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Hypocrisy Rules

Much ruckus over the move, first seen in Gujarat, to lift the ban on government employees joining the RSS. But I want to ask someone, why was there this ban in the first place? Why shouldn't they join the RSS? Or any organization at all? As far as I can see, these supposed bans achieve only one thing: they produce varieties of hypocrisy, to startling degrees.

Want examples? For one variety, take what I heard from a French teacher I know. She teaches French at a place called the Alliance Francaise. As you may know, the Alliance, or maybe I should call it L'Alliance, is a French institution with branches all over the world. Primarily, it runs classes to teach French, but it also holds film festivals, dances and other cultural events. In Bombay at any rate, it is a truly apolitical, purely cultural organization, a statement that will have echoes a little later on in this column.

Anyway, this French teacher once found an IAS officer in one of her classes. The officer sat through the whole course, over four months. One day towards the end, she came up to the teacher and said she would have to stop attending, and would not be able to take any further Alliance courses. Apparently, government regulations barred her, as a serving officer of the mighty Indian Government, from joining any "foreign" organizations. Not even if she simply wanted to take language lessons.

So what did this conscientious IAS officer do? She arranged for private tuitions with the French teacher and quite happily went on learning French. That, apparently no regulations prohibit.

So what did the ban on joining foreign organizations achieve for this particular rule-following servant of the government? Precisely nothing. She had gone to the Alliance only to learn French. Ban or not, she was still doing just that, and from the same teacher too. If the regulation was meant to keep some highly official secrets from leaking out to foreign powers via sneaky foreign organizations, in this case it would have fallen flat on its benighted face. The IAS officer could have easily whispered those secrets to her teacher and let them be passed on to the dreaded foreign powers. Now, without even needing to leave her own home.

Such is the idiocy of bans.

As for the RSS, the problem begins in the same place: the Central Civil Services Conduct Rules. They prohibit government servants from joining any political party, or any organization which participates in political activity, or even any organization that assists a political movement or party or activity. Now the general perception of the RSS over the years has been that it certainly does qualify as one such organization. Thus the ban on government servants joining it.

And that ban, I have no doubt, is wrapped in idiocy entirely similar to what happened with the French lessons. I am sure there are already legions of government servants around the country attending RSS meetings on the quiet, defying the ban. I am as sure there are other government servants attending meetings of other banned organizations as well. Which raises the question: why have such bans at all? Why the pretence that the Conduct Rules are achieving something, whatever that may be? Why this hypocrisy?

In any case, in this business of the RSS, I'm more concerned with a second variety of hypocrisy: the kind the ban on the RSS brings out in our ministers -- prime, chief and otherwise. Faced with some amount of public unease and uproar over moves to lift the ban on the RSS, there is now a regular ministerial chorus telling us that the RSS is "not a political organization", but a purely cultural one.

And just by the way, the chorus also has it, RSS is patriotic too. No faintly wrinkled brows over that juxtaposition, evidently. I mean, in what sense is a cultural organization also patriotic? Or not? Would you call Bombay's National Centre for the Performing Arts -- cultural to the core -- "patriotic"?

You see, those with sympathies for the RSS have always fumed about the ban. But how can they get rid of it? Changing those ridiculous Conduct Rules to throw out the restriction is one way, but the sympathisers don't have the stomach for it. For that will open a troublesome can of worms: there'll be government servants joining all kinds of other organizations that RSS-philes find distasteful. Clearly, they think, those other organizations must remain banned. So the Conduct Rules will have to stay.

The only other way is hypocrisy. Pretence.

Which is why we first had Gujarat's Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel singing the "RSS is not a political outfit" song, as his government lifted the ban. Soon enough, other ministers were adding their own dulcet tones to his: Minister LK Advani, Minister MM Joshi. And then the man himself: Prime Minister Vajpayee. "It is a cultural and social organization," he said of the RSS at a function on February 5, "and I do not think objections should be raised to anybody joining it."

And I thought to myself, yes indeed, right you are, you honourable ministers, prime and otherwise! After all, who else but a thoroughly cultural outfit would print an eloquent exhortation to the prime minister in its mouthpiece? I refer, of course, to the RSS mouthpiece, Panchajanya. For this is what appeared in there last June -- at the height of the Kargil war: "Rise Atal Bihari, for destiny may have ordained you to write the last chapter of this long story [of Pakistani violence against India]. Why else did we make the bomb, why else did we test our missiles?"

A more social, more cultural, more cultured, outburst is hard to imagine, you will agree. In fact, I think I will suggest to some other cultural outfits -- you know, the NCPA, the Jehangir Art Gallery, the Bombay Natural History Society, places like those -- that they insert such appeals in their regular newsletters. Then not only will their cultural credentials be immeasurably firmed up, they will even be hailed as "patriotic."

Sarcasm aside, what's the sense in claiming the RSS is a purely cultural gathering? Its rank and file, its leaders, its followers who are now in various positions of political power across the country, and the rest of us -- everyone knows that it is determinedly political. It has its political agenda. I don't even need to cite more examples to make that point -- I'm sure you would have said the same even without the quote from Panchajanya above.

There's nothing in the least wrong with being political. Lots of us are. I happen to think the RSS's politics is hollow, but there's nothing wrong with that either. Lots of us are hollow. What's wrong is the torturous pretence, solely to get around those Rules, that the RSS is purely cultural and social. Yet men like Advani and Patel and our most exalted elected public servant, Vajpayee, have precisely this laboured hypocrisy draped all over them today.

The questions to ask are not about a ban. They are about why these men resort to this obvious fakery. Why they cannot find the fibre to say: yes, the RSS is a political organization, but we like its politics and have no objection to anyone signing up with it.

Why they cannot find the fibre, too, to say: these Conduct Rules are silly. We're doing away with them. From now on, government employees can join any organization they feel like: from the RSS to the Jamaat-i-Islami to the Bombay Natural History Society to L'Alliance Francaise. We don't care, as long as they put in a honest day's work. That's all we demand. That's the only Conduct Rule we have, and we will enforce it.

Now that last bit, about an honest day's work, is the kind of patriotism the country needs most desperately of all. If we got that from every government employee, there would be no reason to give a damn about the organizations they join. But apparently nobody's politics -- not the RSS, not its ministerial choirboys, prime or otherwise -- extends to ensuring that much. No: all we are given is hypocrisy.

And they call that patriotic.

Tailpiece:
---------------
In my column from a few weeks ago Few Notice The Terror, I wrote about the CBI's Special Court of Inquiry into the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Specifically, I mentioned that the case had been adjourned 24 times since October 1997 because the 49 accused -- including Home Minister LK Advani -- have consistently chosen to remain absent.

Make that 25 times. Here's a news item ("Babri trial is put off once again") from The Times of India, February 10, 2000: "The high profile trial in the Babri demolition case was on Wednesday deferred yet again by the special CBI court as an exemption application on behalf of the 49 alleged accused persons was moved by their respective counsels and was allowed. Additional Sessions Judge JP Srivastava fixed March 28 for framing of charges with the direction that on this date all the accused must appear in person. Personal attendance will not be exempted through counsel on this date unless they produce a story [sic: think they mean "stay"] order from Allahabad High Court."

What odds that none of these honourable men and women, with Home Minister LK Advani showing the evasive way, will be in that courtroom come March 28?

Dilip D'Souza