Foot Soldiers Of The Sangh

As elections near, the RSS is deploying its student wing and other affiliates to crank up its mammoth electoral engine

- Uday Mahurkar

A GROUP OF STUDENTS attached to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), sit at two counters in the arts faculty of Delhi University (DU). One is on the main pathway outside the faculty and the other, just a few metres away, in the office of the ABVP, the university’s elected students’ union. Their job: to identify, enrol and educate new voters on the eve of the 2019 general election. As new voters, mostly 18- to 20-year-olds, walk in to fill up the forms, they can’t escape the literature, or the handwritten posters on the office walls. One of them says ‘Vote for a strong leadership, vote for a better India’, another goes ‘How’s the josh? Go and vote, Sir’, echoing the line from Uri, the film on the so-called ‘surgical strikes’ in September 2016.

The posters have one thing in common. They don’t say ‘vote Modi’ or ‘vote BJP’ directly, but they do draw on the prime minister’s punch lines. One poster is quite direct: ‘Want revenge for Pulwama. Vote for a new India.’ All this notwithstanding the Supreme Court directive on not using the army for campaign purposes. But this is obviously campaigning Sangh Parivar style. Says Siddharth Sharma, a local ABVP leader: “We never take names, we only talk about issues.” Priya Sharma, a political science student and ABVP worker, adds that “most students who come here go back fairly impressed by our focused approach to issues”.