Jaipur: Just days after Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat’s apparent potshots at the Bharatiya Janata Party, another senior RSS leader has taken a barely-veiled jibe at the saffron party after it failed to get a majority of its own in the recently-concluded Lok Sabha elections.
Without naming the BJP, senior RSS leader Indresh Kumar said at an event in Jaipur on Thursday (June 13) that the political party that was ‘Ram bhakt‘ became arrogant and was restricted to 241 seats.
In the recently-concluded Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had won 240 seats, losing more than 60 seats as compared to 2019, when the saffron party had 303 MPs in the parliament.
“You can see Ram’s justice even in 2024, in the festival of democracy. Those who worshipped Ram but slowly became arrogant, that party was declared the largest party, and the votes, the power it should have got, god stopped it because of their arrogance,” said Kumar at the Ramrath Ayodhya Yatra Darshan Poojan Samaroh in Kanota near Jaipur.
“Those who opposed Ram, none of them could get the power and even by coming together, all of them stood at number two instead of number one. That is why, god’s justice is not strange, but the truth,” Kumar added.
Kumar’s comments come just days after RSS Sarsanghchalak Bhagwat had said that a ‘true sevak’ does not have arrogance. Much like Bhagwat, Kumar too emphasised on the word ‘ahankar’ (arrogance) in his speech and after his apparent reference to the BJP, without naming the INDIA alliance, said that those who didn’t have faith in Ram were stopped at 236.
“The party that did bhakti but became arrogant, that party was restricted at 241 (sic) but was made the single largest party. Those who disrespected Ram, all of them together were restricted at 236, saying that this is the dand (punishment) for your unfaith that you cannot succeed,” said Kumar at the event on Thursday.
In recent times, fissures have surfaced in the relationship between the BJP and its parent body RSS, after in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections BJP president J.P. Nadda, in an interview with The Indian Express, had said that while earlier the BJP needed the RSS, now the party runs itself and the RSS is a cultural front. The comments reportedly didn’t go down well with the top leadership of the Sangh, which is being vocal after the election results ever since the BJP failed to secure a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha.
