Viewpoint: Tavleen Singh

India Today, December 21, 1998
Dec 21, 1998

VIEWPOINT
Held Hostage by RSS

Vajpayee's in-house opposition is doing Sonia's work for her.

Tavleen Singh

In the fetid, hothouse atmosphere of Delhi politics it is often hard to tell rumour from truth, fact from fiction. So rumours about RSS interference in Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government have so far not been taken too seriously. Not even by this column. But events of recent weeks should have made it clear to even the politically blind that not only is the RSS interfering in governance it is even functioning as an extra-constitutional authority. We did not elect the RSS to govern us. So it has absolutely no right to decide whether we should have foreign investment in the insurance sector or how much Hindutva schoolchildren need to imbibe.

Unfortunately, concepts of democracy are alien to the fossilised old men who run the RSS. They get their jobs by selection, not election -- and having got them they hang on till death intervenes. If you spend a morning at the RSS headquarters in Delhi's Jhandewalan area, you discover before the end of the morning shakha that concepts of modernity are also alien here. Even the khaki knickers the old gents bravely prance around in at dawn have remained unchanged since K.B. Hedgewar founded the organisation.

Most of the heroes whose pictures adorn the walls are also from the past and pervading everything is the musty smell of revivalism. In Jhandewalan, sneeringly called Flagstaff House by some BJP ministers, the RSS has a right to do what it wants. It is when it thinks that it can piggyback into South Block on the prime minister's shoulders that the problem begins. And there is too much piggyback riding going on.

Nobody in the Government should need to pay any heed to the generally unsound views of the RSS' so-called economists. But barely has the prime minister to announce some new economic measure than S. Gurumurthy or the ubiquitous K.N. Govindacharya will speak out against it.

"If these gentlemen are economists then I am a Bharatnatyam dancer," Jagdish Bhagwati, the well-known economist, once said. But those who have trained for years in those dawn shakhas are not easily discouraged. Gurumurthy and Govindacharya continue to be the Sangh Parivar's resident intellectuals, pronouncing on everything from swadeshi economics to politics.

So Govindacharya announced, after the RSS held a special meeting to analyse the BJP's recent electoral reverses, that they had concluded it was because the Government had moved away from Hindutva and the swadeshi agenda that people were turning back to the Congress. The exact opposite is true.

Very few Indians support the swadeshi world view. Those who have suffered at the hands of our state-owned insurance companies long for private investment to come in and break the monopoly. It can take years to retrieve even small amounts of money and if you happen to be semi-literate and poor then you have quite simply had it. By the time you have finished paying off the network of sharks whose hands your file passes through you are left with almost nothing. Why should anyone want such a monopoly to continue.

When the RSS isn't making trouble for the Government by attacking its economic policies it is making trouble for it in other ways. So suddenly we hear about a Sufi shrine in Karnataka that requires "liberation". The prime minister tells anyone who cares to listen that a shrine worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims should be considered especially sacred and that what is happening in Karnataka is wrong.

It is not the sort of statement that deters Hindutva's footsoldiers. So aggressive members of the lumpen proletariat wearing saffron bandanas descended on rural Karnataka to try and create a communal problem where none had existed. The cause, mercifully, enthused only a handful of people. But the damage to the Government's image was done.

This past week Christians came from all over the country to protest outside Parliament against the spate of "atrocities" against them. The largest number of these atrocities are alleged to have occurred in Gujarat. In nearly every one we see the hand of the RSS. Inevitably, the BJP Government in Delhi gets the blame.

Vajpayee's problems have been exacerbated by the fact that Home Minister L.K. Advani is perceived to be the RSS' real choice for prime minister. Leading RSS intellectuals (Gurumurthy, Govindacharya) are among Advani's closest advisers. So rumours of his complicity in the plot get believed. So much so that he had to officially deny them this past week. But suspicions persist.

As home minister and the RSS' blue-eyed boy it should be quite easy for Advani to control mobs like those which went to Karnataka. What stops him? Equally, how is it so easy for Shiv Sena thugs to attack cinemas showing Fire? Instead of stern action being taken against the thugs it was the film which suffered. It was sent back to the censors after the untrue charge that it was offending the public.

If Vajpayee is not allowed to govern with a modicum of dignity Sonia Gandhi will be prime minister before the turn of the century. The average Indian is quite simply not interested in the sort of substandard, rural lifestyle the RSS is offering him. By contrast, the Congress seems modern and forward-looking. Isn't it interesting that in the name of swadeshi and Hindutva the RSS could end up giving us our first videshi prime minister?

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