If the UPA government insists on siding with HRD minister, in his detoxification effort, the matter will no doubt be taken to the Supreme Court.
Joe McCarthy is not dead. Nor is McCarthyism which sent the United States into convulsions in the fifties of the last century. A new form of McCarthyism is now being offered by Human Resources Development Minister Arjun Singh on the ground that those who have sympathies for the RSS must be weeded out of government employ. Exactly how this task is to be conducted has not yet been specified.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is reportedly against an RSS hunt, if we are to believe 'Deccan Chronicle' (August 12). The main accusation against the RSS is that one of its votaries was responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. That RSS has been cleared of all guilt in this regard obviously does not concern Mr. Arjun Singh. It is the old story of the wolf and the sheep.
Ideological politics
If one wants to condemn an organisation or a party any argument is good enough. If Arjun Singh is serious about hounding out RSS sympathisers, he should take a good look at the record of his most ardent supporters, the Communists who betrayed Congress volunteers in large numbers to the British police and had many of them tortured and killed. Does Mr. Arjun Singh know that the CPI's leader, P.C. Joshi claimed at one stage that his party had done more to track down Congress 'saboteur' (that is the word used by Joshi to describe those fighting the British during 1942 in the Quit India Movement) than even the police?
He would do well to read K.K. Chaudhuri's 'Quit India Revolution' (pages 184 to 213) also to learn that the Communists were strongly promoting the partition of India. If these are his friends today, God save the Congress. But the media - at least the English language media - seems unaware of these facts. Even so the media is very chary of supporting Arjun Singh. The strongly anti-BJP 'Hindustan Times' (August 11) is of the view that while the HRD Minister is not incorrect in his belief that the nation's administration needs to be cleansed of ideological politics, "Mr. Singh's crusade to weed out 'RSS elements' from the system must not end up being a mass replacement of one set of ideologically-driven officials for another".
The paper said that "the UPA government needs to handle this extensive 'detoxification' process carefully" and added as an afterthought that both Mr. Arjun Singh and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh "should ignore the ruckus and instead focus on appointing people whose competence, and not ideology or loyalty, is the only indicator to ascertain whether they are fit or not for the job of running the nation".
The Kolkata-based 'The Statesman' (August 12) described Arjun Singh's diatribe against the so-called RSS sympathisers in government as "wholly unnecessary". It said: "To cull the bureaucracy of a previous government's political appointees may be necessary, indeed defensible. But to declare that any official's personal political beliefs means he is unsuitable for this government, is to start a witch hunt". The paper described "such ideological pruning" as "the Left's hallmark in governance". The Hyderabad-based 'Deccan Chronicle' (August 13) more friendly to Arjun Singh's views thought that his was "an aggressive agenda that cannot be ignored" but noted that "it is no secret that this is not the Congress' official line".
For all that, the paper supported the HRD Minister, saying: "Arjun Singh might or might not have allowed political considerations to influence his decision to raise the issue of confronting the RSS, but he has definitely raised questions that his party will have to answer if it wants to actually defeat communalism and establish a strong India based on mutual trust, social justice and secularism". 'The Telegraph' (August 12) objected to Arjun Singh's support to the acceptance of astrology as a subject for university studies and said: "Mr. Singh has proved only one thing: he should be kept as far as possible from education".
To that it added: "Mr. Singh projects himself as a great champion of secularism. But his brand of secularism does not separate politics from religion and neither does it fight superstition and obscurantism". The one outstanding paper which did not spare Arjun Singh is 'The Free Press Journal' (August 13). It recalled that Arjun Singh has always wanted to be Prime Minister, that his "frustration" has corroded his judgment and world view and that the Prime Minister "will be well-advised to ensure that his HRD Minister is fully rid of this potentially harmful mental malaise before it begins to tell on the conduct of his administration".
Recalling Arjun Singh's role in the Churhat lottery case, his refusal to resign "when as Chief Minister he did not deem it fit to quit" following the "world's biggest industrial accident" in Bhopal, the paper condemned his "shocking behaviour", in no uncertain terms. The paper then added: "The secularist ploy, the new form of McCarthyism, is part of the game of one-upmanship that Singh is known to play to position himself higher than the perceived competition in the Congress Party.... Unless Arjun Singh is stopped in his track, the divisiveness he seeks to create in the polity on the question of both the re-writing of history books and now the so-called crusade against the RSS is bound to recall on the UPA government. If Singh has his Stalinist fellow-travellers to draw 'intellectual' sustenance from, the RSS and its cadres are equally empowered by the Constitution to draw sustenance from the soul of the country, from its seers and saints. If the HRD Minister quarrels with this fundamental fact, if his idea of nationhood is rooted in a foreign ideology, he ought to refurbish even at this late stage his mind or better still move on to a less demanding portfolio where his capacity to do damage is immensely reduced".
School bully
And for good measure, the paper added: "Even otherwise, a precarious coalition of tainted and not-so-tainted Ministers can hardly afford to open too many fronts thus exposing its vulnerability further". 'The Indian Express' (August 13) said Arjun Singh was behaving "much like the school bully urging rivals to the field outside" and pointed out that "as this war of words escalates, Singh must know that his Ministry would be increasingly compromised".
Its advice to the Minister was "talk
less, work more". In the end, if the UPA government insists on siding with
the HRD Minister, the matter will no doubt be taken to the Supreme Court.
Already the country is being divided and what Mr. Arjun Singh is doing
is to widen the division and bring hatred to a land which has had enough
of it. If the Prime Minister is really against Arjun Singh's RSS hunt,
his job is well cut out. Either he has to carry on the hunt not just in
the HRD Ministry, but in all Ministries and in all government offices all
over the country leading to a massive social unrest, or resign. But, according
to 'The Statesman' (August 11) "Babudom is not bothered about the HRD Minister's
war cry" on the ground that "such statements might sound great as political
rhetoric but they cannot stand the test of government rules and regulations".
But if a senior Minister does not realise this, what sort of Minister does
he make?