CM Nayab Saini pays tribute to Deendayal Upadhyay on birth anniversary
Synopsis
Key Takeaways
On the birth anniversary of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini on Friday, September 25, 2026 paid tribute to the ideological architect whose twin doctrines — Antyodaya (uplift of the last person) and Ekatma Manavvad (Integral Humanism) — continue to shape the BJP's political identity more than five decades after his death.
The philosopher who built the Jan Sangh's soul
Deendayal Upadhyay was not merely a founding member of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, established in 1951 — he was its organising conscience. While others provided political muscle, Upadhyay provided the doctrine: a vision of India's development rooted in its own civilisational values rather than imported Western ideologies, whether capitalist or Marxist. His concept of Integral Humanism posited the individual, family, society, and nature as an interconnected whole — a framework that the Jan Sangh's successor, the BJP, has carried forward as a defining philosophical inheritance.
CM Saini's tribute, posted in Hindi, rendered this lineage clearly: 'Desh ko samriddhi ki raah dikhaane waale unke rashtravadi vichar aur Antyodaya ke siddhant Viksit Bharat ke nirmaan mein bahut kaam aane waale hain' — 'His nationalist ideas and the principle of Antyodaya, which showed the country the path to prosperity, will prove immensely useful in building a Developed India.'
Antyodaya's long journey from ideology to policy
The Antyodaya principle — that the measure of any society's progress is the condition of its poorest member — has travelled a remarkable distance from Upadhyay's writings into the language of governance. BJP leaders and governments at the Centre and in states routinely invoke it to frame welfare programmes, particularly those targeting the rural poor and marginalised communities. The anniversary tribute, a consistent annual ritual across the party's leadership, is as much a reaffirmation of that ideological compass as it is a personal act of remembrance.
For Haryana, where CM Saini leads a BJP government, the anniversary serves as a moment to connect ground-level welfare delivery back to first principles — a reminder that the political project claims roots older and deeper than any election cycle.