The Origin Story of India’s Power Elite

AFTER REKHA GUPTA WAS DECLARED CHIEF MINISTER of Delhi, Congress leader Alka Lamba posted a 30-year-old pho­tograph from the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) elections. The image showed both women asprominent young student leaders, taking their oath as general secretary and presi­dent, respectively. Lamba represented the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), Congress’ student wing, while Gupta was from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The social media post went viral. Lamba, head of Mahila Congress, had contested and lost the Assembly election to Delhi’s former Chief Minister Atishi from the Kalkaji constituency. Gupta, a first-time MLA, went on to be the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) pick for the top post in the capital where BJP regained power after 27 years.

Both women appeared to have promising political futures in 1995, especially Lamba who had joined NSUI in 1994 at 19 and had become the DUSU president the next year. Fiery and outspoken, she gained traction within Congress and contested against BJP stalwart and then- Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana in 2003, and much later against Arvind Kejriwal, on both occasions unsuccessfully. But Lamba acquired the image of a politician who was a fighter, who didn’t throw in the towel. Ironically, she left Congress in frustration and joined Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in 2013 and won the Chandni Chowk seat two years later. She quit AAP in 2019 to rejoin Congress but was disqualified from the Delhi Assembly for switching parties. She rose through the ranks subsequently to become the Mahila Congress chief. That is where her career seems to have plateaued, despite her far higher name recognition in Delhi politics than Rekha Gupta’s.

Gupta, on the other hand, skinned her knees in ABVP, which she joined in 1992. She would later become DUSU president. In 2002, she joined BJP and rose through its ranks to become a National Executive member. She served as the national secretary of the party’s Yuva Morcha from 2002 to 2005, became a councillor three times on the strength of her leadership skill, and later, mayor of the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC). After losing the Assembly election from Shalimar Bagh in both 2015 and 2020, she won this time round and became Delhi’s fourth woman chief minister.

Gupta is not the only ABVP alum to occupy a coveted position. Over the decades several of BJP’s prominent leaders have traced their political growth to the student outfit. Gupta’s cabinet already shows significant signs of the influence of ABVP in the selection of Janakpuri MLA Ashish Sood as minister. Sood became DUSU secretary in 1989 and later won the DUSU election to become its president. From Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College, he worked as a full-time member of ABVP from 1989 to 1993. Sood is today party-in-charge for Goa and is known as an organisation man. Karawal Nagar MLA Kapil Mishra, who was associated with ABVP in various capacities, has also been given a ministerial berth.

ABVP’s impact is evident today in Indian politics, with those who have emerged through its ranks accounting for over half the key posts at the Centre and in states governed by BJP. Gupta is also not the first BJP chief minister in recent years to rise through ABVP. Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai, Rajasthan Chief Minister Bhajan Lal Sharma, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis have all come from the ABVP camp. Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami (as well as Tirath Singh Rawat before him) have been ABVP members too.

Between 2014 and 2023, the number of BJP chief ministers who were formerly ABVP leaders rose to 13 of a total 28, from only two earlier. Among them are Raghubar Das, Vijay Rupani, Jai Ram Thakur, and Biplab Kumar Deb, former chief ministers of Jharkhand, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, and Tripura, respec­tively. Moreover, Liutenant Governor of Jammu & Kashmir Manoj Sinha also traces his political roots to the Banaras Hindu University where he was president of the students’ union in 1982.

While many notable leaders of other political parties like Congress also became upwardly mobile in the national scheme of things after making a mark in student politics, it was RSS alone that had the foresight to establish and reinforce a foundational schooling system by which youth power and ideological vision were shaped and harnessed for the future. It thus created a dedicated national pool from which political talent could be sourced across the Sangh Parivar. What also made it exceptional was that ABVP was a mass youth organisation that regularly contested campus elections, mirroring the worldview of the parent body. Many former ABVP members in BJP assert that RSS itself does not meddle in the student body’s decisions. “Learning the skills with which to make considered and life-changing decisions on their own as youth on campus strengthens their mettle, spirit and resilience and prepares them well for a future in public service and the service of the nation and its development,” a former ABVP member recalls.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in-charge of ABVP in Ahmedabad as a young RSS pracharak. His own Union Coun­cil of Ministers currently sports many political stalwarts as­sociated with ABVP actively. The top echelons include Home Minister Amit Shah, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, Health Minister JP Nadda, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, Agriculture Minis­ter Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, and Power Minister Manohar Lal Khattar. Other ministers like Virendra Khatik, Pralhad Joshi, Giriraj Singh, Bhupender Yadav, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, G Kishan Reddy, and Nityanand Rai have all been active in ABVP leaders. Under Modi 2.0 in 2019, of its 56 ministers as many as 24 were from ABVP.

Formed in 1948 by leaders like Balraj Madhok and registered the next year in 1949, the students’ wing of RSS has well over 55 lakh members at present. It was launched to counter the influence of communism. Today, it has a presence in thousands of towns across India. At its 70th national convention in Gorakhpur in 2024, the outgoing national general secretary, Yagywalkya Shukla, had said that ABVP set a remarkable milestone by surpassing 55 lakh members, emerging as the world’s biggest student organisation. Its members have participated in key national agitations such as the JP Movement during Emergency, the Ram Janmabhoomi Andolan, the agitation for the removal of Article 370 for Kashmir, and Chalo Kashmir, among others. Today, if the once booming popularity of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and Congress’ NSUI has drastically waned on campuses across the country, it has a lot to do not just with the political and ideological decline of these parties over the last decade on Modi’s watch but also with the simultaneous rise of ABVP.

Earlier decades of student and campus politics threw up tall lead­ers for BJP such as former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, as well as Rajnath Singh and Gadkari. During Emergency, ABVP participated in the agitation to restore democracy, with more than 10,000 of its ac­tivists jailed. For Jaitley, among BJP’s most prominent and respected leaders, student politics during the turbulent 1970s was the gateway to national politics. In the run-up to the declaration of Emergency in 1975, protests that erupted at an Ahmedabad college over a hike in canteen charges led to police storming the campus. The protests swiftly spread to other towns like Patna, already a hotbed of political activism, where the state Assembly was gheraoed and widespread street protests erupted. The Army had to be called in to quell the pro­tests that kept India on the boil. Jayaprakash Narayan was drawn into the movement which came to be known after him as the JP Movement and called for Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution). At the forefront were RSS, the Jana Sangh, the socialists, and all those who opposed the Indira Gandhi government.

Jaitley was a 22-year-old law student at Delhi University at the time and a prominent ABVP activist. He went to Ahmedabad and then to Patna to stoke the movement into a conflagration. He was later elected DUSU president. In 1974, he was elevated to convenor of the Sangarsh Samiti, an umbrella organisation for all protesting groups. He was at the centrestage of agitations called by JP to gherao the prime minister’s residence and force her to resign, even as an Allahabad High Court judge sought to bar her from contesting elec­tions for six years for violating election rules.

Around midnight of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared Emer­gency. She also began jailing all or most of her political opponents as well as those among artists and public intellectuals opposed to her. The morning after the proclamation of Emergency, June 26, Jaitley received news that he was to be arrested and fled from his home while his father, also a lawyer, kept the police engaged in conversation. Surfacing soon after at Delhi University, he gathered a group and burnt an effigy of Indira Gandhi, making him, in his own words, the “first satyagrahi” against Emergency, since it was the only protest staged that day. Jaitley was later arrested under preven­tive detention and was in custody for 19 months from 1975 to 1977.

Jaitley’s name was later proposed for the 10-member National Executive of the newly formed Janata Party alongside those of stalwarts like AB Vajpayee, LK Advani and Nanaji Deshmukh. However, he resigned from the panel the very next day after ABVP showed its displeasure at its activist joining a political party.

BUT WHILE ABVP has grown from strength to strength over the last decade corresponding to the rise of the pop­ularity if Narendra Modi, it has had a significant but un­intended consequence: the decimation of NSUI, Congress’ once strong students’ wing that dominated campuses in the north. Originally, ABVP’s main objective was to counter the growing influ­ence of communism on youth. NSUI lost out with the decline of the Nehru-Gandhi family. While RSS invested wisely in strengthen­ing a permanent talent pool of A- lister leadership in ABVP to draw from, Congress focused on and invested in its first family. This hap­pened despite the fact that youth political activism had thrown up tall leaders who became chief ministers, including Ashok Gehlot, ND Tiwari, Ghulam Nabi Azad and AK Antony. Most were seen as handmaidens of the Nehru-Gandhi family though.

Bihar Governor Arif Mohammad Khan was another promi­nent student activist who joined Congress. He was general secre­tary of the AMU Students’ Union from 1971 to 1972 and president from 1972 to 1973. Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, once close to Rajiv Gandhi, rose in political stature from the time when, as a student leader at Joga­maya Devi College in Kolkata, she set up the Chhatra Parishad, the students’ wing of Congress (I) which defeated the Democratic Students’ Union of the Socialist Unity Centre of India. With this, she moved up from being an active grassroots worker of Congress to general secretary of its youth wing within four years.

Amritsar MP Manish Tewari, Congress treasurer Ajay Maken and others emerged as leaders drawn from NSUI. Tewari was NSUI national president from 1988 to 1993 and then president of the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) from 1998 to 2000. The advocate-turned-politician was earlier Union minister for information and broadcasting. He was later sidelined for his views on issues which were at variance with the official line of Congress and Rahul Gandhi.

NSUI was founded in 1970-71 as an instrument to carry for­ward the socialistic orientation of the newly formed party after the split in the Indian National Congress in 1969. Indira Gandhi needed a vehicle to carry the slogan of “garibi hatao” to the youth and to amplify the motives for decisions like bank nationalisation and abolition of privy purses. Equally, there was a need to counter ABVP and the socialist-aligned Samajwadi Yuvjan Sabha (SYS) on campuses. After the General Election of 1980, many IYC activists became MPs, adding to its profile, but not for long.

Since the elevation of Rahul Gandhi, Congress has been facing a raft of problems while facing the onslaught of the juggernaut that is Modi’s BJP. Unwavering loyalty to the first family became the only yardstick that ensured upward mobility in the party that was once a political behemoth. There is little organic connection between NSUI, IYC and the main party.

Ironically, former student leaders who now occupy positions of note in Congress are also from either ABVP or other student entities—or from Congress families. The Congress government in Telangana is helmed by Revanth Reddy who was associated with ABVP in his student days. Kanhaiya Kumar is another such import into its youth leadership, this time from the Communist Party of India (CPI). Siddaramaiah, chief minister of Karnataka, the only big state that Congress now has in its kitty, came to the party from Janata Dal (S). In Gujarat, Modi’s home state, Congress imported Jignesh Mevani and Hardik Patel. As with Patel, the ar­rangement was destined to fail. In January 2024, ahead of the elections in Andhra Pradesh, Congress resorted to yet another import, albeit not through the student activism route, by appointing YS Sharmila, daughter of late Congress stalwart and former Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy as the new state president.

The same epoch-defining mass student protests na­tionwide that had marked the JP Movement and call for Sampoorna Kranti was the political launchpad for not just leaders like Jaitley. It also produced young leaders who went on to become stalwarts in the socialist stable, among them Lalu Prasad, patriarch of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Sharad Yadav, and Ram Vilas Paswan. They too were inspired by the Lohiaite worldview and shaped by a socialist vision. However, all three par­ties created by these leaders, who grew out of student politics and grassroots struggles, today predominantly reflect the mentality of family-led enterprises in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar.

Former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad’s political journey began when he became the Patna University Students’ Union general secretary in 1970. He also became its president in 1973. Under the banner of the JP student movement called the ‘Bihar Movement’, Prasad brought in a socialist tidal wave based on OBC (Other Backward Classes) politics in his home state that vanquished Congress’ decades-long dominance, first with Janata Dal and later with RJD. But RJD, Prasad’s family and he himself were rocked by several allegations of corruption. The RJD chief was convicted in the Fodder Scam. He served a jail term till April 17, 2021 when he was granted bail by the high court. Dynastic rule came to be synonymous with RJD on his watch.

ONCE UPON A time the mainstream Left parties galvanised youth, students and factory workers. Left cadres were seen as dedicated, especially in rural areas and mobilisation of people at the grassroots level was undertaken regularly to reflect critical concerns on the ground. With Kerala now the only outpost of the Left, thanks to a seven-party alliance named Left Democratic Front (LDF), the Left has been struck by stagnation and apathy and is facing an existential crisis. Student politics at universities like JNU, once the unquestioned bas­tion of the urban Left, is irrevocably synonymous with the phrase ‘Urban Naxals’, exposing the shallowness and complete disconnect with public sentiment. While elections to DUSU are still used to gauge political winds among the youth and serve as a launchpad for political careers, JNU has been relegated to the sidelines.

The phrase ‘Urban Naxals’ was popularised during the 2016 JNU sedition row. It was used to brand the Left-leaning students who protested the hanging of Afzal Guru, a convicted terrorist. In a mobile phone video that emerged after the protests, some pro­testers were heard shouting slogans like “Bharat tere tukde honge… Insha Allah. InshaAllah (India, you’ll fall to pieces, god willing)” and “Bharat ki barbaadi tak jung rahegi, jung rahegi (The fight will continue until India is destroyed)”. These developments had exposed the rot in leftist thinking and the manipulation of ideol­ogy to accommodate and assimilate lobbyists of extreme political views among the youth.

The disconnect between Left voices at universities like JNU and public sentiment was evident in electoral results. The com­munist parties were down to a fraction of the seats they once held in Parliament, managing to win only five in 2019, an all-time low, compared with 59 in 2004, 24 in 2009, and 10 in 2014.

Leftist student politics at JNU and its power to cultivate promi­nent leaders may have been idolised, romanticised, exaggerated and air brushed for effect for a while. Both former general secretaries of CPM, Prakash Karat and the late Sitaram Yechury, never took part in mass movements. Both actually made a lateral entry into CPM. After their stint in SFI, they worked as assistants to CPM leaders like EMS Namboodiripad and M Basavapunnaiah and climbed up the party ladder swiftly. While others among the cadres moved up from local committees to area committees, district and state commit­tees and only then gained entry into the Central Committee, Karat and Yechury were made Central Committee members quite early without experiencing the rough and tumble of grassroots activism.

In an interview on the Emergency era, the widespread suppres­sion and suspension of civil rights and the student activism that had rocked the nation, Yechury had maintained that his memories of JNU as a new entrant at the time was that of a professor bumming a cigarette from him and of being allowed to address him by his first name. While Yechury was singing in classrooms as a student activist, ABVP leaders from DUSU such as Jaitley played active roles in national politics at the height of the JP Movement.

In the years after former CPM boss Harkishan Singh Surjeet’s stint as party leader, both Karat and Yechury were accorded dispro­portionate publicity by the media. Although their opinions and dik­tats carried little weight in national politics, the ideological gurus of Gole Market (the area in the capital housing the CPM national of­fice) acquired a halo only as part of the Congress-led United Progres­sive Alliance (UPA) I. CPM had, in earlier years, repeatedly placed Congress as Enemy No 1 in its ranking of political adversaries. Not surprisingly, it was shown the door by Manmohan Singh when, beguiled by its own image as a powerful front, the Left withdrew support to the government over the Indo-US civil nuclear deal in 2008. UPA returned to power resoundingly a year later without the unwieldy baggage of the Left and with Singh at the helm.

Between them, Karat and Yechury ran the Left Front to the ground, both on and off the campus. In contrast, ABVP has emerged as the political incubator of top-rung leaders who continue to reshape Indian politics and the stature of the country in the global scheme of things.

 

ABVPAmit ShahBJPDharmendra PradhanManohar Lal KhattarNarendra ModiNitin GadkariPiyush GoyalPolitical leadershipRajnath SinghRekha GuptaShivraj Singh Chouhan