RSS grounds BJP’s overseas wing, PM is fed up with feuds

The order to disband the OFBJP was given by senior RSS leader Madan Dass Devi during an annual Parivar meeting at the Vraj Bhoomi complex in Pennsylvania in the middle of December.

Devi was quoted as telling his shocked audience in the India Post newspaper that the BJP ‘‘does not recognise the overseas wing in its present form’’. And that the decision to suspend the organisation had been made by none other than Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was quite fed up with their petty public squabbling which had begun to hurt the image of the BJP abroad.

Devi also told his NRI audience that the RSS would be appointing a coordinator back home in India so as to keep the ‘American Parivar’ in line.

Sources in New Delhi and in the US confirmed that the organisation scripted its own death in September last year when Vajpayee visited New York to attend the UNGA and the feuding factions began to brawl in his presence. The PM was said to have been so disgusted that he walked out of the meeting, saying, ‘‘Na aap logon ko MLA banna hai na MP, aise kyon lad rahen hain.’’

One of the major reasons for the factional fighting has been the elevation last year of Bhishma Agnihotri from a mere NRI to India’s Ambassador At Large for NRIs and PIOs. Agnihotri is said to have run up a huge bill simply jetting around the world, part of the perks given to him by the MEA.

Other key NRI figures like Mukund Modi, OFBJP founding president and a friend of the PM, as well as Shekhar Tiwari of its Washington chapter have now struck back by refusing to attend New Delhi’s Pravasi conference.

Modi was also quoted in the India Post article as saying that the OFBJP suspension was a ‘‘matter of great sorrow and disappointment because we founded this organisation with the idea of integrating humanism, to dispel the misconceptions about the BJP among the NRI community and to work towards the larger cause of India.’’