Sudarshans War

The first mistake in RSS leader K.S. Sudarshan's interpretation of the Mahabharata is that it was not a conflict between Hindus and anti-Hindus, as he has claimed while predicting another similar epic war in India, but a battle between two closely related families both of which were Hindus, although it is doubtful whether they would have used the term for themselves.

However, Mr Sudarshan is right in a way because the battle which he foresees may well be within another family the Sangh parivar because it is unlikely that the BJP will be pleased with his grim prognostications. Even if there is some convergence in the strategic vision of both the RSS and the BJP, it is clear enough that the latter's tactics emphasise the soft-pedalling of the issues which are close to Mr Sudarshan's heart. To cite only one example, Parliament was officially told on Wednesday that the Centre was not in a position to ban cow slaughter. The entire focus of the BJP's recent politics has been to downplay the contentious issues with which it used to be associated earlier in order to widen its scope for acceptability by other parties. Implicit in this approach is the recognition, as underlined by L.K. Advani some time ago, that the country is so heterogeneous that ... an ideological party, be it the communists or the Jan Sangh, cannot hope to come to power at the Centre on its own. It is the evident compulsions of a multicultural society which have made the BJP shed its ideological straitjacket, even if as a tactical gesture. The essence of such a society is that the various communities in it are not seen as being antagonistic towards each other. The RSS leader's neat division of the citizens of India between Hindus and anti-Hindus and, what is more, the prediction of a war between them may well raise the question whether the temporary tactics and the ultimate strategy of the Sangh parivar is beginning to converge. Such suspicions about the parivar's real agenda may gain credibility in the wake of the latest pronouncement because it is quite in line with Golwalkar's categorisation of non-Hindus virtually as second class citizens.

 

In envisaging a war between the two, however, Mr Sudarshan has gone one step beyond his mentor. Unless the BJP dissociates itself completely from this particularly offensive remark, misgivings about its objective will continue to persist. Indeed, given the closeness of the relations within the parivar, doubts about even the BJP's intentions will not totally disappear. The BJP, therefore, has entered perhaps the most critical phase in its history because Mr Sudarshan's hard line has brought it face to face with issues basic to the parivar's ideology which it has been trying to gloss over so far.