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Mainstream, VOL LII No 34 August 16, 2014 - Independence Day Special
Communal Challenge to Free India
Some Reminiscences and Reflections
Friday 15 August 2014
#socialtags[(Desh Raj Goyal, 84, passed away in New Delhi after a brief illness in the afternoon of February 3, 2013. A veteran journalist and academic, he was the editor of Secular Democracy. From 1963 to 1967 he edited Mainstream.
Goyal-sahb was a crusader against the growing menace of communalism in the country since he fully comprehended the threat it posed having himself been a full-time RSS pracharak (like PM Narendra Modi) in his youth. He later eschewed his connections with the RSS and joined the Communist Party. He also taught in Delhi University’s Kirorimal College. He played a vital role in the struggle against Hindu communalism through the vehicle of late Subhadra Joshi’s Sampradayikta Virodhi Committee, and became the editor of Secular Democracy.
We are reproducing here, for the benefit of our readers, an article he had written for the Independence Day Special of Mainstream (August 16, 1997) on the occasion of the golden jubilee of our freedom. This article brings out his metamorphosis from an RSS activist to a Communist with a broad national outlook, and calls for rooting out communalism. The value of this article at the present juncture—when Modi is heading the PMO and Amit Shah is running the organisation of the ruling party as the BJP President—cannot be overestimated.)]
by D.R. Goyal
For a person nurtured in the RSS culture it was not possible to share the euphoria touched off by the advent of independence. All the more so in Punjab which was bearing the brunt of partition.
[see full text at: http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article3978.html ]
