Rajiv Dixit

Rajiv Dixit (Name sometimes spelled as Rajeev Dixit.) 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 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 in the nearby town of Bemetara. (Some sources report, instead, that Dixit collapsed at the residence of a Bharat Swabhiman Andolan officer in Durg.) In 2019, the Prime Ministers Office ordered a new inquiry into Dixit's death.