Guess who's talking: Let's play 'spot the difference' between the RSS and the Left

Politics makes for strange bedfellows. But who would have thought that in the early days of the Modi sarkar that the RSS saffron warrior and the Lal Salaam comrade would start looking and sounding like brothers under the skin? While the Left has sounded the alarm about Modi’s policies from the get-go, some of the earliest head-butting in the NDA has come from what India Today calls the “Swadeshi warriors” of the “saffron fringe.” When Right becomes Left then politics gets downright confusing. These days if someone says, “It is my humble duty to protect my economy, my farmers, my small-scale sector” it’s hard to figure out who is talking. That for the record was Aswhini Mahajan of SJM. And if you didn’t know SJM stood for the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Mahajan is an RSS swayamsevak you could easily have thought  that was an old school leftie talking. Firstpost presents GuessWho’sTalking – the RSS and the Leftists in their own words on the hot-button issues of the day.                     Of course, it’s not all Lal-Saffron bhai bhai. There are many issues on which the two sides remain irreconcilably apart. The Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti has no friends on the Left as it tries to “rescue” Indian education from decades of Left control. India Today says the National Democratic Teachers’ Front wants to restructure all the councils and higher academic bodies that the Leftists had taken over. There’s no chance of any odd couple forming when it comes to minorities, Article 370 in Kashmir, the secular-communal debate or gays. Except there are even some cracks there. RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav now says that while they cannot endorse “glorification” of homosexuality, it’s “questionable” whether to call it “a crime” in this day and age. The CPI(M) nursing its wounds from its electoral drubbing has set up four panels to chart its revival. But it had better be careful that its road to revival does not get hijacked by the RSS of all people. “RSS is running the government,” warned CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat. But given what the RSS is opposing these days, should he be too unhappy about it?