Of the over 30 outfits living and, at times, thriving under the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s banyan tree-like shelter, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad has emerged as the BJP’s stand-in, pursuing an agenda and fulfilling ends that come closest to the political party’s mandate. The BJP was the RSS’s best-known offspring even in its earlier manifestation, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, although the BJS was a peripheral player in Indian politics. Having grown exponentially from the late 1980s, the BJP never looked back even in a low phase from 2004 to 2014. In recent years, it came close to overwhelming the patriarch but never allowed itself to do so, realising that the parent commanded a stature within the extended family the BJP could never hope for.
On the other hand, the paterfamilias gave the ABVP the space to expand but, in its evolution, the BJP ensured that the organisation became critically dependent on it for survival and advancement. Other “Sangh-inspired”—a term used on the RSS website—setups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh waxed and waned in the course of their lives and are seldom seen or heard in the present BJP regime. Their sphere of activity is clear-cut and they seldom overstep the boundary except when authorised by the Sangh. The VHP’s core work area was fighting to ‘restore’ temples allegedly demolished to build mosques; the SJM was tasked to ‘correct’ aberrations in the government’s economic policies whenever these were seen pandering to foreign collaborators.
Not the ABVP. It began as the Sangh’s student wing and by diligence, networking, resilience, and hard-headedness, succeeded even if success meant being yoked to Big Brother BJP. That was too small a price to pay for learning political life’s lessons.
The ABVP’s triumphs run parallel to the BJP’s victories. This September, it captured the Delhi University Students’ Union, the Hyderabad Central University panel and the presidential post of the Panjab University Campus Students’ Council, the last being a surprise because the BJP has barely existed in Punjab since it snapped ties with longtime ally Shiromani Akali Dal.
In the Panjab University polls, the ABVP did what Big Brother does to overcome a genetic weakness: seek the hands of non-aligned parties to consolidate votes. The tactic fructified into a coalition of the ABVP, the Indian National Students Organisation (backed by the Chautalas) and the Haryana Rashtriya Students’ Committee. The alliance was significant because the university has a sizeable share of students from Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. This union presidency is important in another sense: it mixes ideology with pragmatism, marking the beginning of the acceptance of RSS doctrines—something that has long eluded the ‘parivar’ in the western state.
The ABVP was founded in 1949 as the RSS’s first affiliate by Balraj Madhok, then an indispensable part of the Sangh. Madhok entrusted Yashwantrao Kelkar, a literature professor from Mumbai, to put the nuts and bolts together. The BJS came two years later. For the Sangh, at that point, it seemed as though channelling students’ energy into anti-establishment movements was more important than forming a political party. The idea of setting up a political party hit the RSS only when the long arm of the day’s government began hurting it hard after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and suspicion that the Sangh was complicit.
The ABVP’s charter stated that students’ power should be harnessed into “nation’s power and not become a nuisance”. Its members were directed to play a “leading role in public education, public service... while confronting corruption and anti-national attributes with fervent pride”. Clearly, the code encompassed a range of issues a political party would take up.
But the line between aspiring for “nation’s power” and not becoming a nuisance often gets blurred when the ABVP is laser-focused on winning elections. For instance, Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University has long been an ABVP target; but despite all its attempts, the organisation has never been able to wrench it from the Left’s stranglehold except for picking up an odd seat or two. The central government, which thinks alike, has sometimes used brute force on rival unions’ activists through cops, resulting in violence. Indeed, the nature of issues the ABVP takes up—from displacement of Kashmiri Pandits and “illegal” immigration in Assam, to protests against beef consumption, “offending” films, and Rohith Vemula’s suicide—makes for fierce confrontations with its ideological adversaries, which have earned the outfit the “bully boy” label.
Over the years, the ‘bully boy’ has transformed into a wellspring of BJP’s talent pool. ABVP alumni form the cream of the Narendra Modi government. J P Nadda, BJP president and cabinet minister, emerged from the organisation as a student of Patna University in the high noon of 1975, when the RSS deployed its student wing in the service of Jayaprakash Narayan’s ‘Total Revolution’. Many ABVP activists were incarcerated for “waging a war” against the State. The protests created the first phalanx of second-generation leaders for the BJP that was under the shadow of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and later, L K Advani. Arun Jaitley and Sushil Modi were minted by the anti-Emergency protests, as were Ravi Shankar Prasad and K N Govindacharya. The post-Emergency phase saw a big growth of ABVP on India’s campuses, where it contested more elections, especially in the north. The alumni sported the organisation’s badge proudly.
The Modi system’s ABVP elite force includes Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, Dharmendra Pradhan, Bhupender Yadav, Pralhad Joshi and Nitin Gadkari, while the ABVP alumni among BJP chief ministers include Rekha Gupta, Yogi Adityanath, Devendra Fadnavis, Pushkar Singh Dhami, Mohan Yadav, Bhajanlal Sharma and Pramod Sawant. For Modi, the RSS was the ladder, while minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat came in through the RSS’s farmers’ front.
As some consider the ABVP passageway an easier entry point to BJP leadership than the RSS—avoiding the rigours of shakhas and training camps—insiders ascribe the student wing’s political contribution to its ability to discern and nurture youth leadership, impart skills to speak, debate, confront and agitate, stay grounded, and get exposed to the trends of the day. Not for nothing does the ABVP boast of nearly 60 lakh members today.
Radhika Ramaseshan | Columnist and political commentator
(Views are personal)
