Lock, Stock And Barrel Big Brother RSS is done watching. It has now gone to the mattresses to reboot its most famous offspring, the BJP. AJIT SAHI and HARINDER BAWEJA reveal how the RSS is ‘bombing the party headquarters’ EVERYONE REMEMBERS the television interview that KS Sudarshan, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief of the time gave on ‘Walk the Talk’ programme of NDTV 24x7 in April 2005. All hell broke loose in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after Sudarshan famously told interviewer Shekhar Gupta that Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, all-time BJP stalwarts and the RSS’ tallest exports to Indian politics, should hand over the baton to younger leaders and walk out into the sunset.
Few, however, recalled then, or remember, now, that Mohan Bhagwat, Sudarshan’s lesser-known deputy, had months earlier voiced the view in blunter terms. On July 1, 2004, less than three weeks after Prime Minister Vajpayee’s government was routed in the Lok Sabha elections, Bhagwat had spoken his mind at a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) meeting in Kolkata. “Dr Hedgewar and Guruji Golwalkar left us long ago and yet, the RSS has only grown after them,” Bhagwat had said, referring to the RSS’ founder KB Hedgewar and his successor, MS Golwalkar. “Vajpayee and Advani, too, must give up the BJP leadership and the party would certainly grow after them.” While ailing health put Vajpayee away, Advani had hung around and managed to re-emerge as the party’s paramount leader, keeping the RSS at bay and leading the BJPled alliance into the 2009 Lok Sabha elections it eventually lost. Now, Bhagwat, who was appointed RSS chief last March, is on an unstoppable roll, administering the most sweeping cleanout in the six decades of the BJP, virtually “bombing the headquarters” as BJP dissident Arun Shourie suggested the RSS should do.
In the process, the RSS chief has snuffed out Advani’s political future, shown BJP president Rajnath Singh the door, cracked down on factionalism in the BJP and ended all speculation as to who the boss of India’s second biggest political party is. Unquestionably, that boss now is the RSS. In public statements, the RSS insists that the BJP is an independent political organisation affiliated to the RSS and that the RSS advises the BJP only when it seeks its views on myriad issues, from internal functioning to ideology. Internally, however, the RSS sent out a clear message in the last week of August: the BJP is anything but independent; indeed, it is only a wing of the RSS, whose writ will now decide everything from the party’s faces to its ideology. “You can take over something only if it isn’t already yours,” an RSS-BJP functionary told TEHELKA, preferring not to be named, when asked if the RSS was taking over the BJP. The implication: the RSS already runs the BJP. The RSS brass is now busy deciding the BJP’s new faces to replace Rajnath Singh as party president and Advani as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. “We are putting an anti-virus software into the BJP, while taking the viruses out and sending them into quarantine,” the leader added. “Our focus is to put together a team that has ideological moorings and would lift the morale of the cadres.”
A Nagpur-based RSS sympathiser with access to the RSS headquarters in that city explains that even though the nameplates will change at the BJP office, it really won’t matter who the new faces are. “The era of running the party on the shoulders of the stalwarts is over,” he said. “The BJPwill now be an outfit of workers. The RSSwill be the outfit of its leaders.” In this paradigm shift, the direct control of both BJP policy and action will revert to the RSS and its apparatchiks, as it was until the 1980s. The party’s new faces will merely be implementers of that policy. “The BJP president is like the managing director of Tata Motors,” the insider-sympathiser explains. “The RSS is like Ratan Tata, the final boss.” The Ratan Tata of the RSS is Bhagwat and his cabal of five RSS veterans are: • Sanjay Joshi, RSS general secretary and Bhagwat’s immediate deputy • Suresh Soni, RSS joint secretary in charge of the BJP • Dattatreya Hosbole, RSS joint secretary • Manmohan Vaidya, former Gujarat RSS head who now heads the RSS publicity wing (prachar pramukh); he is the son of former RSS spokesperson, MG Vaidya • Madan Das Devi, head of RSS pracharaks, earlier in charge of the BJP; he had moved to the RSS from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) All under the age of 65 – a stipulation that Bhagwat has made mandatory for the BJP too – these leaders have their task cut out: to “mould the BJP from scratch”. Towards this end, Advani and Rajnath Singh will quit their positions before the start of the winter session of Parliament in November. The RSS is mulling if they should go sooner, as assembly elections will be held in Maharashtra and Haryana on October 13 . With its ally, the Shiv Sena, the BJP faces a do-or-die battle in Maharashtra, where it has lost two successive assembly elections since 1999.
The names being considered to replace Rajnath Singh as BJP president include former Goa chief miniser Manohar Parrikar, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and Maharashtra BJP president Nitin Gadkari. Another possibility is Muralidhar Rao, an RSS export into the BJP. While the media has speculated over the name of Advani’s confidante Arun Jaitley for this job, sources say the RSS brass has reservations about Jaitley due to his closeness to Advani. “The RSS wouldn’t want Advani to rule by proxy through Jaitley,” a leader said. Jaitley isn’t ruled out, though, as he is seen as an articulate leader who understands the Hindutva ideology and works well with the RSS. There is hesitation in the RSS to approve former BJP president M Venkaiah Naidu as a replacement for Advani as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, because of his closeness to Advani. The choice to fill that job is now narrowing to the feisty Sushma Swaraj, the most prominent female leader in the BJP since the ouster of former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Uma Bharati from the party.
But why have the RSS brass decided to reject Advani, a Sangh loyalist for more than 60 years? An RSS insider says the genesis of the current crisis in the RSS-BJP goes back to 2007, when Bhagwat made a crucial intervention to arrest the declining relations between the two organisations. EVER SINCE the BJP’s Lok Sabha loss of 2004, RSS-BJP relations had plunged to an all-time low after the then RSS chief Sudarshan took to publicly criticising Advani, especially when the latter spoke in favour of Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah during a visit to Karachi in 2005. When this mudslinging got out of hand, Bhagwat, then Sudarshan’s deputy, brought about a rapprochement after persuading Sudarshan to stop criticising Advani. Bhagwat offered Advani the full support of the Sangh parivar [family], which includes 35- odd RSS offshoots such as the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) labour union and the ABVP. In return, Advani promised that if he lost the 2009 elections, he would make way for the next generation of BJP politicians. Of course, the fate of the BJP in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls is well known. Having fought with the slogan ‘Advani for PM’, the loss, predictably, brought out the knives in the party against Advani, with leaders like Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh and Shourie firing off salvos demanding that someone be held accountable. At that time, Advani met Bhagwat and assured him he would step down as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, a position he held during 2004-09. But weeks later, Sushma Swaraj, Advani’s deputy in the Lok Sabha, announced that Advani would stay on in that post for five years. “This stunned Bhagwat,” an RSS leader says. It also proved to be the last straw for the RSS chief. In an expansive interview with the Times Now TV news channel broadcast on August 18 last, in which he blasted the BJP, Bhagwat pointedly referred to Advani’s turnaround, clearly indicating that the gloves were finally off and that he was now going to take Advani head on.
When the BJP’s top leadership sat down the next day at Shimla for a brainstorming session called a chintan baithak, Bhagwat’s interview began to unravel the party. Until then, Advani was comfortably ensconced in his position as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Rajnath Singh was counting down the days to his second two-year term as BJP president. But Bhagwat’s interview, in which he warned the BJP to put its house in order, forced Advani’s and Rajnath Singh’s hands. To deflect attacks on themselves, the two expelled dissenter Jaswant Singh for writing a book lauding Jinnah and ordered former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje to quit as Leader of the Opposition in the Rajasthan Assembly. Advani’s goose was cooked two months ago, the moment he reneged on his promise to Bhagwat to quit the parliamentary post. On the other hand, Rajnath Singh is paying the price for promoting factionalism within the BJP, something that is anathema to the RSS culture. In fact, Singh earned the Sangh’s ire soon after he took charge of the party in 2007, when he appointed a lightweight to the key position of BJP president in Uttar Pradesh to outwit his archrival in the state unit, former UP chief minister Kalyan Singh. Kalyan subsequently quit the BJP and joined the Samajwadi Party. But in keeping with its style, the RSS says Advani would not be humiliated in the autumn of his political life. “The stalwarts will be given a warm hug,” a leader said. “Nobody will be kicked out.” (An RSS leader dismissed the view that Shourie’s intemperate outburst against Rajnath Singh in an interview to NDTV 24x7 after Jaswant Singh’s expulsion had the backing of the RSS. “Shourie was only secondguessing the RSS,” the leader says. “We don’t use the harsh language he used.”) Thus, Advani could be given a ceremonial position such as the chairman of the National Democratic Alliance or the chairman of the BJP Parliamentary Party. Rajnath Singh, too, would be re-injected into the structure in some position. In fact, during his end-August sojourn in New Delhi, Mohan Bhagwat was quick to turn up at Advani’s house for breakfast a day after he lunched at the house of Murli Manohar Joshi, Advani’s long-time party rival, triggering media speculation that the RSS chief was snubbing Advani. Aides say Bhagwat’s luncheon meeting with Joshi was fixed three weeks in advance, as was his visit to Delhi. “The visit to Joshi made Advani feel very low,” says a leader. Hence, Bhagwat went to his house the next day. Clearly, Bhagwat has had little grooming in image management despite decades of a public life with the RSS, with which his family has been linked for three generations. IRONICALLY, THE model the RSS brass is choosing to rebuild the BJP is that of its first-ever political offshoot, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS). Veteran Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee started the BJS, also known as the Jana Sangh, in 1951, along with Vajpayee and Advani, who the RSS sent out to launch the political party. Throughout its life until it merged into the Janata Party in 1977, the Jana Sangh leadership took their cues from the RSS. In 1979, Vajpayee and Advani chose to split the Janata Party rather than give up their membership of the RSS when it became a point of confrontation. The pattern of the RSS leading the BJP was evident right through the Ramjanmabhoomi movement from 1989 to 1992 that the VHP and Advani led. But the dynamics began changing in 1996, when Vajpayee quit as prime minister after 13 days as few political parties backed him. The RSS was told that the BJP must be allowed a freer hand and ideological flexibility if its goal to achieve power was to be realised. Once the BJP announced it was putting “on the backburner” issues such as the Ram Janmabhoomi, the BJP returned to power in 1998 and won again in 1999. But throughout Vajpayee’s rule, from 1998 to 2004, the RSS leaders found themselves sidelined. To the unhappiness of the RSS, Vajpayee never allowed the Ramjanmabhoomi movement to come to a boil. When Sudarshan became RSS chief in 2000, he was seen as a lightweight compared to Vajpayee-Advani, who were already running India. Bhagwat, nearly 25 years junior to them, was considered even less of a challenge. But now, it is Bhagwat all the way. Unlike his predecessor, the young RSS chief — who is fond of humming Hindi film music — is seen as a man of this age, one who does not shun public scrutiny. “You should try and see the RSS from up close,” he told journalists at his first press conference in New Delhi on August 28. That was his fourth press conference since taking over in March, the others being held in Jammu, Nagpur and Pune. Tech-savvy Bhagwat encourages the use of multimedia. A CD of his inaugural speech as RSS president and his interview to Times Now is being sent out to RSS cadres across the country. The one thing that the RSS promises to focus on while rebuilding the BJP is corruption and nepotism in the party. In 1996, when Vajpayee became PM, he appointed his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya an Officer on Special Duty. This so upset the RSS that it summoned Bhattacharya to its Delhi offices at Jhandewalan. But after that, the RSS could not stop a corruption of morals in the BJP during its six years in power. RSS leaders now say it has paid a heavy price for that failure.
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September 11, 2009
BJP and its Mentor and Controller the RSS
