New Delhi: BJP’s prime ministerial candidate L K Advani may have agreed to remain as care-taker Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, but the party’s diffidence in announcing its leader in Rajya Sabha and deputy leader in Lok Sabha shows that the Hindutva party’s organisation and political agenda would be henceforth shaped by big brother RSS.
The BJP leaders, some of had been itching for limited “autonomy” against rigid control, seemed to have acknowledged this when L K Advani and BJP chief Rajnath Singh called on RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat a day before the party’s crucial Parliamentary Board meeting on Monday.
BJP to decide on opposition leader: RSS
Though there was near unanimity on the names of Sushma Swaraj as deputy in Lok Sabha and Venkaiah Neidu as the leader in Rajya Sabha, an announcement has been delayed in the absence of a green signal from RSS, BJP sources said.
“A decision on these issues is bound to have some bearing on the choice of the next BJP president after Rajnath Singh’s term is over in December this year. The RSS wants time to make up its mind,” said a BJP leader.
For the record, BJP chief Rajnath Singh and the RSS spokesman maintain that the RSS doesn’t interfere with working of the BJP. “We have been told to do what we think fit,” Singh said after calling on RSS headquarters.
But the truth is that the RSS has been sharply critical of the BJP leadership after its Lok Sabha poll debacle.
An article in RSS mouthpiece Organiser not only attacked its technology-oriented campaign but also accused it of betraying its Hindutva agenda.
“The BJP has to reassure and cultivate its constituency without being defensive or apologetic about its identity as a party with a difference,” it said.
The massage was again hammered home by RSS ideologue M G Vaidya in an article in the Marathi daily
Tarun Bharat the day the Parliamentary Board met.
Vaidya criticised the BJP, and Advani in particular, for dissociating from the main party agenda - the issues of Ram temple, common civil code and Article 370 - which he said resulted in loss of credibility and the dismal show in the elections.
He sought the intervention of the RSS in bringing about a “complete” change in the BJP, calling it a “duty if the BJP is not able to take care of its organisational problems”.
Independent political observers say the RSS attempts for a greater control over the organisation and the struggle for “working autonomy” by the BJP’s Gen Next is bound to lead to an imbalance in the organisation.
“The fact is the RSS had established control over it at the time of the formation the Jan Sangh itself,” says political historian U N Sharma.
Despite protestations of “non-interference” in the political outfit’s working, the RSS had openly started meddling with the BJP’s previous incarnation, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, almost immediately after the death of its first president, Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in 1954, by destabilising his successor Mauli Chandra Sharma,” .
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“A vigorous campaign was launched to turn the Jana Sangh into a convenient handle of the RSS. Orders were issued from their headquarters through their emissaries and the Jana Sangh was expected to carry them out,” a flustered Sharma said in a press conference after the RSS eased him out and installed Deen Dayal Upadhyay at the helm of party affairs.
Few BJP leaders have had the courage to challenge the RSS hegemony while remaining in the organisation and even L K Advani had to eat a humble pie when RSS took umbrage at his Jinnah remarks.
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