Harish Khare 
If Narendra Modi and Amit Shah had not depleted their political capital so extravagantly these last ten years, they could perhaps protest Mohan Bhagwat’s speech at the annual Vijayadashami rally in Nagpur because the RSS boss’s oration can easily be read as an indictment of how the Prime Minister and his Home Minister have administered this country.
Deploying a trainload of platitudes and cliches the RSS Chief bemoans a society suffering from all kinds of fault-lines.
One has to wonder what the Union Home Ministry and other custodians of national security would make of Bhagwat’s alarming understanding of our internal landscape: “Today, Punjab, Jammu-Kashmir, Ladakh on the north-western border of the country; Keral and Tamil Nadu on the sea border; and the entire Purvanchal from Bihar to Manipur are disturbed.”
A damning verdict. Even after five years of the ministrations of the strongest and the shrewdest Home Minister the country has had since Independence, the great sarsanghchalak finds reason to express his unhappiness at the state of the nation.
Except an indirect reference – “Everyone feels that Bharat as a nation has become stronger and more respected in the world with an enhanced credibility in the past few years” – there is no mention nor any word of praise for the Modi-Shah regime.
If truth was to be told, this year’s speech could have been made by any other sarsanghchalak at any other time: The same Rotary Club kind of exhortations of togetherness and brotherhood, the same belabored incantation of the “auspiciousness and righteousness,” the same cataloguing of character-building formulas dished out by the style-gurus in airport paperbacks. At display is an imagination that has run dry.
If at all, Mohan Bhagat seems to want to give the impression of trying hard to keep himself and his organisation at an arm’s length from the BJP of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Despite the well-known and well-acknowledged links between the RSS and the BJP, Mohan Bhagwat appears to be bending over backward, addressing himself to all political formations, without playing any favorites.
May be as the RSS inches towards its 100th year, Bhagwat and his co-sanghchalaks realise that the organisation has failed to capture national imagination and admiration precisely because it has tried to ride two boats at the same time: a parental mentor to the Jan Sangh/ BJP as well as a self-proclaimed only custodian of Hindu civilisational values and virtues.
And, this duality remains a very consequential handicap. If Bhagwat was sincere in his disapproval of the party politics that seeks to “turn diversity into differences, create distrust towards the system among the groups who are victims of some issues and covert discontent into anarchy,” he should have had something to say about the BJP’s electoral and political practices.
These last ten years, BJP has mastered the art, first, of creating differences and then consolidating differences among castes; no other political party has manipulating sub-categories in the Hindu society for electoral purposes as has the BJP: Jatavs vs non-Jatavs among the Dalits in UP; the Jats versus others in Haryana, the Yadavs versus OBC s in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; not to talk of the most glaring and most dangerous identity politics that the BJP has encouraged in Manipur.
Bhagwat’s failure to disapprove of the BJP’s blatant and unapologetic caste calculations robs him of the respect and esteem he seeks.
Nor is Bhagwat able to find words or formulations, direct or indirect, to deplore the BJP’s use of astronomical of money power and its disastrous consequence – an amoral, transactional polity – and, this self-imposed limitation diminishes him. And, then, thus, it is no wonder, that Bhagwat is conspicuously silent on the creeping stranglehold one business tycoon has acquired on the Modi government and in the national economy.
Those who exhort indispensability of individual and national character, self-esteem, and moral fiber, simply recourse, when the push come to a shove, to a silence of pusillanimity. Nagpur is no longer beyond the shadow of crony capitalism.
On the other hand, like a Sancho Panza, we find Bhagwat again tilting at windmills of ‘Deep State’, “Wokeism,’ ‘Cultural Marxist’ and ‘Alternative Politics.’ He eloquently suspects some kind of external forces and groups out to promote a “destructive agenda” in India, something like what recently happened in Bangladesh.
Indirectly, the RSS boss is accusing Prime Minister Modi’s western friends of instigating ‘Arab Spring’ type tool kit of “evil attempts all around Bharat—especially in the border and tribal areas.” This is a classic case of nauso chuheye kha kar, billi Haz ko challi.
The Nagpur establishment now finds it too inconvenient to remember its own role in providing foot-soldiers for the so-call Anna Hazare movement that was aimed at paralyzing a duly-elected government. Ten years too late the RSS supremo argues that “a powerful discourse is the need of the hour to keep the society safe from these conspiracies spreading intellectual and cultural pollution.”
Unsurprisingly Mohan Bhagwat goes gaga in praise of masculinity and organised strength because the weak gets pushed around.
“Even Gods punish the weak – neither horse nor elephant and never the tiger, but a goat is sacrificed.” No one can quarrel with his invocation of internal unity, nor argue with formulation that “it is everyone’s wish and duty to make this country united, happy, peaceful, prosperous and strong.” Bhagat also appears to be even-handed in handing out rebukes for “extremism and illegal practices”, noting that “it is not that all these things are done by a single community.”
Mohan Bhagwat is the head of an organisation that is dedicated to uniting and consolidating the Hindu community, yet he craves – as did all his predecessors since 1925 – to be accepted as a natural guardian of our civilisational virtues and values. That honour eludes him and will continue to be denied to him unless he and his organisation would let go of the allure of power politics.
After all, J.P. Nadda has already declared openly that the BJP no longer needs the RSS. And, perhaps it has escaped Mohan Bhagwat’s attention that the Nadda declaration remains un-retracted. It seems the RSS’ quest for national acceptance will continue in its second century.
Harish Khare was editor of The Tribune.