Rajasthan Governor Kalraj Mishra’s decision to organise a “Ram Katha” programme at the Raj Bhavan presided over by a former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharak has raised eyebrows, with a civil society outfit raising objections. This is the first time a Ram Katha event is being organised at the Raj Bhavan. Though the Congress-led state government has not yet commented on the matter, a civil liberties outfit claimed that the Congress-led state government’s Directorate of Information and Broadcasting was promoting the event. The BJP too has not commented on the matter but its leaders were in attendance on the first day of the five-day event that began on Saturday. Every day of the programme, a katha vachak (narrator of holy text) named Vijay Kaushal will read the Ram Katha daily from 4 pm to 7 pm. Sources said Kaushal was from Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh and was an RSS pracharak earlier. The event, which is being telecast live on Kaushal’s YouTube channel, is open to the public. People can enter the Raj Bhavan after furnishing their identity cards. Before the start of the event on Saturday, Mishra conducted a puja of Hindu deity Ram and the Ramcharitmanas. The governor also inaugurated an art exhibition titled “Bhakti Kala Pradarshani” in which devotional paintings and artworks are being displayed. Among the attendees on the first day were the BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Ghanshyam Tiwari and BJP MP from Jaipur Ramcharan Bohra. In a statement, the Raj Bhavan quoted Mishra as saying that Ram Katha enriches life with values and that it was a matter of good fortune that a katha vachak such as Vijay Kaushal had accepted the request to narrate "Ram Katha". Like Kaushal, Mishra too was a Sangh pracharak once and was also an associate of Jayaprakash Narayan. He started his political career with the RSS in Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh in 1963. Influenced by the JP Movement, he worked as a convenor of “Sampurna Kranti (Total Revolution)”, which was started by Narayan, in eastern UP in 1974. He has served as the BJP’s UP unit chief and has been a minister in the state and at the Centre. He was appointed Rajasthan governor in 2019. PUCL Rajasthan president Kavita Srivastava said in a statement that it goes “against the dignity of his (Mishra’s) constitutional post to organise a religious ceremony in the Raj Bhavan”, and added that it was against “secular values enshrined in the Preamble of the Indian Constitution”. The civil liberties organisation appealed to Mishra to shift the event to “any other public place” and added that “neither the Raj Bhavan nor the state government should sponsor this event”.
