The “succession battle” became the subject of political chatter once again when Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat visited Gorakhpur this month, days after the BJP’s underwhelming performance in the Lok Sabha elections. The spotlight was barely on the four-day RSS volunteers’ camp in the city which Bhagwat was attending. The only question on everyone’s minds was: Did Bhagwat meet Adityanath or not?
The answer was supposed to carry clues as to who the RSS, the BJP’s ideological parent, would support in the impending succession battle. Or so people hoped.
But how does the Sangh see Adityanath? A firebrand Hindutva icon like no other? A counterweight to the current dispensation? Or an outsider, who has not been bred in the RSS ways?
Over the last seven years, he has emerged as the Hindutva poster boy par excellence — a role model for BJP chief ministers. He has pushed the boundaries of executable Hindutva much beyond even the RSS’s conception.
The “turnaround” in UP’s law and order under his watch is an enviable blueprint. As the head of the Gorakhnath Math, his influence goes way beyond temporal politics — he is a self-proclaimed karmayogi, which provides a spiritual framework to his politics.
As an RSS functionary put it, “Yogi combines the strength of the Brahmin and the Kshatriya… he is a natural leader.”
Yet, when it comes to the question of him being Modi’s successor, hushed apprehensions within the RSS remain.
As the same RSS functionary pointed out, Adityanath is a natural leader, who has grown outside the BJP. “In that sense, he is not bound by the organisation or its discipline,” he says. “And that can be a problem… he is like an adopted son of the parivar (family), who is an overachiever.”
The conflicting views expressed by the same person capture the RSS’ dilemma about Adityanath perfectly. He is a mass, even populist leader, who appeals to the people directly. But he has not gone through the institutional vetting process of the Sangh, making him a bit of an outsider in the “family” — and also outside the scope of its control.
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The darker shade of saffron
In the early 20th century, a host of Hindu nationalist organisations, including the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, were coming up across India. During the same time, the Nāth sampradāya (community) or the Nathpanthis — a sect of Shaiva ascetics believed to represent the oldest school of Hindu asceticism — in Gorakhpur in the Terai of the Himalayas, and particularly its nucleus, the Gorakhnath Math, too was reimagining the ways it could intervene in worldly politics.
As argued by scholar Veronique Bouillier in a paper, while even earlier the Nath yogis were both spiritual and temporal counsellors to the kings, “the 20th century ushered in a new configuration in which religious figures entered the political arena” directly.
The powerful, and extremely political mahant of the Gorakhnath temple, Digvijaynath, was the first in the sampradaya to formally take the plunge into electoral politics.
A Rajput from Udaipur, Digvijaynath — described by Krishna Jha and Dhirendra Jha in Ayodhya: The Dark Night as “a tall, stocky, broad-shouldered, immensely dignified man with a quiet manner and a gift for diplomacy” — joined the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937. Just three days before Gandhi’s murder, he “exhorted Hindu militants to kill the Mahatma”, they write in the book.
Contrary to popular understanding, the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS always kept a distance from each other. “The two did not see eye to eye on several issues. Golwalkar (RSS’ second sarsanghchalak) and Savarkar (Hindu Mahasabha leader) famously hated each other,” Walter Andersen, scholar and author of The Brotherhood in Saffron, says. “And the Gorakhnath Math has traditionally been much closer to the Hindu Mahasabha and Savarkar, so there is that fault-line.”
By all standards, the Hindu Mahasabha and its head in the United Provinces, Digvijaynath, were considerably right of the RSS. A report published in The Statesman in 1950, for instance, quoted Digvijaynath as saying that if the Hindu Mahasabha “attains power, it would deprive the Muslims of the right to vote for five to 10 years, the time that it would take for them to convince the government that their interests and sentiments are pro-Indian”.
But there were several overlaps, and in the course of history, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS have actively collaborated and borrowed issues from each other — the biggest being the movement for the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
It was Digvijaynath who first began to rally support over the Babri Masjid-Ram Mandir issue in the 1940s — much before the RSS took up the cause or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, its offshoot) was even formed.
As argued by political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot in an Indian Express article, “the rapprochement between the two political strands (Hindu Mahasabha and RSS) happened largely because of the Ayodhya movement, started by Digvijaynath and taken up by the Sangh Parivar in the 1980s. But the two strands did not merge completely.”
Digvijaynath’s successor and Yogi Adityanath’s guru, Mahant Avaidyanath, carried forward this legacy. He was a five-time MLA and two-time MP from Gorakhpur, variously as an Independent or Hindu Mahasabha candidate. However, in 1991, Avaidyanath fought and won the Lok Sabha election on a BJP ticket.
“By the 1990s, the BJP had become the face of the Ram Mandir movement which was, in a way, started by Digvijaynath,” explained the RSS functionary mentioned above. “By this time, the Hindu Mahasabha had ceased to be a significant force at all… so, Avaidyanath moved to the BJP towards the end of his political life — something which Adityanath would follow.”
However, as the story of the Nath mahants of Gorakhpur since the early 20th century shows, Gorakhpur has been a Hindutva stronghold for decades quite independently of the Sangh Parivar. In fact, in many ways, it is the Sangh that has borrowed from the Gorakhpur strand of Hindutva, which Adityanath is an heir to.
Yogi’s ‘parallel’ Hindutva
Adityanath, who was born and raised as Ajay Singh Bisht, joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS, while in college in Uttarakhand’s Kotdwar.
According to his biographer, Shantanu Gupta, it was during this time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Ramjanmabhoomi movement was at its peak, that Ajay began to get attracted to “spirituality” and politics. It was in Kotdwar that he met his guru, Mahant Avaidyanath, and began to work for him.
“This was a time when Avaidyanath was already the head of over five committees for the Ram Mandir set up by the VHP… Ajay would go around creating awareness about the temple for his to-be guru,” Gupta says. “But you see, he was always intrinsically Sangh because he was formally with the ABVP in college, and he began his public life in a sense in close association with the VHP,” he adds.
In 1994, Ajay followed his guru to Gorakhpur, and took sanyaas (renunciation), thus becoming Yogi Adityanath. In 1998, he joined the BJP and became the MP of Gorakhpur on a BJP ticket. He continued in the post till 2017.
“The chatter about him being an ‘outsider’ is ill-informed’,” Gupta argues. “Even when he took sanyaas, the person who presided over the ceremony was Ashok Singhal (former head of the VHP) … So there have been old ties between Yogi and the RSS.”
“The only thing is that he has not risen through the ranks of the BJP, in the sense he was never a zila adhyaksh, chunav prabhari, etc.… he straightaway became a star campaigner,” Gupta further says.
However, through the years, there have been some tensions between the Sangh Parivar and the “parallel Hindutva” of the Gorakhnath Math.
“To begin with, what was the need to start his own Hindu Yuva Vahini?” asks an RSS functionary from Lucknow on the condition of anonymity. “There was VHP, Bajrang Dal, already, but he started his own army.”
In 2022, the Hindu Yuva Vahini was formally dissolved — reportedly after repeated prodding by the Sangh, which was irked by the “parallel army’s” clout in UP.
It was not just the Hindu Yuva Vahini, however. As his own clout grew rapidly in Gorakhpur, Adityanath would often use pressure tactics with the BJP to get his own men to fight elections, sources say.
In one of the most well-known of these cases, Adityanath revolted against the BJP, and fielded Dr Radha Mohan Agarwal on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket in 2002 from Gorakhpur Urban assembly seat. Agarwal, who is now a BJP MP from the Rajya Sabha, defeated BJP’s Shiv Pratap Shukla by a significant margin. During the election campaign, Adityanath characterised the BJP as a party speaking in two voices and appealed to people to oppose it.
As late as 2017, Adityanath’s exclusion from the state BJP election committee before the UP assembly elections had reportedly led to widespread protests by the Hindu Yuva Vahini, which were only called off after he was deployed across the state.
Yet, the way Adityanath virtually “ran” Gorakhpur is viewed with deep admiration, too.
“Gorakhpur has been associated with mafias, mismanagement, poverty, etc. And Yogi has virtually run it like a successful CEO,” says an RSS-affiliated journalist. “And he has done this independently of the BJP-RSS, so that makes him a natural leader.”
From Gorakhpur to Lucknow — ‘fringe’ to mainstream
However, after becoming UP chief minister, Adityanath, it is widely believed, has considerably changed his ways, and made sincere attempts to strengthen ties with the BJP and RSS.
“The fact that he dissolved the Hindu Yuva Vahini was a huge gesture,” says a BJP functionary. “It was an acknowledgement that he is formally part of the Sangh Parivar, and will function as such.”
Gupta, his biographer, agrees. “When he just got elected, he wouldn’t even meet MLAs and MPs. But over the years, he has transformed himself — he has done everything to integrate himself into the organisation… He holds weekly meetings with BJP workers, attends their weddings, funerals, everything,” he says.
“He has been in power for about eight years now, and he has done nothing to create suspicion in the mind of the RSS,” the BJP functionary adds. “His relationship with the two (RSS) pranth pracharaks of UP is very good too. There might be tensions that he has with a few leaders in the BJP, but surely none of that applies to the RSS.”
Yet, opposite voices exist, too.
Many RSS-BJP functionaries believe that Adityanath has not done much to strengthen the organisations through his years as chief minister. Under him, the system of patronage has not been democratised, says an RSS functionary from UP. “The MPs, MLAs are powerless.”
“His Hindutva is also outside the framework of the Sangh, it is too personalised,” the functionary explains. “Adityanath is not an organisation person. He is a populist leader, so he goes by his own instinct and connection with people and less by organisational discipline or instructions,” he adds, while acknowledging that the UP CM had also done nothing to rub the Sangh off in the wrong way.
And of course, the RSS is deeply aware of how much it has benefited ideologically from Adityanath’s leadership. “UP is the most Hindutva-ised state of the country, and that is all because of Yogi,” says a right-wing commentator, who requested anonymity.
As argued by Bouillier, from the anti-Romeo squads to meat crackdown and police encounters — Adityanath has an impressive, enviable record as a Hindutva administrator. But it is always accompanied by massive press coverage. When it comes to Adityanath’s politics, she argues, it is the “politics of presence” and the “politics of permanent performance”.
For the RSS, which prefers institutional change to personality-driven ostentatious politics, these can be red flags.
Other suspicions and apprehensions remain, too. As the right-wing commentator says: “If it comes to choosing between your own son and your neighbour’s son, you would choose the former even if the neighbour’s son has done everything right.”
That, he says, is the problem with Adityanath. “He has not been vetted by the institutional structure of the RSS… they have immense respect for him, especially as the spiritual head of the Gorakhnath Math, but respect is not institutional trust.”
Andersen, the RSS scholar, agrees. “The RSS and Yogi get along very well. But when it comes to the question of the top job, I would suspect you would need someone with an RSS background,” he says. “Adityanath has not grown up in the world of RSS shakhas and camps… those friendships, childhood relationships are very important to rise in the RSS.”
Yet, many from the RSS and BJP believe that if there are enough people, including ground-level workers of the RSS, who favour Yogi Adityanath as Modi’s successor, then the Sangh will not dispute it.
“There was no consensus within the Sangh over Modi’s candidature as PM in 2013-2014, either,” says the right-wing commentator. “But the Sangh and Modi both knew that the average RSS karyakarta was with Modi… when the RSS did its own survey, that’s what it found, and threw its weight behind Modi.”
Yet, Modi is an RSS pracharak with the backing of the entire RSS machinery. Even some of Adityanath’s staunchest supporters agree that what he lacks is the weight of an organisation or team behind him.
“He does not have a team of RSS people or futuristic leaders who can guide him… even now, his core team includes people from Gorakhpur or people he has known personally, who do not necessarily have much to offer in terms of strategic political planning,” the RSS-affiliated journalist says.
“Yogi does not have an Amit Shah or L.K. Advani,” another person, who knows the UP CM well, commented. “How far can he go without the RSS, without a team, without even a senior leader behind him?”
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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