Former RSS ideologue K N Govindacharya ended his political hibernation on Tuesday with the announcement that he would float his own outfit on January 14, Makar Sankranti Day, leading Uma Bharti’s party till then.Bharti’s Bharatiya Janshakti will, in fact, work as the political wing of Govindacharya’s Rashtriya Swabhiman Andolan (RSA).Bharti herself compared the equation between her party and Govindacharya’s RSA to the one between the BJP and RSS. She claimed the new arrangement would give the RSS a new political wing to engage with because it will follow the same nationalist ideology. However, observers believe that Govindacharya and Bharti — who have an old association — are trying to offer an alternative to the RSS in the wake of arrests of Hindu leaders for alleged involvement in terrorist activities. While Bharti has offered to field Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur — arrested in connection with the Malegaon blast — against Sonia Gandhi, another accused, Dayanand Pandey alias Swami Amritanand, has claimed to have been in touch with RSS leaders, including its ideologue Govindacharya.Of late, Govindacharya has been very vocal in his criticism of the BJP, as well as leaders like Advani and Rajnath Singh. Recently, he compared BJP chief Rajnath with Advani, this time calling Rajnath the hardliner. Bharti too has left no opportunity to run down Advani, including asserting today that it was Govindacharya who was instrumental in turning Advani into a national figure. “He enabled the party to rise from two seats to a power that ruled the Centre.” She has also questioned Advani’s silence over the Sadhvi’s arrest.However, both Govindacharya and Bharti have always observed restraint when it comes to the RSS.Once a powerful general secretary of the BJP, Govindacharya’s stock in the party had started to fall after a controversial remark quoted him as calling Atal Bihari Vajpayee just the ‘mask’ of the BJP while L K Advani was its real face. Though the 65-year-old leader denied having made the remark, there were few takers for his explanation.He remained a BJP general secretary till late 2000 when he sought a “two-year study leave” to study the impact of globalisation and never returned to the party.Bharti, for her part, has been expelled twice from the BJP, the last time in November 2005. The relations between Govindacharya and Bharti have always been a matter of speculation. A few years ago, she admitted that he had proposed to her in 1991, but said that once she took ‘sanyas’, he had come to respect her as her ‘guru’.
