Des Raj Goyal was born in 1929 in
Moga,
Panjab. Goyal became a member of the RSS in 1942, when he was still a school student. He joined it with the belief that it was an organisation fighting for India's independence and worked as a full-time
pracharak. He subsequently got disillusioned with the organisation and left it in 1947. He continued with his interest in the organisation at an analytical level and published a book on it in 1979, which is considered authentic by academics. Goyal started working as a journalist since 1946, associated with several publications, including the Urdu weekly
Sandesh, Urdu daily
Sangram and Hindu daily
Milap. While working at
Milap, he was told by acquaintances in the
Hindu Mahasabha Bhawan in Delhi to go to Gandhi's prayer meeting on 30 January 1948 because "something historic was to happen." By the time he reached the meeting, Gandhi had already been
assassinated. Subsequently, Goyal was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate
Jawaharlal Nehru. While in prison, he read various books borrowed from the prison library, which exposed him to Marxist literature for the first time. Disillusioned by the RSS, he began to look towards socialist solutions for India, especially in the context of the seemingly extraordinary success of the
Soviet Union. Determined to find an organisation different from the RSS but opposed to the
Congress, he joined the
Communist Party of India. He was led to renew activism after noting the diatribes of
M. S. Golwalkar against Nehru after the 1962
India-China War. He found it odd that Golwalkar had no issues with keeping aloof from the freedom struggle but was now prone to equate anti-Nehruism with patriotism. Jointly with
Subhadra Joshi, Member of Parliament from
Jabalpur, he co-founded the organisation
Sampradayikta Virodhi Committee (Anti-sectarian committee), which was later renamed to
Qaumi Ekta Trust (National unity trust). It focuses on inter-faith dialogue and communal harmony in India and publishes the
Seculary Democracy magazine. Goyal was the editor of the
Mainstream Weekly from 1963 to 1967 and the editor of
Secular Democracy since 1968. Goyal died on 4 February 2013. == Works ==