1. Syama Prasad Mookerjee:
The founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh was a big critic of Article 370 for Jammu & Kashmir. He crossed into that State in protest in 1953 and was arrested. Ailing in custody, he was administered penicillin even though he was allergic to it and died. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru refused an enquiry into the incident.
Two things happened after that. For one, J&K came sharply under focus and Nehru was forced to remove the discriminatory permit system. The State also didn’t have a Governor or Chief Minister, but a Sadar-e-Riayasat and Prime Minister. That was eventually done away with.
The second was that it fired a generation of Jana Sangh leaders and RSS to fight against the Congress. In fact former Prime Minister AB Vajpayee had called Mookerjee’s death a “Nehru conspiracy”.
That laid the foundations for the Jana Sangh being part of the government in 1977, Vajpayee’s ascent in 1996 and Modi’s rise in 2014. You could say that Nehru laid the foundations for Rahul’s crash in 2014. How ironic! Image: BJP.org
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