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So, ultimately, Nagpur had to sit on a white charger and gallop fast and furious to sort one of its beloved progeny out. The family may be large and powerful but recently its most public wing was looking distinctly weak and spent.

This charge to the rescue puts an end to all speculation about who really holds the reins in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). We often hear about the Congress High Command aka Sonia Gandhi who takes all decisions on behalf of the Congress, even of Bal ‘remote control’ Thackeray when his party shared power in Maharashtra in the 1990s. The BJP has shouted itself hoarse about extra-Constitutional powers running the UPA governments.

Now in its moment of dissent and disarray, its parent body, the Rashtriya Sawayamsewak Sangh (RSS) had to take effective steps to stem the blood flow, bandage the wound and sternly lecture all its errant children on what is permissible in the Sangh school of behaviour and what is definitely not.

Why does half the nation, and the legion of admirers of the Sangh Parivar and its exclusivist thinking, even bother to deny the links between the RSS and the BJP? It is curious, this insistence that the BJP is an independent party which may share some ideas about cultural nationalism with the RSS but has no other links with it. All evidence is to the contrary and has long been so.

Yes, there is no outright organisational connection between the two — shared office-bearers and so on. No official High Command or Remote Control so to speak. But make no mistake, there is a high command and there is a remote control. Don’t go back too far. Just as far as LK Advani’s comments in a guest book in Pakistan about MA Jinnah being a secular man. The RSS expressed outrage and Advani was out as party president.

Several top BJP leaders also started life as RSS pracharaks. Their first allegiance is to that ideology which they have sworn to propagate across the country or even the world.
What part of this is not known? Jaswant Singh now says he’s not a pracharak, never belonged to the RSS and did not even buy into its thinking. This is a bit precious considering that he stayed with the BJP for 30 years till they chucked him out for writing a book ostensibly saying nice things about Jinnah.

In his defence, you might consider that Advani was merely reprimanded while Singh’s punishment was more severe. Was it because he had no pracharak past to help? Or was his sin so dire?

But the RSS has read the BJP the riot act not just because of Singh. The BJP has been struggling to deal with its losses in the last two general elections and with the intense competitive race in the party to grab leadership. Pracharaks ideally are selfless volunteers married to a bunch of thoughts, not greedy, grasping, power-hungry mini-despots in the making. That was, apparently, the way of other political parties.

Many years ago Advani had with unusual prescience bemoaned the “Congressification” of his party. That “downfall” likely happened long ago; or it was never any different. Selfless discipline was an illusion created by clever public relations and image manipulation.

The RSS has made it clear to those possible dissenters within the BJP and the naïve hopers outside how powerful it is. The BJP gets its raison d’etre from the RSS. One way or another, Hindutva will come back on its agenda. This dream of some political thinkers of a conservative party to balance the left-of-centre Congress, but without a propensity to murder people belonging to non-Hindu religions, is likely to remain a pipe dream.

It apparently took Jaswant Singh 30 years to realise what the BJP was. Other possible dissenters within the party are sure to be struck by the same incomprehension whenever power looks imminent again. The rule of Nagpur, though, can never be doubted.