Modi serves, RSS relishes |
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| OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | ||
New Delhi, July 24: Prime
Minister Narendra Modi hosted RSS chief Mohanrao Bhagwat and his
colleagues for dinner this evening at his Race Course Road residence.
General secretary
Suresh “Bhaiyya” Joshi and joint general secretaries Suresh Soni,
Dattatreya Hosabale and Krishna Gopal accompanied Bhagwat.
Sources said the
dinner was essentially a “thanksgiving”, hosted by Modi to express his
gratitude towards and acknowledgment of the RSS’s “support” to his
leadership and cooperation with the BJP cadre during the 2014 elections.
No one from the
BJP was invited, indicating that unlike Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Modi has
an easy equation with the Sangh. In November 2000, Vajpayee had invited
then RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan and his colleagues Bhagwat, who was then a
general secretary, H.V. Seshadri and Madan Das Devi to dinner. He made
it a point to also invite L.K. Advani, then BJP president Bangaru Laxman
and Laxman’s predecessor Kushabhau Thakre. “Atalji was never
comfortable in a one-on-one situation with the Sangh leaders,” a source
recalled.
That was the first
and last time that Prime Minister Vajpayee supped with the RSS brass.
His relations with Sudarshan later went downhill over several issues,
notably economic policies.
BJP and RSS
sources said the Modi-Bhagwat association — which goes back a long way
to the years when Modi was “discovered” and nurtured by Bhagwat’s
father, Madhukar Bhagwat, at that time a “pracharak” in Gujarat — was
not expected to follow the Vajpayee-Sudarshan trajectory.
“The main reason
is that even the Sangh realises that in spite of all its hard work and
dedication (in the Lok Sabha polls), the catalyst for the victory was
Modi’s projection as the PM candidate. With the kind of mandate that the
BJP won, the Sangh has figured out that it is purposeless to needle
Modi,” a source said.
Modi, said RSS
sources, was a “pracharak” (Sangh whole-timer) while Vajpayee was a
“swayamsevak”. The demoninations “represent the difference between an
abiding sense of commitment to the RSS’s ideology and values that a
‘pracharak’ has and a little-more-than-peripheral association a
‘swayamsevak’ brings with him”, a source said. "We are sure that Modi
will never let the Sangh down. Even if he takes policy decisions that
might upset some of our constituents like he did in Gujarat when he
hiked power tariffs across the board, he will never ever betray people’s
faith in him, his government and the BJP by tolerating corruption,
indiscipline and misdeeds,” the source said.
Earlier in the
day, Joshi, Soni, Hosabale and Gopal went to the residence of Union
minister and former BJP president Nitin Gadkari for a meeting. New
party chief Amit Shah, Shah’s immediate predecessor Rajnath Singh and
the general secretary (organisation), Ramlal, were present. Over lunch,
they discussed Shah’s prospective team of office-bearers, sources said.
Shah is keen on
recasting the BJP’s apparatus to make it look “young and fresh” which,
sources said, means that even those party officials who have not made it
to Modi’s council of ministers might lose their jobs.
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July 25, 2014
Modi serves, RSS relishes
The Telegraph - 25 July 2014
