Dadi Janki

Dadi Janki (1 January 1916 – 27 March 2020), also known as Rajyogini Dadi Janki, was an Indian spiritual leader and centenarian who served as the Head Administrator of the Brahma Kumaris from August 2007 until her death in 2020 at the age of 104. She had joined the movement in around 1937, when she was 21, and was described in obituaries and tributes as one of its founding members.

In 1974, at the age of 58 and speaking no English, Janki moved to the United Kingdom to establish the first Brahma Kumaris centre outside India, and lived in London for around three decades. From the Brahma Kumaris' London centre she was associated with several international peace and interfaith projects from the mid-1980s, founded the UK-registered Janki Foundation for Spirituality in Health Care in 1997, and was a 2005 recipient of the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award. She was appointed a brand ambassador of the Government of India's Swachh Bharat Mission and, on the first anniversary of her death, was honoured with a commemorative postage stamp released by Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu.

Early life Janki was born on 1 January 1916 in Hyderabad in Sind in British India (now in Pakistan) to a Sindhi Hindu family. A 2002 feature in The Times of India described the family as "devout, philanthropic and wealthy", and reported that she had received only a few years of formal education; The New Indian Express likewise wrote in its 2020 obituary that she had studied only up to the fourth standard. Janki was among the small founding cohort of women, mostly drawn from the Sindhi Bhaiband community, who took up residence in the original Hyderabad community.

After the death of the founder Brahma Baba in January 1969, the Brahma Kumaris was administered by Dadi Prakashmani as Head Administrator, with Janki working alongside her in the senior leadership of the organisation and sharing in its day-to-day administration. Working with Prakashmani, she shaped the movement's growth and its international expansion in the decades.

Move to the United Kingdom In April 1974, Janki was sent to London to establish the first Brahma Kumaris centre outside India. She was 58 at the time and spoke no English; according to the United Religions Initiative tribute by its founding executive director Charles Gibbs, she travelled with the knowledge that British immigration rules would prevent her from returning to India for several years.

International peace and interfaith work From the mid-1980s onwards, Janki was associated with several international peace and interfaith initiatives organised through the Brahma Kumaris' London centre. According to the organisation, in 1986 she launched the Million Minutes of Peace appeal as the Brahma Kumaris' contribution to the United Nations' International Year of Peace; the campaign asked supporters to pledge minutes spent in meditation, prayer or positive thinking rather than money, and pledges totalling approximately 1.23 billion minutes from 88 countries were presented to UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in October 1986. The appeal was followed in 1988 by Global Co-operation for a Better World, a similar initiative collecting people's visions for positive change from over 120 countries. A 2011 profile in The Interfaith Observer described her, at the age of 95, as a frequent participant in international interfaith gatherings such as the Parliament of the World's Religions and meetings of the United Religions Initiative.

Janki Foundation In December 1997, Janki founded the Janki Foundation for Spirituality in Health Care, a UK registered charity (number 1063908) launched at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi both publicly expressed condolences; Modi described her as having "served society with diligence" and praised her work in empowering women. Tributes were also paid by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Union Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal, the Chief Ministers of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, the Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, the BJP leaders L. K. Advani and J. P. Nadda, and the yoga teacher Baba Ramdev.

Commemorative postage stamp

On 12 April 2021, India Post released a commemorative postage stamp of 5 in Janki's memory to mark the first anniversary of her death. The stamp was released in New Delhi by Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu in the presence of Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and senior Brahma Kumaris members. Naidu described Janki as "one of the foremost spiritual leaders of contemporary times" and praised the Brahma Kumaris as a women-led organisation that demonstrated, in his words, that "spiritual attainments transcend gender-based distinction".