Mixed signals from BJP and RSS
It takes two to tango, and the BJP and the RSS are doing their best, but the result is confusing. In this election season, RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat seems to be speaking every other day to shore up morale, and often in tandem with BJP president Rajnath Singh.
Ten years out of power has been a wait too long, apparently. But it is hard to see what the BJP’s real message for voters is: Hindutva or development?
After so much being made of the so-called Gujarat model of development which lured sections of the aspiring middle class and market radicals, and lifted Mr Narendra Modi’s campaign to be the next Prime Minister, Mr Bhagwat has lectured on the need of a “unified Hindutva” in Patna on Sunday, saying “Hindutva is the fulcrum of Indian society and saffron the symbol and identity of Hindutva and Indian culture.” This harks back to the highly controversial writings of Golwalkar, a former RSS head and iconic developer of the Hindu-supremacist ideology, the sensitive nature of whose pronouncements are generally sought to be downplayed by BJP leaders these days.
Addressing the media on the day that the RSS chief was laying out the saffronite vision, the BJP president told a press conference in New York that the Ram temple was a “national issue” at best, not the BJP’s poll plank. Is there a difference, especially when the so-called national issue is being frequently ventilated after the election campaign has begun to roll? Mr Modi’s trusted former minister Amit Shah, the key BJP figure in charge of the campaign in UP, has also visited Ayodhya and made the appropriate sounds to appease a section of the electorate and send out the intended signals.
Mr Rajnath Singh maintained in New York, however, that it is the development agenda on which his party would take its chances, and interrogate the Congress government. This is at odds with his attack the other day on the use-value of the English language in India, remarks he later said were quoted out of context. But the unstoppable Mr Bhagwat took no such plea as he reinforced Mr Singh’s observations with elaboration of his own. (The RSS is Mr Singh’s mentor, after all.)
National Sample Survey Organisation data shows that in 2012 Gujarat had fallen below the national average and slipped in the average monthly spending capacity of its urban and rural households compared to the year 2000, a period in which Kerala, Punjab, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra made advances. On this evidence, the choice of the development plank may need to be re-thought, and then what’s left is Hindutva.
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