THE Bharatiya Jan Sangh is `the illegitimate child of the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh],` Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said on Jan 5, 1952.
The Jan Sangh was set up on Oct 21, 1951. It merged into the Janata Party along with other parties in 1977 to form a government but split in 1980 to reemerge as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The cause of the split was the other parties` strong objection to its association with the RSS. Its predecessor the JS was floated as the political arm of the RSS. The BJP retains that character to this day.
Last month saw an obscene power play at the highest levels of its power structure. Lal Krishna Advani, former deputy prime minister, opposed the anointment of Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat as the BJP`s candidate for the prime minister`s office in thegeneral elections due next year.
Advani has never recovered from his successive defeats in 2004 and 2009. Now he sees a man he had helped to survive pip him to the post. After the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat inFebruary 2002 the then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee contemplated asking Modi to resign. Advani came to his rescue.
Last year Modi won his third victory in the state assembly elections and, to Advani`s discomfiture, the support of a demoralised BJP. The rest of the country is not impressed, either.
The RSS has tightened its control over the BJP and that bodes ill for India`s democracy and its secularism. Advani`s stand on the RSS has varied with his fortunes. He proudly reminds one and all that he had joined that fascist body in 1942 in Karachi when he had just turned 14. He owed his rise in the party to the RSS` support and endorsed its line when it ousted two presidents of the Jan Sangh in 1954 and 1973.
He was its third victim. During his tour of Pakistan, he wrote a laudatory comment in the visitor`s book at the mausoleum of Mohammad Ali Jinnah in2005. It was not designed to woo Pakistanis but to impress Indians that he was not the hardline character they had imagined. All hell broke loose in the ranks of the BJP.
Immediately on his return to New Delhi the RSS general secretary Mohan Bhagwat told BJP workers that Advani had to go.
Advani complied the very next day but secured a reprieve for a graceful exit. He formally resigned on Dec 31, 2005, but not before telling the party that `the BJP has taken the ideology of culture and nationalism from the RSS and the BJP is inseparable from the RSS`.
Yet in a formal statement he had spoken of `an impression` that `no political or organisational decision can be taken without the consent of the RSS functionaries`. His successor Rajnath Singh instantly declared `we are all workers` of the RSS.
Itis unnecessary to trace the changesthat followed except to note that in March 2009 Bhagwat became the RSS supremo and appointed a veritable Caligula, an obscure Mohan Gadkari, as BJP president. Gadkari later resigned under a cloud and Rajnath Singh took over. Bhagwat and Singh overrode Advani`s objections to make Modi the BJP`s campaign chief, its face in the poll campaign and favourite for the prime minister`s job if the BJP won the polls.
Advani resigned from all the party posts on June 7, withdrew his resignation shortly thereafter and went to the RSS headquarters in New Delhi to call on its supremo on June 20. The statement issued thereafter said it all.
`Bhagwatji gave Advaniji a patient hearing`. This is the language used for a superior according an audience to a supplicant. He had failed.
The grim realities are that Modi is in the ascendant. His confidant Amit Shahis now a general secretary of the BJP`s UP chief and faces criminal charges.
Mohan Bhagwat is all set to impose the RSS agenda even more firmly on the BJP. Sure enough on July 6, Amit Shah rushed to Ayodhya, to the makeshift temple set up illegally on the debris of the demolished Babri Masjid, and `prayed that we together build a Ram temple as soon as possible` The RSS worldview, articulated by Mohan Bhagwat in a series of pronouncements, is disquieting. `India has to lead the world` he ambitiously proclaimed in October last year.
The RSS organ Organiser reported an earlier speech in which `quoting the example of human body, he said that importance of any part of body is only as long as it remains with body and separation of it would pain both body and part. Similarly, separation of countries like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Tibet, Pakistan, etc. has created problems for those countries andthey in turn are creating problems for us. As a result of this, Indian borders are contracting and the day will come when there would be no place for Hindus to live in Hindustan`.
Despite the moderating, if feeble, influenceof the then prime minister, Vajpayee, the BJP pursued its own agenda, when it was in power at the centre (1996-2004) as do BJP-led state governments.
Two eminent scholars Manjeet S.
Pardesi and Jennifer L. Oetken record: `In spite of the constraints of a coalition government, the BJP was not restrained from implementing education policies that promoted a skewed interpretation of India`s history along their ideological lines.
They have conflated the Vedic period of India`s history (1500 BC 600 BC approximately) with the Indus Valley civilisation (which flourished in the third millennium BC) to show that all of India`s Hindus are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the subcontinent.
Expect far worse from a BJP tightly controlled by the RSS, without any moderating checks, whatsoever. • The writer is an author and a lawyer.
Keywords: Political science , Political issues , Political process , General elections , Democracy , Politics , PM Jawaharlal Nehru , Narendra Modi , Lal Krishna Advani , Gujarat , New Delhi , Afghanistan , Sri Lanka , BJP , RSS , BC