It is natural that the prime minister should come out in defence of the Gujarat government's decision to lift the ban on government employees participating in RSS activities. After all the Gujarat government is run by the BJP, the party to which Shri Vajpayee owes allegiance. Moreover, for Mr Vajpayee, as per the title of an article written by him and published in Organiser, May 7, 1995, the RSS is his "soul." The deceit indulged in by Shri Vajpayee is not surprising. Responding to presspersons after inaugurating the World Book Fair in New Delhi, he asserted that the RSS is a "social outfit" and not a political organisation. This deceit and double-speak is very much in keeping with the RSS tradition.

RSS BRAND POLITICS

Vajpayee's justification comes in the backdrop of a spate of developments since the BJP-led government assumed power in May this year. First came the packing of the ICHR with known RSS personalities, to be followed by the sacking of Romila Thapar and Rajendra Yadav from the Prasar Bharati Board. The cue was readily picked up by the BJP state governments. The new incumbent in the chief minister's chair in UP, got through a bill aimed at denying permission for construction of new mosques in the state. Later, the chief minister also stated that if the VHP and other organisations so desire, construction of the Ram temple can begin at Ayodhya. Then came the lifting of the ban in Gujarat. Therefore, what Shri Vajpayee did was but to give credibility to the actions that his partymen were indulging in, in other parts of the country. But while doing so, Mr Vajpayee indulged in falsehood.

The RSS is politics of a peculiar kind. An Organiser report in its January 16, 2000 issue tells us that, in his address, RSS general secretary repeatedly used the term national unity and talked of strengthening the nation while asking for uniting and strengthening the Hindus as a community, and kept depicting the minorities as enemies. So it is not surprising if on the one hand he said, "we will have to alert people so that not even a single Hindu gives up his religion" and, on the other, if he said that "Hindu society is awakening. There is a welcome change in Hindu society that it is welcoming re-entry of converted people into Hindu Dharma."

But RSS politics is not satisfied with pitting the Hindus against the rest. It wants to equate the Hindus with the nation and turn them against the rest. This is no coincidence if, in the very next sentence of this report, we find RSS general secretary emphasising "on the need of strengthening national (?) security." And in Gujarat, that is home of the Sangh Parivar's anti-Christian campaign, he obviously does not forget to attack the Pope and raises the bogey of the Pope's call for "conversion of Asians to Christianity." It is politics of majority communalism, aimed at establishing a theocratic Hindu state in India.

The constituents of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), who were earlier taking secular positions, are only exposing themselves by remaining silent on the issue. It is precisely their silence which the BJP is utilising to push its agenda as opposed to the NDA agenda. It may be recalled that it was out of its compulsion of remaining in power that the BJP agreed to the formulation of the National Agenda for Governance after the 1998 elections. This was dictated by the fact that Vajpayee's 13-day experiment in 1996 failed because the BJP could not win any allies owing to the BJP's programme and outlook. It was only in the last elections that the BJP did not come up with its own manifesto and committed itself to the NDA manifesto, thereby postponing issues like the Ram temple, uniform civil code, abrogation of article 370, etc, which in fact constitute the core of the Hindutva agenda. This, however, did not mean that, as we have been repeatedly stating, the BJP has renunciated its own agenda, or what later on came to be known as the "hidden agenda."

HISTORICAL FACTS

That the RSS is not really concerned with socio-cultural issues is borne from many facts. All the top BJP leaders come from the RSS; the party has been groomed and trained by the RSS; its leaders still continue to be members of the RSS and seek guidance from the parent organisation. Right from its foundation in 1925, the RSS has indulged in political activities in the guise of a social organisation. In the year following its foundation in 1925, Nagpur City was shaken by communal riots.

Writing in The Statesman (January 14 & 15), A G Noorani refers to A Life of Our Times by Rajeshwar Dayal, who was the chief secretary of UP during the days of partition. Dayal reveals that, soon after partition, deputy inspector general of police of the western range, B B L Jaitley, brought to him two trunks full of documents which "revealed incontrovertible evidence of a dastardly conspiracy to create a communal holocaust throughout the western districts." There were accurate maps "marking out Muslim localities and habitations... Timely raid conducted on the premises of the RSS had brought the massive conspiracy to light. The whole plot had been conceived under the direction and supervision of the supreme of the organisation himself (M S Golwalkar)."

Further, even today, the RSS claims that Godse was not a member of the RSS. However, his brother who was also one of the conspirators in the crime, revealed in an interview to the Frontline in 1994: "All the brothers were in the RSS. You can say we grew in the RSS rather than in our home. It was like a family to us. Nathuram had become a baudhik karyavah (intellectual worker) in the RSS. He has said in his statement that he left the RSS... because Golwalkar and the RSS were in a lot of trouble after the murder of Gandhi. But he did not leave the RSS."

This business of being in politics but claiming to be apolitical or "social" or "cultural" is not something new that Vajpayee has done. When the RSS was banned in the wake of Gandhi's assassination, Golwalkar, in a letter (November 12, 1948) to prime minister Nehru, wrote that the "RSS was aloof from politics." As opposed to this, Rajendra Singh and Bhauraro, Balasaheb Deoras's brother, claimed that it does not indulge in day to day politics "though the Sangh has a political philosophy within its wide sweep of political work. It is possible to change this policy and even participate in politics."

In his reply on September 11, 1948 to Golwalkar's letter that sought that the ban imposed on RSS in the wake of Mahatma Gandhi's killing be lifted, Sardar Patel wrote: "Organising the Hindus and helping them is one thing but going in for revenge for its sufferings on innocent people and helpless men, women and children is quite another thing... All their speeches were full of poison. It was not at all necessary to spread poison in order to enthuse the Hindus and organise for their protection. As a final result of the poison, the country had to suffer the sacrifice of the invaluable life of Gandhiji... Opposition turned even more severe, when the RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji's death. Under these conditions it became inevitable for the government to take action against the RSS."

Years later, K R Malkani, one of the leading lights of both the RSS and the BJP, wrote in the Organiser on April 8, 1979: "Fact is that RSS is not political. It is, if I may coin a word, metapolitical. It is not interested in power as such; but it is very much interested in the factors and forces that go into the making of a country's politics. It is interested in the people and their character, our culture and its integrity; in the country and its unity and strength. But it stands above and beyond politics, like some kind of an institutional Rajguru."

Madhu Limaye joined issue with Malkani and wrote in Sunday (June 10, 1979): "The RSS line is very clear. It is a supra-party, para-military organisation which wants to take over the state and the nation and establish an authoritarian regime in the manner of the Nazi leaders." This Malkani-Limaye debate was in the background of the issue of "dual membership" (of both the RSS and the Janata Party) that was raised by the non-RSS members of the Janata Party in 1979, which finally led to the split in the party and fall of the Morarji Desai government.

ORGANISATION OF A DIFFERENT GENRE

But the RSS is not merely a political organisation. It is a political organisation of a different genre: it preaches intolerance; is intrinsically anti-democratic and anti-secular; and most importantly it is a fascistic type of organisation. Hedgewar's mentor and friend B S Moonje, after visiting Italy under Mussolini, made the following entry in his diary:

"The Balilla institutions and the conception of the whole organisation have appealed to me most, though there is still not discipline and organisation of high order. The whole idea is conceived by Mussolini for the military regeneration of Italy. Italians by nature, appear ease-loving and non-martial like the Indians generally. They have cultivated, like Indians, the work of peace and neglected cultivation of the art of war. Mussolini saw the essential weakness of his country and conceived the idea of Balilla organisation... Nothing better could have been conceived... The idea of fascism vividly brings out the conception of unity amongst people... India and particularly Hindu India needs some such institution... Our institution of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of Nagpur under Dr Hedgewar is of this kind." Hedgewar and Golwalkar both had enormous praise not only for Mussolini but for Hitler also. This is the kind of organisation that Vajpayee would have us believe to be apolitical, rather "social."

Now that Vajpayee has been joined by L K Advani and the UP chief minister, it becomes all the more clear that these were not stray thoughts but part of a conscious effort to push in their agenda.

SILENCE WOULD COST THE COUNTRY DEARLY