends squarely on its alliance with two Hindu nationalist movements, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an organisation of religious leaders, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant youth organisation”.
Singhal never openly complained against the silent attempts to deny him the status of the BJP’s father figure. But after his death, especially since the BJP has secured an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, shouldn’t the saffron party be introspecting whether Singhal be granted what he was denied all his life?