‘The state party unit’s differences with the RSS are out in the open’.
New Delhi: The appointment of Sabarimala poster boy K. Surendran as the president of BJP’s Kerala unit has brought the state party unit’s differences with the RSS in the open. More important, the decision, which was hanging fire for the past three months, has come at a time when the RSS was tightening its grip over the party machinery in the state. The appointment has set the stage for an open power struggle within the state unit and the rumblings are already felt.
Surendran, one of the four general secretaries in the state, came to the forefront during BJP’s Sabarimala agitation and belongs to the faction led by Union minister V. Muraleedharan, a known Modi-Amit Shah man. The other faction, led by P.K. Krishna Das, one of the former presidents, has the blessings of the RSS. Just a day after Surendran’s appointment as president was announced, two of the general secretaries, A.N. Radhakrishnan and M.T. Ramesh, owing allegiance to Krishna Das have requested the central leadership to relieve them from their party posts.
A third general secretary Shobha Surendran (no relative of K. Surendran) along with former president and RSS ideologue Kummanam Rajasekharan preferred to stay away when Surendran came to take charge at party headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram last Saturday.
Ravish Thantri Kumar, Kasaragod district president of the BJP, has threatened to quit politics after he was replaced by someone belonging to Muraleedharan faction. Claiming that it was impossible to work in the party if one does not belong to one of the factions, Kumar has decided to disassociate with the party for the time being. In the last parliamentary elections, Kumar had come second in the Kasaragod constituency.
Ever since the party’s Sabarimala agitation failed to bring any dividends contrary to expectations in the general elections, the Kerala unit of the BJP had shrunk to a paper organisation. It was without a head as the incumbent president, P.S. Sreedharan Pillai, was shunted out immediately to Mizoram as Governor. Incidentally, the earlier president Kummanam Rajasekharan too was despatched to Mizoram unceremoniously in the midst of a by-election in May 2018 without even consulting the RSS. He was brought back to contest a by-election at the behest of RSS, but lost.
RSS at that time itself had charged certain sections within the BJP with engineering Kummanam’s defeat in Vattiyurkkavu in Thiruvananthapuram where the party had a fair chance to win in the wake of dissidence in the Congress. Some say this was the flash point when the parent body started interfering in BJP’s internal matters directly.
Last month, in the internal party elections Krishna Das group had won nine out of the 14 districts. Still the central leadership chose to back Mraleedharan in the state, much to the annoyance of the RSS.
The intensification of anti-CAA struggles in the state came in handy for the RSS to take full control. In the absence of any counter move from the BJP in the state, the RSS began organising community meetings and house-to-house campaigns. Most of these meetings were addressed by members of the RSS shakhas. It is said that even those BJP members who took part in these meetings were in fact tutored by pracharaks. Many of the mandal office bearers and district chiefs were reportedly handpicked by the RSS. But this was denied by RSS Pranthakarya vahak (general secretary) P. Gopalankutty. “This if just a figment of media imagination… RSS has nothing to do with the organisational matters of the BJP,” he is reported to have said,
While the BJP was trying to convince Muslims that the contentious law would not affect them, RSS took the other way around: why Muslims were made to stand out. This was not to the liking of traditional BJP supporters who had always resented RSS overshadowing them. They have been turned into a minority within the party since without RSS cadre BJP is nothing in Kerala.
RSS has over 5,000 shakhas in Kerala, the highest in the country. Whether there is a conscious effort on the part of the BJP leadership to free itself from the RSS clutches is debatable, but many in the BJP feel that if the party wants to win over minorities in Kerala, then it has to distance itself from the parent body.
At the same time, the party wants to keep a militant Hindu face and Surendran seems to fit in that position. But his biggest drawback is that he has only one Sabarimala agitation to fall back on.
In the past, BJP with the help of organisations such as the SNDP, and later through Bharat Dharma Jana Sena, had cobbled up a sort of NDA coalition which is in tatters now.
Popular Adivasi leader C.K. Janu had parted ways. BDJS itself is on the verge of a split. NSS seems to be non-committal. NSS for the time being has distanced itself from the BJP as it feels that the party’s central leadership has failed them on the Sabarimala issue. Can Surendran revive NDA and win over his opponents within state BJP is the question the central leadership faces now.