In one of the most striking moments from Suvendu Adhikari’s swearing-in ceremony as West Bengal’s first BJP Chief Minister in Kolkata on Saturday morning, PM Modi was seen walking up to a frail 97-year-old man seated among party veterans, embracing him warmly and touching his feet in a rare public gesture of respect.
The man was Makhan Lal Sarkar, one of the oldest surviving grassroots leaders associated with the early Jana Sangh and BJP movement in Bengal, and a former aide of Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
As visuals of the interaction went viral on social media, many began asking the same question: Who exactly is Makhan Lal Sarkar?
A forgotten foot soldier of the Jana Sangh era
According to Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya, Sarkar was among the companions who travelled with Syama Prasad Mookerjee during his historic Kashmir movement in the early 1950s. Mookerjee had launched the agitation against Jammu and Kashmir’s separate constitutional arrangement and famously declared that India could not have “two constitutions, two prime ministers and two flags.”
Sarkar was reportedly present during Mookerjee’s final political journey to Kashmir in 1953, a journey that ended with the Jana Sangh founder’s controversial death in custody in a Kashmir jail under circumstances that continue to be debated even today.
Bhattacharya said Sarkar was arrested in Kashmir in 1952 during protests linked to the movement to hoist the Indian tricolour there. For many within the BJP, Sarkar represents a living connection to the ideological origins of the broader nationalist movement in post-Independence India.
Arrested for singing a patriotic song
Recalling another little-known episode from Sarkar’s life, Bhattacharya said the veteran leader was once arrested by Delhi Police during the Congress era merely for singing a patriotic song.
According to him, Sarkar was produced before a judge and asked to apologise. Instead, he insisted that he had committed no crime and had merely sung a patriotic song. Intrigued, the judge reportedly asked him to sing the song again in the courtroom itself.
Sarkar did exactly that.
“The judge then directed the police to arrange a first-class ticket for Sarkar to return home and also give him Rs 100 for the journey,” Bhattacharya recounted at the ceremony.
One of the BJP’s earliest organisers in North Bengal
Makhan Lal Sarkar later emerged as one of the BJP’s earliest organisational figures in North Bengal after the party’s formation in 1980.
He became the first BJP district president of the Siliguri organisational district and played a crucial role in expanding the party’s network across West Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling at a time when the BJP barely had a political footprint in Bengal.
Party leaders say Sarkar enrolled nearly 10,000 members within a year during the BJP’s formative phase in the state. From 1981 onwards, he remained district president for seven consecutive years, considered an extraordinary organisational feat in an era when party posts were rarely held for such long durations.
Why PM Modi’s gesture stood out
PM Modi’s decision to publicly touch Sarkar’s feet was widely interpreted within BJP circles as a symbolic tribute to the old Jana Sangh generation that built the ideological and organisational foundations of the party long before it became electorally dominant.
For many younger BJP workers present at the swearing-in ceremony, Sarkar’s presence served as a reminder that the party’s rise in Bengal was built not just by contemporary electoral battles, but also by decades of groundwork laid by largely forgotten karyakartas who kept the movement alive during politically hostile times.
At 97, Makhan Lal Sarkar remains one of the last surviving links to that era.
