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Look who's trying to bring down Indian PM Modi

NDA allies like Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) have started acting tough.

The right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) in India kicked off a three-day conclave in Delhi on Monday by praising the main Opposition Congress party for securing India's independence. It also clarified it did not believe in a Congress-mukt (Congress-free) India but a sarvalok-yukt (all-inclusive) India. It came as a surprise because the RSS' prime minister, Narendra Modi, has spent four years spewing venom against the Congress, its prime ministers and the family that holds the party together. Certainly, the RSS revealed its changed thinking when it invited Congress chief Rahul Gandhi to this conclave. Despite Rahul's surprise hug for Modi in Parliament, better sense prevailed and he spurned the RSS invitation (unlike former president Pranab Mukherjee, who attended an RSS function in Nagpur in June, thinking he was laying the ground for himself to head a coalition government after the 2019 election). And though the RSS is eternally tainted with the assassination of "Mahatma" MK Gandhi in 1948, it has occasionally flirted with the Congress as evidenced by the fact of dozens of RSS men named as culprits in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
Still it is surprising that with a majority government still in the saddle and about eight months to go before the parliamentary election, the RSS finds it necessary to extend an olive branch to the main opposition party. It cannot be, as the RSS claims, that it is a misunderstood organisation and that this exercise is meant to dispel the wrong notions surrounding it. The RSS thrives on a certain element of mystery and myth given its rigid hierarchy and organisation and its para-military nature. There is only one explanation for the RSS's current behaviour: it has read the writing on the wall that its government is on its way out. Hence it is building bridges with opposition parties, because it fears what may come once Modi is out of power.
That things are not going well for Modi is evident from various other recent developments. NDA allies like Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) have started acting tough. The Bihar chief minister, who till recently was silently facing all-round opprobrium for dumping his electoral partner (the Rashtriya Janata Dal) and hitching his wagon to the BJP, is now demanding his pound of flesh before the next parliamentary election - he does not want just a handful of seats to contest and has formally inducted Prashant Kishor, the data-genius behind Modi's 2014 victory, into his party to ensure it remains the senior partner in any future electoral alliance in Bihar. Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has demanded an early assembly election in which he hopes to do well, and he is least bothered about Modi's pet project of a simultaneous parliamentary and assembly election. Even Ram Vilas Paswan, a dalit leader from Bihar who is reliably a political weathercock, has been talking about leaving Modi's National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The rats are obviously deserting the sinking ship.
The RSS would likely be concerned. In Delhi there is a general expectation that Modi's parliamentary tally will decrease to around 150 seats following the 2019 election, and while that would ordinarily be enough to remove a leader and replace him with someone acceptable to coalition partners (who have been silently licking their wounds of neglect the past four-plus years), the RSS also knows that removing either Modi or party chief Amit Shah will not be easy. Both these gentlemen are apparently willing to sit in opposition and let a coalition government totter about for two to two and a half years before finally collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Modi fashions himself after iron lady Indira Gandhi, and like her, might bide his time to return to the top post as she did in 1980, after a nearly three-year hiatus.
This does not suit the RSS, which would rather try to retain governance under a different prime minister, heading a coalition that was much like the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government. There are various advantages to this: to consolidate much of the hidden social work and deep changes in the education sector that the rightwing has undertaken since May 2014. Modi has been such a polarising figure that a replacement government would want to first of all undo much of the damage to institutions that he has inflicted, in the name of getting things done, where his will was supreme over any Constitutional nicety or propriety.
First things first, however: the RSS has to save its own skin. There are many political parties who would like to give the RSS cadres a thrashing of their lives. The RSS must be highly conscious of the fact that the atmosphere against it will change drastically once Modi loses power. Hence, the RSS top brass have humbly recounted Congress's contribution of independent India's history, and have extended the peace pipe to Rahul Gandhi. It is a heartening sign for Indian democracy that Rahul has showed the RSS its place - that it does not rule supreme over all Indians, but merely over a sullen part of society, whose achhe din are hopefully soon coming to an end.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India and author, most recently, of The Spy Chronicles: Raw, ISI and the Illusion of Peace