India: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) drops the pretence of being organisationally autonomous of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)?

The News (Pakistan)

BJP kowtowing to the RSS

by Praful Bidwai

Friday, February 01, 2013

Has the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) decided to drop even the pretence of being organisationally autonomous of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)? The manner in which it chose Rajnath Singh as its president just when Nitin Gadkari was all set to get his second term suggests so. This shows India’s leading opposition party in a poor light and raises questions about its ability to take on the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the latter’s most vulnerable moment.

The RSS looms over the BJP as its organisational master. Three years ago, it imposed Gadkari, a Power-Point-obsessed, home-grown businessman, as its president. The incompetent Maharashtra politician is innocent of the complexities of Hindi heartland politics. He lacks a mass base and is incapable of strategic thinking.

Gadkari’s sole qualification was his strong loyalty to the RSS. Not only is he a Brahmin, like most RSS leaders, he can also be trusted to resist – unlike some RSS nominees to the BJP organisation – the temptations of mainstream politics. He has also showered favours upon the RSS via his Purti Group of Companies. Gadkari mishandled every situation he could. In Karnataka and Jharkhand, his ineptitude ensured the BJP’s isolation or outright loss of power. In Uttar Pradesh, he handed over election management to the RSS’s Sanjay Joshi, who botched it up. The BJP did badly in the elections.

Gadkari became an obstacle in the BJP’s attempt to corner the UPA on corruption just when the party faces elections this year in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and Delhi. Then, the Purti scam broke out, and disclosures were made about Gadkari’s pleading for contractors in a controversial dam project, and his role in allotting Chhattisgarh coal blocks to a businessmen friend.

It’s rumoured that allegations about his corruption were planted in the media by party rivals. But so keen was the RSS to give Gadkari a second presidential term that it had the party constitution amended, and got Narendra Modi to accept it in return for a larger national role. Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat also prevailed upon LK Advani, who opposed Gadkari’s continuation. A day before Gadkari’s scheduled election, income tax authorities raided 17 companies that had investments in the Purti group. Gadkari’s reappointment became untenable when Advani revived his opposition and got senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha to file presidential nomination papers.

At Bhagwat’s behest, RSS’ number two Suresh Joshi and joint general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale lobbied hard for a second Gadkari term, but had to give in to opposition from various senior BJP leaders. Their hands were strengthened by an intra-RSS turf war between Joshi and Hosabale and Suresh Soni, the Sangh’s main point man in the BJP, who bears a grudge towards Gadkari. So much for the RSS’ legendary discipline and unity!

As the drama unfolded, Advani first proposed Sinha and then Sushma Swaraj as replacements for Gadkari. But the RSS vetoed Sinha, a former socialist and late BJP entrant, as a “rank outsider”. It also ruled out Swaraj because she was Advani’s nominee. The RSS told Advani who the boss is, as it had done earlier by removing him as BJP president in 2005 following his remarks praising Jinnah, and in 2009 by asking him to resign as the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha.

Eventually, Gadkari had to propose Rajnath Singh as successor. Singh, a Thakur from Uttar Pradesh, promptly displayed his loyalty to the RSS by attacking home minister Sushilkumar Shinde for his statement on ‘Hindu terrorism’, and by declaring that “no Hindu can ever be a terrorist”. Singh has threatened that parliament wouldn’t be allowed to function unless Shinde withdraws his remarks.

The episode has highlighted the BJP’s factionalism. From ‘a party with a difference’, it has turned into ‘a party with differences’, with growing suspicion between Advani and his one-time protégé Jaitley, and open rivalry between the latter and Rajnath Singh, and between Singh and Modi (whom Singh had dropped from the BJP’s parliamentary board).

Worse, the BJP has shown itself to be totally subservient to the RSS, an unelected body devoted to Hindutva. The RSS has strengthened its hold over the BJP as its ideological mentor, political master and organisational gatekeeper. It makes appointments to all key positions in the BJP and ensures its continuity with rank communalism and obscurantism.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the BJP’s deplorable characterisation of Shinde’s remarks about Hindutva-inspired terrorism (granted, he was wrong to use the term ‘Hindu terrorism’) as “a downright insult” to “India’s spiritual, cultural and civilisational heritage”. This implies that the nation is insulted if a Hindutva link to terrorism is found, but not if innocent Muslims are falsely charged, arrested and tortured in these very cases.

The National Investigation Agency has established definite links between Sangh Parivar activists and numerous bomb blasts: Malegaon in September 2006, Samjhota Express in February 2007, Mecca Masjid, Hyderabad in May 2007, Ajmer dargah in October 2007 and Malegaon again in September 2008. It has filed two charge sheets in the Samjhauta case.

One only has to read the home ministry’s Monthly Report Card of January 10 to see that these charges are prima facie credible. The Parivar simply cannot deny its close connections with people like Pragya Singh Thakur, Swami Aseemanand, Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Sandeep Dange, Ramji Kalsangara, Sunil Joshi and Indresh Kumar, a member of the RSS’s national executive. Joshi is believed to have been killed by his own right-wing accomplices in 2007. The police have just recovered the murder weapon.

As the net closes in, the RSS is getting desperate – to the point of getting the BJP to disrupt parliament’s budget session and generally create mayhem, as Rajnath Singh has threatened to do.

Where does all this leave Narendra Modi, who is looking to play a larger political role after his third win in Gujarat? Does it make sense to talk about India’s next big political fight as a Rahul Gandhi-Modi contest, as many in the media do? Modi has certainly emerged preeminent among the BJP’s second-generation leaders, but Singh’s ascendancy as president has complicated matters. Singh has his own ambitions to India’s top job.

More important, the RSS, to which Singh is loyal, doesn’t trust Modi despite his violent version of Hindutva. He is too much of an arrogant egotist and reckless individualist to be put in charge of party or government. He could destroy the RSS and turn the national BJP into a one-man dictatorship, as he has done in Gujarat.

Many in the BJP and the National Democratic Alliance too don’t trust Modi. So the race for the NDA’s prime ministerial nomination is wide open. Yashwant Sinha has tried to influence its outcome by proposing Modi. Sinha knows this is a premature move, which would be opposed by Bihar’s Nitish Kumar and the Janata Dal (United). But he made it to align himself against the RSS. He was backed by Ram Jethamalani.

A Modi-Rahul straight contest is highly unlikely. Modi can hope to become the NDA nominee only in a post-election contest, and probably only if the BJP wins 200-plus Lok Sabha seats. But he’ll fight tooth and nail for prominence and give the RSS a hard time. Inner Parivar turmoil is set to increase seriously.

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi