Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar is a man after the RSS’s own heart — a technocrat, grounded, honest and given to freely voicing his beliefs with little regard for social and political norms.

He was among the Sangh’s chosen few to take over from Rajnath Singh as BJP president in 2008-09. As it happened, Parrikar chose those heady days of his possible accession to describe LK Advani as “rancid pickle”.

The term was apparently distasteful even by the RSS/BJP’s standards. Or so it seemed when they settled for another favourite, Nitin Gadkari, to be BJP president. The defence minister, however, is not to be outdone. He has conjured up the extraordinary spectacle of India sending “terrorists to fight terrorists”. The imaginative strategy has naturally elicited a suitable rebuke. “It must be the first time that a minister of an elected government openly advocates use of terrorism in another country on the pretext of preventing terrorism from that country or its non-state actors,” said an official Pakistani statement. We all know where “use of terrorism in another country” is part of acceptable strategic thinking. But in this instance, can we really blame Pakistan?

But the defence minister is indefatigable. “ Mirchi, who bhi Andhra ki lagi hai (chilli, that too from Andhra has hit them),” he said at a seminar organised by an RSS-sponsored thinktank. The audience of like-minded intellectuals was apparently thrilled. They do believe in a hawkish approach towards Pakistan, after all.

He then turned his attention to the Chinese, who have been flooding the Indian markets with everything — from toys to religious figurines. The minister knows this because “their eyes (of Ganesha idols) are becoming smaller and smaller”. This is reportedly before he proudly described his father’s solution to India’s population problem. How? By dropping “a bomb”! Should a Union Minister persist in being offensive?

Political Editor

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