New Delhi: Rajasthan’s government has revoked its 52-year-old ban on government employees participating in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)’s activities, PTI reported.
The state BJP government’s move comes after the Union government lifted its ban – dating back to 1966 – on government servants joining the RSS and taking part in its activities through an office memorandum on July 9.
According to PTI, the Rajasthan government reviewed instructions from 1972 and 1981 and removed the RSS’s name from among those organisations whose activities state government employees cannot participate it.
After the office memorandum issued last month by the Union government’s personnel and training department, the official ban on government employees is now confined to membership of and participating in activities organised by the the Jamaat-e-Islami.
The office memorandum was issued as the Madhya Pradesh high court was hearing a plea by a retired government servant challenging the ban.
Later that month, a bench of the high court said the “aspirations of many central government employees of serving the country in many ways” had been “diminished” because of the ban on joining the RSS.
“It took almost five decades for the central government to realise its mistake; to acknowledge that an internationally renowned organisation like RSS was wrongly placed amongst the banned organisations of the country and that its removal therefrom is quintessential,” The Hindu quoted the court as saying.
While the office memorandum was made public on the personnel department’s website, the file pertaining to it has been kept under the wraps.
When The Wire filed an RTI application seeking a copy of the file, the personnel department said the file was “classified in nature [and] hence cannot be disclosed”.
PTI’s report said that state governments in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have already revoked their bans on employees participating in the RSS’s activities.
The Hindu nationalist RSS is considered the BJP’s ideological fountainhead.
