LUCKNOW, July 28: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Rajendra Singh alias Rajju Bhaiya's `shakha' (meeting) with senior IAS and IPS officials during his two-day sojourn in the state capital caused ripples in political circles.The Uttar Pradesh IAS Association is likely to discuss the issue in its executive committee meeting scheduled for the first week of next month while Congress and Samajwadi Party leaders have also expressed concern over what they termed a bid to ``saffronise the bureaucracy''.The RSS chief had delivered the controversial baudhik (intellectual discourse) to senior bureaucrats on Saturday night and advised them to work with impartiality despite pressure exerted on them by political bosses.On the surface, the meeting seems an innocuous exercise but a section of senior IAS officials who were not invited think otherwise. ``It was clearly an exercise to saffronise the bureaucracy which is already divided on caste and political lines in Uttar Pradesh. Rajju Bhaiya has nolocus standi to call a meeting of bureaucrats,'' said a senior IAS official on condition of anonymity.The meeting was ostensibly ``a get-together of the alumni of Allahabad University'' where the RSS chief was head of the department of Physics. The organisers who include Higher Education Minister N K S Gaur, himself a teacher in the same University, and senior IAS official Akhad Pratap Singh said the meeting was a ``normal get-together of the pass-outs of the University''.It is another matter that even office-bearers of the Allahabad University Alumni Association had no information of the meeting.Another senior IAS official said to be among the blue-eyed boys of former chief minister Mayawati said it was an unusual development. ``You go through the list of invitees and it will clearly indicate that all of those invited were not pass-outs of Allahabad University,'' he told The Indian Express on condition of anonymity. Officers with a tilt towards the Sangh Parivar were specially invited to themeeting, he said.Political leaders allege that the BJP is trying to wedge the IAS and IPS fraternity on caste and political lines for larger gains in future. ``You see the list of invitees in which many are from upper caste. There are a number of other alumni of the University in the Uttar Pradesh cadre belonging to lower castes but they were not invited,'' Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Pramod Tiwari told The Indian Express.State Samajwadi Party chief Ram Sharan Das echoed Tiwari's view, saying when it came to politicising the bureaucracy, there was no difference between the BJP and the BSP. ``Both parties attach weightage to the officials as per their vote banks,'' he said.Added a senior official, ``During Mayawati's regime, BSP supremo Kanshi Ram used to hold meetings of officers; in Kalyan's regime, the same role has been taken by Rajju Bhaiya.''
