As the RSS move to invite Congress, it is apt for Communist leaders to share their vision for Bharat.

The whole point of being in public service is that you work for the nation and its people. The motivations for doing so, or the kind of India those belonging to disparate ideologies have in mind, is what makes the idea of India a contested one. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which has long been kept out of this national debate by an establishment dominated in the main by those with Leftist ideological inclinations, seems to have realised that it would be held guilty by history for doing exactly what it accused, with some justification it must be said, its ideological opponents of doing to it since Independence. It is, therefore, a very welcome move by the Sangh, which as an institution is today in the ascendant as a thought leader, to organise a three-day national seminar to which 1,500 invitees representing various shades of opinion will be invited to present their views on the kind of India the RSS envisages for the 21st century. Included in the list of potential invitees, apparently, are Congress president Rahul Gandhi and CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Dyed-in-the-wool critics of the Sangh will, naturally, paint this effort at samvaad or dialogue/conversation as an attempt by the Sangh to legitimise both its ideas and its role in Indian public life; indeed, they have already begun to do so. This is understandable because it is a mindset that is closed, doctrinaire and unwilling to engage with a different, even radically different, point of view and has internalised tactics of demonetisation followed by condemnation as a substitute for serious debate. Our assessment is that neither of the two Opposition luminaries mentioned above will attend though we hope we are wrong. For, what they should do is send their best and brightest to the seminar to engage, debate and discuss the nuances in different narratives which are often elided in political discourse geared towards elections that all political parties are guilty of in contemporary India.

The motivations of the RSS in wanting to invite people from ‘all walks of life, including from different political outfits, ideologies and religions are not so hard to decipher. Never before in its history has the organisation held such a pivotal position as a shaper of national discourse. In seeking outreach to those who may have different points of view, it is clearly marking out the clear blue water between itself and the ancien régime which barely gave the time of day to its ideological opponents. There is also an effort to project the Sangh as being above political party affiliations in a sense though that is unlikely to cut much ice given the contours of the Sangh Parivaar nowadays. In fact, it is the RSS too which needs to introspect on how and why it has morphed from what LK Advani famously termed as an organisation that held a kind of ‘moral authority over the BJP’ to have become in many ways the same corporation albeit with technical distinctions in terms of operating freedoms intact. The Sangh needs to seriously ponder whether that is indeed the best route for its hope for a 21st-century Bharat to come to fruition. The planned outreach could be an apt way of beginning that process.

Writer and Courtesy: The Pioneer

As the RSS move to invite Congress, it is apt for Communist leaders to share their vision for Bharat.

The whole point of being in public service is that you work for the nation and its people. The motivations for doing so, or the kind of India those belonging to disparate ideologies have in mind, is what makes the idea of India a contested one. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), which has long been kept out of this national debate by an establishment dominated in the main by those with Leftist ideological inclinations, seems to have realised that it would be held guilty by history for doing exactly what it accused, with some justification it must be said, its ideological opponents of doing to it since Independence. It is, therefore, a very welcome move by the Sangh, which as an institution is today in the ascendant as a thought leader, to organise a three-day national seminar to which 1,500 invitees representing various shades of opinion will be invited to present their views on the kind of India the RSS envisages for the 21st century. Included in the list of potential invitees, apparently, are Congress president Rahul Gandhi and CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury.

Dyed-in-the-wool critics of the Sangh will, naturally, paint this effort at samvaad or dialogue/conversation as an attempt by the Sangh to legitimise both its ideas and its role in Indian public life; indeed, they have already begun to do so. This is understandable because it is a mindset that is closed, doctrinaire and unwilling to engage with a different, even radically different, point of view and has internalised tactics of demonetisation followed by condemnation as a substitute for serious debate. Our assessment is that neither of the two Opposition luminaries mentioned above will attend though we hope we are wrong. For, what they should do is send their best and brightest to the seminar to engage, debate and discuss the nuances in different narratives which are often elided in political discourse geared towards elections that all political parties are guilty of in contemporary India.

The motivations of the RSS in wanting to invite people from ‘all walks of life, including from different political outfits, ideologies and religions are not so hard to decipher. Never before in its history has the organisation held such a pivotal position as a shaper of national discourse. In seeking outreach to those who may have different points of view, it is clearly marking out the clear blue water between itself and the ancien régime which barely gave the time of day to its ideological opponents. There is also an effort to project the Sangh as being above political party affiliations in a sense though that is unlikely to cut much ice given the contours of the Sangh Parivaar nowadays. In fact, it is the RSS too which needs to introspect on how and why it has morphed from what LK Advani famously termed as an organisation that held a kind of ‘moral authority over the BJP’ to have become in many ways the same corporation albeit with technical distinctions in terms of operating freedoms intact. The Sangh needs to seriously ponder whether that is indeed the best route for its hope for a 21st-century Bharat to come to fruition. The planned outreach could be an apt way of beginning that process.

Writer and Courtesy: The Pioneer