Rajiv Dixit

Rajiv Dixit (30 November 1967 – 30 November 2010) was an Indian social activist who founded the ''Azadi Bachao Andolan''.

His organisation promoted a message of ''swadeshi''-economics that opposed globalisation and neo-liberalism. In alliance with Ramdev, he formed the ''Bharat Swabhiman Andolan'' and its political offshoot, which combined the economic message with promotion of yoga and Ayurveda.

Life and career

In 1984, the Bhopal disaster, in which a gas leak from a pesticide plant owned by a multinational corporation resulted in thousands of deaths, led Dixit to question the role of such corporations in the Indian economy. His thinking on the subject was subsequently shaped by Dharampal, a Gandhian historian and thinker. In 1992, Dixit founded the trust, ''Azadi Bachao Andolan'' (Save Independence Movement), with the stated mission to "counter the onslaught of foreign multinationals and the western culture on Indians, their values, and on the Indian economy in general". Dixit's message was spread through thousands of speeches delivered across the country and through recordings on CDs and tapes distributed by the organisation. In 2004, Dixit faced allegations that he had misappropriated funds from the ''Azadi Bachao Andolan'' to benefit his brother, and his relation with the organisation were estranged.

Also in 2004, Ramdev, who at that time was a traveling yoga teacher with a considerable following of his own, sought out Dixit and the two met in Nashik. Over the next few years Dixit became a mentor to Ramdev and their campaigns, against globalisation and for yoga respectively, merged. The two founded the ''Bharat Swabhiman Andolan'' (Indian Self-respect Movement), with Dixit serving as its national secretary. The new organisation had political ambitions. Prior to the 2009 Indian general election, it agitated alongside the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and allied Hindu organisations in a movement to clean the Ganga river, and in March 2010, the ''Bharat Swabhiman'' party was launched with an aim to contest the 2014 Indian general election. Dixit and Ramdev set out on a tour (''Bharat Nirman yatra'') across India to campaign for the party but Dixit died during a stop in Chhattisgarh, under murky circumstances.

Dixit's death, and the surrounding controversy, ended Bharat Swabhiman party's ambition to field electoral candidates.

Ideology and activism

Dixit held that globalisation and economic liberalisation represented a new form of colonialism and blamed them for India's "dependency on the West, lack of domestic production, the rise of excessive consumerism, the weakening of the agrarian sector, and farmers’ suicides." He re-appropriated the term ''swadeshi'' for this message, thus linking it to the Swadeshi movement pioneered by Aurobindo Ghosh and Mahatma Gandhi during the Indian independence movement.

After the formation of the ''Bharat Swabhiman Andolan'', the message of ''swadeshi'' economics was extended to include concerns about governmental corruption and economic inequalities, and interwoven with promotion of yoga and ayurveda.

In 2023, video emerged of a speech given several years earlier in which Dixit celebrated India's national anthem, ''Jana Gana Mana'', repeating a controversial narrative of its creation as an homage to King-Emperor George V, and that the King-Emperor later awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to its author, the poet and polymath Rabindranath Tagore. The claims were originally published in contemporary Anglo-Indian media when the song was first performed in 1911, and have been shown to be mistaken. Tagore himself denied that the song was a tribute to the British monarch, and George V was not chairman of the Swedish Academy in 1913 when Tagore was awarded the prize.

Death

Dixit died on his 43rd birthday, on 30 November 2010, at a hospital in Bhilai, Chhattisgarh; the attending doctor declared the cause to be cardiac arrest. Dixit had been brought to the hospital after collapsing in a bathroom at an ashram

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