It took five decades for the central government to realise its “mistake” of wrongly placing “an internationally renowned organisation like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh” in the list of organisations government officials cannot be associated with, the Madhya Pradesh High Court observed on Thursday. The court was hearing a petition filed by Indore resident Purushottam Gupta, a retired central government officer, who had in September 2023 knocked on the court’s doors, saying rules that barred him from joining the RSS were “an impediment for him to gratify his desires at the dusk of his life”. In fact, a day after the Centre issued a notification removing the RSS as a political organisation with which government officials cannot be associated, an affidavit was filed in this court by the Union of India on July 10, apprising it about the order. While disposing of the petition, a Bench of Justices S A Dharmadhikari and Gajendra Singh lamented that "it took almost five decades for the central government to realise its mistake; to acknowledge that an internationally renowned organisation like RSS was wrongly placed amongst the banned organisations of the country and that its removal therefrom is quintessential”. “Aspirations of many central government employees of serving the country in many ways, therefore, got diminished in these five decades because of this ban, which got removed only when it was brought to the notice of this court vide the present proceedings," the Bench said. The court had earlier expressed its displeasure over the fact that for 10 months, the case was kept pending as the Union of India did not file its reply to the petition, filed by Gupta through his lawyer Manish Nair. On May 22, Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta appeared virtually before the court and asked for time to file a reply. On the delay in filing the reply, the court said, "Perhaps there was never any material, study, survey or report at the relevant point of time on the basis of which the ruling dispensation arrived at a satisfaction that involvement and engagement of central government employees even with the apolitical/non-political activities of RSS must be banned for maintaining the communal fabric and secular character of the country.” It said the issuance of office memorandums “painting the whole universe of even the apolitical activities of RSS as communal, anti-secular and against national interest is a decision having drastic consequences, not only for the organisation, but also everybody aspiring to associate with it with the noble interest of rendering community and public service”. “Any executive or legislative decision infringing upon fundamental rights must always be backed by cogent data, evidence and material justifying imposition of the restrictions chosen by the government to be clamped down upon its subjects/ citizens,” the court said. While the Centre has chosen to remove the RSS from the list of “don't join” organisations, “any such exercise of proposing and restoring its name back in a ‘don't join’ list ever in future must be preceded by a profound thought process”, the court said. “Intensive deliberations at the highest levels of the rule-making authority, backed by persuasive data, compelling evidence and material as to why RSS – as an umbrella organisation along with all its subsidiary organisations – need to be banned from participation by any of the central government employee… be also delved deep into, before holding the same to be a facet of misconduct,” the court said. The Bench added, "It's a matter of general knowledge in public domain that today, RSS is the only nationally established self-driven voluntary organisation outside the governmental bureaucratic hierarchy, which has highest membership participating in religious, social, educational, health and many apolitical activities under its umbrella, which have no pertinence to political activities of RSS.” Secondly, the court said, these "apolitical activities may be undertaken by the volunteers purely out of community service, without political ambitions or goals constituting the comrade on the field”. The court cited examples of RSS affiliates involved in apolitical work like the Rashtriya Seva Bharti, which aims to "organise a peer group with nationalist thoughts and patriotic sentiments under one umbrella”. It also pointed to the Saraswati Shishu Mandirs, “where lakhs of students from impoverished backgrounds receive primary and higher secondary education”. “Membership of RSS per se may not aim at or drive oneself always to the involvement in the political activities of the organisation, much less being engaged in communal or anti-national or anti-secular activities," the court said. “Voluntary membership of a national and internationally famed organisation like RSS, for activities other than political in nature, like religious, social, philanthropic and educational, cannot be proscribed through executive instructions,” it said. “They ought to have been done only through duly enacted law if the necessity was felt for doing so, preferably through amendments to the conduct rules itself.”
