One may find many opinions of BJP MP Subramanian Swamy to be extreme, but he has never shied away from being honest about the nature of his party's ideology and Hindutva. Thursday was no different as Swamy tweeted the BJP cannot survive without the RSS, widely regarded as its ideological fount.
Swamy described the RSS as a “power plant” and BJP MPs as the “bulbs which shine on getting electricity.” Swamy tweeted, “BJP cannot survive without RSS. Understand that RSS is the power plant. We MPs are bulbs which shine on getting electricity or can get fused. But RSS does not micro manage BJP and its macro perspective is complex. This I learnt the hard way. PTs should learn this.”
In recent years, Swamy has emerged as among the most outspoken of BJP leaders on issues of Hindutva ideology such as the Ayodhya dispute. However, the last two lines of his tweet, addressed to “patriotic tweeple” (PTs), will also evoke memories of Swamy's once-bitter relationship with the RSS.
Though Swamy was part of the Jana Sangh, the predecessor to the BJP, he reportedly fell out with the organisation due to opposition from late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In her 2017 book Evolving with Subramanian Swamy: A Roller Coaster Ride, Roxna Swamy, his wife, claims the RSS sided with Vajpayee in excluding her husband when the BJP was formed in 1980.
Swamy, who sided with socialist outfits in the 1980s, played a crucial role in bringing together AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaa and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in 1999 with the aim of bringing down Vajpayee's government. Swamy had then said the aim was to form a “secular” government.
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In early 2000, Swamy wrote an article in Frontline magazine titled The RSS game plan about the outfit's plans to establish a 'Hindu rashtra'. In the same year, he wrote in The Hindu that leaders of the BJP and RSS had “betrayed the struggle against the Emergency”. As examples, Swamy cited “apology letters” written to the then Congress government of Indira Gandhi by RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras and Vajpayee.
In September 2006, Swamy publicly re-established ties with the RSS when the organisation's then chief, K.S. Sudarshan, attended the release of his book Hindus Under Siege: The Way Out. Swamy merged his Janata Party with the BJP in 2013.
In 2015, Swamy tweeted “I have understood RSS after an agni pariksha. Per capita there are more patriotic persons in RSS than any other organisation.”