Excerpt. Fathers of the pride

To understand how the wider Sangh Parivar works on the ground, I travelled to Varanasi for the final phase of the UP elections.

Banaras Hindu University is one of the Sangh’s oldest recruiting grounds. The Modi government made it a point to award the university founder, Madan Mohan Malaviya, the Bharat Ratna in its first year in office. With a vice chancellor who prides himself on being a Sangh product, the university — like most Indian higher educational institutions after 2014 — has witnessed many academics now publicly articulating their loyalties to the organization’s worldview.

One such associate professor, also a swayamsevak, said the Sangh was ‘101 per cent’ involved in the election campaign. He was not entirely comfortable with the BJP’s ticket distribution, and felt it was wrong of the party to deliberately keep many aspirants hanging for a long time. He also felt that the BJP had sacrificed all other elements at the altar of winnability. ‘Earlier, they took inputs from the Sangh. They have done so this time too, but less than in the past. They have picked defectors from all parties, at the cost of ideological commitment.’

But this, he emphasized, did not take away from the larger goal of supporting the party. ‘At the end of the day, the BJP has to fight elections and not us.’ The academic outlined the exact role the Sangh was playing. It was helping manage the dissatisfaction of those who were resentful at not getting the ticket. ‘We are telling them they will be accommodated next time, that they must think of the need to remove the Samajwadi Party government.’ Volunteers like him were speaking to their friends and family, colleagues and students, and university staff and telling them how bringing a BJP sarkar in UP would help. ‘And our pracharaks are doing what they did in 2014 — working at the booth level to get voters out.’

Take another constituency of supporters. The Sangh’s financial strength comes from the old entrepreneurs and businessmen.

Varun Mehra owns Hotel Swastik Inn in Godhulia Chowk, near the Dasaswamedh Ghat. The hotel is on the second floor of a building inside a narrow by-lane, one of the hundreds which have made Varanasi an urban maze. Mehra was sitting along with a police official, who introduced himself as responsible for security at the Vishwanath temple and its vicinity. He was an RSS sympathizer as well.

This was a crucial election, Mehra argued, because it offered them an opportunity to have the same government in Delhi and Lucknow. ‘The general sentiment among the educated, among the business community, is that the BJP must win UP for development. This is the message we are sending out to our friends, in our circles. Everyone has got a chance, why not the BJP this time? This argument is appealing to many people.’

Mehra comes from a family of Sangh supporters, closely integrated in the local Sangh ecosystem.

‘I was born into it. We are the Sangh, hum hi Sangh hain,’ he said with a laugh. He explained how the organization, and its supporters, worked. ‘The Sangh works quietly. None of us want any publicity. I will give you an example. A pracharak of the Kashi region yesterday got a BJP MP to meet businessmen. We had an interaction with him. And then there was a photo session. As soon as people started taking selfies, the pracharak slipped aside. You will not see them, and that is why this perception that they are not present.’

The importance of individuals like Mehra for the Sangh came from their old loyalty, for their importance in the local marketplace and wider community, and their financial strength. For Mehra and his wider family, the expectation from the Sangh and its political affiliates is that they will create a more business-friendly climate. Even though a move as disruptive as demonetization had just taken place, and had adversely affected his business, Mehra’s loyalties were not shaken.

The Banaras Hindu University academic and Mehra represented the Sangh volunteers who would not be counted if you take a narrow view of how the RSS supports the BJP. They are the invisible supporters, embedded in communities, with influence, who can shape opinion in an election. The more direct work of mobilization is done by the Sangh machinery.

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Right opposite Mehra’s hotel is the old office of the RSS in Varanasi.

Pracharaks give their lives to sustaining and expanding the organization, and its objective of ‘uniting Hindu society’. They are the ones who help provide the personnel to the party at key moments, such as elections.

Three old men were reading newspapers, around a large desk in a quiet room. A pracharak introduced himself as someone associated with the Sangh since 1955. He echoed Mehra: ‘There is a feeling that the same party should be in power at both the central and the state level. Both the rich and the poor want Modiji. The army morale is up. Vikas ka kaam aage badh raha hai, development work is moving forward.’

He highlighted an important distinction in the way the Sangh and the BJP thought about elections. ‘The Sangh is a school where we award people marks on the basis of merit, hard work and outcome. But politics is different. A party has to see caste, economic strength, winnability. Ultimately, they have to fight elections. And we are there to support them.’

It was six days before Varanasi would vote. RSS joint general secretary Krishna Gopal — the key man who coordinates with the BJP — had arrived in Varanasi and was convening meetings of activists from different districts. Having directly held charge of eastern UP, Gopal was familiar with the entire political landscape.

The elderly pracharak explained what happened in these meetings. ‘He seeks inputs from all workers on the political situation, on booth-level dynamics, on voter mood. He also issues clear instructions about what they are meant to do on polling day, and reiterates that having a higher voter turnout is essential. That will ensure success.’

But this work was done quietly — which is why the Sangh’s role is so often shrouded in mystery. The pracharak continued, ‘Let me explain it to you in another way. A parent takes care of the child, educates him, helps him settle down, provides him a home, but doesn’t go around announcing it. The Sangh does not need to announce it.’ The Sangh workers do not distribute posters, do not arrange chairs at rallies or bring crowds themselves. ‘That is not our work. That is why media always gets confused. They look in the wrong places. Our work revolves around quiet sampark, contact, on a door-to-door basis — encouraging people to vote for a leader and a party which thinks of the nation, increases India’s prestige worldwide, improves the army’s morale and believes in vikas for all.’

Only one leader, and one party, fit this bill in the imagination and messaging of the Sangh. That leader remained Narendra Modi. That party remained the BJP.

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The new Sangh office is located in Sigra, only a few kilometres away from Godhulia Chowk, but the legendary traffic of the town means we crawled our way to it. It was from here that the functioning of the Sangh in eighteen districts of Kashi prant was managed.

Inside, in a small room, a man was assiduously doing accounts. He told me, ‘You should also go out, and persuade your friends and people you know to vote for Modiji. We are a cultural organization, but this state needs a BJP government for vikas, development.’

He then outlined how the Sangh was helping achieve this goal.

‘We work through a platform called the Matdata Jagrukta Manch, the voter awareness front. We are focusing on voter turnout. The RSS believes that it is the duty of Indian citizens to participate in democracy and vote.’ The subtext was that this encouragement was reserved for voters who were most likely to vote for the Sangh’s political affiliate.

But the most authentic explanation for how the Sangh helped the party came from key political interlocutors themselves. A key BJP leader, interacting with the Sangh on a daily basis, reconstructed the sequence of events. ‘We had our first meeting with the Sangh in November 2016 about the elections. And it was decided right then they would focus on sampark, contact, on the ground. Before elections, senior Sangh leaders arrive in the region going to polls and independently hold meetings, and help.’

He said that there were, however, two big differences between the Sangh role in 2014 and in 2017 in the state election.

The first was that the BJP itself was weaker in UP in 2014, and needed that assistance. By 2017, given the work put in by Amit Shah, Sunil Bansal and his team, the BJP organization had become a lot stronger, and the need for outside assistance had diminished. This is an obvious, but important, point that applies nationally. Where the BJP itself is strong and deeply embedded, the need for the Sangh during the election process is lesser; where the BJP is weak, but the Sangh has deeper roots, the latter becomes more important.

This also resulted in a second difference. In 2014, many RSS workers from outside UP had been brought to the state to assist in all activities — IT, feedback and monitoring, door-to-door mobilization, campaign management. This approach can sometimes boomerang. In the Bihar elections, a top state leader hinted to me that it generated resentment among the locals. In UP 2017, the BJP did not need workers from outside in any large number. In fact, local leaders from areas which had already voted were shifted to the areas going to vote next.

‘RSS workers from outside are not as involved, but that is because there is no need for it. They are doing what is required,’ added the leader, who traced his roots to the RSS. ‘Ultimately, please understand that the Sangh is where we come from. It is my mai-baap too. This distinction is artificial.’

Indeed, in the search for an RSS role, it was easy to miss the fact that the entire leadership had come from the Sangh itself.

Narendra Modi was a pracharak in the Sangh. Amit Shah was from the Sangh. Sunil Bansal had come from the Sangh just three years earlier. Keshav Prasad Maurya was a VHP activist and office-bearer till not so long ago. Lower down the hierarchy, Chandramohan had been in the ABVP, in the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, before moving on to the BJP. Many state-level office-bearers traced their roots to one or the other organization of the Sangh Parivar. The support staff of every major BJP leader, Amit Shah downwards, consisted of individuals who had come from a Sangh background.

Indeed, the BJP was the Sangh. In some elections, the rest of the RSS machinery may be more active, and in some, they may retreat.

This search was also a bit confounding for outsiders because we were desperately looking for some mysterious, secret army which would appear from nowhere, campaign during the elections and then disappear. Obviously, it did not work like that.

The BHU academic was the Sangh. Varun Mehra was the Sangh. We only focused on the pracharaks and their role in mobilization, and this was inadequate. As Bhaiyaji Joshi, the second most powerful person in the Sangh, told Organizer in an interview, ‘Our entire effort is to make Grihastha (family) karyakartas the main pillars of our work. Today, thousands of families are taking forward this work. The number of pracharaks is very less in comparison to the Grihastha karyakartas.’

This was the wider ecosystem, and each person — in his own way, often quietly — did what he had to during the election.

Prashant Jhais a journalist with Hindustan Times

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