Celebrating his party’s victory in the West Bengal Assembly elections at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared, “the soul of Syama Prasad Mookerjee must be at peace today”. Modi has often described him as “a statesman, thinker and patriot who devoted his life to strengthening national integration”. 

Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901-53) is a prominent Hindutva icon for the RSS/BJP brigade. It was Mookerjee who — on the advice of M.S. Golwalkar, the second chief of the RSS and its most prominent ideologue — founded the BJP’s forerunner the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) in 1951 and became the first president of the political arm of the RSS.

Hindutva rhetoric about Mookerjee’s patriotism needs to be cross-checked against contemporary documents available in RSS and Hindu Mahasabha archives. These documents clearly reveal that the claim of being a ‘selfless patriot’ is a white lie. Mookerjee never participated in the freedom struggle. Not only did he stay away from it, he betrayed it — by collaborating with the British Empire and the Muslim League to crush and communally polarise our freedom movement.

Pre-Independence, Mookerjee was a prominent leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, led by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In 1942, when the Congress launched the Quit India Movement, the British unleashed a reign of terror. The Congress was banned, its provincial governments were dismissed, all of India was turned into a jail and thousands died in the action unleashed by the armed forces of both British and native rulers. The crime of many of those who were killed was that they dared to unfurl, or even carry, the tricolour.

Hindu nationalist organisations, namely the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS, along with the Muslim League — which had been demanding the partition of India since1940 — not only boycotted the Quit India Movement but also decided to support the British government in its repressive........

© National Herald