New Delhi, July 6: As Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee gave the short shrift to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to keep his “secular” allies on his side and reinforce his “liberal” credentials with well-wishers at home and abroad.
Out of power, Vajpayee seems to have rediscovered his ideological moorings, even if only for tactical reasons.
Days after demanding an apology from home minister Shivraj Patil for removing four governors because of their RSS antecedents, Vajpayee today took the battle to the enemy camp. He alleged that the Congress-led government was trying to “impose” a “poisonous ideology” on the country which could sow the seeds of “another Partition”.
Vajpayee, who fell foul of the Sangh after initiating what looked like a process to oust Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi because of the riots, was apparently atoning for his verbal outbursts in Manali.
Addressing a function on the 103rd birth anniversary of Jan Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, he said the RSS was “nationalistic” and asserted that the BJP was ready to “fight the war of ideologies” with the Congress because of the latter’s “mentality”.
Vajpayee and former deputy Prime Minister .K. Advani, who also spoke on the occasion, attacked Patil for his statement that the governors had been removed because they belonged to a “different ideology”.
“There is an effort to impose a poisonous ideology on the nation. They say only those following their ideology can become governors,” he said.
Earlier, addressing reporters, Advani expressed his “distress” at the United Progressive Alliance’s mindset and said he was asked if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi would attend a commemorative function in Mookerjee’s honour in Parliament’s central hall this morning. “Only the Lok Sabha Speaker came. Maybe, the PM and his ministers did not get the time,” he remarked.
Advani said the hallmark of a multiparty democracy like India was it allowed different ideologies to grow and survive without isolating a party from the mainstream just because it subscribed to a certain ideology.
“Pandit Nehru’s cabinet had people of different ideologies. Do Congressmen believe in Marxism? Ideologies can be different but a multiparty democracy runs successfully because it does not isolate anyone from the mainstream on ideological grounds,” he argued.
BJP sources said the please-RSS gestures followed realisation that while the Sangh could be side-stepped when the party was in power, it was not “easy to ignore” it when in the Opposition.
