Who’s Calling the Shots?

Fifty-two-year-old Nitin Gadkari, presently chief of the Maharashtra unit of the BJP, is reportedly all set to replace Rajnath Singh as BJP president. So is it good news that a leader so young by Indian political standards has been roped in to salvage the sinking BJP ship? This, time will tell. But the fundamental question is: Why Gadkari, who people outside Maharashtra have not heard of, and not more promising and visible ones like Arun Jaitley? The answer is simple. The likes of Jaitley have no RSS roots, nor are they in the good book of the Sangh, while Gadkari (whose name, going by a report, has been proposed by none other than the RSS chief himself), with roots in Nagpur (where the RSS headquarters is located), is close to the RSS. In other words, it is not merit that has counted even this time, but the RSS factor. It is still the RSS that is deciding who should be who in the BJP, and which means those who are not associated with the Sangh have no chance at all to move up the party organizational ladder despite them being gifted. While this may not upset the majority in the BJP for it being the political offshoot of the RSS and over which, therefore, the Sangh claims the right to wield influence, what cannot be glossed over is the kind of contribution that the RSS has made towards making the BJP a modern, democratic, progressive right-of-centre force. And what is that contribution? Perhaps nothing. This is not to berate the RSS but to drive home the point that the RSS would rather do well to restrict itself to its own domain — ‘‘social works’’ as it calls — and let the BJP  evolve as an independent modern rightist entity. In the BJP it is the BJP that must call the shots. THE SENTINEL