Since it isn't often that newspaper headlines give people reason to be unqualifiedly happy, it is important for us to enjoy the sight of the Bharatiya Janata Party being forced to eat the circular that allowed civil servants in Gujarat to become members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In these ecological times, it is good to see paper being recycled. We haven't heard the last of this; the BJP looks set to make the running in Indian politics for a while yet, so it is reasonable to assume that the party will continue to work for the day when its many supporters in the civil services are allowed to take their shorts out of their closets and try them for size in public. While the withdrawal is a defeat for the sangh parivar, it is also a dress rehearsal. After a decent interval, the saffron brotherhood will take the issue to the country with every argument it can stitch together: quasi-legal points ('after all, the RSS isn't a banned organization' or 'the RSS isn't a political organization'), plausible analogies ('if civil servants can be members of the Rotary Club, then...') and plain brazenness ('the chief secretary in my state has been drilling in shakhas for years'). People will nod and be swayed by these arguments because the image of men in uniform doing PT (which is how people imagine the RSS) doesn't necessarily conjure up visions of a sinister paramilitary force; it has benign, reassuring associations too. I can imagine the 'average voter' being persuaded to think of the RSS as an outfit not dissimilar to the home guards, or the territorial army or the National Cadet Corps or a dedicated seva dal or even a troop of ageing boy scouts. The prime minister, when the controversy began, told us that the RSS was a cultural organization, unconnected to politics. When these arguments begin to be made again, secular people need to be prepared to meet them. They could start by saying that if the RSS and its vigilante fronts, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, are apolitical, then the Ku Klux Klan is a band of social workers working for Caucasian emancipation. The RSS is founded on the idea of historic Hindu grievance and it is committed to the transformation of the republic into a Hindu rashtra. Ironically, (given the BJP's newly found enthusiasm for teaching Muslims patriotism by hoisting the national flag in their midst) for decades after independence the sangh parivar was deeply suspicious of the tri-colour because of its similarity to the Congress's standard. The RSS salutes a saffron flag, the Bhagwa Dhvaj, which is the sangh's emblem for the Hindu state-in-the-making. Its most revered sarsanghachalak, Guruji Golwalker, wrote a tract called We, Or Our Nation Defined in which he argued that Muslims living in Bharat should be second class citizens, living on Hindu sufferance, with no rights of any kind. 'From this standpoint sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations, the non-Hindu people in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of the Hindu Nation, i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ingratitude towards this land and its age-long traditions, but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead; in one word, they must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizens' rights.' Guruji also admired Hitler's way with the Jews and thought Indians needed to learn from his example in dealing with intransigent minorities. 'German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic races - the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.' All this is well known, or should be, but it is worth repeating if only to graphically contrast the narrow sectarianism of the RSS and its front organizations with the generous pluralism of India's Constitution. To allow government employees to become members of the RSS or any organization like it would be to declare that the secular Indian state doesn't mind its civil servants publicly endorsing the idea of a Hindu rashtra, an idea that subverts the constitutional foundations of the republic which they have sworn to serve. Apart from the message that it would send to the general public, such a move would put enormous pressure on the subordinates of a civil servant, say a joint secretary in the home ministry, to ingratiate themselves with the boss by joining shakhas too. We know how corporate climbers learn golf to network: if this circular had gone through, Hindu callisthenics would have become the fast track to preferment. Try to imagine the morale of a civil service where one half feels that the others are getting ahead because of their ideological affinities with their superior or the government of the day. To argue that the RSS is not a banned organization and should therefore be open to civil servants is to miss the point: the Ku Klux Klan isn't banned in most parts of the United States but no black defendant would want his trial judge to be a Klansman. Freemasonry is legal in Britain and yet there was a commission appointed to study the penetration of that country's police force by Freemasons. There were concerns that promotion into the upper echelons of the British police was impossible unless the office belonged to the brotherhood of Freemasons. To claim, as Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani did, that the circular was purely a provincial matter, subject to the decorum of centre-state relations, is disingenuous. It is hard to believe that Messrs Advani and Vajpayee had no inkling of what the Gujarat government was likely to do on a matter as momentous as this, given that Gujarat has a BJP government. It becomes even harder to believe when you consider that Advani and Vajpayee defended the Gujarat government's circular enthusiastically when it first appeared. Advani even indicated that he was thinking of extending the freedom of the RSS to Central government employees before backtracking on the issue. We have seen and heard Venkaiah Naidu list the many virtues of the RSS - its patriotism, its discipline, its social work - to justify the Gujarat government's decision. To take the last of its virtues first, every organization that helps in times of floods, fires or famine, deserves the gratitude of the nation, but the RSS's good works are not the issue here. It is the RSS's construction of patriotism that is the problem. What Naidu and the RSS mean by patriotism is an exclusive chauvinism based on the claims of a dominant community. Hindus consolidated are the national community, Hindutva is the culture that must define this nation and the Hindu rashtra is shorthand for the kind of state that the saffron brotherhood would like to see in place. Their vaunted discipline is their way of trying to make all this happen, so it is hard to see why Naidu expects people outside the RSS, especially those who admire the Indian Constitution, to see this as a virtue at all. Advani said, in the course of this controversy, that everything he was, he owed to the RSS. He, more than any one else, helped create through his rath yatras and his sponsorship of the shilanyas, the mood for the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the BJP's rise to power. So we should take him seriously, and at his word. Advani intended his statement as reassurance; we would be wise to read it as a warning. The defeat of the BJP in this matter is a victory for every Indian citizen. This time the opposition (for once) was vigilant enough to see that it wasn't a provincial government's circular but the nature of the republic that was at stake. But it will happen again - we need to keep watch.