I took ‘skinny Atal’ to his first shakha

Go 4 km down a snaking road from here and you will meet a 90-year-old man who says that once upon a time, must be 1938, he took a ‘‘skinny boy in Class IX’’ called Atal to his first shakha in Gwalior.

That man is Narayanrao Tarte, a patriarch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an organisation with its headquarters here and perhaps the first one to catch any straws in the BJP’s shifting wind.

Past barricades, past a blue police Mazda, past sandbags, the RSS headquarters in the Mahaal neighbourhood of the old city is a three-storeyed pale pink building. A platoon has been posted here since 1976, when during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi ordered a crackdown on the RSS.

Pramod Manager Mahajan would feel out of place here, the RSS office has no cubicles or files, no fancy computers with charts and maps. At the end of a passageway strung with clotheslines, lives the man of whom Vajpayee said on his last birthday: ‘‘What I am today is of his making.’’

Tarte sits surrounded by medicines, letters and books, shrunk to four feet, his feet resting on a sack of grain. ‘‘He was a very good student, he used to stand first. When he was in college, I had predicted he will be Prime Minister.’’

He then gets up, waves aside an ever-lurking attendant, walks to a cupboard from where he digs out a frayed inland letter.

‘‘My respected, dear Mamu,’’ it begins. The date is January 7, 1986, the BJP had only 2 seats in the Lok Sabha, Vajpayee is party president, recovering from his 1984 election defeat in Gwalior, and it’s a fortnight after his birthday. ‘‘I was born in 1924,’’ he writes, ‘‘father while putting me in school put 1926. If he’s younger, he can work longer, will retire later. How did he know that they would celebrate my birthday and present me as a young person…To laugh to death and to die laughing is my wish,’’ he writes, signing off on a note that seems philosophical and yet political: Yahan to Bharatiya aur Hindu ke shabdjaal mein hi uljhe hain. (Here, I am just caught in the verbal twists and turns of ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’).

Eighteen years on, that struggle is on, in the party’s manifesto which Tarte is having a trying time reading. Struggling with his cataract, Tarte, who edited Hindustan Samachar and Hindu Vishwa, flips the vision document (the revised version with just two PM photographs) and complains the typeface is too small for him to read.

It does not contain the RSS rhetoric on Ayodhya, Article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code. And Tarte isn’t complaining. ‘‘If it (Ayodhya) is solved with the consent of both the communities, it’s much better for the country,’’ he says, echoing what his protege said. What does he feel about the ideological watering down?

‘‘It’s okay,’’ he says. ‘‘Election issues are more financial.” After roads, Tarte says the next step is riverlinking. The mentor has done his homework. He’s certain Vajpayee will come back to power. His advice? ‘‘Step down. He’s getting on in age. It will be a terrific moral example. Look at all those MPs who don’t vacate houses.’’

And who’s to take his place? ‘‘Lal Krishna Advani, of course. Mind you there is a world of difference between the man who raised the Ram cry and now.’’

His voice is soon drowned by the 70 children standing on the dusty ground outside.

Nilesh Pimpalkar, 18, is one of them. He says he doesn’t have a single Muslim friend in a college. And how MNCs are eroding his culture. ‘‘With Kya aap Close Up karte hain ringing in your head, do you think anyone will buy Babool or Vicco?’’

Tarte walks to see the children at the shakha. In the light of the lamp, he points with his fingernail—this is where the country’s first shakha was held in the 1920s. The poll season hasn’t made it past the metal detector. ‘‘Nobody important has come here of late,’’ says head constable Mukesh F Chhadi.

Perhaps he forgets a certain 90-year-old.