By Amulya Ganguli, IANS
That the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the paterfamilias of the ultra-nationalist Hindutva camp in India, controls the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has never been a secret. For all practical purposes, the BJP has always been the RSS’s political wing rather than a party that takes its own decisions.
Although a number of presidents of the BJP and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, such as Mauli Chandra Sharma in 1954, had grumbled about the RSS’s stranglehold, they had generally expressed their views behind closed doors.
The most recent evidence of the RSS’s ‘hidden’ hand was the replacement of veteran L.K. Advani by the unprepossessing Rajnath Singh as BJP chief in the aftermath of the controversy caused by the former’s pro-Jinnah comments in Pakistan. A few days earlier, RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan openly called upon Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the two senior leaders, to retire because of their age.
The Jinnah episode apparently acted as a catalyst to enable the RSS to place the more pliable Rajnath Singh at the BJP’s head.
But it is now Rajnath Singh who has let the cat out of the bag by revealing the RSS’s role in the controversial organisational reshuffle within the BJP. Although he has since tried to backtrack in an exercise typical of all Indian politicians when they find themselves at the centre of a public row, few people have any doubt about the veracity of Rajnath Singh’s initial observations.
The comments were significant not only for exposing the RSS’s manipulations but also because they gave a glimpse of the tense relations within the Hindutva brigade. The most dramatic change which Rajnath Singh carried out was the demotion of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP’s and the saffron lobby’s poster boy who is known for his hawkish views.
It was Modi’s removal from the party’s parliamentary board which was seen as a move by the RSS to cut him down to size, apparently because of his growing arrogance, fostered by his election victory after the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Rajnath Singh has now said that the decision to remove Modi was 70 percent the RSS’s and 30 percent his own. Similarly, a 50-50 division was said to be behind a similar move to marginalize Modi’s friend Arun Jaitley, one of the BJP’s bright young faces (who are derisively referred to as Young Jerks by critics). Jaitley’s prominence has been growing since the tragic death of Pramod Mahajan.
Rajnath Singh’s revelation of the RSS’s anti-Modi bias is all the more noteworthy because of two reasons. One is that it has come only a few months before Gujarat is to go to the polls. And the other is that the powerful anti-Modi group within the BJP’s state unit, led by former chief minister Keshubhai Patel, will get a moral boost from the RSS stance.
Clearly, such a development doesn’t bode well for Modi in a state the BJP likes to project as a ‘laboratory’ for implementing a pro-Hindu agenda. A demoralized Congress, which has been out of power in Gujarat for a decade, will obviously hope to cash in on the disaffection in its opponent’s ranks.
But in addition to these implications, what is intriguing about the RSS’s position is that it has had no hesitation in turning against someone who was popular with large segments of BJP supporters and seemingly had a fair chance of winning yet another term. Not only that, Modi’s hardline, anti-minority outlook, which was very much in evidence during the riots, would have normally been expected to secure the RSS’s whole-hearted endorsement.
Yet, the ostensible head of the Hindutva family, to whom members of the BJP routinely pay guru dakshina (tuition fee to the teacher) once a year, has taken a stand that can only gladden the hearts of the BJP’s adversaries.
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that not only the RSS likes to run things in its own way in the BJP but it cannot tolerate anyone whom it suspects of being capable of pursuing an independent line even if it coincides with its own.
So, it engineered the ouster of Advani and is trying to clip Modi’s wings although these two, along with Vajpayee (who too is not one of the RSS’s favourites), have been among the more successful of the BJP’s leaders in contrast to the lacklustre Rajnath Singh and other nondescript leaders like M. Venkaiah Naidu.
Politicians like Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha, who held important portfolios in Vajpayee’s cabinet, do not come into the picture at the organizational level since they are outsiders, having joined the BJP from other parties.
What the RSS’s stranglehold on the BJP means is that the latter will have to willy-nilly follow a hard ideological line at the behest of the RSS, which cannot but undermine the cohesion of the National Democratic Alliance.
This disruption was evident during the presidential poll, when the BJP’s allies like the Janata Dal-United, the Janata Dal-Secular and the Trinamool Congress were wary of supporting veteran BJP leader Bhairon Singh Shekhawat lest they alienate the minorities although Shekhawat contested as an independent.
The Shiv Sena, too, parted company with the BJP although that was because, as a Maharashtra-based party, it couldn’t but support the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance candidate Pratibha Patil, who belongs to the state.
It is obvious that if the RSS continues to maintain its firm grip on the BJP, the latter will soon revert to its status of being an ‘untouchable’ in Indian politics, which haunted the party all through its Jana Sangh days and right up to 1996 when it shelved its pro-Hindu agenda to woo non-Congress and non-communist ‘secular’ parties.
However, the RSS has never been happy with the BJP’s decision to put in cold storage the Hindutva lobby’s plans for building a temple in Ayodhya, scrapping Article 370 of the constitution conferring special status on Jammu and Kashmir and for introducing a uniform civil code.
With the RSS now reasserting its control, the BJP is in a dilemma as to whether to listen to its friend, philosopher and guide or follow its own political line.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached at [email protected])