Govind Ballabh Pant was a Congress icon. Why does his legacy appeal to BJP?

6 min readNew DelhiSep 11, 2026 07:05 AM IST First published on: Sep 11, 2026 at 07:05 AM IST

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday paid tribute to the state’s first CM Govind Ballabh Pant on his 139th birth anniversary. The CM showered praise on Pant as a freedom fighter, a promoter of Hindi, and someone who helped implement land reforms in the state.

Pant was a prominent Congress leader and the praise for him from a BJP leader is not the first time that the party has chosen to celebrate a leader from the Congress, its primary rival today at the national level.

It has been a strategy of the BJP for a long time now to target Jawaharlal Nehru and the Nehru-Gandhi family while celebrating the legacy of several other Congress leaders at the time of Independence. By doing this, the BJP not only paints the non-Nehru-Gandhi leaders as part of a common national legacy it apparently upholds but also often goes to the extent of claiming that the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family erased their memory in later decades.

In the case of Pant and some others who had distinctive elements of Hindu conservatism, the BJP thinks that it has a legitimate right to celebrate their legacies, as it feels closer to their concerns than Nehru was in his lifetime.

CM Yogi Adityanath pays tribute to GB Pant on Thursday. (Express Photo)

A complex character

The situation in Pant’s case is, however, historically complex. He was a conservative and a champion of Hindi, but he was also committed to land reforms. He was a friend of Nehru who had also shielded him from a police baton charge by falling over him when the Simon Commission visited Lucknow, something historian Gyan Pandey describes at length in his book The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh. However, he was also ideologically at variance with Nehru.

There are multiple instances of this. As socialist leaders of the Congress decided to break with it to form a separate socialist party after independence, 13 of them in UP resigned from the Assembly on ethical grounds, writes The Indian Express’s Senior Associate Editor Shyamlal Yadav in his book, At The Heart of Power: The Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh. In June 1948, by-elections were held for these 13 seats and these threw one instance of a contest where Pant fielded a sadhu against Acharya Narendra Dev, a socialist and atheist, largely on religious-ideological lines.

The sadhu, fielded as a deliberate replacement for the Congress candidate, was Baba Raghav Das, a freedom fighter. Pant campaigned intensively for Raghav Das, and tulsi leaves were also distributed as part of the campaign, Yadav writes.

Journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay writes in The Demolition And The Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India that Pant, during his campaign in Ayodhya, accused Narendra Dev of not believing in Lord Ram. “Pant emphasised that Narendra Dev did not wear the chot, the tuft of hair worn by devout Hindus,” he writes, adding that Pant also charged that “Muslims and Zamindars were trying to undermine the Congress”. Raghav Das won by 1,300 votes.

Raghav Das soon got linked to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. When a nine-day akhand paath of the Ramcharitmanas was held in Ayodhya from October 20, 1949, he attended the programme on the last day, sharing the stage with Mahant Digvijayanath of the Hindu Mahasabha — the guru of Mahant Avaidyanath, whose disciple is Yogi Adityanath — and Swami Karpatri of the Ram Rajya Parishad.

After a Ram Lalla idol was placed in the Babri Masjid on the night of December 22-23, 1949, Nehru ordered its removal. But he couldn’t have his way. The pushback to the PM’s orders came not just from then District Magistrate KK Nair and city magistrate Guru Dutt Singh, but also from Raghav Das.

Mukhopadhyay writes, “In 1950, when the Centre, at Nehru’s directive, was pressuring the state government for action, Raghav Das threatened to resign from the assembly and the party if the idol was removed.”

Another example of Pant’s ideological overlap with the BJP’s predecessor, Jana Sangh, is the celebration of Hindi and Pant’s view that Urdu is a “Muslim language” and Hindi a “Hindu language”, as Mukhopadhyay has pointed out.

Brahmin factor

At a time when there are murmurs of a Brahmin blowback against the BJP as the “upper castes” seem upset with the UGC equity regulations, celebrating Pant is also the BJP’s signal to Brahmins before polls. And it works not only in UP but also in Uttarakhand, as Pant was a Kumaoni Brahmin by birth, and the community has the second-most significant presence after Rajputs in the state. The two also compete for power in the hill state.

Another important factor is that members of Pant’s family later came close to the BJP or joined it. His daughter-in-law Ila Pant joined the party in 1991 and defeated Narayan Dutt Tiwari in the Nainital Lok Sabha constituency in 1998. Pant’s son K C Pant also shifted from the Congress to the BJP once Atal Bihari Vajpayee became PM and served as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission from 2000 to 2004. He even reminded Congress leaders that his father had saved Nehru during a baton charge.

Historian Neerja Singh says that Pant sometimes ignored Nehru’s letters and saw him as “childish” and ignorant of politics. However, Pant’s persona was complex and not amenable to being bracketed in any ideological binary. Yadav writes in his book that Pant passed the Hindu Code Bill, “which made monogamy compulsory for Hindu men while giving Hindu women the rights to divorce as well as inheritance of ancestral property”.