Why Rahul Gandhi confounds the RSS

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh loves to play the “politics of paradox". Which means they stand at each end of the pole but sit on neither end, confusing not just their critics but also their own cadres who have no idea what their leadership actually intends. But Rahul Gandhi confounds them no end.

He is not the Congress president, yet he is the only Congressman leading from the front. He is dismissed as a reluctant politician, yet he is the only opposition leader in recent years going hammer and tongs at the government and the only one targeted daily by the BJP and its spokesmen.

He has been labelled by the BJP as inconsequential, yet he is the only leader who has consistently come up with statesmanlike solutions not just to combat the Coronavirus crisis but even before that, for example, when he advocated the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY)which could have checked the migrant labour crisis during the lockdown.

What’s more, he is refined, painfully well behaved and yet he can come up with barbs like 'Suit-Boot ki Sarkar' or 'Chowkidar Chor Hai'which stick and are often picked up by not just his supporters but also other leaders of consequence around the country.

So even as the BJP in 2014 set out to destroy the Congress and thought it would be an easy task to reduce Rahul Gandhi to tatters, today the RSS distances itself from BJP's agenda of ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’.

“Rahulji will be better off as a billionaire business tycoon,” says Dilip Deodhar, an RSS ideologue, who is an enormous fount of knowledge in not just RSS philisophies and tactics but also the intertwining histories of the Congress and the RSS.

RSS founder KD Hegdewar, Deodhar recalls, was after all a Congress Seva Dal worker, part of the Tilak faction in the Indian National Congress, and moved away from the party after the advent of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1920s which set the party on course to an all-inclusive secularism far removed from Lokmanya Tilak's upper crust Brahminism before then.

Gandhiji's advent is often seen as the breaking point for many elitist Congressmen who until then were mostly either upper crust or upper caste trying hard to keep out both Muslims and non-upper castes from the freedom movement.

While Tilak's passing away around the same time deprived these elitists of their anchor and led to the formation of the RSS (whose cadres were modelled on the Congress Seva Dal),  its ideologues cling to the fact that Pandit Motilal Nehru was great friends with Tilak, both issuing statements  in each other’s names with complete confidence that neither would deny the other,and were completely in tune with each other.

Gandhiji's arrival and his adoption of Motilal Nehru's son, Jawaharlal, as his political heir, altered the course of both India and the RSS. For while Nehru had the appellation of Pandit" there was scarcely anything that was discriminatory in Nehru about other Indians. At times, he even took on his own father in his views and mostly won those battles.

Deodhar repeats more than once, "Mind you, (Jawaharlal) Nehru was a “Pandit" and stayed a Pandit to the end.”

But beyond that Kashmiri Brahmin identity and appellation, there is little the RSS can claim vis-a-vis Nehru who remained fiercely anti-fascist to the end, even turning down  an attempt by Benito Mussolini, at that time a very powerful European leader and  nothing short of a Roman emperor, to meet and cohort with him.

“Rahul is absolutely fearless and simply has no lust for power," says AICC general secretary Avinash Pande (in charge of Rajasthan) considered a Rahul Gandhi acolyte. Pande hails from Nagpur and knows the RSS well. “And that is what makes it so difficult for the RSS to understand what makes him tick – none of their usual tricks work so far as Rahul Gahdhi is concerned.”

Deodhar admits that the BJP IT cell set out to besmirch Rahul Gandhi's reputation and succeeded to a certain extent but did not quite destroy him as they would have wished. So, he says, "If Rahulji wants to go down in history, he must follow in Mahatma Gandhi's footsteps and dissolve the Congress. It has outlived its utility.”But therein is an admission that neither the BJP nor Modi have been able to do it.

Deodhar claims rather sweepingly, “Look at the BJP's Assam unit. The government consists many senior former Congressmen. Modi and (Amit) Shah have this game plan to chew up and digest the Congress everywhere and set up their own house."

Some, if not all, Congressmen also feel that in 2014, Rahul Gandhi was thrown in at the deep end, without even being the party president, by leaders who let him carry their baggage. Says Sachin Sawant, Mumbai party spokesperson, “The outcome in 2014 was inevitable following the Modi and the media blitzkrieg against the UPA. But Rahul Gandhi was made the fall guy.”

Many Congressmen, speaking off the record are also of the view that he should not have quit the party presidency in 2019 taking responsibility for the electoral defeat, something that unsettled the BJP and the RSS.

Congressmen acknowledge and admire the fact that Rahul Gandhi is not only leading the Congress but is also the only opposition leader of consequence who has the courage to speak truth to power, consequences be damned.

Perhaps that is what even the BJP fears and why the RSS periodically blunts its edges and holds out an olive branch.