RSS Letter to PM : Desperate Bid to Save Face?
Manisha Sethi
As the spool of the Hindutva terror networks begins to unravel, and the question whether terror can be prefixed by ‘saffron’ or ‘Hindutva’ begins to be asked on television channels, RSS Chief Sarkaryavah Suresh (Bhayya) Joshi, has felt the necessity of writing a rather long letter to the Prime Minister.
There is a visible surge in the Sangh’s epistolary tendencies each time it faces public embarrassment and anger, or the possibility of a ban. Within hours of the assassination of Gandhi, M.S. Golwalkar, the chief of the RSS at the time, shot off telegrams to Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel expressing shock and sadness at the killing. This wasn’t enough however to save Golwalkar from being arrested on 1st February 1948; three days later the RSS was banned by the Government of India. Faced by a ban yet again and incarceration of its Chief, Balasaheb Deoras wrote several obsequious missives between 1975 and ’76 to Indira Gandhi promising loyalty and obedience in exchange for lifting of the ban and release from prison. In these letters (see A.G. Noorani’s The RSS and the BJP, Leftword, 2000) Deoras fawned over Indira’s Independence Day speech, congratulated her for her wholly dubious victory in the Supreme Court, sang paeans about her ‘excellent’ foreign policy decisions and dissociated the RSS from the movement against the Emergency. In the later letters, an increasingly desperate Deoras offered the services of the lakhs of Sangh volunteers and rues that someone is misinforming her about the glorious work rendered by the RSS. The swayamsevaks were instructed to furnish an undertaking for their release from jail, promising “that in case of my release I shall not do anything, which is detrimental to internal security and public peace... I shall not do anything prejudicial to the present emergency.”
This time around, Bhaiyya ji has written, “The RSS, a social organisation, does not intensely interact with the political establishment…So there are not many occasions for the RSS to write to or meet with the hon'ble Prime Minister. Therefore I am not very happy that in my first ever letter I have been constrained to bring to your attention facts which are not entirely pleasant.” And what might be these unpleasant facts? That RSS and its leadership is being implicated in a series of blasts that have occurred in the last several years (blasts which had conveniently been attributed to ‘jihadist’ organizations such as the SIMI, IM, HuJI etc). RSS pracharaks Devendra Gupta and Modi’s protégé Swami Aseemanand have not only been arrested; the latter is also singing and it’s a song that Bhayya ji finds utterly cacophonous. The RSS spin on it is that Indresh Kumar – the most prominent RSS leader whose name has emerged in the investigations (but who is at present only named, not charged by the Rajasthan ATS for his involvement in the Ajmer Sharif dargah blasts) – was a victim of the plot by the terror-accused Purohit and Dayanand Pandey to murder RSS leaders.
Bhayya ji is greatly exercised by the Maharashtra ATS’ decision to “abort probe into the conspiracy to murder,” which “only helped the detractors of the RSS to carry on insidious campaign against the RSS.” While Bhaiyya rails against this purported injustice, he forgets how the BJP-led Madhya Pradesh government virtually killed the probe into RSS leader Sunil Joshi’s murder, a murder in which Indresh Kumar himself was implicated. Joshi, whose writ ran large in the Malwa area of MP till he was shot dead in late December 2007 is the key accused in the Ajmer Sharif dargah blasts. Swami Aseemanand’s confession before a magistrate records that in June 2006, he along with other members of the Sangh Parivar like Riteshwar, Sadhvi Pragya and Sunil Joshi met at Riteshwar's house in Valsad to plan the bombings. Bharat Bhai Rateshwar, a co-accused in the Ajmer blast case has in his signed statement to the court disclosed that Sunil Joshi’s murder was “the handiwork of Indresh Kumar, who didn’t like Joshi.” (http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/ajmer-blast-key-accused-names-rss-leader-indresh-kumar-85124?pfrom=home-India) The BJP Government in MP clearly scuttled the probe into Joshi’s murder to avoid the inevitable exposure of RSS links to terror. Bhayyaji, in his desperation to shed the RSS’ terror taint, is also conveniently silent on Sadhvi Pragya, the Sangh’s latest poster girl in the Rithambara-mould who campaigned for the BJP in assembly elections in MP and Gujarat.
The Sangh’s letter to the PM is an acknowledgement of the BJP’s failure to politically manage the saffron terror crisis, and of the fear that any deeper probe will reveal even more murky terror skeletons in the Sangh closet.
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