Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday paid his tributes to BJP's founding ideologue Syama Prasad Mookerjee on his birth anniversary, saying he dedicated his life to the making of a strong India.
In a tweet, Modi described Mookerjee, a minister in the independent India's first government, as a great nationalist thinker and educationist who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the forerunner to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
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His ideals and principles will inspire every generation in the country, he said.
Born in 1901 in Calcutta, now Kolkata, Mookerjee was a well-known academician who made a mark as a politician in Bengal in the undivided India.
An early champion of repealing Article 370, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir, he joined hands with the RSS to launch Jana Sangh in 1951 and is counted, along with Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, as one of the ideological beacon for the BJP.