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RSS ideologue Vaidya was so committed to agenda, he proposed replacing BJP with new party

Sangh and BJP leading lights remember M.G. Vaidya, who died Saturday, as one who not only shaped Hindutva ideology, but ensured no one deviated from it.

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New Delhi: Following the defeat of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in the 2004 general elections, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) brass met on the outskirts of the national capital to take a call on its future relationship with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Then-RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan and senior leader Madan Das Devi, who was the point person handling BJP-RSS ties, were at the meeting, as was ideologue M.G. Vaidya, who passed away in Nagpur Saturday at the age of 97. Vaidya was the oldest living swayamsevak, who had the rare distinction of working closely with all six RSS sarsanghchalaks from K.B. Hedgewar to Mohan Bhagwat. Vaidya was a close confidant of RSS sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras, who shaped the formation of the BJP’s political predecessor Jana Sangh, and also served as the RSS’ first spokesperson, witnessing nine decades of its history — from creation to three bans, the Emergency and the BJP’s ascendance to power.

Deeply upset with Vajpayee and BJP’s performance, Sudarshan wondered if RSS’ experiment with politics should come to an end. But Vaidya was not in favour of such a move. He advocated an alternative — a new party.

Vaidya said the Jana Sangh had been formed to fulfil the agenda of Hindutva, and if the BJP was not able to fulfill that core agenda, the RSS should think of ending its association with the party, he said.

Similar sentiments were echoed at an RSS meeting in Haridwar in 2005, but other Sangh representatives didn’t agree with Vaidya’s line. The idea ultimately didn’t go anywhere.

Sudhir Pathak, who was Vaidya’s associate at the Nagpur-based newspaper Tarun Bharat that the latter edited, said: “Vaidya’s idea was to form party with agenda of RSS thought, and Sudarshan and he wanted to start afresh. But it was not considered a good option later.”

But the incident was reflective of Vaidya’s staunch commitment to the core ideology of the RSS, say Sangh leaders.


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Commitment to ideology

There were other incidents too, when the BJP and the RSS came face-to-face over core issues.

The ties got particularly strained when former BJP president and deputy PM L.K. Advani visited Pakistan in 2005 and praised Muhammad Ali Jinnah for his secular credentials at his mausoleum.

Vaidya and other RSS leaders, including chief Sudarshan, immediately sent a message to the BJP that Advani must hold a press conference and tell the media that the context of his statement was different.

RSS organisational general secretary Sanjay Joshi held a meeting of senior functionaries and passed a resolution to dissociate with Advani’s remark. Later that year, at a BJP executive meeting in Chennai, Advani called for a reconsideration of BJP’s relationship with RSS.

The ties regained their cordiality only after the appointment of Rajnath Singh as the BJP president.

Seshadri Chari, former editor of the RSS’ paper Organiser, said this was a turbulent phase in the relationship between the RSS and the BJP, but “Vaidya ji’s beauty was that he was committed to the ideology”.

“He used to say that RSS is not a Hindu organisation but we are a sangathan (organisation) of society — not for society, but of society. He never hesitated to propound his views. He was committed to Hindu ideology and Sangh ideology,” he said.

Chari noted that Vaidya’s commitment was such that both his sons are in the RSS as well — Manmohan Vaidya, the joint general secretary, and Shriram Vaidya, who leads the foreign cell of the body.

Former Rajya Sabha MP Prabhat Jha, who was the editor of Right-wing newspaper Swadesh, said he and Vaidya, who ran Tarun Bharat, “frequently exchanged ideas”.

“He was one of the last-generation ideologues who had the courage to call out wrong. He never compromised his ideology due to pressure or a prime minister’s call, which is rare these days,” said Jha.


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Interests of Sangh

BJP leader K.N. Govindacharya, who was the party general secretary in the Vajpayee-Advani era, said Vaidya’s life could be seen in totality for his commitment to the Hindutva ideology — in shaping it as well as ensuring that no one deviated from it.

“He was a dictionary of RSS history. In the RSS, there are two main functions where the sarsanghchalak’s speech and other drafts are sent to every shakha — Vijayadashmi and Pratinidhi Sabha. And he was the man who drafted those speeches, from Balasaheb Deoras’ time to Raju bhaiya‘s (Rajendra Singh), before Sudarshan took over,” Govindacharya said.

Once, Vaidya and Panchjanya editor Bhanu Pratap Shukla were critical about Vajpayee’s disinvestment policy, as was Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and Swadeshi Jagran Manch leader Dattopant Thengadi. Both wrote about the sale of profit-making companies in their publications. Vajpayee called Sudarshan, Madan Das Devi, Thengadi, Vaidya and Shukla to apprise them of the government viewpoint, said a BJP leader who didn’t wish to be named.

“But Vaidya told Vajpayee, ‘Your job is to run the government. Our job is to protect ideology and interests of Sangh. We both should stick to our own interests’,” the leader said.

Yashwant Sinha, who served as finance minister as well as external affairs minister in the Vajpayee government, said there were various issues, like disinvestment and foreign investments, where differences existed.

“Every time Sudarshan ji and his team tried to block economic reform, we used to call him, S. Gurumurthy and Govindacharya to convince them, but Vajpayee was a tall leader and his instruction was not to bow down before them,” Sinha said.

“We took the decision to allow 26 per cent FDI in defence; they protested. I tried to convince them but they were not convinced, and several meetings took place at my home. Vajpayee said go ahead but in those meetings Vaidya didn’t take part. Sudarshan ji and Gurumurthy used to brief Vaidya because he was spokesperson of RSS,” he added.


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‘Visionary’

Vaidya’s column ‘Bhavishya’ (future) in Tarun Bharat ran for 25 years. On several occasions, the RSS and the BJP had to distance themselves from his personal views.

According to Chari, Vaidya was one of the first people who propagated the idea of trifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir into three parts — Ladakh, Jammu, and Kashmir.

“We were all against this idea. As editor, I told him how can we publish this article? He said you write your disagreement in editorial, I will write in my article. It was published. And see, how he was a visionary,” said Chari, pointing to the Narendra Modi government’s decision to bifurcate the erstwhile state into the union territories of Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir after scrapping Article 370.

In 2012, when Nitin Gadkari was seeking his second term as BJP president and Modi was making his bid to reach the national political stage, various reports surfaced in the media about alleged corruption by Gadkari’s Purti group. His resignation was also sought. At the time, Vaidya wrote a blog saying Modi had orchestrated the entire controversy to block Gadkari’s chance to become BJP president.

His column was discontinued after this attack on Modi, and the RSS and BJP dissociated with the blog as well.

However, after 2014, he praised Modi on several occasions on the insistence of his son Manmohan, as well as due to the fact that Modi did fulfil the core Sangh agenda, which Vajpayee didn’t touch, say BJP leaders.

Chari said Vaidya was hardline ideologue, but had a sense of humour. “It is a rare quality these days,” he said.

“Once, the Madhya Pradesh government awarded Vaidya for journalistic contributions. A newspaper journalist wrote that Sangh pracharak received the award. Vaidya called the journalist and said ‘you are factually wrong. I am not only Sangh pracharak, I am the ‘baap of sangh pracharak’ (father of RSS ideologue), and laughed. He meant to say he is father of two Sangh ideologues,” added Chari.


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1 COMMENT

  1. Ideology should guide one’s approach to an issue, like a beacon, not become a mill stone around the neck. If economic and external affairs decisions are going to be guided by Hindutva, India would be no different from the USSR, which refused to accept Einstein’s theory of relativity because it was contrary to dialectical materialism!

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