25th September: Remembering Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay on his 104th birth anniversary

Deendayal Upadhyay, the founding member of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, was born on 25 September 1916 in Mathura. His parents died at a very young age. In these difficult circumstances, he completed college and during this time he joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1937. When Shyamaprasad Mukherjee formed the Bharatiya Jana Sangh with the help of the Sangh, the Sangh sent Upadhyay to politics to see the work of the organization.

While being General Secretary of Jana Sangh for 15 years, he strengthened the roots of the party. He took forward the ideology and played an important role in reaching the people. Upadhyaya took over as the party’s president in 1967. However, his dead body was found near Mughalsarai railway station on 11 February 1968 under mysterious circumstances. The reason for his death remains a mystery even today. The Yogi Adityanath government of UP has named the Mughalsarai station after him. Along with this, Gorakhpur University is also named after Deendayal Upadhyay.

He gave the country a progressive ideology like Integral Humanism and said that the world needs humanism, not capitalism or communism. Deendayal Upadhyaya also said that Hinduism is not a religion or sect, but the national culture of India. Along with being a politician, he was also a journalist and writer. He laid the foundation of the weekly magazine Panchjanya published by RSS. The first editor of this magazine was former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.