Nearly a hundred years ago, a young
Brahmin boy of Nagpur went to Calcutta to become a doctor. But, with his
studies, he hobnobbed with the patriotic terrorists of the city"s
sprouting secret societies, like Anushilan Samiti, and inevitably got arrested
by the colonial police. He got released a while later and earned his medical
degree too. But, after returning to his home town, Keshav Balirao Hedgewar, now
a "doctor" prefixed to his name, developed a different idea of
patriotism. He thought India
craved from freedom from not just two hundred years of British subjugation but
a thousand years of foreign domination, beginning, perhaps, from the march of
Mohammad Ghori and his brigade in the eleventh century. On a small ground in Nagpur in 1925, the young
doctor held a meeting attended by some of his friends and formed a society
which they named Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS). It was the Vijaya Dashami
day.
The day, therefore,
is very special on the calendar of the "saffron brotherhood", whose
political wing, the BJP, is in power with a simple majority in the Lok Sabha
for the first time. The brotherhood is understandably preening a bit. When it went
out of its way by using the state-owned Doordarshan to air a programme based on
current RSS sarsanghchalak (supremo) Mohan Bhagwat"s Vijaya Dashami
speech, it was as if all hell had broken loose. Those in Delhi long used to wearing the
"secular" badge on their sleeve went ballistic. A Congress
spokesperson whose late father famously acted as the bridge between arms dealer
Gopichand Hinduja and the Atal Bihari Vajpyee administration, was particularly
crestfallen. "I am shocked", he declared. The communists went a step
further, calling it an open announcement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi"s
fascist programmes.
It is nothing but
nitpicking. It is based on a long-standing belief that BJP (or the Jan Sangh,
its earlier avtaar) is embarrassed about its RSS lineage and any public
reminder of it would make it tremble in its pants, or those khaki half pants,
to be precise. It is a tactic that BJP"s opponents picked up from the
early days of coalition politics. During the Janata Party rule in the late
1970"s, its socialist constituents were apprehensive about continuing to
share power with merged Jan Sangh members and so they started needling their
Sanghi colleagues and even demanding that they resign from RSS. Sangh stalwarts
like Vajpayee tried to bypass the trouble, saying that RSS is just a
"cultural organisation", but nothing worked and the first
non-Congress government at the Centre crashed on the RSS issue.
BJP became cautious
about its RSS link after the collapse of Morarji Desai government on the
"dual membership" issue. Even hardcore RSS pracharaks (full time
workers like Narendra Modi) deputed to the BJP made it a point to avoid public
glare of their links. Nanaji Deshmukh shunned politics on the ground of age
factor and Sunder Singh Bhandari became the link between the RSS & BJP. But
it was known to all that L K Advani is the bridge and maintained his Hindutva
posturing while Vajpayee, during his tenure as prime minister (1998-2004),
remained touchy about it. So incensed was Vajpayee about it that K Govindacharya
had to pay a heavy price for calling him a "mukhouta" (Mask) of the
RSS. Vajpayee projected himself as a representative of "soft
Hindutva" which was never appreciated by the RSS. Therefore, Vajpayee
never enjoyed a good equation with K. Sudarshan, who was the RSS supremo during
the best part of Vajpayee"s rule. For instance, he continued to liberalise
trade in line with the WTO agreements of 1995 despite strong opposition from
Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an RSS offshoot.
However, Vajpayee
led a coalition government and his partners wouldn"t accept the RSS
meddling in government affairs either. But the BJP under Modi, which has more
than half of the seats in the lower House, has no reason to be coy about its
political parentage. Besides, as I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar has
observed, Bhagwat"s speech is "news-worthy". If there is anyone
who"s at least Modi"s equal in the saffron brotherhood, he is
Bhagwat. There is little justification, therefore, for the head mentor of the
ruling party being blanked out of state-owned television.
It is true that,
other than praising Modi"s government, much of what the RSS chief said was
routine fare, except a sudden (not sure if well-thought-out) advise to Indians
to avoid buying Chinese goods. It is expected that his cautioning will have
little effect on the rising curve of India"s
imports from China.
And to avoid buying Chinese goods may be as difficult as to "make"
things "in India".
However, there is another reason why the Modi government decided to let the RSS
chief come out and speak on the stats media. As past experience shows, RSS was
used by anti-BJP forces as some sort of a bogey, and the more it happened the
more BJP was tempted to push it back into the closet. It often backfired on the
party. RSS is a disciplined body whose organisational skills, and ability to
transcend the caste barrier within Hindu society, was praised, among others, by
Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb Ambedkar. It is by alienating this disciplined
army of helpers the Vajpayee is said to have lost the 2004 poll by a mere seven
Lok Sabha seats. The disciplined army of RSS volunteers, disheartened at their
Chief Sudarshan being ignored by the government of the day, didn’t work for the
victory of the BJP. The RSS got a jolt when Advani decided to preach secularism
after visiting Jinnah’s memorial in Pakistan and dumped him in 2009.
Modi therefore had every justification (political) to give the avuncular
RSS chief some air time to babble, at taxpayers' cost, of course. It may force
the RSS to come out of the closet and debate its ideology in public in the
years to come. Will this experiment pay dividends to Modi in 2019 Lok Sabha
polls ?
(The author
is National Editor,
Lokmat group)
