Struggle within the Sangh

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The attack on BJP party president Nitin Gadkari, a virtual unknown before he was plucked from obscurity and thrust on the national stage by the men who matter in Nagpur, begs the question — who is behind it and what is there to gain if he is pushed back into the shadows?

The Gadkari scandal may pale in comparison to the many scams that have embarrassed the UPA. But as one uncomfortable detail after another emerges about the alleged murky dealings of this businessman-politician, the shock expose has thrown a spotlight on the saffronists’ worst kept secret — the rift between the BJP and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh.
Once seen as an extension of each other, today they couldn’t be further apart. Arvind Kejriwal may have started a fire that will require all of the BJP’s ingenuity to douse, as the man who was set for a second term with the blessings of the RSS now looks increasingly shaky. The Gadkari story, in fact, only underlining how deeply suspicious the two sides are of each other, with a section of the Hindu right-wing organisation suspecting that the entire scandal is the handiwork of some very powerful and ambitious leaders within the BJP in Delhi who want to stop Gadkari from staying on as president for a second term, and seeing the targeting of Gadkari as a not-so-subtle message to the Sangh that this is what it would come up against if it continues to interfere with the organisation as blatantly as it has done thus far.

The saffronists’ attempts to move away from hardcore Hindutva — and the RSS — began when former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee took ‘the middle path’, attempting to emulate the Congress in its bid to make itself be seen as modern and acceptable to a larger section of society.
Like the Marxists, the BJP, long known for its strong ideological leanings, put its core issues abrogation of Article 370, uniform civil code and Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya under the carpet on the pretext of ‘coalition compulsions’ during the Vajpayee regime. BJP veteran L.K. Advani had done much the same when he praised Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Pakistan following the NDA’s defeat in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. It was an attempt to shed his hardline image after he came to the realisation that ‘hardline’ did not cut any ice with the ordinary man on the street.

Some see Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi also changing tack. After winning two Assembly elections on the Hindu plank, this time he is not talking about “hum panch, hamare pachhees”, or ‘Mian Musharraf’ to polarise voters. His ‘Sadbhavana yatra’, undertaken before the state Assembly polls, was clearly a bid to keep minorities in good humour.

With both ‘Rath Yatri’ Advani and Hindutva ‘poster boy’ Modi distancing themselves from the RSS politically, the mandarins at Reshimbagh, the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, are said to be deeply unhappy. In Mr Gadkari, the RSS saw a BJP chief who would counter the party’s Delhi-based leaders, whom the RSS has grown to distrust, and stop the saffron party from looking more and more like the centrist Congress. In appointing Mr Gadkari as party chief, and pushing for a second term for him, the RSS was putting into place a plan to ‘free’ the BJP from the clutches of the G4, the so called Group of Four, who call the shots in the BJP in Delhi.

So far, this group has been unable to persuade the RSS to see things their way, despite demonstrating how they changed the rules of the game, ended one party rule and came to power in 1996. The BJP’s strategists believe that the party cannot come to power on the basis of a Hindu vote alone. Hindus do not vote en bloc as the Muslims do. Rather, they vote along predominantly caste lines.

Secondly, a BJP run by remote control from RSS headquarters in Nagpur would only work if the BJP comes to power on its own. In this era of coalition politics, a Nitish Kumar, for instance, would find it difficult to sell this to his core voter. But this has fallen on deaf ears in Nagpur, which is unable to control stalwarts like Mr Advani, Mr Jaitley, Ms Swaraj, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Venkaiah Naidu, even Ananth Kumar of Karnataka.

With Assembly elections in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhat-tisgarh and Delhi set to see straight fights between BJP and Congress, the RSS is scrambling to install a party chief who will follow its line in letter and spirit. The RSS does not want the ‘Congressisation’ of the BJP.
It is towards that goal that a BJP leader from outside Delhi whose “chaal, chehra and charitra” would be different from that of the G4, someone like Goa Chief Miniser Manohar Parrikar or any other hardliner in the event that Mr Gadkari steps down, is being looked at.

But with neither the BJP nor the RSS having charismatic leaders as they did in the past, like Mr Vajpayee in the party and a Keshav Baliram Hed-gewar or Madhav Sada-shiv Golwalkar or Bala-saheb Deoras in the Sangh, the battle for the saffron soul has just begun. Mr Gadkari, party president or not, is the first casualty.