To many more who hardly get a peek into the RSS which is the banyan tree of the parivar, someone like Subhash Velingkar is either not known or is a supreme enigma. Or let’s change that to “was” an enigma. For those who follow Goa’s politics even cursorily, a RSS organisation man, who like Chief Minister Parsekar, has been a professor and an academic, was never expected to be the BJP’s strongest and perhaps most electorally dangerous foe. Today, he is getting increasingly recognised among many grass-root workers as indeed being BJP’s biggest foe.
The question is, is Subhash Velingkar, going to be the man who will stop the BJP from coming to power in 2017, or has he been “shown his place” by a powerful Manohar Parrikar, who made the distinction between governance and ideology, by keeping the grants for English schools going without actually bringing in a legislation to that effect. Those close to the former Chief Minister and Defence Minister are categorical that if the BJP government had allowed itself to be run by the RSS and the BBSM, it would have lost a lot of ground, with polarisation complete in minority dominated areas. The irony though is that the BJP has anyway lost ground in these areas.
Secondly, Parrikar and Velingkar go back a very long way as brothers-in-arms and comrades. And there was time when Velingkar, unlike any other RSS top brass leader in any state, used to exercise a lot of control in the ruling party and even monitor minister’s performances as well as, at times decide portfolio allocation.
However, Mr Parrikar, during his second term as Chief Minister, wanted to literally break free. The mandate of 2012, unprecedented as it were, made Mr Parrikar take a different approach to governance during the heady first year of his term. And the more stringent BBSM became, as it upped the ante against the Chief Minister for withdrawing grants to English medium schools, Parrikar became even more stringent that the decision would be taken by the government and not the parivar. Of course the actual indecision on MoI will come back to affect the BJP, but neither of the men, Parrikar and Velingkar refused to cede any ground, the union Defence Minister insisting that a decision will be of the Goa government and not the Parivar and Mr Velingkar insisting that a BJP government has to be dictated by the Parivar’s ideology.
It is measure of the clout Mr Parrikar has started commanding within the RSS top brass that the Sanghs topmost leader in Goa, could actually have been removed. His role though, in this, for obvious reasons will never be confirmed.
Then the unthinkable happened. The entire RSS organisation in Goa including workers and cadre, quit en masse and gathered close to midnight at the Hegdewar school in Bambolim on Wednesday and attacked Parrikar openly. This would have never been imagined either by the Parivar or the party.
But there are no winners here. Camp Parrikar feels very strongly that the average Goan BJP worker has changed. He is not necessarily a cadre and Sangh worker but is a new age BJP worker who looks at his future and what the party can do for him. A senior Sangh Parivar ideologue who is now crucial BJP organisation functionary feels that in many seats, the Velingkar effect will be neutralized because the cadre is not from the RSS.
However, this obviously isn’t the 100% picture. The show of strength at the Hegdewar School in favour of Velingkar and the cadre that he has created in vast swathes of Bicholim, Ponda, Quepem and Pernem talukas, will indeed pose worries for the BJP.
The angry tide of a scorned RSS is something the BJP has never faced and this alone may become its albatross.
