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Wednesday, Aug 18, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Go Arjun, go

By Harish Khare

The RSS-Arjun Singh battle should embolden the liberal community to rediscover its voice and its faith in Nehruvian values.

THE UNION Human Resource Development Minister, Arjun Singh, has intrepidly called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's bluff. Rather than getting cowed down by the RSS' threat of a legal case, the Union Minister has virtually told the Nagpur brass to take a hike. The onus is now on these self-styled desh bhakhts to decide whether they want to expose their organisation to what could become an exacting judicial scrutiny and a prolonged public exposé. The country does need a grand trial on the question of culpability of those other than Nathuram Godse in Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. It would be a wonderful tonic for the entire country to learn a little about the men, their ideas and infatuations and the organisational habits of a group that never accepted the Mahatma or his message of secular brotherhood. Quite unwittingly, Mr. Singh has stumbled upon a stratagem that could help the polity rediscover its liberal equilibrium.

Expectedly, the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and their spear-carriers in the media have raised questions about Mr. Singh's motives in taking on the RSS. The insinuation is that the Minister's real target is the Prime Minister, not the Sangh. Mr. Singh's reputation perhaps invites these kinds of suggestions. However, anyone familiar with the current realpolitik power equations of the Congress party can easily arrive at two simple and obvious inferences.

First, the Arjun Singh of 2004 is not the Arjun Singh of 1994-95; today he has very little personal following in the party. No one in the party thinks of him as a Prime Ministerial contender. Whereas in 1991 he could easily walk into the Narashima Rao Cabinet as the undesignated No. 2, his entry itself into the Manmohan Singh Government was a touch and go affair. Second, in 1994-1995 when he took on the then Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, he could entertain the fiction that he had the silent consent, if not the connivance, of 10 Janpath. Today, there is no scope for him — nor for that matter, for anyone else in and out of the Congress — to misunderstand or misinterpret Sonia Gandhi's total commitment to the Manmohan Singh Government's success and longevity.

However, given his many enemies, within and outside the Congress, doubts will persist about the wisdom of Mr. Arjun Singh's anti-RSS pinpricks. He is quite capable of dealing competently with his detractors. The only worthwhile caveat against the Union Minister that needs to be taken note of is the argument that he has created a situation whereby the BJP leadership would be forced to come to the aid of the Jhandewalan gang.

This is too facile an argument. If the BJP embraces the RSS, so be it. After all, it is not Mr. Singh's or the Congress party's obligation to help the BJP leaders extricate themselves from the RSS company. Nor, to be precise, do these leaders want to liberate themselves from their "soul" called the RSS. The Congress certainly stands nothing to lose if the so-called "moderates" within the BJP were to appear as cut from the same RSS cloth as the self-styled hardliners. Indeed, the Congress should welcome a BJP that is seen as totally tied to the RSS apron strings; the middle classes in India would then be forced to rethink their ambivalence towards the Hindutva party.

However, there is a much larger context to the Arjun Singh-RSS battle of nerves. The RSS threat of legal action against Mr. Singh is to be seen as part of the Sangh Parivar's strategy of manufacturing judicial respectability for itself. After having questioned for long the judiciary's competence to pronounce in "a matter of faith" (Lord Rama's birth place), the Sangh Parivar has gleefully seized upon the Supreme Court's majority judgment in the Hindutva case. The Sangh and its ideologues selectively used Justice J.S. Verma's words to proclaim the apex court had legitimised their definition of Hindutva and its core beliefs.

Ever since the Verma judgment, the Sangh Parivar has been only too prone to threaten its political detractors and rivals with a legal battle. It has tried to instil a fear among its critics that their opposition to the Parivar would entail the additional complication of a legal entanglement. It is indeed an irony that an inherently anti-democratic group should be able to use the legal accoutrements of a liberal Constitution to browbeat its critics. The threat against Mr. Singh is part of a familiar pattern and it is about time someone picked up the RSS' gauntlet. The trials relating to the post-Godhra violence have exposed the Hindutva brigade to unflattering judicial scrutiny, and it would be an act of national catharsis if the judiciary at the highest level were to undertake a kind of audit of the Sangh Parivar's historical role in the pre- and post-Partition events.

Building on this spuriously manufactured judicial sanction for its Hindutva beliefs, the BJP began garnering political respectability for the RSS and its agenda. It helped the party win over a section of the middle classes; once in power at the Centre, the party milked the Kargil nationalism to enhance the Hindutva agenda. It was even tempted to redefine the basic constitutional scheme of things; the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution was a sleight-of-hand attempt to create quasi-judicial sanction for a majoritarian governing arrangement. The BJP establishment proceeded on the assumption that the judiciary was no longer averse to granting it its sectarian wishes; in particular, after 9/11, the Sangh Parivar presumed that it had the global understanding and the American nod to indulge in its anti-minority reflexes.

The deliberate delusion that the Sangh Parivar has the judicial sanction to carry on its business needs to be demolished, and the Sangh Parivar-Arjun Singh spat might just do that. As it is, the ambivalent and the timid in the civil and police bureaucracy have already come to terms with the essence of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. Even the BJP crowd has lost its aggressive voice.

Look at Narendra Modi. On August 15, 2003, he had moved the traditional Independence Day function to Patan, the seat of the Solanki dynasty in 8th-11th Century that lost its glory when Mahmud of Ghazni attacked it in 1024; the Chief Minister pointedly donned the RSS black cap while hoisting the national flag. This year, it was an altogether different scene. The Chief Minister instructed all his Cabinet Ministers to sport the traditional saffa (conventional headgear) and to talk of Sardar Patel and development. Mr. Modi could hardly run the risk of giving a sectarian colour to a secular and democratic rite; nor could he dare invite the displeasure of the Centre.

The RSS threat against Mr. Arjun Singh is the last roll of the dice in the hope of recouping, through a judicial verdict, its lost fortunes. It is about time there was a discussion of the RSS and its role in the affairs of the BJP and, by extension, in the national arena. Its claim to being a nationalist organisation does not absolve the outfit of the obligations of transparency and accountability. A grand trial would add a new chapter to our national education; here is a group of people that claims a right to interfere in how the BJP behaves in and out of power — even foists a Deputy Prime Minister on the country — and yet has escaped a scrutiny of its extra-constitutional role. It is about time.

More than judicially putting the Sangh Parivar in its place, the RSS-Arjun Singh battle should embolden the liberal community to rediscover its voice and its faith in Nehruvian values. It is a different matter that the Congress party itself is guilty of jettisoning many of Nehru's liberal instincts. That does not mean that the RSS' claims and pretensions cannot be challenged. And in any case, the battle for Nehru's idea of India cannot be left to be fought only by the Congress. Mr. Singh has become just an accidental soldier in a battle that was long overdue.

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