Bharat Bhushan: It suits the RSS to allow BJP to encourage defections from other parties
NB: Some weeks ago, the RSS' student front the ABVP got a Kerala professor suspended for calling the RSS a proto-fascist organisation. Actually the progenitors of Hindutva were eager admirers of Nazism and Fascism. Here is the research article on Hindutva's fascist connection from the 1930's. Also relevant is Desraj Goyals seminal book on the RSS
Some information for Israelis (and the rest of us)
A subaltern fascism? - by Kannan Srinivasan
Madhu Limaye's observations on the RSS (1979)
As pointed out in this forthright article, behind the mask (mukhauta) of the NDA, this is an RSS regime - nothing more, nothing less. Headlines such as RSS doesn't give clean chit to Modi are Orwellian deceit. Coupled with the brazen perversion of the justice system, they are intended to establish (via subliminal messaging) the RSS as the legitimate lawgiver of the Indian polity. All the disasters of the past 7 years: notebandi, distress migration, CAA, communal intimidation, violent vigilantism, Central vista vandalism, Covid mass deaths etc, are consequences of Sangh-approved policies.
The 'Sangh Parivar' specialises in what the American 'black ops' people call 'plausible deniability'; in distancing themselves from their own men if they prove a liability. But this is what they are. What has taken place in India since they came to power is their strategic action plan to install an ideocracy, i.e. the tyranny of an ideology. Ironically (given their intense hatred for communism), in style and strategy, the RSS are closer to the Stalinist than to the Hitler regime - the Nazi dictator was focused on an international war of conquest; the CPSU was bent upon consolidating an internal totalitarian regime that required the total destruction of civil society and total control over the human soul. Their front organisations carry out propaganda and agitations to fulfil the task of communal polarisation and the intimidation of their opponents. They treat the 'nation' as their property; and arrogate to themselves the right to certify others as national or 'anti-national'. They regard civil society as a battle-ground for civil warfare; and they conspire in broad daylight. The silence of the mass media is a sign of complicity. DS
Bharat Bhushan: It suits the RSS to allow BJP to encourage defections from other parties
Is Jitin Prasada’s exit from the Congress, eight months
before the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls, realistically a major gain for the BJP
and a terrible loss for the Congress? Defeated in three consecutive elections,
Prasada’s credentials as a popular Brahmin caste leader are weak. Neither is
the BJP short of Brahmin faces in UP. To claim that his entry will correct
public perception of the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath leaning
excessively towards Thakurs and help the party electorally is an absurd spin.
So why is the BJP encouraging defectors from other
parties in Uttar Pradesh?
The party needs to change the optics before the UP polls. After its West Bengal debacle and consequent erosion in the invincible image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP must once again demonstrate that it is a party attractive to power seekers. Defections from other parties help to showcase it as a potential winner and put potential challengers psychologically on the back foot. As the BJP loses political energy, weakening the Opposition makes it appear stronger. However, pre-poll defections do not always work when the prevailing public mood is hostile. If the people are angry with a party, they tend to vote against the incumbent and care less about the opponent’s attributes.
The UP assembly elections, due next February, will take place under extraordinary circumstances. Almost every voter has either lost a family member, a relation or a friend to the pandemic. There is palpable anger against the BJP government. Images of people distraught outside hospitals for lack of beds and oxygen, river-bank burials and attempts by the local administration to snatch away saffron shrouds, or Ramnami Chadars from corpses to hide the dimensions of the tragedy are vividly imprinted in the public mind. If voter anger against Yogi and the BJP persists till the polls, then even a hundred defectors to the BJP will not help.
Criticism that the BJP stands to lose its ideological
purity by promoting defections misunderstand the party. It is not a normal
political party. It is a front organisation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) whose sole agenda is to create a ‘Hindu’ nation. The BJP is only a
political instrument required in a democratic political system for achieving
that goal. There are numerous other RSS fronts
in the fields of education, history-writing, cultural reform among tribal
communities, trade unions, beef militias, etc. which are united in their aim of
homogenising Hinduism and chipping away at the diversity of the Indian Republic
to conform to their majoritarian imagination.
As a political instrument, the BJP can be modified,
altered and adjusted depending on the prevailing circumstances. The RSS will
not come in its way as long as it increases its ambit of influence. It did not
mind when its predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, merged with the Janata Dal
to defeat Indira Gandhi. It got some brand rub-off from the other secular
parties that merged with it to defeat Indira Gandhi. That made it somewhat
kosher in the public mind. Although the public perception of the BJP changed,
the RSS did
not.
The BJP is allowed to shape-shift as needed: sometimes as an instrument of building a Ram Temple; a bastion against ‘minority-appeasement’; an effective military shield against an adversarial Islamic Pakistan; or as a party that believes in “Sabka saath, sabka vikas” (Development for all) and the harbinger of development and “achhe din” (a bright future). As long as the strategic goals of the RSS continue to be pushed forward incrementally using the state machinery, the BJP can refit, recast and reposition itself to effectively pursue that mission. RSS ideologue Govindacharya was needlessly reviled for revealing the essential truth--that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was merely a mukhauta (mask) used by the RSS. So is Narendra Modi or any other BJP leader.
If the RSS were bothered about the ideological purity of
its instruments, it would not have allowed the party to field defectors as
candidates, induct them into the Council of Ministers in states where BJP has
formed governments through defections. In Assam the BJP chief minister is a
defector from the Congress and not from the RSS stable of politicians. Clearly,
it suits the RSS to let the BJP grow beyond its ideological confines.
The RSS, the real political power seeker with a mission,
is therefore, happy to operate with those with no RSS-antecedents like Yogi,
Biswa Sarma or Suvendu Adhikari or encourage alliances with predominantly
Christian not-averse-to-beef tribal parties of the North-east. Defections also
allow the BJP to renew itself. Himanta Biswa Sarma has, for example, helped
extend the reach of the party in the North-eastern states through alliances and
defections.
The fortunes of the main national Opposition Congress
will not be affected substantially by the defections of power-seekers,
including that of Jitin Prasada. That is inevitable when the party has fallen
on bad times and is unable to offer any prospect of power. In any case, the
majority of those in the Congress are in the party not for ideological reasons
but in the hope of power and pelf. Should the Congress come to power in Uttar
Pradesh or even at the national level, “ghar wapsi” or reverse defections from
the BJP are more than likely. Witness the return of the TMC defectors to the
mother organisation in West Bengal.
To challenge the BJP effectively, the secular political parties, especially the Congress, must first understand its puppet masters and their political vision (even while it claims to be only a cultural organisation). Only then an alternative, secular, inclusive and democratic vision can be presented to the people. For this the Congress party and others who want to challenge the BJP will have to strategically rethink their policies and programmes instead of waiting to constitute a Manifesto Committee two months before every election. That alone will provide their grassroots leaders with specific issues of public interest for political mobilisation. Merely promising free money and free food will not be enough as they can be easily outmatched by those already in power.
Modi says Congress committed 'sin' of partition // The Non-politics of the RSS
Harish Khare: After 7 Years of Modi & Shah, the RSS's Fall from Grace is Total and Complete (where was the grace to begin with?)
For over half-century, it has been an axiomatic tenet of Indian politics that the Bharatiya Janata Party enjoys a decisive advantage over its rivals because it has the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh watching its back. That is what L.K. Advani meant when he used to say that the BJP was “a party with a difference”. That statement may have been intended as a moral assertion but it reflected the organisational realities of the BJP. In practical terms, the RSS-BJP relationship can be broken down to at least five working propositions:...Yet the RSS continues to maintain and internalise the myth that it is a “cultural organization”...
https://thewire.in/politics/rss-mohan-bhagwat-bjp-modi-covid-19
Anand
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