NEW DELHI June 15: The ailing R.S.S. chief has, it is reported, named his successor in three separate sealed covers which will have 10 be opened after his death.

This piece of hard information has become a bit of jokes in the Indian capital, according to the Hindu, a conservative national daily, According to some; the Scaled Cover conceals the name of Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao as the next R.S.S. chief while Rao’s successor will be L.K, Advani.

Jokes apart, the newspaper in a recent no holds barred article fore Saw anew push to communal politics in India where not one but two of the biggest political parties the BJP and the Congress (1) are now engaged in playing the same Hindu electoral card. The only difference is that while the BJP: has placed its card on the table, the Congress {I) is keeping it in its hands, not even close to its chest. The newspaper says that the Babri tribunal’s verdict revoking the ban on the R: S.S. had the effect of once again legitimizing Hindutva as an ideology while Congress sponsored Som yagnaat Ayodhya confirmed that the BJP and the Congress {I) are no two separate political identities in the ideological sense because the holders of the yagna too toe the BJP line that the proposed Ram mandir should be built at the spot on which the Babri masjid stood before its demolition on December 6.

Even the ban on the R.S.S. was lifted with government’s connivance as the Bahri tribunal noted that the Rao government’s own Ayodhya while paper had absolved the RSS of all responsibility of what happened at Ayodhya on December 6, according to the newspaper.

The Hindu article written by Nina Vyas further makes the following Observations: fall the Hindu gods: and legends, the Ram legend has been projected across the country, by the RSS.

The Ram legend seems to connect well with BJP’s political aspirations Ram belonged to the ruling class, he was a king. The RSS is male dominated and has no place for women, The Ram legend been thus appropriate as there been no place for Sita in Ram’s Ayodhya. She was banished by Ram. And even the common greeting of Mai Siva (Sita) Ram has been refashioned by the BJP to exclude the reference to Sita. The BJP greeting is ‘Jai Shri Ram.”

The RSS has its own race theory. The RSS chief has till now always been a Maharashtrian Chitpavan Brahmin, fair and blue-eyed. The former RSS chief, M.S.Golwalkar, by far the most influential till now under whose tutelage the current BJP leadership grew to maturity, was without any reservations adulatory of Adolf Hitler who, according to Golwalkar, manifested “race pride at its highest” when he shocked the world “by purging the country of Semitic races, the Jews.” Germany, he had said, provided a “good lesson for us in Hindustan (6 learn and profit by.” The lifting of the ban on the RSS, the renewed legitimacy being given to its Hindutva ideology, the aggressive celebrations among the rank and file of the RSSBIP, and the keenness of the Congress(f) to grab the very same political platform should warn us of the direction Indian polity is taking. It happened in Germany, it happened in Iran, and today “ethnic cleansing” seems to have become the fashionable obsession, the political implications of the push the Tribunal’s order has given to Hindutva can be far-reaching. The writing is on the wall for all who care to read.

Article extracted from this publication >>  June 18, 1993