Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (10 page)

Poddar appears in the Bose Commission’s report at crucial junctures. Throughout the proceedings of the commission, Shanti Prasad Jain and Jaidayal Dalmia had maintained that the Dalmia–Jain business existed as a group up to 31 May 1948. However, the commission took into account an exhibit, a document in Hindi, executed on 15 July 1946 in Mussoorie. Shanti Prasad Jain told the commission that ‘Hanuman Prasad Tauji (uncle), an intimate friend of the family whom all trusted and revered’ had drawn up the document.
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After translation of the document, the commission came to the understanding that ‘at the date of document the three of them jointly held the principal’ that consisted of cash and shares ‘situated anywhere’.
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The document prepared by Poddar, the commission said, did ‘not divide any property physically’ but ‘merely defined or re-allocated the share of each’.
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The document also spelt out the ‘exact interest that each was to have’ and ‘how that interest was to be divided and distributed’. It also specified that dividends from shares would be divided among different charitable trusts as well as the three proprietors in accordance with the shares held by each. The three—Ram Krishna Dalmia, Jaidayal Dalmia and Shanti Prasad Jain—were termed ‘maliks’ (owners) by the document.

When confronted by the commission, Shanti Prasad Jain dismissed it, saying the document was a ‘lot of nonsense executed to humour an old-fashioned friend of the family who was not familiar with the precise legal form’ through which the assets were being managed. Jain said he had signed the document because the Dalmia brothers had signed it. His lawyer argued that the document was a ‘make-believe document executed just for consolation to make a show’ and it was never acted upon.
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But the commission did not agree; it believed the Poddar- drafted agreement was important and relied upon by the three proprietors.

Another important document that was again drawn up by Poddar consisted of a list of companies that had been partitioned (divided) in April 1948. Bose and other members of the commission found it odd that ‘Poddar an old friend of the family was again called in to help settle the basic principles of the partition’.
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Though Shanti Prasad Jain told the Commission that the ‘principles evolved themselves’, his elder brother Shriyans Prasad Jain in his cross-examination said, ‘These people regard him (Poddar) as one of the elders; though he may not be a blood relation he is more than a blood relation.’ He admitted Poddar had helped in ‘framing the basic principles of the dissolution’.

Though the Nehru government had appointed the commission, the ordeal continued till the time of Lal Bahadur Shastri. Shanti Prasad Jain and Rama Jain ‘rebuffed (R.K. Dalmia’s) efforts to resume command’ of
The Times of India
, after his release from jail in 1964,
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and Poddar who had good relations with Shastri requested him to show compassion as ‘Ram Krishna Dalmia and Shanti Prasad Jain have suffered enough’.
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The Dalmias were not the only ones to involve Poddar in their business concerns. Even Seth Govind Das, who by his own admission had relinquished the family business, would request Poddar to prevail upon Purushottam Das Tandon to become a shareholder of his company before its annual general meeting. Das also asked Poddar to convince the Raja of Padrauna (near Gorakhpur) to buy shares of his company.
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Poddar would receive requests for help from all quarters, even from Gandhians for whom he had become an anathema in the wake of January 1948. Dada Dharmadhikari and Vimla Thakkar, senior members of the Sarva Seva Sangh involved in Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan (land grant) movement who were getting Rs 250 per month from the Dalmia–Jain trust, asked Poddar for help when this suddenly stopped in August 1958. Thakkar wrote to Poddar thanking him for having the monthly contribution restored in January 1959.
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Ram Sinh, the Raja of Sitamau (Madhya Pradesh), was enamoured of both Poddar and Goyandka and regularly sought their advice from the mid-1930s onwards. Sinh, considered a progressive ruler,
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sent his private secretary Shivram Krishna Godbole all the way to Gorakhpur to meet Poddar.
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In 1935, when Ram Sinh built a small cottage for meditation, Godbole was asked to consult Poddar about the colour that should be used to paint the place.
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Either directly or through Godbole, Ram Sinh kept in regular touch with Poddar, often prodding him to come to Sitamau and conduct satsangs. His constant concern was about his disturbed mental state and the spiritual solution to it. It is possible Ram Sinh’s problem was related to his son Govind Sinh’s decision to convert to Christianity in 1936. Poddar had heard the news and inquired about it from Godbole who confirmed it.
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According to Godbole, Govind Sinh had wanted to convert earlier but was convinced not to take the step before meeting with religious scholars to understand Hinduism’s basic ethos. Though he promised not to take any sudden decision, he did exactly that. He went to Indore all alone and informed the family after the conversion rites were over. Godbole said that though Ram Sinh had taken the episode in his stride, he needed mental peace that only a satsang could provide. Poddar was asked to come to Sitamau. In later years, Ram Sinh visited Gorakhpur and Rishikesh to attend Poddar’s or Goyandka’s religious discourses, and the two Gita Press stalwarts also visited Sitamau.

Jagat Narayan Lal from Bihar was among the senior leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha who switched to the Congress after Independence and became at various points minister of law, cooperatives and animal husbandry. But he kept alive his connections with the conservative elements including Dalmia and Poddar. Incidentally, in the elections to the Central assembly in 1935, Lal had contested as a Hindu Mahasabha candidate against Dalmia as an independent and Anugraha Narayan Singh of Congress. (Lal’s deposit was forfeited and Dalmia could barely scrape through).
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It was to Gorakhpur that M.S. Golwalkar of the RSS came to meet Poddar for the first time, but the year is unknown. He had heard about Gita Press and its religious publications. ‘I was always curious to know about this organization that was making religious texts available at nominal rate. What is this organization? Who runs it?’ Golwalkar wrote in an article after meeting Poddar.
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He recalled meeting a cheerful person of medium height, full of sophistication and sweet language. Golwalkar wrote that any organization could not succeed only through noble goals and money: ‘What is needed is a person who to achieve the goal is far-sighted, focused and a good planner. He should also be willing to sacrifice his mind, body, soul and money. Gita Press has the amalgamation of all this in Jaydayal Goyandka and Hanuman Prasad Poddar.’

The conservative section of Congress, led by Hindu revivalists Madan Mohan Malaviya, Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi and Sampurnanand, was always close to Poddar. Malaviya’s death in 1946 and Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 did not change Poddar’s equation with the Congress, at least with this section.

In an undated letter, believed to be of the 1950s, to then home minister Govind Ballabh Pant, Poddar referred to Pant’s offer of a Bharat Ratna that he had already refused.
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Poddar’s letter quotes verbatim Pant’s reaction to his refusal of the highest national honour: ‘You are so great that humanity should be proud of you and therefore I had recommended you for Bharat Ratna’ and ‘you are far superior than Bharat Ratna’. Strangely, Poddar told Pant that he had ‘burnt the letter’ in which the offer of Bharat Ratna was made. He also requested Pant that his letter should be ‘kept secret’. Destroying letters and other communications was a regular feature of Poddar’s life. In fact, the partially published manuscript of his life, based on interviews, quotes him as saying he destroyed letters from Tilak and many others. Several of his letters contain instructions to the recipients to destroy them after reading.

Poddar also told his biographer Gambhirchand Dujari that during the colonial period he was first offered the title of Rai Bahadur by Gorakhpur collector Adhya Prasad, and later knighthood by United Provinces governor Sir Harry Graham Haig. ‘When I refused the knighthood, Haig was very happy and told me such honours are akin to putting a collar around a dog’s neck.’

Closeness to politicians also meant Poddar had to sometimes get involved in the machinations and take sides during challenging political contests, often at the cost of the high principles that he and
Kalyan
espoused so passionately. When Sampurnanand took over as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh after G.B. Pant was made Union home minister in 1955, Congress’s famed factional feud came out in the open and soon assumed serious proportions. Poddar’s friend of many years, Sampurnanand, a kayastha, had differences with his revenue minister Charan Singh, who resigned from the Sampurnanand cabinet in 1959. Singh’s opportunity to retaliate came when an allegation of corruption was made against Lokpati Tripathi, son of the state’s home minister Kamlapati Tripathi. The allegation was that the irrigation department had given a work contract without tender, and this firm had outsourced the work to Hindustan Commercial Corporation, a company allegedly owned by Lokpati Tripathi.

Poddar’s letter to Sampurnanand was in defence of Tripathi and against Prayag Narain, deputy chief engineer of the irrigation department, who he said was working in tandem with Charan Singh.
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Poddar said the questions on the scam, popularly called the Sarda Sagar dam scandal, raised by Raj Narain, then the Socialist Party MLA from Moti Mahal, Lucknow, had been supplied by Prayag Narain. He called for severe action against Prayag Narain ‘lest it may cause a severe damage to the party in power and nation as a whole’. The petitions department of the UP government acknowledged Poddar’s letter.

The scandal soon got out of control, forcing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to intervene. Paul R. Brass brings out the larger story of the scam in which Charan Singh was drawn in, allegedly for fomenting trouble against Sampurnanand.
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Nehru’s intervention did not go in Charan Singh’s favour and in subsequent years Singh would become one of the most vocal voices against the dominant Congress.

Poddar’s relationship with Kamlapati Tripathi continued, and in 1970, Tripathi made him a key member of the national committee to celebrate 400 years of Tulsidas’s
Ramcharitmanas
. Samuparnanand, who had resigned as chief minister in 1960 as a fallout of the Kamlapati Tripathi saga, also remained close to Poddar. Leading a retired life in 1967, he would seek Poddar’s help in securing a job for Vidya Bhaskar, former editor of
Aaj
, in Ramnath Goenka’s proposed new Hindi newspaper. Bhaskar had already had a meeting with B.D. Goenka, son of Ramnath, but Sampurnanand wanted Poddar to put in a word.
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Poddar, whose relations with Ramnath Goenka were excellent, obliged, but the project would take several more years, and
Jansatta
started only in 1983.

In the past, Poddar had sought Goenka’s help for newsprint and a printing press. With the anti-Congress and anti–Indira Gandhi wave on the rise since the mid-1960s, articulated mainly by Goenka’s
Indian
Express
, the owner threw his hat in the electoral arena, contesting in the 1971 Lok Sabha elections as the Jana Sangh candidate from Vidisha. For the ailing Poddar, this was an occasion to sacrifice another of his vows, namely to keep away from direct politics. Though only two years before Poddar had advised Goenka to slowly wind up his business and immerse himself in full-time devotion to God, so that he would have less worries,
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he now issued a public statement in Goenka’s support. Poddar underlined that his aim was that ‘religion should not suffer in the country since religion is the only way to achieve human welfare’.
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Goenka, he said, was not merely an industrialist but also a social worker who was progressive and large-hearted. ‘Above everything he is religious. I know him from my childhood and have highest regard for him. I request voters to ensure he wins with highest margin. People would gain from his desire to serve.’

Goenka’s first attempt to fight an election in 1951–52 as a Congress candidate from Tindivanam in Madras state had failed miserably, as he had finished second with a paltry 15.5 per cent of the votes. This time he won, garnering 52.04 per cent of the votes. Manibhai J. Mehta of the Congress came a distant second with 41 per cent.

A few years before his death, responding to a query about his relationships with women, Poddar told an unnamed acquaintance that he did not have permission from the divine to divulge everything. Assuming the role of a man with godlike qualities, he rated the women he had known as his ‘devotees’: ‘Yes, I can give an indicative answer in brief. Among female devotees I have been attracted to three: Ramdei, my wife in this life, Chinmayi Devi of South India and Savitri Sekhsaria. There are other men and women too. But they are much below these three. Among men though Jaidayal (Dalmia) is not considered a devotee and even he does not think himself to be one but consider him the best. He has the highest place among those whom I really like.’
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Little is known about Savitri Sekhsaria apart from the fact that she belonged to a well-off Bombay family. Harikrishna Dujari who knew her well told me, ‘She was totally devoted to Poddar and used to spend a few months in Gorakhpur every year.’ Barring a single reference, Poddar’s personal papers do not talk of Savitri, but Chinmayi Devi appears in his personal accounts as a devotee from Bezwada (present-day Vijaywada). On a pilgrimage in 1956 Poddar was staying with an acquaintance in Vijaywada when he met Chinmayi Devi who was living in the neighbourhood. Poddar saw a framed photograph that Chinmayi was worshipping and, immediately recognizing it as a photograph from his Bombay days, asked who the man was. Chinmayi replied that she had read about him in a paper long ago, and had surrendered herself to him though she had never met him. When she finally realized that the man in photograph was standing in front of her, she worshipped him by putting a tilak on his forehead and sandal paste on his feet. Despite Poddar’s curiosity to know more about her, she asked him to leave and would not reveal anything. This spiritual encounter, recounted by Poddar ten years later, was in keeping with his status as a man with godlike qualities.
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