Not quite a happy Parivar

The even more delicious irony is that Sudarshan and the aged Hindu fanatics who surround him appear not to have realised that the real relic in the story is the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. Vajpayee and Advani may be old but at least belong to an organisation that is still relevant and will continue being relevant in the future if it gets its act together. The RSS and its more rabid progeny — the VHP and the Bajrang Dal — are already in the garbage bin of history, only they do not know it. Sadly, nor do some of our more naive politicians and political analysts who continue to rave and rant about ‘‘communal forces’’, thereby giving them more importance than they have.

Don’t believe me? Pop down to your nearest shakha and count the number of young men in attendance. I am willing to bet that you would see mostly old (and very old) men whose bulging bellies and knobbly knees sticking out of khaki knickers make them look like a bunch of old fools. When I last visited RSS headquarters in Nagpur, a few months ago, I noticed that the youngest men were hitting 50 and when I last visited a shakha, the only sign of youth were a couple of street children who had clearly come for recreational rather than ideological reasons. The talk we continue to hear about ‘‘cummunal phorces’’ is mostly because political leaders, like Laloo and Mulayam, would lose their raison d’etre if they could no longer have ‘‘communal forces’’ as a bogeyman to frighten Muslim voters with.

There was a time when the RSS was a powerful force, that time has gone. Ideologically it remains frozen in a time warp. In the thirties the thoughts of Golwalkar and Hedgewar may have sounded radical and important but in the 21st century they have lost their allure. The RSS ideology leaves room for neither democracy nor change, so adapting to the needs of young Indians of the 21st century is next to impossible. Most young Indians want their lives to improve materially as soon as possible and they want to see India become a prosperous, modern country. An economic superpower. Even here the RSS cannot deliver because it clings to economic ideas that were fashionable in the thirties. Swadeshi must have been a powerful word in the days of the British Raj but it has no meaning today. If we want the world to buy Indian goods we cannot refuse to buy theirs. The old men of the BJP understood this. The old men of the RSS never will.

So, Sudarshan has done the BJP a huge favour by giving the party an exit. Only if it dumps the dead weight of the RSS will it be able to renew itself and become a proper political party. Instead of a return to Hindutva, what the BJP needs is to spend the next few months evolving a strategy for renewal. The first step in this strategy should be to get its best and brightest leaders out of Delhi’s air-conditioned TV studios and into the heat and dust of their constituencies. Let them find out what went wrong in the last general election and whether the ‘‘organisational muscle’’ really came from the RSS. They might discover that RSS cadres, in the five years of BJP rule, were too busy enjoying the spoils of office to make much organisational difference. They might also discover that one of the main reasons for the defeat was that nearly all the party’s senior and middle level leaders were spending so much time enjoying the comforts of Delhi that they lost touch with ordinary people and the issues that affect them. This led to the illusion that all was well when it was not.

If you read Advani’s speech at the national executive you realise that he continues to delude himself about where the party stands. Listen to this. ‘‘Thus, the BJP has succeeded in demolishing the one-party supremacy of the Congress and transforming Indian polity into a bipolar foundation. What is more, the BJP is clearly the stronger of the two poles in terms of ideological distinctiveness, organisational muscle and commitment to the basic values of democracy.’’

If this is all Advani can come up with by way of rallying the troops then perhaps Sudarshan is right and it is time for him to take a more sedentary job and leave the hurly-burly of party building to someone more dynamic. Perhaps he is right anyway because as a devoted foot soldier of the RSS what chance is there of Advani breaking links with what he has often referred to as the mother organisation. Unless these links are broken there is little chance of the BJP rising from the ashes and every chance that like the rest of the Sangh Parivar it will become increasingly irrelevant.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com