The Rediff Special

'The major cause of the degradation in the quality of swayamsevaks is the lives of the leaders which are unable to inspire the new generation'

There are no obvious signs of apocalypse just now. But the organisational iron-frame of the RSS is showing up rusty patches. There is erosion at the level of the pracharaks, the corps of volunteers who forms the crucial link between the rank-and-file and the top leadership.

"More and more of them are going about in cars, for instance, even though the RSS does not work on cars and where everything is built at no-cost basis," says a functionary. This could be an exaggeration except that several pracharaks confirm this, and finger-pointing is more open now than at any time before.

"Being a pracharak is like being any other professional," says an RSS person. "It is slightly harder but no more. It enjoys a good social status too, and the spin-offs of the BJP being a pretender to national power are also there." Since a full-time pracharak should be celibate, many in the RSS clock in six to 12 years on the job now, and assured of there being no serious impact on their prospects within the RSS, leave to make a family.

"This is," insists Raj Kumar Bhatia, an economics lecturer at the DAV College in south Delhi's Srinivas Puri, once a pracharak, much before that a charismatic Delhi University Students' Union leader, and tipped in his generation for one of the top jobs in the RSS, "a basic human urge."

It is. The RSS accepts it too. There is considerable stress in recent RSS writings on the family as a means to roll back the 'benign' western 'cultural invasion'. But the relaxation of the old rigours has come at a time when the quality of intake into the shakhas that contribute to the legion of swayamsevaks has sharply deteriorated.

"All those who become swayamsevaks come from society," explains Yadav Rao, an old RSS hand and editor of Manthan, a magazine of the Deendayal Research Institute. "And the prevailing atmosphere in the country is bound to affect the whole social structure. The picture in the university campuses is different from that in our times. The set of students joining the Congress also come to the RSS and the BJP. It is up to us to mould them."

"But it is my contention," he goes on, "that there is definitely a degradation in the quality of the swayamsevaks. The major cause of this is the lives of the leaders which are unable to inspire the new generation. It is becoming a hazardous task to mould them. And I say that there is a deterioration in the quality of the other sangathans as well."

What manner of deterioration has taken place? Is it the Congressisation of the BJP indicated by the rise of corruption, casteism and factionalism (as in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan)? Or is it the 'deficiency' of the Samskar Bharati, the RSS's cultural front organisation, in countering western 'satellite cultural influences' in any meaningful manner? Could it be the absence of a consensus between the BJP and the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch on the issue of swadeshi? Or would it mean the deep differences been the VHP and the BJP on starting Ayodhya-like movements in both Kanshi and Mathura?

Are individual sangathans blameworthy at all? Or is the RSS, the progenitor of them all and their supposed ideological motorforce, at fault? Is Rajinder Singh, as sarsanghchalak, to blame? Or is the collective leadership of the RSS, comprising, besides Singh, Seshadri, Sudershan, Madan Dass Devi (joint general secretary; tipped to succeed Singh), the pranth pracharaks, heads of some front organisations, and so on, to be held responsible?

Or is it that sangathans have grown so far apart, with their separate objectives, constitutions, functionaries and work cultures, that to expect them to fall into any line drawn by the RSS would be taken askance? Is there, to carry this further, anything like a concept of a sangh parivar anymore then?

Would these questions have arisen, at all, if the RSS leadership style of the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies were in force today? Would Golwalkar, credited with giving the RSS its solid foundations uninterruptedly in these decades, have stood a Congressised BJP? Could the BJP be expected to be different if Deendayal Upadhyaya (charged by Golwalkar to run the BJP's precursor, the Jan Sangh, after the death of its founder, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee) had not been assassinated 30 years ago?

And, would Dattopant Thengdi, the BMS and Kisan Sangh and Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad supremo, have acted, so far, any differently from Rajinder Singh if he were the RSS sarsangchalak instead of Singh? Would he, for instance, as the formulator of swadeshi -- which the RSS has taken up, convictions apart, because of the force of Thengdi's character -- have allowed the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government in Maharashtra to okay the Enron deal?

Courtesy: Sunday magazine

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