Stronghold of RSS, unwinnable for BJP since 1998—the curious political puzzle that is Delhi

“Naturally, that has benefitted the RSS because the entire base of the Arya Samaj has shifted to the RSS quite seamlessly over the years.”

But that does not mean he has always necessarily supported the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Arya cautions. “For us, it is a cultural, not political, thing. The ideology and objectives of the Arya Samaj and the RSS are the same; so the two have been natural allies.” 

In Delhi, where the influence of the Arya Samaj was enormous owing to the large influx of Hindu, Arya Samaji Punjabi refugees in the wake of the Partition, this has meant a strong foundation for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since the late 1940s itself. In 1937, Delhi had six shakhas; by 1947, the number was already up to over a hundred. 

As Ashok Jindal, the pradhan of North Delhi’s Ashok Vihar chapter of the Arya Samaj, who is also an RSS worker, says, “A pracharak of the RSS once said to an Arya Samaji leader in front of me, ‘The RSS is the B team of the Arya Samaj—both gain from each other, so both should work in tandem’.” 

Despite the Jana Sangh and the BJP’s chequered electoral history in the national capital—the BJP last won an election in Delhi in 1993—the upper-middle class and middle-class Hindu culture of Delhi has been highly influenced by the RSS-Arya Samaj combine. 

As Jindal says, “Delhi is a bit like Kerala in this regard. The RSS is very strong here, but the BJP does not win.”

As Delhi heads to the polls on 5 February, ThePrint examines this contradiction: Why is it that while the RSS continues to be strong in Delhi, its political wing, the BJP, has struggled to achieve electoral dominance in the city in the last three decades? According to informal estimates, the RSS has about 2,200 shakhas in the capital, a relatively high figure given the city’s small geographical size.

Can this contradiction be understood through Delhi’s urban class politics shaped by decades of migration to the national capital? And is there a gulf, as alluded to by Arya, between the cultural and electoral politics of Hindus in Delhi that makes the RSS ethos culturally dominant, but does not translate into an electoral edge for the BJP? 

Also Read: Modi govt’s selective embrace of RSS ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya’s ideology in policymaking

A ‘new’ Delhi 

The 1947 Partition irrevocably changed Delhi, until then a city predominantly of Rajputs, Banias and Muslims. At least 2,00,000 Muslims fled Delhi, bringing its Muslim population down from 33 percent to 6 percent, while about 500,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees came in as refugees. Overnight, Delhi became a Punjabi city—by the end of 1947, Punjabis made up almost one-third of the city’s urban population.

The demographic change would have far-reaching consequences for the yet-to-crystallise politics of the new city.

“A large number of Punjabi refugees, who came to Delhi obviously needed rehabilitation, land, education, etc.,” says Biswajit Mohanty, a professor of political science at Kalkaji’s Deshbandhu College. “This was provided for by the government itself… In fact, this college we are sitting in right now too was made for refugees.” 

“But the suffering of the refugees could not be compensated purely materially… There was loss, trauma, anger and a feeling of betrayal, which needed redressal,” he added.

That, Mohanty said, was provided by the RSS, at least rhetorically. 

To be sure, as argued by political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot in the essay The Hindu Nationalist Movement in Delhi, the Congress enjoyed the support of many Punjabi refugees in Delhi owing to not just the help extended by the state in the aftermath of the Partition, but also to the Hindu nationalist leanings of many Congress leaders, like Lala Lajpat Rai, even before the Partition. 

Yet, there was anger against Nehru, but Gandhi, in particular, which was awaiting mass political articulation. 

When Gandhi announced what was to be his last fast in 1948 demanding not just Rs 55 crore in aid for Pakistan, but also a ‘peace pledge’ signed by local representatives of different communities, the anger of the refugees was palpable. 

Immediately, there was a demonstration by refugees in front of Birla House. Slogans like ‘Blood for blood!’ and ‘Let Gandhi die!’ filled the air. 

Nehru’s secular politics could not cater to this desire for revenge.

Arya Samaj, the precursor to RSS

On 25 January 1948, in response to Gandhi’s last fast, a large procession of about 50,000 refugees was organised. The organisers were not the activists of the RSS. In fact, according to Jaffrelot, Hans Raj Gupta, the then prant sanghchalak of Delhi, signed a peace pledge on behalf of Hindus to assuage Gandhi.

The organisers of this procession were the Hindu Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj. 

In the 1940s, the RSS was only two decades old. The Arya Samaj—essentially a ‘Go-Back-to-the-Vedas’ movement that dismissed idolatry, caste discrimination, sati, etc. as later distortions of a pure and original Hinduism—on the other hand, had been around since 1875. 

“It was the Arya Samaj which originally started the Shuddhi movement in the 1920s in Punjab and Delhi,” says Devender Kumar, a purohit (priest) at an Arya Samaj temple in Ashok Vihar.

“Swami Shradhanand, the disciple of Swami Dayanand (the founder of the Arya Samaj) was killed here in Delhi by a Muslim radical because of his large-scale reconversions to Hinduism,” he adds. “In a way, the Arya Samaj was the original Hindu nationalist movement in Delhi because one can say that of the Hindu refugees who came from Lahore and other parts of Pakistan, 80 percent were Arya Samajis.” 

While it is hard to find a factual corroboration of Kumar’s claims about the number of refugees who were Arya Samaji, they were certainly not the only support base of the Arya Samaj. 

As early as 1931, in pre-Partition Delhi, out of about 4,00,000 Hindus, more than 50,000 were Arya Samajists, most of whom, according to Jaffrelot, belonged to the merchant communities, the Banias. 

“The Arya Samaj had prepared the ground for Banias joining the RSS in Delhi as it had in the Punjab,” Jaffrelot writes. 

Post-Partition, it was this same combine of Punjabi refugees and Banias that formed the support base of the RSS. 

In fact, while the early leaders or “publicists” of the RSS in Delhi were from Maharashtra like in the rest of the country, it was the city’s Banias, the local “rais”, who acted as the financial backbone of the fledgling organisation. 

As for the Punjabis, they were to emerge as the leaders in the RSS’ political wing, the Jana Sangh, which was established in the heart of Delhi in the Raghumal Arya Kanya Vidyalaya near Gole Market on 21 October 1951. 

‘The oldest electoral stronghold of the Jana Sangh’

To challenge the might of the Congress in the 1950s did not just seem difficult, but also delusional for any party, says BJP Delhi’s senior leader Vijay Goel. 

“Back in the day, our (Jana Sangh’s) plea used to be ‘Chacha Nehru Zindabad, par vote Jana Sangh ko (Long live Nehru, but vote for the Bharatiya Jana Sangh),” he said. 

Yet, it was a group of Punjabi men—Balraj Madhok, Bhai Mahavir, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Kedar Nath Sahni and Har Dayal Devgun—who built the party “brick by brick”, as Goel said. 

As argued by Jaffrelot, “The moving spirit behind the creation of the Jana Sangh was Syama Prasad Mookerjee but his colleagues in this enterprise were either Delhi-based Hindu nationalists or refugees from Punjab.” 

The fact that the Punjabis and Banias were both essentially merchant castes troubled by Nehru’s socialism, made them naturally attracted to the Jana Sangh, whose Deendayal Upadhyay was their chief spokesperson in business terms, argues Jaffrelot. 

Whatever the reasons, for the people of Delhi, the Jana Sangh was a clear second option. 

In the first post-Independence elections to the Delhi Municipal Committee in 1951, for instance, the Jana Sangh won only seven seats as opposed to 42 by the Congress. Yet, in terms of voter percentage, the barely two-month-old party polled 25 percent of the votes as against 33 percent by the Congress. 

In the 1952 assembly elections, it still performed reasonably well taking 22 percent of the valid votes, making Delhi, as argued by Jaffrelot, “perhaps the oldest electoral stronghold of the Hindu nationalist movement”.

By 1967, when the Delhi assembly was dissolved and turned into a Metropolitan Council with elected members but no legislative powers, the Jana Sangh had already come to power in Delhi, with Vijay Kumar Malhotra and L.K. Advani, both born in pre-Partition Pakistan, as its chief executive councillor and chairman, respectively. 

“We maintained the 30 percent vote in Delhi throughout, it was no mean feat,” says Goel. “One can say that the BJP has not come to power in Delhi in a long time, but the fact is Delhi was the Jana Sangh’s base before any other state.” 

Within the first two decades of Independence, the contours of Delhi politics had been drawn—the Congress was the party of the poor sections, the lower middle classes, OBCs, Muslims and Sikhs, while the Jana Sangh was the party of refugees, businessmen and the urban Hindu middle class. 

The Emergency—the years RSS silently grew 

“My father would go to the shakhas sometimes…But we didn’t have much to do with the RSS,” says Jindal. “We used to know that there used to be shakhas in the neigbourhood, but we never really went.” 

But with the Emergency in place, the RSS was banned for a second time, shakhas ceased to operate, and RSS leaders and members were arrested in large numbers.

“My father, who just went to shakhas sometimes, was not only put behind bars but also had MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) slapped on him,” Jindal recalls, as he sits in his tiny fabric shop on his narrowly-constructed second floor in Chandni Chowk. 

“That time, more than my family, it was the RSS leaders, who stood by our family. From legal aid to financial help, it all came from them.”

One such RSS worker responsible for providing aid to RSS-affiliated families, whose earning members had been put behind bars, was Ram Niwas Goel, the current Speaker of the Delhi assembly. 

“My father and two brothers were also put behind bars during the Emergency,” he says. “The brief to me was that I should not get arrested at any cost because I had to collect money through donations, and distribute it among families.” 

According to Jindal, the Emergency was a crucial period for the RSS because even though the organisation went underground, people began to get increasingly sympathetic towards it. “If you ask several of the workers of the RSS of my age, they became interested in the RSS because of the years of the Emergency, and what was being done to the organisation.”

“This was again a phase when the support for the RSS was quietly growing even though the Jana Sangh was not only not in power, but all political activity had come to a standstill,” he added. 

Resistance from the poor 

The Arya Samaj was always popular among the “educated” and “sophisticated” communities, says Kumar, the Arya Samaji priest who is an OBC himself. 

“The Banias, Punjabis, Rajputs, Brahmins—they were attracted to the Arya Samaj,” he says, adding in a husted tone: “This is because the Arya Samaj essentially spread through education, so it could never penetrate into the lower strata of society, who do not always have the sense and mannerisms of the educated.” 

The same became true for the RSS when it took over the beacon from the Arya Samaj, according to Kumar.

It is a limitation most RSS workers from Delhi openly acknowledge.

“From the start, the RSS knew very well that it is not popular among the labourers, the workers and lower strata of society,” says Ram Niwas Goyal. “The middle classes could come to the shakha, the poor had to go to work and earn.” 

After the Emergency, he says, the RSS became more “overtly political”, and realised that to have an impact on the poor, it could not rely on the shakha model. “From the 80s onwards, it started a range of affiliates like the Sewa Bharati and the Bharat Vikas Parishad to penetrate into the lower strata.”

Very slowly, the RSS began to gain some currency among the poor. Yet, it was not a leniency they were willing to extend to the BJP. “Even when I used to work in the slums, people would tell me, ‘Seva Bharati is good, but we will vote for the Congress’,” said Goyal.

“Yes, in 1993, the BJP did come to power, but that was because that election came in the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi aandolan,” Goyal said. “That was a time even the poor cast their vote on dharm, but that was not representative… By and large, the poor kept trusting the Congress.” 

Madan Lal Khurana, who became the chief minister of Delhi in 1993, was also a refugee. He was born in Lyallpur in west Punjab and joined the RSS even before he became a teenager. 

A city of migrants

“We cannot tolerate an Emergency-like situation. People are living in fear and don’t know when the axe will fall on them,” Vijay Kumar Malhotra, the senior Jana Sangh/BJP leader, said in an interview to India Today in 2000. 

Ironically, it was a BJP-led government at the Centre, which Malhotra was indirectly referring to as responsible for an “Emergency-like situation”. 

“We built the BJP’s support base in Delhi brick by brick. It took years and plenty of patience and effort. Don’t let a few bulldozers flatten that base,” he pleaded. 

As the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government came to power at the Centre, with the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) under it, evictions from unauthorised colonies increased exponentially. 

According to an essay titled (Un)Settling the City: Analysing Displacement in Delhi from 1990 to 2007 published in the Economic and Political Weekly, from 1993-98, there were 6,429 evictions in Delhi, but from 1998-2003—the years of the Vajpayee government at the Centre—the evictions increased to over 40,000. 

Disgruntled flat owners, shopkeepers and pavement dwellers thronged the offices of BJP MPs begging them to stop. While Jagmohan—the bureaucrat-turned-politician, who was the urban development minister under Vajpayee—did not budge, the BJP had to pay for his unrelenting desire to beautify the city, electorally. 

“The BJP’s image as a shehri party got solidified during these years. There was no going back,” says a senior Delhi BJP leader, who requested anonymity. 

“A lot of these unauthorised slums were inhabited by migrants, who were increasingly becoming the deciding voters of Delhi. These moves made sure that these people never came with us.” 

Within less than two decades after the dramatic influx of refugees during the Partition, internal migration was quietly changing Delhi’s demographic character and culture once again. 

According to urban demographer Veronique Dupont, the share of net migration to the total population growth of Delhi National Capital Territory (urban and rural areas included) was 62 percent for the 1961-71 period, 60 percent for the 1971-81 period, and 50 percent for the 1981-91 period. 

As of 1991, most of the migrants, Dupont writes in the essay Spatial and Demographic Growth of Delhi, came from the neighbouring states of Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Migrants from UP accounted for as much as 46 percent of Delhi’s total migrant population.

As recorded by several scholars, most of these migrants were poor, Dalit or OBC. “As a shehri party, the BJP could never make inroads in these communities,” concedes Vijay Goel. “They always trusted the Congress, before they moved to AAP in 2013.” 

Mohanty, the political science professor, agrees. “What these communities did to the politics of Delhi was very interesting—they brought their own states’ politics to Delhi, thereby not allowing the Hindu nationalist politics of the BJP to gain ground.” 

He argues this was why the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did well in the 2008 Delhi Assembly elections, winning 14 percent of the total vote. 

While the migrant population of Delhi has largely stayed away from the BJP, the educated and the middle classes, beyond the original Punjabi-Bania base of the party, have been attracted to it, he says. 

“There is a post-liberalisation, MNC-going middle class, which does support the BJP. It is because of them also that the party has managed to never let its vote share go beyond 33-35 percent.” 

In the 2020 assembly elections, in fact, the BJP’s vote share went up to over 38 percent.

“But, for the BJP to come to power in Delhi, it has to have the jhuggi-jhopdi dwellers back it,” Mohanty adds.

It is a section among whom the RSS has continuously been working quietly.

“Just last month, at the Arya Samaj mandir in Ashok Vihar, we (RSS) organised a Sajjan Shakti Sangam event where we called caste leaders from the Valmiki, Dhobhi, Khatik, Jatav, Dacot samaj,” said Jindal. 

“Even the pradhan of the Baudh dharm came for the event—earlier they would not even let us enter their temples, but slowly we keep working for ekta (unity) among all sections,” he says. “We keep doing these events even if 10 people show up.” 

Whether or not that translates to votes for the BJP, is purely coincidental, he claims. 

(Edited by Sugita Katyal)

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