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RSS wants to decide BJP's candidates

George Iype in New Delhi

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has put forward a demand to the Bharatiya Janata Party --a demand that the BJP finds not entirely to its liking.

The RSS wants the BJP to clear all its candidates for the general election with its seven-member policy-making body, which includes RSS chief Professor Rajendra Singh and senior leaders Dattopant Thengdi and H V Seshadri.

The reason for this demand: the RSS has found that some 70 BJP members of the dissolved 12th Lok Sabha have been "disloyal and uncommitted" to the Sangh ideology in the last year. A high-level meeting of RSS officials also recommended that some of these MPs should not be given tickets to contest the poll.

"After getting elected to Parliament, many of them behaved as if they never heard of the RSS. We want to ensure that the BJP gives tickets to only pro-Hindutva candidates," a senior RSS official told Rediff On The NeT.

He said 144 key BJP officials across the country are full-time RSS workers, who strive during every election to bring victory to the party. "So if the BJP does not lead their MPs better, we will certainly ask our senior pracharaks like K Govindacharya, K L Sharma and J P Mathur not to campaign for it anymore, " the official said.

An internal pre-poll assessment by the RSS has revealed that if the BJP goes to the election with active support from the Sangh Parivar it would gain around 220 seats, the RSS official said.

Thus, he continued, the Sangh leadership has officially informed Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, BJP president Shahsikant 'Kushabhau' Thakre and Home Minister and BJP campaign leader L K Advani that only "genuine candidates screened and selected by the Sangh" should be allowed to fight the poll.

Vajpayee, Thakre and Advani are said to have agreed to the RSS proposal; the trio feel the arrangement would be "mutually beneficial."

After the Vajpayee government fell, the BJP leadership brokered a truce with the RSS. Accordingly, the Sangh leadership agreed to support the BJP and its allies.

Despite opposition from organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the RSS has allowed the BJP to shelve controversial issues like building a Ram temple at Ayodhya, the creation of a Uniform Civil Code and the scrapping of Article 370 for the time being.

During the Vajpayee government's 13 months in power, raging differences on a host of issues broke out between Sangh hardliners in the BJP and the liberals led by Vajpayee. While the hardliners, headed by Thakre, often blamed the government's poor economic policies and its failure to arrest the price rise, Vajpayee's men accused the Sangh Parivar of trying to tie the prime minister's hands.

But after Vajpayee lost office, the tensions between the RSS and the government reduced. Both camps recognised that if they did not find a meeting place for ideology and practice, the BJP would fare badly this election.

If the BJP-RSS agreement on crucial issues firms up, the RSS will come out actively to campaign for Vajpayee's party. RSS leaders say the first time such a campaign took place was 22 years ago, during the 1977 Lok Sabha election.

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