By Balraj Madhok

HAGIOGRAPHY also has a role in history. And so this tribute by an acolyte to his hero is to be welcomed. Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s was a short life. While his election to the Calcutta University senate at the age of 23 and his elevation to the vice-chancellorship had everything to do with his being Sir Ashutosh Mookerjee’s son, the credit for his remarkable political career must go to him alone. He battled Subhas Chandra Bose on his home turf and Nehru on the national scene.

Had he lived longer, he might have realised his full potential, but the party he founded in 1951, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, has, in its present incarnation as the Bharatiya Janata Party, been the leader of the ruling coalition for the last three years. Cause enough for a centenary biography.

To describe Mookerjee as a patriot is like describing Madhuri Dixit as a woman. Self-evident but patriotic to whom? All of India, or to a part? Mookerjee answered this when, on taking to active politics at the age of 38, he chose to join the Hindu Mahasabha in preference to the Congress.

There were two possible reactions to the communalism of the Muslim League: either a rival Hindu communalism or an unbending secularism. Gandhi and Nehru chose the latter. Gandhi realised, as Mookerjee did not, that most Indians, and Hindus, shied away from imitative or vengeful communalism as the answer to the Muslim League. This was scorned as “appeasement” by Mookerjee, the rss and the Hindu Mahasabha.

It is, therefore, ironic that Mookerjee got his first cabinet position, as finance minister of Bengal, under Fazl-ul-Haq. It set the tone for all the other unlikely coalitions into which Mookerjee’s party has entered in its quest for power. They have never come to power on their own. Why?
Because, on a basic level, Mookerjee and others of his ilk were and are confused Indians. Mookerjee thrilled in being Indian but to him India was synonymous with a pre-colonial past. And since, in his view, the colonisation of India began not with the Battle of Plessey but with Mohammad-bin-Qassim, his concept of Bharatiya ‘sanskriti’ was limited to what ancient India had to offer. And it was to their conception of Bharatiyata that the minorities were asked to subscribe, failing which, in the eyes of men like Mookerjee, they failed the loyalty test.

Mookerjee laid the entire blame for Partition on the Congress, being particularly venomous about Maulana Azad. He never asked himself whether India’s independence could be indefinitely postponed till the British were satisfied that the Muslims would accept freedom without Partition. Mookerjee quit his ministry in 1950 over Nehru’s pacts with Pakistan about the treatment of Hindus in East Pakistan. It is never clear what alternative Mookerjee had. If his solution was war and conquest, Mookerjee shied away from saying so. He wanted an “economic boycott” and “other measures”—as if the whole western world were not waiting to rush to Pakistan’s aid if India moved on sanctions. He did not want the voice of Sheikh Abdullah or the Kashmiri Muslim to be heard. For him, it was enough that Jammu’s Praja Parishad leader wanted full integration.

The biggest disappointment in the book is the terse reference to the six hours of discussion that took place between Mookerjee and Sheikh Abdullah in Srinagar. The author merely says he does not know “what exactly transpired”.
The last chapter is a moving account of Mookerjee’s last journey (in a compartment occupied by Atal Behari Vajpayee among others) and his mysterious death in Srinagar under detention. That is a murky tragedy which needs clearing up, but according to Madhok, Mookerjee had suffered his first heart attack seven years earlier. That, not the perfidy of Sheikh Abdullah, might be all there is to Mookerjee’s sudden but sad passing away.