THE TIMES OF INDIA | JULY 22, 2004
EDITORIAL
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/785860.cms
Beyond Ideology: The Case Against RSS Governors
ALOK RAI
Thrown off-balance by Verdict 2004, the once deputy prime minister of India is blustering with threats of dire but unspecified consequences: The Congress, he said, will have to pay a heavy price for this! Well, the Congress can take care of itself, but it behoves us as concerned citizens to spend a little time with the matter that has so exercised the hon'ble Mr Advani: The summary dismissal of four RSS functionaries whom his government had installed as provincial governors.
The sainted Mr Advani, projected as another Sardar Patel from time to time, is seeking to play Gandhi, positioning himself somewhere above (and outside) Parliament from where he can criticise the established legal order. But the muttered threats diminish him cruelly into something like a Hindu Jinnah.
Advani's affectations apart, the underlying issue is not merely the technical one of whether the president is legally right in dismissing the four governors. It is the deeper moral question of whether self-confessed RSS types should have been — or should ever be — appointed to high offices where they are in a position to pervert the workings of the Constitution to which their allegiance can only ever be tactical and hypocritical. If not, then irrespective of Mr Advani's posturings, the great wrong was that of having appointed such people in the first place, and we should be grateful for what the president has done.
In the bad old days before the formation of the NDA government, a lot of people who should have known better, persuaded themselves that the constraints of office would "normalise" the BJP. In becoming a mainstream party, it would shed its manic elements. There is a profound sense in which the BJP has been "compromised" by its years in office. There isn't much point in naming names. Let us merely remember, just when Enron is about to hit us with a Rs 26,000 crore bill, that the statesman-like Mr V actually cleared the second phase of the Enron project — having rubbished it earlier — during the 13 days when he was the prime minister in 1996, before unsuccessfully seeking the initial vote of confidence!
And yet, it is not the widespread corruption that is the most worrying thing about these people. Their demonstrated venality is what might even delude us into accepting them as "normal", muddled and corruptible — just like the rest of us. The thing that puts them firmly beyond the pale of constitutional politics is their so-called "idealism", their carefully projected air of sanctimonious virtue, their mealy-mouthed saintliness.
The processes whereby the RSS manages to produce, en masse, a certain kind of personality have not received the academic attention they deserve. But while the etiology and inner structure of this kind of personality might be imperfectly understood, we are familiar with its behaviours. I refer not only to the bloodied foot-soldiers of "Gujarat 2002", but rather to the perfumed leaders who, with clean hands and clean consciences, presided over this orgy of violence. Not only the unmentionable Modi but also Mr "Flip-flop" Vajpayee and Mr Advani. Two years after those gruesome events, they still haven't grasped the horror of what happened, and are publicly concerned about whether the violence lost or won elections for them, and consequently whether or not it was something they should apologise for, or boast about.
This question — How do they do it? — has a direct bearing on the matter of the dismissed governors. My own sense of it is that the RSS, after the manner of similar organisations, creates in its cadres an area of self where merely human considerations no longer apply. It has been supposed, simplistically, that the demonising of the Muslim is an end in RSS ideology. My sense of it is that the "demonised Muslim" is merely the means whereby a trans-moral personality is created. It is of the essence of this kind of "engineered" personality that it is, in most respects, normal, and sometimes even rather refined. (The case of the concentration camp commandant who returned to Wagner and Bach after a hard day at the gas chambers is legendary.) The area of self functions as a secure and privileged enclave, beyond the reach of rational argument, and the cries of human pain and suffering. The merely human being, once possessed of self-hypnotising, dogmatic certainties, and absolved of moral responsibility, is rendered into pure will, an instrument of history, or the nation, or the Aryan ideal.
It seems merely an elementary precaution to exclude such worthies from every office that requires an explicit fidelity to the Constitution of India. It cannot be argued that theirs is an ideology just like any other — because if mere ideological affiliation were a disqualification, then Khurana and even Nawal Kishore Sharma should have been excluded. But the RSS is not, as they themselves routinely declare, a political party with a particular ideology — it is a secret society. And whatever little has filtered out about the aims of this secret society, it aims at nothing less than subverting the liberal and secular Constitution of India. Can it now claim the protection of a liberal order that it seeks, day in and day out, to pervert and malign?
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