Saffron rising: Will PM Modi be able to escape the RSS Chakravyuh?

The chief of RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, made a very significant observation last fortnight while addressing a gathering of Sadhus in the holy town of Haridwar. In a reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bhagwat told the gathering that “our Abhimanyu has entered the Chakravyuh … And he will surely emerge out of it successfully”. Bhagwat described the Indian political/ bureaucratic system as constituting the Chakravyuh which Modi was battling. In the Indian epic Mahabharata, Chakravyuh is a complex battle formation that the Kauravas lay down to trap the young Pandava warrior Abhimanyu. The Pandavas enable Abhimanyu to enter the Chakravyuh but no one has the knowledge as to how he would emerge alive and victorious from the complicated battle formation. Of course, Abhimanyu gets killed after offering a ferocious fight. The RSS chief is sincerely wishing that Narendra Modi emerges from this complex battle formation unscathed. In a sense, Mohan Bhagwat may want to liken himself to Yudhishter, the eldest of the Pandavas, who actively helped Abhimanyu enter the Chakravyuh. Bhagwat did singularly help Modi to become Prime Minister. [caption id=“attachment_1848073” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Narendra Modi. AFP.[/caption] But today it appears that Bhagwat and the wider Sangh Parivar members themselves are part of the Chakravyuh aimed at trapping Narendra Modi. How else do you explain one controversy after another being created by the Sangh Parivar elements at a time when Parliament is in session and the NDA government is trying to bring various important legislations relating to the economic reforms agenda. Parliament has been disrupted by highly communal and divisive issues like forced, large scale conversion of a Muslims to Hinduism. The Prime Minister is not publicly condemning such acts because the culprits belong to the Sangh Parivar. Another BJP MP, Sakshi Maharaj, describes Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, as a patriot. Godse is being lionised and celebrated by Hindutva zealots in Maharashtra. Former MP and Bajrang Dal leader from UP, Vinay Katiyar ,says Omar Abdullah was a Hindu three generations ago, in the context of Sangh Parivar’s ongoing conversion campaign. On the same day Ram Naik, Governor of UP and an old Parivar hand, says Ram Mandir must be built as soon as possible. Mind you, all this goes on when Parliament us in session and Narendra Modi is personally engaged in a summit meeting with Russian President Vladmir Putin! What sort of imagery of “modern India” will Putin carry back to Russia? So can Mohan Bhagwat now explain whether the Sangh Parivar itself is contributing to the “Chakravyuh” designed to trap their “Abhimanyu” ? The conversion controversy comes close on the heels of Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti’s remarks on the illegitimacy of all Indian citizens who are not “sons of Ram”. Parliament got paralysed for some days as the opposition asked for the Sadhvi’s resignation from the government. Prime Minister Modi merely sought forgiveness for the Sadhvi because of her “background”. If Mohan Bhagwat and the Sangh Pativar are now publicly embarrassing the Prime Minister, it is something most political analysts had anticipated when NDA came to power. It was only a matter of time that sections of the Parivar would start making demands on the government. After fighting Lok Sabha elections on a development platform but with covert and coded communal messaging, it was only a matter of time before Narendra Modi would be trapped by the Sangh Parivar which helped him win a thumping majority. It appears the Sangh is not in a mood to let Modi leave a legacy which is predominantly that of a development oriented Prime Minister. This is not surprising because Narendra Modi himself had been very much part of the grand strategy of the Sangh Parivar to build a new social chemistry of fusing Hindutva with backward caste politics. Modi as a backward caste leader combined with the image of “Hindu Hriday Samrat” was clearly central to Mohan Bhagwat’s thinking when he pushed for Modi’s elevation as the Prime Miniterial candidate in September 2013. The RSS seems to have been working on this elaborate plan for a while. This became quite evident when the BJP MPs last week staged a dharna to protest the opposition’s concerted attack on a “woman of lower caste”.The caste card came out because the BJP was clearly on the backfoot. Modi sought forgiveness on behalf of Niranjan Jyoti citing her “background”. Here again Modi seemed to have left a coded message. Was Modi referring to her background as a Dalit or as a Hindu preacher? If one looks at the subtext of such statements, it becomes somewhat clear that the Sangh is working on radicalisation of the Dalits and Backwards toward Hindutva. Many of the aggressive Sangh Parivar outfits such as Bajrang Dal have promoted backward caste leaders in the past. For instance Vinay Katiyar was built as a Bajrang Dal leader in the 1990s to spearhead young zealots in the Ram Temple campaign. Later he became a Member of a Parliament from Faizabad. There are other Sangh/BJP sympathisers like Baba Ram Dev, who is also a backward(Yadav). RSS has promoted a several backward leaders with Saffron passions in the past few years. The only political outfits who have understood this deep RSS strategy are the current backward caste leaders like Nitish Kumar, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Yadav, Sharad Yadav and so on. So they are coming together in a joint front to counter the RSS. This will be the new churn in the Hindi heartland politics. Bihar elections next year will be a key test for BJP’s long term strategy of injecting Hindutva identity among backward castes. However, the Sangh Parivar’s grand social experiment of fusing backward politics with Hindutva, in ways which could turn violent, runs the risk of discrediting the NDA’s overt developmental agenda. The vast majority of the young voters are impatient to improve their lives and have very high expectations of Modi. Equally, the RSS also has very high expectations of Modi in terms of delivering on its underlying programme. This indeed is the complex “Chakravyuh” from which Modi will have to emerge unscathed!