making him their favourite punching bag and reducing his stature to a mere local politician, is a temporary nightmare. But the ground level feedback is that that this nightmare is for real. And while the all knowing Mr Parrikar has the divine habit of blaming all, including Herald, for the apparent divide between the RSS and the BJP, it is he alone who is blame for the mess he has put the party in over grants to schools based on their medium of instruction at the primary level.
It is not as if he was not warned. A section of the senior party leadership had advised him, just after he won the elections, that his policy of letting ‘sleeping dogs lie’ and not addressing the issue, while giving grants to 137 odd schools run by the archdiocese, would haunt him by the end of his term. This scenario is being played out exactly as prophesised but with a slight twist. No one had imagined that the BBSM, whose poster boy Parrikar was, would turn into his most vocal public critic, accusing and abusing him in a manner even the opposition hasn’t dared to do. It is not a trade secret that the Bharatiya Bhasha Suraksha Manch, is a confirmed acolyte of the RSS. Before 2012 Mr Parrikar was indeed comfortable in that avatar, sitting on a dharna with his BBSM colleagues sporting a black BBSM Tee shirt. As Chief Minister, Parrikar was so overwhelmed by his victories in Salcete and appropriated them to his own goodwill with the Archbishop and the Church, that he chose to continue to give sops to Church backed schools, even though he was with the RSS/BBSM on the issue of not giving grants to English medium schools.
But he fell off trying to balance politics with ideology. In fact before the 2012 elections, the creative matter for a hand out and an advertisement stating emphatically that the BJP was in favour of education only in the mother tongue was withdrawn hastily at the last moment by Parrikar, after Salcete based leaders told him that this would be a political disaster in the making. But once in government, Chief Minister Parrikar should have had the courage to either take the BBSM and RSS into confidence and make the cabinet decision of giving grants to Church based schools into a more broad based policy move of giving grants according to parents choice for all schools. Or he should have declared that his party’s policy is to support education only in the mother tongue and therefore, he was going back to the drawing board and framing a policy according to the ideology of his party. The BBSM has now termed him ‘narad’, the mythological character who causes rifts between two parties, even within the family. The sobriquet fits to the extent that Mr Parrikar kept FORCE happy by maintaining that grants were coming their way and compulsions prevented him for going ahead with an act to freeze it. He cleverly did not reveal that the moment he made this into an act, it would be challenged in court since giving grants to only Church based institutions would tantamount to discrimination on the ground of religion. If grants have to be given, then they have to be extended to all English schools. At the same time he kept BBSM at bay saying that his policy was not to give grants and hence he was not bringing an act into place. He was trying to be too clever by half.
However, it is crucial to account for the fact that this has given RSS the handle that it wanted to, to attack the government’s functioning. It used its blue eyed boy minister Rajendra Arlekar to make a statement on the government’s wrongs and how the decision should be revisited. This was followed by Union minister Mr Shripad Naik speaking to the media on the sidelines of the inauguration of a bridge which he attended along with Mr Parrikar, and asked the government to revisit the issue of giving grants to English medium schools. This was done on the very day, in fact the very time, that the BBSM was holding a rally in Pernem where Parrikar was called ‘Narad’ and ‘Hitler’, by the BBSM. BBSM convenor and the most important RSS functionary Subhash Velingkar said, “If the government thinks people can be taken for granted, time is not far away to pull down this government.” This could well indicate that RSS is threatening to prop up another leadership and have an alternative parivar led government. This is where players like Arlekar and Shripad Naik come into play.
If Chief Minister Parsekar is clever (and who knows that may well be a game plan), he may surrender at the altar of the RSS with an excuse that he had to bow down to his overall leadership and say that in any case the decision to give grants to Church schools was not his. For all you know, that is the last ditch compromise formula that the BJP may be looking for, blessed by the RSS.
In any case, the internal reputation of one man has been hit permanently – Manohar Parrikar.
