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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Nov 08, 2014, 05:10 AM IST
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is known for its opaque functioning. But in the contemporary political climate, the organisation’s customary behind-the-scenes role has become more pronounced. These days, the RSS is taking an increasing interest in the workings of the Narendra Modi government. According to latest media reports, Modi’s parliamentary office in Varanasi is run by RSS, and not Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), cadres. Not just that, Varanasi’s Jayapur village, which Modi has adopted as part of his government’s just announced village development scheme, is the very same village the RSS developed in 2002 under its “ideal village scheme”. Other BJP MPs are also trying to adopt villages already under RSS care.
As the BJP’s ideological fountainhead, the RSS had long waited for the moment that crystallised after the 2014 general elections. The BJP’s electoral triumph suddenly boosted the RSS’s prospects of giving pace to its ideological agenda.
The spate of recent meetings between RSS and the Modi government’s ministers indicates that interactions between the two are well under way. The RSS functionaries met five Union ministers in separate meetings to facilitate the beginning of this ‘coordination’ process. Arguably, such interactions are natural in the present political order. A pracharak himself, Modi, in the years preceding his Prime Ministership, publicly flaunted his long-standing association with the RSS. The BJP also happens to be indebted to the hard work of RSS volunteers in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
Consider the recent unravelling of events. Within months of the Modi government settling down in office, the RSS deputed two of its key pracharaks, Ram Madhav and Shiv Prakash, to the BJP. The move signalled the RSS’s intention to play a pro-active role in government policies. Senior BJP leaders and Cabinet ministers have been periodically calling upon the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. In a highly controversial move last month, the government allowed Bhagwat to telecast live on Doordarshan his Dussehra address to RSS volunteers.
The recent engagement suggests that the RSS is more integrated with the BJP government now than during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004). The BJP leadership, of course, maintains that its interactions with the RSS are part of the Modi government’s general consultations with voluntary organisations. However, till now, the RSS appears to be the sole “voluntary organisation” that has been in consultation with the Modi government.
Many believe that such active RSS intervention may promote RSS’s majoritarian ideology and increase vulnerability of minority groups. It’s also believed that education and culture are the ‘soft targets’ of any such process of indoctrination. During the last BJP-led government’s tenure, the education sector turned into a hotbed of controversy with Murli Manohar Joshi, then BJP human resources development minister, overhauling the existing textbook curriculum and pushing through a new one.
It’s useful to remember in this context the choppy relations between the RSS and the Vajpayee government. Not so far back, the RSS also regarded Modi with suspicion, perceiving in him a highly individualistic leader. Many believe that the RSS today is to the Modi government what the National Advisory Council (NAC) used to be to the Manmohan Singh government. Then in opposition, the BJP, would routinely slam the UPA government for allowing an ‘extra-constitutional’ body like the NAC to meddle in decision-making.
For now, camaraderie reigns between the Modi government and RSS. However, given Modi’s troubled history with the RSS, the Prime Minister may — in the days to come — walk a tightrope in negotiating his terms of governance with the Sangh Parivar.
