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As Parliament midwifed the new state of Telangana finally on Thursday, the Congress may have reasons to thank its old bugbear, RSS, more than its own fractious MPs, for the legislative success.
The unusual sight of the Congress and the BJP voting on the same side of an issue, insiders told ET, was a result of the RSS bearing down on the BJP “to keep to the right side of our ideology”.
“There was a clear distaste on the part of some senior leaders including L K Advani on clearing the bill in such din and without the presence of the 16 MPs from Seemandhra who were important stake holders in the division,” said a senior source in the RSS.
“However it has been our longstanding ideological position that smaller states are good, and that this Bill cannot be allowed to hang fire for the next government to deal with,” he added.
“Our support for Telangana has been more than three decades in the making,” the RSS insider said. The instructions were passed on to the BJP at its Sunday meeting on the issue.
What was left unsaid was the bonhomie between the BJP and Seemandhra politicians such as N Chandrababu Naidu and YSR Congress Party chief Jagan Mohan Reddy had also left RSS cold.
The development shows that the RSS is very much in the driving seat not just in the larger ideological framework of the BJP, but the tone and tenor of its campaign message. This has been sometime in the making.
More recently, when the BJP and Narendra Modi started getting cosy with Chandrababu Naidu, the state unit in Andhra Pradesh virtually revolted, and the RSS’ own leaders had a less-than favourable opinion of the proposed alliance.
The reason was simple: Naidu stood to gain more than the BJP in the arrangement, and all that the latter would get was the tag that Modi was no longer untouchable.
Therefore, despite repeated meetings, no formal announcement of an alliance between the the BJP and the TDP has yet been announced. And, now, after the formation of Telangana, an alliance looks unlikely.
Source: ToI
