On Tuesday, five Union ministers met representatives of Sangh-affiliated organisations. This marks the beginning of a new phase of “coordination”, it is being said, between a BJP-led government and the RSS. Of course, BJP-RSS intimacies are well known though they are not entirely open. This is a government, moreover, in which those liaisons appear even more consecrated. The BJP’s campaign for the 2014 polls was helped visibly and vigorously by RSS cadres and there is a conspicuous RSS presence in government, beginning from the prime minister who was a pracharak, to the two men who proudly flaunt their RSS apprenticeship elevated most recently as chief ministers. Even so, Tuesday’s interface has raised some questions — and concerns.
A government has the right to widen its circle of consultations and drawing in the RSS at the policymaking stage might even help to avert displays of opposition and petulance of the kind the Vajpayee government had to face from within the Parivar. Yet, at the same time, because of their tangled histories, it is necessary for a BJP government to do two things before it meets the RSS: one, clarify the lines that separate the elected and accountable government from the “social and cultural organisation”, and two, shine more light on the terms of their “coordination”. Without more transparency, an RSS-BJP meeting on matters of economic policy now — the ministers at Tuesday’s interaction represented the economic ministries — or on the RSS’s fetish, HRD affairs, next, would raise the spectre of extra-constitutional pressure and influence on policy of a kind we’ve seen before. The National Advisory Council was set up by the Congress-led UPA as an institution outside government that directed and dictated policy but took on no responsibility or accountability. Is the Modi-led NDA government now in the process of setting up the RSS as its very own NAC?
The Modi government commands a large majority and its surge continues as it wins in states like Haryana and Maharashtra where it has never had its own chief minister. Is a government as strong and secure in its numbers as this one telling us that it will keep a nervous eye on a centre of authority outside itself, just like the Manmohan Singh government? Is a government elected on the mandate for change signalling the creation of the very same condition and mechanism that it robustly criticised the UPA for? If RSS inputs are regularised, this government must know that the outcomes will be parsed for the stamp they bear. The Modi government must decide whether it wants to lay itself open to the same suspicions of ceding of political or policy initiative that nibbled away at the legitimacy of its predecessor.
