What will Pranab tell RSS?

At RSS headquarters in Nagpur today, former President Pranab Mukherjee will deliver a closely-watched valedictory speech. His former party, the Congress, is deeply upset with him for accepting the RSS’s invitation. Pressure was brought upon him by assorted Congress leaders to back out of the event.

But Mukherjee is a stubborn man. Many forget the deep hurt he felt on October 31, 1984, when following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, he was denied the prime ministership by a cabal of leaders close to Rajiv Gandhi. News of the assassination attempt had reached Kolkata where Mukherjee was campaigning with Rajiv. The two men, along with the Lok Sabha speaker Balram Jakhar and others, immediately flew back to Delhi. During the flight, news of Mrs. Gandhi’s death was confirmed. Confabulations began among the leaders on board the plane over who should succeed her as the prime minister.

Throughout the flight, Mukherjee sat silently, alone in his seat, as the others argued back and forth about Rajiv’s claim to the prime ministership. Mukherjee clearly felt that, as the senior-most Congress cabinet minister, he should be the frontrunner, not the untested 40-year-old Rajiv. As I wrote in my biography of Rajiv Gandhi (published by Penguin): “In many ways, Mukherjee would have been justified in proposing that he be made the interim prime minister. This exhibition of political ambition was widely regarded as the reason for Mukherjee’s exclusion from Rajiv’s first post-election Cabinet, announced on January 1, 1985.”

Back in Delhi, Rajiv’s coterie, led by Arun Nehru, ensured Rajiv would succeed his mother as the prime minister even as Sonia tried in vain to persuade her husband not to accept the offer. She feared he, too, would be assassinated.

A few months later, I visited Mukherjee at his modest home to interview him for the Rajiv biography. He was out of favour with Rajiv’s inner circle, who did not trust him. Rajiv, to his credit, encouraged me to meet Mukherjee even though relations between the two men had soured and Mukherjee had left the Congress. He would return only years later.

Mukherjee was a picture of rectitude. Throughout the hour-long interview, he rarely betrayed signs of anger at being sidelined by the new Rajiv Gandhi government. Eventually, after Rajiv’s own tragic assassination in May 1991, Mukherjee became one of the key ministers in successive Congress governments. But his ambition to be the prime minister was left unfulfilled even as others like Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh were preferred over him.

The reason was plain: unlike the others, Mukherjee has a mind of his own — and he spoke it. Sonia eventually developed a cordial relationship with Mukherjee in UPA 1 and UPA 2, but the road for him beyond the home and finance ministerships was blocked. That is why he was persuaded in 2012 to retire with honour to the portals of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. It left the path open for younger, ambitious loyalist Congressmen if future opportunity beckoned and Rahul Gandhi, the heir, decreed it.

All of this explains the unease Congress leaders felt when Mukherjee decided to speak at today’s RSS function. They feared he would speak his mind, ventilating uncomfortable home truths. Besides, his very presence would validate if not endorse the RSS. The Congress has for decades demonised the RSS. It has done this partly out of conviction that the Sangh’s ideology is antithetical to the plural idea of India. But it also fears the RSS. The Sangh has a large and active cadre. Sonia was quick to recognise the electoral danger this posed. The Congress began a premeditated campaign to discredit the RSS during UPA1 by raising the bogey of ‘saffron terror’. While Rajiv had no particular animus against the RSS, Sonia and Rahul have demonised it ceaselessly to polarise Muslim and Christian votes.  

The RSS has played into the Congress’ hands. It speaks of a Hindu Rashtra rather than an inclusive Bharat Rashtra. This makes it easy for progressives to dub the RSS as regressive and communal. The Congress’ own decades-old communalism, going back to the Shah Bano case in 1986, is camouflaged as ‘secularism’ when it is in fact the opposite.

Former finance minister P Chidambaram, who has no love lost for Mukherjee (and whose office in UPA 2 he had allegedly bugged), has said the former president should not have accepted the RSS’s invitation, but now that he has, he should tell it “what is wrong with its ideology.”

Here are three things that are unquestionably wrong with the RSS’s ideology and need to be corrected. One, it must allow women entry to, and leadership positions in, the main Sangh organisation (not just the separate mahila wing). A woman sangarchalak — unthinkable today — would lift the RSS into the 21st century. Two, the Sangh must abandon its mistrust of foreign investment. Contemporary swadeshi economics should embrace, not reject globalisation. Three, the RSS must be inclusive of all faiths — Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Jews. Many are former Hindus anyway. Embrace them and the RSS will emerge stronger.

I suspect Mukherjee will say all of this and more in his speech today. But he will couch it in the cautious language that has served him well in his long and illustrious political career.

The writer is author of The New Clash of Civilizations: How The Contest Between America, China, India and Islam Will Shape Our Century. Views are personal.