Whether to continue wearing those comical short pants is not the only crisis in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Quick on the heels of their brand new and ‘young’ sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat expressing a need for the ‘cultural’ organisation to keep pace with the times by presenting a more respectable front through a costume makeover, it turns out that they need to do some cosmetic dressing for their political front, the BJP too.
It sends out all sorts of mixed signals. First of all, it is touching to see that the RSS is now reflecting on its own ‘image’. The common perception is that the BJP suffered a huge loss of face in its electoral debacle in the recent elections. But no one has paused to inform us how the RSS received this electoral slap on the face of its political mukhota. My contention is the loss to the RSS was considerably more. For the first time in years they realised that the smug expressions they sported on their faces at the ascendance of the BJP through the 1990s and which they had interpreted as the victory of their own political philosophy of ‘cultural nationalism’, had come a cropper.
Integrated into the RSS’s quest for a face-change (more, a face-lift) is the self-contradictory idea of projecting themselves as a congregation of the ‘young’. They are busy now trying to sell the idea that their antediluvian ideas of a politics anchored on hard religion is the oxygen on which a newly youthful India will anchor itself. Without wanting to bring about any change in their core ideology, they are taking the easy route of making us believe that by replacing a gerontocracy by more middle-aged leaders they are automatically creating a ‘young’ organisation. It never ceases to surprise that in India we continue to look at those above fifty as ‘young’ whereas many societies would treat even 35 as an age too high for that.
That the RSS is loath to give up trying hard to push the Hindutva envelope is evident from the ongoing controversy they have initiated in the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh, where the practice of Surya Namaskar and Pranayama are sought to be made compulsory in schools. It has predictably raised the hackles of those running ‘minority’ institutions as being a clever attempt to infiltrate their institutions with neo-Hindu ideas. That the RSS/BJP is trapped in a rather narrow mindset is more than evident in this example. What one objects to, however, is how in the process they end up giving a bad name to a perfectly legitimate and no-religious set of physical practices that have helped millions keep fit. It would be as silly for example to call Yunani system of medicine Islamic or the Ayurvedic system as Hindu. It is a mark of the failure of the RSS that its laborious appropriation of cultural markers and its attempt to fit it into a monotheistic grid are quite out of tune with the mindset and thinking of the truly young in our society.
One almost feels like giving out a call to the fashion fraternity of the country to imagine a new uniform for the RSS. It is universally accepted that there can be nothing more boring and unattractive than their present attire of shirt, bell-bottomed shorts and broad belts borrowed most likely from the early boy-scouts movement. (No comments on the boy-scoutish politics they went about playing after donning the attire). The black cap, which too was a colonial piece of sartorial accoutrement that had been adopted in Maharashtra, became their accepted headgear. It should be child’s play to redesign this piece of mish-mash.
What contemporary fashion designers will have to pay attention to, however, is how to make it trendy, smart and ‘cool’. It won’t be a bad idea, in fact, to call for a national costume design contest for the RSS. The brief should be that the proposed design should be able reveal adequate ‘saffron’ or ‘yellow’ to enable those looking at it to evaluate the quantum of national cultural sentiment the wearer is comfortable with. One daresay that a newly-attired and outfitted RSS is sure to become an instant hit with India’s young. It is a moot point whether they might want to adapt the RSS’s politics; but they are sure to want to be seen wearing the fashionable togs and it can be a source of some instant revenue to Jhandewala.
Their attempt to give a youthful twist to the BJP though, is fraught with greater distress. That would require nothing short of plastic surgery. It is impossible to get the BJP straightened out politically. The party has got too mixed up in its own contradictions. But the RSS can try the cultural route. Now that the official ‘iron wall’ between the Church and the State, between the RSS and the BJP has fallen, no harm in dressing up their frontsmen in Parliament too in the costume and wait for ‘youthful’ political dividends.
