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Time of India
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
The silence of the reels: Why Hindi cinema never faced the Emergency
Power games: The few filmmakers who did deal with the subject, either directly or indirectly, faced bans and attacks For an industry that prides itself on chronicling the nation's struggles, Hindi cinema's silence about the Emergency is more revealing than any film could ever be. The 21 months between June 1975 and March 1977, when Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties, censored the press, and jailed thousands without trial, were arguably the most consequential in India's modern political history. Yet, in the decades since, Hindi cinema—the self-appointed mirror of Indian society—has barely mustered a smudge to reflect it. This conspicuous absence did not arise from creative oversight or timidity alone. In the early decades of Independence, popular cinema was never truly free. Nehruvian socialism shaped public policy and the ideological contours of the industry. The so-called golden triumvirate—Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand—crafted personas that echoed Pandit Nehru's vision of the self-sacrificing, morally upright everyman. Dilip Kumar's dialogue seemed like leftovers from Nehru's speeches, Dev Anand's rebellious charm served the establishment's romantic socialism, and Raj Kapoor's everyman heroes peddled idealism to the masses. Such intimacy with power set the template. The state could inspire cinema, but never the other way around. When that same state turned authoritarian, the industry found itself unprepared and unwilling to challenge it. In the Emergency years, the machinery of coercion extended directly into the corridors of Bombay. V C Shukla, Indira's information & broadcasting minister, became infamous for exerting his influence over the film industry. Wielding the Maintenance of Internal Security Act like a scythe through the industry, the political establishment wasn't breaking new ground—it was merely weaponising an existing dependency. Kishore Kumar, the mercurial genius whose voice had soundtracked a generation's dreams, was banned from All India Radio and Doordarshan for refusing to perform at a Youth Congress rally. Dev Anand, tricked into attending a Sanjay Gandhi event and asked to praise his 'dynamism', found his films blacklisted when he refused to comply. When he sought an explanation from the I&B Minister, he was told with chilling matter-of-factness that it was 'a good thing to speak for the govt in power.' Shatrughan Sinha , then one of cinema's busiest stars, saw his films banned for the cardinal sin of supporting Jayaprakash Narayan. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like The Most Unwelcoming Countries in the World, Ranked BigGlobalTravel Undo Gulzar's 'Aandhi', merely suspected of drawing inspiration from Indira Gandhi's life, while most argued it'd taken a few chapters from the life of Tarkeshwari Sinha, was banned for the duration of the Emergency, releasing only after the Janata victory restored a semblance of democratic normalcy. 'Maha Chor' starring Rajesh Khanna casually inserted a 'Vote for Congress' graffiti into a musical sequence. Most telling was the fate of Amrit Nahata's 'Kissa Kursi Ka', a political satire that dared to mock the Emergency's absurdities. All prints of the film were destroyed allegedly by Sanjay Gandhi at a factory in Gurgaon. This was not subtext—it was brazen collusion between art and authority. Yet what happened after the Emergency lifted reveals the true depths of the industry's moral bankruptcy. When the time came to reckon with the period—its absurdities, its tragedies, its moral squalor—Hindi cinema fell silent. There was an almost immediate return to sycophantic normalcy. Feroz Khan's 'Qurbani' (1980), the biggest hit of the year when Indira Gandhi returned, opened with a short film eulogising Sanjay Gandhi, narrated by Khan himself as he dedicated his film to the memory of the 'Prince' and bowed in reverence to the 'Mother'. If films between 1977 and 1980 did not address the Emergency, to expect that to happen after Indira Gandhi returned would perhaps be hoping for a miracle. This wasn't just political calculation—it was the instinctive reaction of an industry that had learned to worship power. Some filmmakers attempted to address the Emergency but it was often through the refuge of allegory—Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 'Kotwal Saab' and 'Khubsoorat' chose not to cast a direct look; the latter managed to justify the Emergency as a necessary evil. Mukherjee's 'Naram Garam' gave Hindi cinema's smartest comment on the era in the form of a nervous joke — Om Prakash, told to hurry because of some emergency, haplessly comments, 'Phir se?' While not Hindi cinema, Satyajit Ray's 'Hirak Rajar Deshe' and Jabbar Patel's 'Jait Re Jait', used the same route. Parallel cinema, too, largely skirted the challenge and despite their social conscience, filmmakers preferred the microcosm to the macro. Over the years, some films such as 'Ghashiram Kotwal' based on a Vijay Tendulkar play and directed by K. Hariharan, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop, Saeed Mirza were cited as a film about the Emergency. However, it was written in 1972 as a response to the rise of a local political party in Maharashtra. There are structural reasons for this reticence. Hindi cinema has always struggled with ambiguity, preferring neat endings where heroes redeem all. The Emergency, by contrast, offered no catharsis—only a nation capitulating to authoritarianism without resistance. The definitive Emergency film still eludes the screen even as we enter the fiftieth year of the Emergency. The exceptions remain sparse: Sudhir Mishra's 'Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi' would not arrive until 2005, nearly three decades later. Even then, it couched its indictment within the personal journeys of three idealistic young people, careful not to indict the broader complicity of society. Even today the few who try to confront the past are harassed —Madhur Bhandarkar's 'Indu Sarkar' provoked shrill attacks and legal threats simply for attempting a fictionalised retelling. The Emergency may have ended in 1977, but its most lasting victory was psychological: the creation of a cultural establishment that polices itself more effectively than any censor ever could. Perhaps it was simpler to pretend nothing happened. After all, if cinema cannot process a trauma, maybe the nation never really did. (Chintamani is a film historian and author)
Scroll.in
21-06-2025
- General
- Scroll.in
‘Dukh ki Duniya Bhitar Hai': In writer Jey Sushil's memoir, an intimate republic and a sense of loss
The literature of mourning is a curious subgenre. It can easily slip into sentimentality, but the best examples rise above that to reflect on bigger things, society, time, and the fragile bonds that hold families together. Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai, a memoir in Hindi by journalist and writer Jey Sushil, belongs to that rare kind. It is both a deeply personal story of a son grieving his father and a wider reflection on a disappearing way of life in postcolonial India. This way of life was shaped by ideas of collective work, the respect tied to public sector jobs, political dreams, and simple, honest hopes. It once shaped the lives of millions in India's industrial towns. As India shifted towards a market-driven and individualistic culture, that world began to fade not through breaking news, but in quiet living rooms and long silences. Sushil's memoir is one of the few literary attempts in recent memory to document that quiet erosion. The memoir, written with startling clarity and emotional restraint, revolves around Sushil's late father, a man born in a small village in north Bihar, who spent much of his working life in the uranium mines of Jadugoda, now in Jharkhand part of the industrial belt that once symbolised India's postcolonial ambition. His life was shaped by the hopes of Nehruvian socialism and the dignity of unionised labour, only to end in the quiet disappointment that many experienced in liberalised India. His story, rendered with care and restraint, reflects a generation of working-class men who helped build the Indian republic but were rarely written about. In this way, Sushil's memoir joins a quiet but significant tradition of sons writing to understand their fathers. Akhil Sharma's Family Life explores a boy's fraught relationship with his parents amid grief and migration; Aatish Taseer's Stranger to History traces a son's search for an absent father across borders, ideologies, and silences. Saikat Majumdar's The Firebird captures the delicate act of observing a parent's gradual unravelling from a child's eye. Even in VS Naipaul's Miguel Street, the narrator tries to make sense of his father's slow decline and the quiet failures of an ordinary man. Like Naipaul's characters, Sushil's father is ordinary; he is not a writer, leader or thinker, but through this memoir, he becomes unforgettable, a symbol of middle India's lost dreams and fading dignity. The inner world of grief Sushil begins his story not with grand declarations but with an awkward phone call, a simple SMS that triggers a landslide of memory. This is refreshing. Indian memoirs often tend to adopt a heroic tone, as if the narrator had always been aware of the literary weight of his own story, scripting his life in hindsight. Sushil, in contrast, writes from the middle of confusion, from within the fog of unresolved emotions. His grief is not performative; it is searching, unadorned, and honest. It grows gradually, like a slow monsoon over parched ground and as it deepens, so too do our sympathies, not just for the storyteller, but for the father whose absence animates every page. What opens is a moving recollection of childhood in Jadugoda, not just a place on the industrial map of India, but a dream built with brick, uranium, and belief. Sushil writes with tender clarity about his mother, his brothers, sisters-in-law, and the nephew who is now grown; later, his artist-wife and infant son quietly enter the story, threading the past with the present. Created during the zenith of India's post-independence industrial push, Jadugoda, as Sushil reveals, was a city held together not by policy but by people – the technicians, clerks, drivers, and mine workers who believed in the republic's promise, even when that belief asked for everything and gave very little in return. At the heart of this fragile promise stood Sushil's father, a unionist, a principled man, at times rigid, often misunderstood, but never cynical. He believed in the dignity of labour, read Hindi magazines like Dharmyug and Saptahik Hindustan, wrote letters with care, and took pride in his small kitchen garden. To understand the son, we must first understand the father. Sushil, a journalist who once flirted with being an artist, carries a quiet urge to observe, record, and belong. This seems to come from his father, whose life was filled with handwritten notes, old pamphlets, union records, and minutes of political meetings. While reading, we find that Sushil's prose is gentler, more intimate. He writes less like a polemicist and more like a witness to both public change and private loss. His grief is not tidy or stylised; it meanders, returning to the domestic; the memory of onions growing by the kitchen, a half-read Dharmyug magazine, the sound of a transistor crackling in the summer heat. In these moments, Sushil achieves what few writers do; he brings together the sentimental and the structural, capturing both a father's silence and a generation's fading script. The place and the migration One of the memoir's greatest strengths is its deep-rootedness in place. Jadugoda, Darbhanga, and the small towns of eastern India are not mere settings, they are living, breathing characters. Sushil describes these spaces with a gaze that is clear-eyed yet affectionate. He includes the emotional geography of small-town life, where distances are not measured in kilometres but in rituals, reputations, and shared memories. Migration, in Sushil's telling, is a quiet, cyclical process of leaving, returning, and never fully belonging again. His father's move from the ancestral village to the industrial township of Jadugoda, and Sushil's own journey from Jharkhand to Delhi and eventually to the United States, are narrated not as escapes or achievements, but as part of a slow dislocation. The further he moves from home, the more he clings to memory. In this way, the memoir is not only an elegy for a father or a time, but also for the fragile threads that tie us to where we come from, even when we can no longer return. Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai is not a conventional memoir. It does not have a linear plot, nor does it offer easy closure. What it does provide, however, is a rare honesty. It speaks of disappointment, of misunderstanding, of silences that accumulate over the years. As a reader's questions may arise in our thoughts, like, What do we owe our parents? Or, what parts of their stories do we carry forward, and what do we leave behind? Sushil does not offer definitive answers, but rather invites us to sit with these questions, in the long shadow of memory, in the in-between spaces of love and regret. In its quiet, unassuming way, this memoir becomes a gentle act of remembrance, and perhaps, of reconciliation. In an age obsessed with spectacle, where public memory is curated through soundbites and hashtags, Sushil's memoir is an act of quiet resistance. It reminds us that grief is not a performance; it is a conversation, often with people who are no longer there to respond. If literature has a civic role, it is to recover these lost conversations. In doing so, it helps build a more honest archive of the nation's inner life. Dukh Ki Duniya Bhitar Hai does precisely that and with grace, depth, and lasting dignity. Ashutosh Kumar Thakur curates the Benaras Literature Festival.
Indian Express
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
The Indian nationalist hero had scientific temper. Now, he just has tech
Through the 1950s and '60s, one of the most enduring figures of Indian nationalism on screen was the male figure we might call the Five-Year Plan Hero. He was, usually, a doctor, an engineer or a scientist and reflected an important theme within Indian nationalism of the immediate post-colonial period: That of 'nation-building'. He may have been a lover, a potential suitor and adept at singing romantic songs; however, the most crucial aspect of his personality was that he possessed a 'scientific temper' and sought to apply it to refashioning a national identity based on critical thinking. The Five-Year-Plan Hero had mastered the technologies of medical procedures, dam building and laboratory-based experimentation; however, he was never just a technologist. He was, above all, a scientist. This was a time when a 'scientific' world view referred to a philosophical standpoint on the nature of post-colonial life and developing a questioning attitude towards established norms. Technology was just one aspect of science and did not exhaust its meaning. And, love (the filmic kind) and science co-existed in a very particular Nehruvian understanding of the possibilities of post-colonial life. Romantic love offered freedom from familial constraints that dictated whom to marry, whereas scientific thinking freed one from outdated modes of thought. The 'scientific' Five-Year Plan Hero embodied a quiet confidence in Indian capacities for engaging with complex ideas and a lack of anxiety about having to prove oneself to the rest of the world. It was a confidence that derived from a progressive strand in anti-colonial thought. If there is one thing that was clear in the version of nationalism that accompanied the India-Pakistan hostilities in May 2025, it is the shift from the possibilities of scientific nationalism imagined by the women and men who took part in the anti-colonial struggle to a technocratic nationalism that now strongly characterises the Indian present. It is also, in this regard, a shift from a confident national identity – one that could combine emotions with rational thought – to an anxious and insecure one. The vast number of social and other media articles relating to the Indian defence superiority derive from techno-nationalism and the concern that the world sees us as capable of 'precision' and technological mastery. Scientific nationalism was about questioning what came before. Technological nationalism is an anxiety to prove ourselves to the world. There are, now, many situations where technological nationalism has conquered fields where, you would have thought, it might have been resisted. It is at the heart of Googling the meaning of a well-rounded education in order to discover that there is no relationship between thinking and its application to everyday life. According to this logic, there is no sense in reading books that say that religious or gender-based discrimination is wrong and criticising situations where this happens. The important act is the self-described capacity for, say, Googling: This form of technological mastery proves that we are as good as any in the world. Clicking, according to this line of thought, is everything. Technology itself is thought. You know that something serious has happened when techno-nationalism becomes the key way of thinking about a well-rounded education. It takes us back to some older ideas about education and learning that we thought had been done away with. Two examples should be enough. In one version of nationalist debates about schooling, an important reason for promoting education among women had to do with the idea that this would make them better mothers. The educated women will be better at child-rearing, and educated mothers, the thinking went, are important for nurturing healthy children, particularly sons. The key value of education was to maintain a social norm, one that said that motherhood was fundamental to a woman's identity. Education was a technology that allowed you to achieve that norm. You became a wholesome person through maintaining rather than questioning norms, and that is the actual meaning of a well-rounded education. Educational activity also formed a cornerstone of the Charter Act of 1813, through which the British parliament introduced changes to the role and functioning of the East India Company. The Company was asked to finance education in order to impart 'civilizational values' and produce 'learned natives'. Colonial systems of education cannot, however, be about encouraging thought that might encourage criticism of colonialism itself. So, a key part of the debates that followed the 1813 Act interpreted 'civilisation' and 'learning' as technical mastery over many forms of knowledge, rather than knowledge as a tool of social and political change. To be civilised and learned was to know about many kinds of literature, music, philosophies, and art. Being civilised did not mean questioning the hierarchies of the world. Anti-colonial activism that asked, 'Is being civilised just knowing more or is it also about questioning discrimination and power?' introduced other ways of understanding what it is to be civilised. It redefined the meaning of education, moving it away from technical mastery and rote learning by asking if education should be about changing society or just knowing many forms of art and music. In all parts of the world where colonialism defined education as a technology of civilisation, anti-colonial activity redefined it as a science of questioning the accepted norms of high and low, the civilised and the uncivilised. The rise of techno-nationalism, so many years after the end of formal colonial rule and in so many different ways, says something both about national anxiety, about identity, as well as a return to an earlier meaning of what it means to be 'civilised'. Technological mastery over machines and technical knowledge of art, music and languages is the mark of a new national identity. To try and think beyond technology (the task of scientific thinking) and whether book knowledge should have any connection with real life – democracy, equality and discrimination – is pointless activism. The writer is Distinguished Research Professor, SOAS University of London
India Today
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- India Today
From the India Today archives (2011)
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated June 20, 2011)"As I begin to paint, hold the sky in your hands; as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me."—M.F. Husain With the death of Maqbool Fida Husain in a London hospital on the morning of June 9, India has not only lost her most iconic contemporary artist but also perhaps one of the last living symbols of the very idea of her modern, secular and multicultural nationalism. Born in 1915 at the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Husain came from a lower middle class Sulemani Muslim family and rose through the ranks to become India's most famous painter of people, places and a visual artist-especially a mid-20th century modernist painter-Husain was precariously perched on the crest of a nascent and evolving national consciousness. In the post-Partition era, when he first burst on the Indian art scene, Husain became a much celebrated symbol patronised by the Nehruvian state looking to create modernist role models. Yet, that very celebrity made him and his works vulnerable to be hijacked, misrepresented and reviled three decades later by a semi-literate cabal claiming to represent the collective voice of a largely silent Hindu majority. In fact, the torrid love affair between Husain and 'modern secular' India and their eventual dismaying disengagement makes for a civilisational sociologist Veena Das remarks, this "impossible love" had an inherent fragility because the idol, the image and the word are all strongly contested entities. It is also further complicated by the illicit intimacy between history and the 'perception of history' in post-colonial imaginations. The tantalising and tragic relationship-between a nation's notion of the self and Husain's visualisation of it in his art practice-became the vexed terrain over which competing political alignments fought their proxy wars for a good two decades before it eventually led to Husain's self-imposed exile from India in 2006. Four years later, he accepted Qatari nationality, spending his time between Dubai, London and Husain was educated in the streets of Indore, a madrassa in Baroda, the Indore School of Arts and very briefly the J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. He was an immensely talented and intelligent man with an enormous curiosity about the world who learnt effortlessly from life and people. He arrived in what was then Bombay in the early 1930s, penniless but bursting with enthusiasm and energy, traits that he retained all through his first started out by walking the streets of Bombay offering to paint portraits of people who could afford to pay him Rs 25. There were not too many commissions but some of these early portraits still survive. In 2008 in London, I saw a portrait Husain had done of Lord Ghulam Noon's elder brother in a Bhendi Bazaar sweet shop. Soon, he moved to painting cinema hoardings, first for V. Shantaram's Prabhat Studios and later for New perched high on bamboo scaffolding, Husain learnt to be able to concentrate amid the noise and chaos of the street below. He used to paint 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in Mumbai for many years. From painting hoardings, he progressed to designing toys and painting children's furniture for Rs 300 a month. "But even at that time I knew I would be an artist one day," he used to say, adding, "there was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non-stop." Cinema held a life-long fascination for Husain and decades later, he went on to make several much-talked about films. Of these Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival but the most well-known is Gaja Gamini (2000) that featured Madhuri Dixit as his muse. In 2004 he made the semi-autobiographical Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities with Tabu in the lead role which ran into trouble with Muslim life started to change radically around the time of Independence. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), the prodigious enfant terrible of Indian art, spotted Husain's talent by chance and immediately included him in his Progressive Artists Group (PAG) in 1947. Husain's work was noticed right from that first showing and with the encouragement of Rudi von Leyden, the German Jewish art critic, he held his first one-man show in Mumbai in 1950. With prices ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 300, the exhibition sold out. As Husain told me with a chuckle, "I was a best seller right from start."advertisementWhat differentiates Husain from his Progressive contemporaries is his deeply rooted 'Indianness' and his celebration of Indian life and people. While his contemporaries were busily assimilating European art from Byzantium downwards, Husain sought inspiration in temple sculptures (Mathura and Khajuraho), Pahari miniature paintings and Indian folk the mid-1950s Husain got national recognition with two very seminal canvases 'Zameen' and 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. 'Zameen' was inspired by Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1955) but instead of bemoaning rural poverty and indebtedness, it presents a symbolic celebration of life in rural India with a vibrancy that had never been seen before. "I realised one did not have to paint like Europeans to be modern," he maintained. Nor did he, at any time, understand the angst of existentialism."Alienation as a concept is alien to my nature," he would joke. The next year he painted the more enigmatic 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. This painting, considered by cognoscenti to be his best of all time, features five women reminiscent of ancient Indian sculpture with an oil lamp hanging from the top of canvas and some unintelligible words in a script that looks like ancient Brahmi, Magadhi or some long forgotten dialect. From the hand of one woman, painted as if frozen in a mudra, hangs a large spider by its thread. Some critics have suggested the women were the pancha kanyas (Ahalya, Kunti, Draupadi, Tara, Mandodari) of Hindu mythology. When this painting was shown, despite the ripples it created, no one came forth to buy it for Rs 800. It now hangs at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, on loan from the Husain became a living icon of Hindu-Muslim, gangajamni culture, his art acquired a quintessentially Indian form and content while being global in its relevance and appeal. Moreover, Husain invariably brought relevance to his paintings by making them topical. He was ever ready with the 'image of the day' whether it entailed painting the 'Man on the Moon' in 1969 or Indira Gandhi as Durga after the Bangladesh war in modern Indian art gained wider acceptance through the 1970s and 1980s, Husain was steadily scaling up his prices and using the media to create hype around his colourful persona and his escapades. "Life without drama is too drab," he used to say. Detractors screamed commercialisation and friends frowned in exasperation; but Husain insisted that "the fiscal worth of a painting is in the eyes of the buyer". And buyers came in Badri Vishal Pitti, the Hyderabad businessman for whom he painted 150 paintings, to Chester Herwitz, a handbag tycoon from Boston, who bought up anything that Husain produced through the 1970s. Two decades later, Kolkata industrialist G.S. Srivastava struck a deal for 124 Husain paintings for Rs 100 crore; not for love of art but as good investment. Indian art was appreciating at a higher rate than most stocks and brand Husain was now Husain Inc. After his emigration from India, Sheikha Mozah of Qatar was his last great all his fame and wealth, Husain was personally untouched by both. He could be as comfortable in a dhaba as in a five-star hotel relishing an expensive meal. He stopped wearing footwear as a tribute to the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in 1974 and he used to walk barefoot into the most exclusive and august gatherings as well as clubs the world epic saga is ever perfect. And Husain had more than his share of controversies and brickbats. However, it is in posterity that Husain's art and persona will get a truer reckoning. Perhaps the best tribute the Indian state could give would be to set up a museum devoted to the life and art of this most talented son of the to India Today Magazine
News18
07-06-2025
- Politics
- News18
Narendra Modi Strives To Realise Deendayal Upadhyaya's Vision
Last Updated: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's fundamental governance philosophy reflects Deendayal Upadhyaya's thought and vision The 60th year of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya's historic lectures that shaped the philosophy of Integral Humanism is being commemorated at a time when a BJP's Prime Minister completes 11 years in office. Narendra Modi may not have met or heard Deendayal Upadhyaya, but he has certainly emerged as one of Upadhyaya's finest exponents, manifesting the latter's aspirations and hopes through his governance vision and action. In the course of a public life that spans more than four decades, Modi must have had the opportunity to mingle with many stalwarts of the movement who were moulded and shaped by Upadhyaya. Upadhyaya, the RSS pracharak, was deputed to the newly formed Jana Sangh, as Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee's understudy in 1951. He went on to shoulder the burden of laying the foundation of the new political party for the next 15 years, emerging as one of the tallest leaders of the Nehruvian and the immediate post-Nehruvian era. Modi, an RSS pracharak, was deputed to the newly formed BJP and for the next three odd decades, toiled for the new party, at various levels, till he scripted and charted out for it a historical course that is altering India's trajectory. Deendayal Upadhyaya established the Jana Sangh as an alternate pole in Indian politics, while Modi has been successful in positioning the BJP as the pre-eminent political party in India in three decades. These three decades were characterised and dominated by coalition politics and unstable governments which were pulled in various directions under the exigencies of political demands and short-term calculations. Absent, during these three decades, was a grand narrative of where India ought to be and of how to reach that position. Narendra Modi has comprehensively altered that. He has drawn a grand narrative sculpted and chiselled by the goal of 'Viksit Bharat" and of 'Amrit Kaal." Throughout Upadhyaya's tenure as general secretary, the Jana Sangh had advocated the necessity of India going nuclear. One of the first major decisions that propelled India to the status of a major nuclear power was Vajpayee's decision to go in for the nuclear tests in May 1998. The flagship 'Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan', launched by Vajpayee which saw a massive grassroots focus on education especially among the most marginalised, was another governance milestone that manifested Upadhyaya's philosophy and his hopes of empowering and equipping those left out and left behind. Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya delivered his four lectures at Mumbai's Ramnarain Ruia College grounds on the philosophy of Ektaama Manava Darsana on April 22-25, 1965. These lectures eventually formed the bed-rock of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and later the BJP's political philosophy and action. It was for the first time that a political party, formed after Independence, discussed, debated and articulated a political philosophy which it sought to embody and express through a political programme. The philosophy spoke of unleashing India's civilisational powers, of making her self-reliant through her own strengths, of seeing her regain her rightful place as 'Viswamitra" (a friend of the world). A power that is benign but not powerless. Upadhyaya spoke of India seeking out her own all-around progress, based on her innate strengths and experiences. This national march towards prosperity, Upadhyaya's philosophical postulates insisted, had to be equitable, no one could be left behind. In Upadhyaya's lectures one discerns the hope of ushering in a Viksit Bharat and a Samriddha Bharat. In his concluding lecture, Deendayal Upadhyaya defined the goal when he said: 'Our goal is not merely to protect the culture but to revitalise it so as to make it dynamic and in tune with times. We must ensure that our nation stands firm on this foundation and our society is enabled to live a healthy, progressive and purposeful life…" Upadhyaya spoke of creating a Bharat, which 'will enable every citizen in its fold to develop his manifold latent potentialities…" Narendra Modi, as Prime Minister, in the last eleven years has been driven by these fundamental governance parameters. PM Modi has harped on collective national prosperity and strength. To realise a healthy and purposeful living has been the key-goals of his governance action. Narendra Modi's vision of 'Garib Kalyan", his governance philosophy of reaching out to the most marginalised, his unceasing emphasis on aatmanirbharta (self-reliance), his uncompromising championing of India's national interest and of her national security, his 'Panchamrit" foreign policy, which is a shift from a powerless and defensive 'Panchsheel"-driven foreign policy, his focus on securing and developing India's borders, his concept of 'Jan Bhagidari", his fulfilling the promise of 'One Nation, One Constitution", his vision of 'Ek Bharat, Sresht Bharat", his emphasis on 'Vikaas aur Viraasat", which means development along with the preservation and dissemination of the fundamentals of our national heritage and inheritance, fundamentally and intrinsically reflect Deendayal Upadhyaya's thought and vision. The author is Chairman, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, and a member of the National Executive Committee, BJP. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views. tags : Atal Bihari Vajpayee BJP deendayal upadhyaya pm narendra modi rss Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: June 07, 2025, 11:38 IST News opinion Opinion | Narendra Modi Strives To Realise Deendayal Upadhyaya's Vision
