Prof. Rajendra Singh (29 January 1922 – 14 July 2003 ), popularly called Rajju Bhaiya, was the fourth Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh between 1994 and 2000.

He worked as a professor and head of the Department of Physics at Allahabad University but left to devote his life  for the Sangh in the mid-1960s. Rajju Bhaiyya was acknowledged as an exceptionally brilliant student by Sir C. V. Raman, the physicist and Nobel Prize-winner, when he was his examiner in M.Sc. He also offered Singh a fellowship for advanced research in nuclear physics.

He joined Allahabad University after majoring in Physics to teach Spectroscopy. He taught at the university for several years, where later he was appointed head of the Physics Department. He was also considered an expert in nuclear physics which was very rare those days in India. He was a very popular teacher of the subject, using simplicity and clear concepts.

With the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh :

Singh was active in the Quit India Movement of 1942 and it was during this time that he came in contact with the RSS. From then onwards the Sangh influenced his life. He resigned from his university post in 1966 and offered full-time services to the RSS as a ‘prant pracharak’ of  Uttar Pradesh, . He was later entrusted with responsibility of  Sar Karyavaha (General Secretary) in the 1980s. In 1994, he was nominated to succeed BalaSahebji  Deoras as Sarsanghchalak.

While in Uttar Pradesh, he worked with Lal Bahadur Shastri, Chandra Shekhar and V.P. Singh. Murali Manohar Joshi was also one of his best students.

Rajju Bhaiyya shared an excellent rapport with political leaders cutting across ideological lines besides academicians, social workers and intellectuals. He abdicated the post of Sarsanghchalak on account of his failing health in February 2000 and nominated the K. S. Sudarshan ji for the post.

During emergency he went underground and toured whole India. He was also responsible for organizing human rights convention presided by Justice VM Tarkunde in Delhi in 1976. He was also responsible for setting up friends of India Society International.

One of his most important beliefs was: “All people are basically nice. One should deal with every person by believing in his goodness. Anger, jealousy, etc. are the offshoots of his past experiences, which affect his behavior. Primarily every person is nice and everyone is reliable.”

Rajju Bhaiyya was a firm believer in the concept of Swadeshi and empowering rural economy. Initiating the rural developmental activities, he had declared in 1995 that the utmost priority should be given in making the villages hunger-free, disease-free and educative. Today, there are over 100 villages where the rural development work done by swayamsevaks has inspired the people of surrounding villages and their experiments are being emulated by those people.

Addressing the Vijayadashami festival at Nagpur in 1995, Singh remembered Mohandas K. Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri. He challenged the way in which the central government was working on fulfilling the dreams of these two statesmen.

Rajju Bhaiyya wanted to establish a memorial named after Bismil in Delhi, the capital of India. He died on 14 July 2003 at Kaushik Ashram in Pune, Maharashtra.

Writer – Anonymous