Raj Bhavan axe falls, first to go are the RSS veterans

All four governors who were removed today—Vishnu Kant Shastri, Kailashpati Mishra, Babu Parmanand and Kidar Nath Sahni—are prominent RSS swayamsevaks and that was a key reason for their dismissal, sources said.

The move is likely to further intensify the BJP’s aggressive opposition to the UPA government that was witnessed in the inaugural session of the 14th Lok Sabha over the issue of “tainted” ministers.

The BJP is set to make a big noise in the coming session of Parliament about the “undemocratic” removal of the governors who refused to tender their resignations when they were first indirectly and then directly asked to do so. The decision of the governors not to go quietly was fully backed by the BJP leadership — L.K. Advani told as much to Home Minister Shivraj Patil when Patil broached the subject with him earlier this week.

With the exit of the NDA, the Left-backed UPA government is keen to remove the more obvious symbols of RSS from government. ‘‘The government is not targetting all BJP appointees but only those who are blatantly RSS,” a Left leader said, pointing out that Madan Lal Khurana was regarded more as a BJP politician than an RSS swayamsevak, Rama Jois had been a a High Court chief justice and T.N. Chaturvedi a senior bureaucrat and were, therefore, not in the same category as the four sacked governors.

The RSS has jumped into the fray with spokesman Ram Madhav defending the appointment of swayamsevaks as governors today. Reacting to the dismissal, Madhav said, ‘‘RSS-associated swayamsevaks are doing a number of works and there is nothing wrong in being a governor… dismissing them just because they belong to the RSS is undemocratic.’’

Vishnukant Shastri, sacked as governor of UP, went further to assert: ‘‘I am very proud to be associated with RSS and I want to ask if being a swayamsevak is a crime? When people having RSS background can be vice-president, prime minister and deputy prime minister, why can’t they become governors?’’

Neither the UPA government nor the Left parties can declare the RSS illegal but the effort, sources said, was to remove the power and respectability the RSS had gained in recent years, thanks to the BJP-led NDA government.

The removal of known RSS men from the country’s Raj Bhavans was only a part of the more protracted battle to save the ‘‘Idea of India’’—a phrase used extensively by Sonia Gandhi at the Shimla Conclave and later—from those who advocate a “Hindu rashtra”. The move, it is learnt, is fully backed by the Left parties which were the first to call for the “detoxification” of history textbooks and removal of personnel associated with the RSS.

The project to delegitimise the RSS, though, is not just a “Leftist” agenda but can be traced back to the Nehruvian era. Although the first ban on the RSS in the wake of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination was lifted within two years and the organisation became legal, India’s first prime minister was instrumental in ensuring that “legal” did not mean “legitimate”.

Indira Gandhi continued the tradition of regarding the RSS as an extra-constitutional and “sinister” outfit that should not be allowed to spread its tentacles into the organs of the state.

The RSS first gained legitimacy after the Jana Sangh merged into the Janata Party in 1977 but within two years, the Janata experiment fell apart over the “dual membership” issue—which once again brought to the fore the deep anti-RSS misgivings shared by much of the political establishment.

However, the ascendancy of the BJP in the 1990s and the formation of the BJP-led NDA government put an end to the RSS’s isolation. Under NDA rule, RSS swayamsevaks and pracharaks were no longer outcastes and were accommodated in different levels of the government.