Syama Prasad Mukherjee

Syama Prasad Mukherjee

Syama Prasad Mukherjee ( Bengali শ্যামাপ্রসাদ মুখোপাধ্যায় , Śyāmāprasād Mukhopādhyāẏ; born July 6, 1901 in Calcutta , † June 23, 1953 in Srinagar ) was an Indian politician and lawyer. Initially he was active in the Indian Congress Party and campaigned primarily for the rights of the Hindus in the province of Bengal . After independence, he served as a minister in the first Indian government. After differences with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru , he resigned from the government and in 1951 founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh , the forerunner of today's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Life

Syama Prasad Mukherjee was born in Calcutta, the then capital of British India, in 1901 into a Bengali Hindu family. His father, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, was a judge at the High Court of Judicature at Fort William (now Calcutta High Court ), the then highest court in British India, and Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta . His mother was Lady Jogamaya Devi Mukherjee. He had a younger brother, Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay, who later became known as a Bengali writer and author of books on the Himalayas. Mukherjee received his education in Calcutta, and studied English and law at the university there. In 1923 he earned a Bachelor of Laws degree and was admitted to the Calcutta High Court in 1924 . From 1926 to 1927 he studied at Lincoln's Inn in London and was admitted there in 1927 as a barrister . He returned to India where he initially worked in the academic administration of the University of Calcutta. From 1933 to 1938 he was Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, like his father who had died in 1924. During his tenure, at his invitation, Rabindranath Tagore gave the opening speech for the academic year 1937 for the first time not in English, but in Bengali .

In 1922 he married Sudha Debi, daughter of Dr. Benimadhav Chakravarty, with whom he had five children. His wife died of pneumonia after 11 years of marriage. After that, his sister-in-law was mainly responsible for bringing up his children.

Mukherjee has been politically active since the late 1920s. From 1929 to 1930 he was sent to the Legislative Council (Legislative Council) of the Province of Bengal as a representative of the university . He joined the Indian National Congress, which at the time had formulated Dominion status for British India as a political goal . He was later re-elected as an independent candidate. During 1937-41, when the Krishak Praja Party in coalition with the Muslim League had a majority in the Bengali Legislative Council , he was the leader of the opposition.

From 1941–42 he was Finance Minister of the Province of Bengal in the Progressive Coalition government under Fazlul Haq, the last coalition government of Muslims and Hindus in Bengal. In the following years he became more and more a spokesman for Hindu interests, as he felt the need to counterbalance the actions of the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah . In 1944 he was elected president of Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha (ABHM, All India Hindu Mahasabha), the Hindu counter-organization to the Muslim League. He became active in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the national Hindu volunteer organization, and regularly attended summer courses and ideological trainings of the RSS. During the famine in Bengal in 1943 , he organized relief operations for the affected areas. In the wake of the partition of India, which Mukherjee had initially fought vehemently, and the separation of the new Muslim state of Pakistan , violence broke out, killing hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims on both sides. A consequence of the division was also the division of Bengal into a part inhabited predominantly by Hindus (today's Indian state West Bengal ) and a part predominantly inhabited by Muslims (what was then East Pakistan and today's Bangladesh ). Mukherjee experienced the violence in Bengal at close quarters, for example the riots in Calcutta in 1946 , in which around 5,000 people (both Hindus and Muslims) died, and the Noakhali riots in October / November 1946, which involved 5-10,000 Bengali Hindus Victims fell.

Ministerial office, resignation and establishment of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Prime Minister Nehru appointed Mukherjee, who enjoyed a great reputation as a trained lawyer and administrative specialist, as Minister for Industry in the first Indian interim government in 1947. In 1950, Nehru and Mukherjee fell out over the conclusion of an agreement with Pakistan on refugee issues. The agreement provided for partial compensation for refugees on both sides. Mukherjee, who had the millions of refugees and the massacres of Hindus in East Pakistan in mind, spoke out against the agreement, which he viewed as a policy of appeasement, and called for a sharper approach to Pakistan. He resigned from his ministerial office together with the minister Kshitish Chandra Neogy , who also came from Bengal, and founded a new party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), in Delhi on October 21, 1951 . The BJS was widely seen as the political arm of the RSS and, in contrast to the secular- socialist course of the congress party under Nehru, advocated a Hindu-dominated India and the Hindutva program .

The status of Jammu and Kashmir in India also became a point of contention . Most of Jammu and Kashmir had become part of India after independence and only a small part remained with Pakistan. In order to accommodate the Muslim majority in this state, the Nehru government was prepared to grant Jammu and Kashmir very extensive special rights. These were set out in Section 370 of the Indian Constitution. Laws passed by the Indian parliament - unless they concerned foreign policy, communications and the military - only became valid in Jammu and Kashmir if they were explicitly approved by the local parliament. Jammu and Kashmir received their own prime minister, their own state flag and were further separated from the rest of India by a customs border. Mukherjee and his BJS advocated abolishing the special rights of Jammu and Kashmir in order to fully integrate the state into the Indian Union, and initiated a corresponding political campaign under the motto ek pradhan, ek nishan, ek vidhan (one president, one flag, a constitution). However, he was willing to compromise with regard to the autonomy regulations. He went to Kashmir, where he was arrested on May 11, 1953 while crossing the border at Lakhanpur . He died in Srinagar Prison on June 23, 1953, possibly as a result of pulmonary embolism with pneumonia . The death was attributed to his general health and no further investigation into the circumstances of the death was made. Later, individual BJP politicians called Mukherjee a "martyr", or spoke of having fallen victim to a "Nehru conspiracy".

Assessment and aftermath

Colored picture by Mukherjee

The historical importance of SP Mukherjee lies primarily in its aftermath. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh he founded (later mostly Jan Sangh or Jana Sangh ) represented the Hindu nationalist program in the political landscape of India in the first two decades after independence. Even if Mukherjee was toying with Hindu nationalist ideas, he was not a narrow-minded Hindu nationalist. He envisioned the founding of a large, conservative national people's party that could effectively oppose the dominant Congress Party, which was strongly influenced by socialist ideas under Nehru. During his short tenure as party chairman, he tried several times to merge the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which he founded, with other conservative parties in order to give it an ideologically broader, less communalist base. However, Mukherjee's early death prevented the execution of these projects and his party remained on its relatively narrow Hindu nationalist base for the next two decades of existence. It was able to win between 6 and 10 percent of the vote in the all-India elections from 1957 to 1971, but did not develop into a real people's party and never gained much political weight. In 1977, the BJS merged with three other parties to form the Janata Party . However, this heterogeneous party did not stay together for long and split up into many individual parties between 1978 and 1980. In 1980, former Jan Sangh supporters re-established the old party under the name Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP rose to become one of the most important political parties in India in the following decades. Today's BJP regards Syama Prasad Mukherjee as one of its spiritual fathers and appeals to him.

Web links

• Dr. Shyamaprasad Mookerjee 1901-1953 , short biography on shyamaprasad.org (English)
• Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee , short biography on the BJP website (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Dr. Shyamaprasad Mookerjee 1901-1953. shyamaprasad.org, accessed on February 16, 2015 (English, short biography). 
2. ↑ Balraj Puri: Leaf from the past: Nehru-Abdullah-Mukherjee Formula on Kashmir. (No longer available online.) Greaterkashmir.com, August 8, 2010, archived from the original on August 18, 2014 ; accessed on February 16, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Craig Baxter: The Jana Sangh - A Biography of an Indian Political Party . Oxford University Press, Bombay 1971, VI: Mookherjee, Sharma and the RSS: 1952–1957, pp. 107-152 (English, SBN 19 560259 5).
4. ^ Nehru conspiracy led to Shyama Prasad's death: Atal. The Times of India, July 7, 2004, accessed February 16, 2015 . 
5. ^ Shyama Prasad Mukherjee independent India's first martyr: Narendra Modi. June 24, 2013, accessed February 16, 2015 . 
6. ↑ Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee. Retrieved on February 16, 2015 (English, short biography on the BJP website).