From Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLVIII No. 06, February 09, 2013
by Radhika Ramaseshan
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has always sought to exercise an ironclad control over its political offspring, the Bharatiya Janata Party. The machinations of the former have directed the fortunes of the latter, including determining who the party president should be. Over the last two decades, however, there have been many changes in the relationship between the two. Most recently, while the current Sangh chief, Mohan Bhagwat favoured "regional" leadership of the party over Delhi-centric leaders, his choice, Nitin Gadkari, had to step aside and make way for Rajnath Singh. The run-up to the 2014 general elections will tell if the BJP will assert its identity or if the Sangh will try to regain complete control.
Radhika Ramaseshan (ramaseshan.radhika@gmail.com) is Political Editor, The Telegraph.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Rajnath Singh lost no time after his appointment in sounding the war cry on his party’s pet theme cross-border terrorism.
Little over a year remains for the next Lok Sabha elections and the BJP and Congress are bracing themselves for the “dress rehearsal” that will be staged on the battlegrounds of Karnataka (April-May 2013), Jharkhand (schedule uncertain) and Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (November-December 2013). The last four states will see the Congress and the BJP embroiled in a direct contest while Karnataka has four players (the Congress, BJP, Janata Dal-Secular and Karnataka Janata Party) and Jharkhand has a multitude of parties besides the two main ones.
Given this situation Singh’s treatment of the terror leitmotif was rooted in the “undivided” Hindutva fraternity’s theory of “appeasement” to which he belongs. He alleged that the Congress was not prepared to weigh in the “loss of lives” caused by Pakistan’s “incursions” along the Line of Control (LoC) and reluctant to confront the “enemy” even after two Indian soldiers were killed and one of them was decapitated recently. As a counterpoint, the BJP chief alleged that the Congress’ “alacrity” to act on “saffron” terror was “understandable” because it believed in “pandering to the minorities” and “victimising” the majority.
That, in short, was the message emanating from a small exhibition of protest the BJP put up in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on the morning of 24 January. Singh probably hoped that his call for Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde’s head for casting “aspersions” on the colour “saffron” and for “brazenly” identifying it with “terror” as well as his threat to stall the budget session of Parliament (starting on 21 February) if Shinde did not resign would resonate in the office of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in west Delhi and in the RSS central headquarters in Nagpur.
Sushma Swaraj, the Lok Sabha opposition leader, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Singh, taking the call for battle to a crescendo that recalled the infamous demand for “10 (Pakistani) heads for one (Indian) head” she had made when she called on the family of a beheaded soldier in Uttar Pradesh.
To the BJP and the RSS, Shinde’s charges were cannon fodder. Starved of a plank to capture the imagination and sensibilities of their cadres and sympathisers – each time the BJP spoke of the Congress scams, it was stymied in its backyard by a “tainted” B S Yeddyurappa or a Nitin Gadkari – the “saffron terror” centred campaign took it back to familiar terrain.
However, in the present context, the discourse was less significant than the objective. The BJP’s objective was to please the RSS bosses in Nagpur. The prelude and the aftermath of the regime change in the BJP, which saw Gadkari go out and Singh enter, openly revealed the RSS hand in the micro- and macro-management of the BJP and the kind of veto power it exercised. The events also proved that for all its claims to preside over the country’s largest “cultural” organisation, the RSS was as adept at hatching intrigues, gerrymandering and outwitting opponents as a person fighting a bitterly-contested direct election. If power was a poisoned chalice – as the just anointed Congress vice-president, Rahul Gandhi remarked in Jaipur – then the RSS willingly sipped from it. Its overt intervention in the affairs of its political offspring has grown incrementally.
Manipulative Mediation
It began in the 1990s when the late Rajendra Singh (nicknamed “Rajju Bhaiyya”) headed the RSS. A former Allahabad University academic, Singh’s political reflexes were moulded in the cradle of eastern Uttar Pradesh, regarded as a bellwether of the nation’s political mood. His mediations felled leaders who today are regarded as extremely powerful.
In 1995, he ensured that Narendra Modi, who was a general secretary in the Gujarat unit of the BJP, was pushed out of the state for instigating the then chief minister, Keshubhai Patel in the latter’s combat with Shankersinh Vaghela for the power sweepstakes. Rajendra Singh ignored the cadres’ wishes that Modi should be retained in Gujarat and assigned a bigger role. As far as the RSS was concerned, the Patel-Vaghela saga that began as a quarrel and blew up into a feud with caste dimensions, very nearly led to the loss of the BJP’s first full-fledged government in Gujarat, a state the Sangh viewed as a laboratory for its diabolical sociopolitical experiments.
That Modi was back eight years later as chief minister of Gujarat and has successfully retained control in every election he has led has pleased the RSS so much that it has forgiven his exertions to wipe out the Sangh affiliates in Gujarat. In Modi’s regime, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which under Praveen Togadia was Modi’s biggest handyman in the 2002 pogrom, has all but vanished. The Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS) was victimised for agitating on behalf of the farmers who were penalised for allegedly not paying electricity and water bills which they claimed were trumped-up. Little is heard of the BKS now.
In 1995, Rajendra Singh camped in Lucknow to lobby for his nominee to take over as the president of the Uttar Pradesh unit of the BJP. He was outfoxed by Kalyan Singh, who then rode the crest of popularity in the post-Babri demolition phase and believed he was invincible. Interestingly, as the RSS’ interference became more upfront, the mystique it had acquired in the decades it was headed by K B Hedgewar, M S Golwalkar and Balasaheb Deoras evaporated. This mystique was generated by a dexterously crafted propaganda that portrayed the RSS as an ultra-nationalist entity that preached about and adhered to a “nation first” credo and claimed that its office-bearers were exceptional persons who lived disciplined and spartan lives, travelled on foot or by public transport, could be counted upon to do all kinds of menial jobs in a natural or human-made calamity (which, to be fair, they did), were soft-spoken and incapable of hurting an insect. The sarsanghachalaks surfaced occasionally from their cloisters in Nagpur’s Resham Bagh to address the cadres. If indeed they met the BJP’s representatives, the meetings were held surreptitiously. To the larger population, they were faceless.
Rajendra Singh personally witnessed the decline of the mystique on a muggy afternoon in Haryana’s Karnal district in October 1995. As he spoke at a rally, the swayamsevaks (literally translated as volunteers but in actuality whole-timers), dressed in khaki shorts, were repeatedly admonished by an organiser for walking out to fetch cold drinks. When nobody heeded his scolding, he asked the vendors to leave; as they left, the swayamsevaks trooped out, leaving Rajendra Singh to preach to a clutch of the faithful. However, his pragmatism brought benefits to the BJP.
Vajpayee at the Top
His lasting contribution was that he principally catalysed the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition that facilitated Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s ascendancy as the prime minister (PM). A close friend of the late Chandra Shekhar (former prime minister and a fellow Thakur from Uttar Pradesh), Rajendra Singh was persuaded by Chandra Shekhar’s plea that the BJP should prop up Vajpayee and not L K Advani as its PM candidate in the 1996 elections because of the “acceptability” quotient. Heeding this counsel, Rajendra Singh went against the grain of the party cadre’s sentiments in favour of Advani and chose Vajpayee, then the lesser player who stayed aloof from the rank-and-file in the Ayodhya era. It was a choice that Advani finds difficult to accept even today; as the spearhead of the “Ram temple movement” that leapfrogged the BJP onto the national stage he believed that the Sangh should not have disregarded his “natural entitlement” to the country’s top job. But the final call Rajendra Singh took proved that appropriating political power is the RSS’ final goal and any sacrifice – be it of an individual or an ideal – is worth the end.
Singh’s successor, K S Sudarshan, headed the RSS at an inopportune time: the NDA, led by Vajpayee, was in power at the centre and in several states and was beset with crises, arising not so much from the doings of the opposition parties but from the RSS’ insistent demands that challenged the logical compulsions of governance. Had Rajendra Singh continued as the sarsanghachalak, perhaps Vajpayee might have had a smoother time because he understood realpolitik.
From fronting the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) as a countervailing force against Vajpayee’s economic reforms agenda and scuttling projects like the Rs 1,300 crore Sankhya Vahini electronic data carrier project to wanting to decide his economic team and setting deadlines to build the Ayodhya temple, the RSS and Sudarshan were Vajpayee’s greatest bugbears.
The last straw that broke his back was when the Sangh manipulated the BJP brass to secure Modi’s position as the chief minister after the 2002 pogrom. Vajpayee desperately wanted Modi out because of the ill fame the pogrom brought to his “liberal” credentials and his government. But he found no backers in the BJP. Even the late Pramod Mahajan, who Vajpayee thought was his biggest pillar of support, deserted him at a time when he was faced with a tough political dilemma.
Simultaneously, Advani leveraged the goodwill he then enjoyed with the RSS because of his “hard-line” Sardar Patel-like image to extract the post of the deputy prime minister. Vajpayee was against that too. When Modi won the elections in late 2002, Vajpayee ruefully told a BJP leader, “We won Gujarat but we have lost India”. His words were prescient.
Advani’s Gameplan
After the 2004 defeat, Vajpayee stepped back. The RSS and Sudarshan espied a window to regain a stranglehold over the BJP, convinced that “their man” Advani would play ball. He did not. He believed that his ascendancy as the country’s prime minister was a matter of time and he must, therefore, redeem his hard-line image. Advani changed colours and discovered secularism in Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His ill-fated trip to Pakistan in 2005, whose highpoint was his copious praise of Jinnah, cost him the BJP president’s post, once the RSS made it clear that his gesture was ideologically unacceptable. Advani’s confidants, notably Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, presently the opposition leaders in Parliament, did not relish the prospect of a fresh RSS takeover. But they were ineffective against its onslaught. However, Advani’s speech in September 2005 before he demitted office at the Chennai national executive was an attempt to draw new lines.
In 1954, Mauli Chandra Sharma, the second president of the Jan Sangh (the BJP’s predecessor) resigned to protest RSS dominance. Nearly six decades later, Advani registered his protest in another fashion: he plainly told the Sangh not to reinforce the notion that the BJP could not take a decision without its nod of approval. Advani – the charioteer of the incendiary “Ram Mandir rath” – now emphasised that the BJP had to embrace large sections outside the “layers of its ideology”.
By this time however, the RSS had turned tone deaf to his entreaties. It brought in Rajnath Singh, who served in various posts in the organisation and in the Uttar Pradesh government as a higher education minister and later as the chief minister. The politics of the outwardly mild-mannered Rajnath Singh had a communal underpinning like that of any swayamsevak. As an education minister, he had piloted a project of rewriting history texts to “correct” the accepted versions of Islamic rule. The project provoked protests, not so much from the Muslims as from the Christian missionary schools and non-partisan Hindu historians for the demonisation of medieval and Mughal rulers and the glorification of Hindu monarchs.
But the RSS was not completely pleased with Rajnath Singh’s tenure because it was a mixed bag. Dictated by the Sangh, he ejected Modi from the BJP’s apex decision-making panel, the central parliamentary board, at a time when the Sangh’s relations with Modi had plummeted very low. He also tried to marginalise Jaitley. But Rajnath never fulfilled his basic mandate of banishing Advani’s shadow that still hovered over the BJP. Albeit reluctantly, the RSS was forced to declare Advani as the BJP’s PM candidate for the 2009 elections. Ironically, the BJP’s defeat under Advani was a godsend for the Sangh. By then, Sudarshan was out as the sarsanghachalak and a much younger, Mohanrao Bhagwat was in the saddle. The Bhagwat phase again recast the RSS-BJP equation. While it consolidated the Sangh’s grip over the BJP, it also unexpectedly undermined Bhagwat’s standing in his organisation and indeed in the saffron parivar.
‘Regional’ Mohan Bhagwat
The purpose of taking the reader through the vicissitudes that the RSS-BJP relationship has undergone in the past two decades is to contextualise the contemporary events that began with an over-assertive Bhagwat “super-imposing” his man from Nagpur, Nitin Gadkari, on the BJP in 2009. Three years later, Bhagwat faced the ignominy of Gadkari’s departure in such unsavoury circumstances that questions are being raised over his legitimacy as the RSS head. An oft heard refrain in the Sangh is that left to himself, Bhagwat would have made Gadkari either the prime minister or the country’s president.
Bhagwat’s stance towards the BJP was evident from day one: after taking over, he disclosed that the BJP’s president who would succeed Rajnath Singh would not be from Delhi but from a “region”. The Delhi-region dichotomy had a profound subtext: with the BJP out of power since 2004, its central leaders – all of whom fancied themselves as future prime ministers – wrangled their own parliamentary berths from the state chief ministers. For instance, it is being openly said that if the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had been indifferent, Sushma Swaraj could not have won the Lok Sabha seat from Vidisha. Jaitley too trusts Modi to get him elected to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat; Advani’s victory from Gandhinagar is also now entirely in Modi’s hands. The power scales tilted slowly but surely towards the regional chieftains.
In 2009, when Bhagwat’s search panel was scouting for a party president, the chief ministers, including Modi were approached but they flatly refused. Bhagwat and Gadkari’s relationship goes back a long way; both are from Vidarbha, their families are known to each other and Bhagwat – who unlike his immediate predecessors, Rajendra Singh and Sudarshan never served a stint in Delhi – is socially and functionally at ease with Gadkari. Their universe began and ended with Maharashtra and Vidarbha.
Bhagwat viewed the “Delhi cabal” of Jaitley, Sushma, M Venkaiah Naidu (a former BJP president) and Ananth Kumar (Bangalore MP and general secretary) as Advani loyalists. He believed that if the keys of the party were handed over to one of them, they would deposit them with Advani. The simplistic reading overlooked something every BJP worker knew: the “Delhi cabal” was rife with dissension. Sushma and Jaitley had no love lost for each other, Naidu was seen as an arriviste and Kumar as an “anti-Yeddyurappa schemer” in Karnataka.
Businessman First
Gadkari was ushered into Delhi and was unwillingly accepted because everyone thought that from then on, the RSS would call the shots. No one was at ease with his functioning: the street idiom he used in internal meetings embarrassed the women and publicly he conveyed the impression of being an entrepreneur rather than a politician. His speeches invariably returned to the themes of his business interests in Nagpur and the Mumbai-Pune highway he commissioned as the public works minister in Maharashtra’s BJP-Shiv Sena government. The Hindi heartland leaders were dismayed with his refusal to adapt sartorially: his public appearances were made in a safari suit and not the appropriate “kurta-pyjama”.
Indeed, BJP insiders wondered what it was about Gadkari that so endeared him to Bhagwat; he was not even a “disciplinarian” by the RSS’ yardstick because according to them, he was never punctual at meetings and preferred to hold them late into the night.
Armed with Bhagwat’s patronage, Gadkari became audacious enough to hand over the management of the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2011-12 to a coterie “imported” from Maharashtra. Its members thought that by merely juggling caste arithmetic on their laptops, based on dated statistics, they could swing the polls. Gadkari even tried hard to get a controversial non-resident Indian businessman elected to the Rajya Sabha from Jharkhand; Yashwant Sinha, an MP from the state, halted this proposal in its tracks.
That the RSS and more specifically Bhagwat, would stand by their protégé through thick and thin was amply manifest when Gadkari’s dodgy business deals – documented in media exposes but still not corroborated by an official investigation – caught up with him. Bhagwat’s second-in-command, Suresh “Bhaiyya” Joshi, RSS general secretary, issued a statement when the charges were first levelled by anti-corruption activist, Arvind Kejriwal, and debunked them as “vague” and engineered by “vested interests”. Joshi hinted that a second term for Gadkari – the BJP’s constitution was earlier amended to facilitate one – was on the cards.
As more and more charges implicating Gadkari’s Purti Group tumbled out, the RSS allegedly hired the Chennai-based chartered accountant and its on-off ideologue, S Gurumurthy, to conduct an internal probe. The probe, that amazed the BJP’s leaders, predictably gave Gadkari a clean chit. After its findings were independently contested, the normally articulate Gurumurthy turned defensive.
The script was tailored for a sure-shot second term for Gadkari. However, Advani overturned the apple-cart, first by putting up Mahesh Jethmalani, the Mumbai lawyer, as a prospective contestant against Gadkari and later, Yashwant Sinha. Jethmalani, his father Ram Jethmalani, and Sinha spoke out publicly against Gadkari and emphasised he should step down or else the BJP’s “crusade” against the Congress’ “corruption” would be undermined. That a “consensus” on Gadkari’s name, contrary to Bhagwat’s conviction, was practically unachievable was apparent when veterans like Murli Manohar Joshi and Jaswant Singh too raised objections, albeit covertly.
Identity Struggle
To construct the current RSS-BJP tussle as an Advani-Bhagwat face-off would be simplistic. The dramatic events that presaged Gadkari’s departure enclose the narrative of a child that has far outgrown the expectations and diktats of its parent and is struggling to achieve its identity in late adulthood.
Vajpayee, in his tenure as the PM, foresaw the impracticalities of a BJP being forever yoked to its parent; Advani realised it later. On his limited political turf in Gujarat, Modi figured out that if he wanted to superimpose his “model of governance” – a peculiar template of high economic growth skewed in favour of the affluent and underpinned by communal polarisation – he should get the Sangh out of his way. Other BJP chief ministers like Chouhan and Raman Singh walk the middle path: they use the official mechanisms to placate the Sangh on its core certitudes like cow worship and propagating slanted versions of history. They also try and wriggle out of the Hindutva straitjacket by reaching out to the Muslims without making a production of their gestures like Modi did with his overblown “sadbhavana mission”.
Gadkari is out and Rajnath is in. But it is a transition that Bhagwat is unlikely to digest. The RSS Marathi-speaking lobby amply hinted that Gadkari’s return was a “matter of time”. That may well be wishful thinking because if this lobby introspects, it would have to infer that the sarsanghachalak is no longer omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent.
When the decision to replace Gadkari was finally taken, Bhagwat was kept out: the RSS decision-makers were Suresh Joshi and Suresh Soni. Ironically, in December 2012, Soni’s exertions to re-nominate his man, Prabhat Jha for a second term as the Madhya Pradesh BJP president were scuppered by Bhagwat. Bhagwat’s blueprint was to move Soni southwards and task him as the minder of the southern states. Soni had his comeuppance. It is evident that from now on, a six-member presidium that includes Bhagwat, Joshi and four joint general secretaries, Soni, Dattatreya Hosbole, Krishna Gopal and K C Kamman will manage the BJP’s affairs from the RSS, ostensibly to inject the “consensus principle”.
A newspaper report (“RSS may reinstate Gadkari as BJP chief before 2014” by Ramu Bhagwat, The Times of India, 24 January), datelined Nagpur, quoted unnamed Sangh sources who alleged that “certain” BJP leaders opposed to Gadkari had “collaborated” with the finance minister, P Chidambaram after which Chidambaram issued search orders against those companies which had invested in Gadkari’s companies. That the surveys were ordered a day before his possible re-election were also independently questioned. Months earlier, a former RSS spokesperson, M G Vaidya, who is said to be close to Bhagwat, had charged Modi with manipulating the “media campaign” against Gadkari.
Rajnath Singh early on reckoned it was futile to edge out Gadkari, an alias for Bhagwat. To signal that he means to keep him as an ally, Rajnath Singh will be in Nagpur on 28 January as the chief guest in an agricultural exhibition put up by Gadkari. Wrapped in Rajnath Singh’s message is a personal imperative: in his earlier tenure as the BJP president, he constantly battled the pressures from Advani and other weighty Delhi leaders who saw him as nothing more than an Uttar Pradesh “block pramukh”.
The power dynamics on the BJP’s chessboard will play out in the next phase of the battle on who will lead the party in the 2014 elections. If Modi imagines that he is through by virtue of the extraordinarily high ratings given by the so-called opinion polls, a reality check or two is called for.
He is undoubtedly the cadres’ favourite. But if keeping and expanding the NDA coalition is the criterion, then those like Jaitley and Sushma have girded themselves to be on Nitish Kumar’s right side. Nobody knows as yet who will have the last word. But for now Modi has brokered peace with the RSS because even if Nagpur’s veto power is no longer absolute, it will count in the final analysis.
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