Is Organiser anything more than a mouthpiece of RSS?

NEW DELHI: What is the difference between an ideologically committed publication and the mouthpiece of a political party? Who gets to write editorials and who is held liable for them make the critical difference, according to Prafulla Ketkar, editor of the Organiser, which has been published by Bharat Prakashan and long considered the mouthpiece of the RSS.
The question arose after the Organiser published an editorial lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to China, a country towards which the RSS is known to have a hawkish attitude. As headlines popped up attributing a change in the RSS attitude, as demonstrated by the editorial, Ketkar was at pains to declare that the Organiser was reflecting its own editorial line and not the views of the RSS.

“Yes, we represent an ideological stream of cultural nationalism, but we are not a mouthpiece,” said Ketkar, who was teaching at Pune University before he took up his current job.

“Unlike People’s Democracy (mouthpiece of the CPI-M), where the party general secretary writes the editorials, and Saamna, where every editorial is vetted by the Thackerays (of the Shiv Sena), I have never produced any editorial before anyone from the RSS or the BJP,” he said. According to Ketkar, he wouldn’t have clarified all this had it not been for the fact that the BJP government was in power.

“Since every issue of the Organiser becomes critical for the mainstream media as a feeding ground for RSSrelated news, it hampers our editorial autonomy, an autonomy which saw us interview Sitaram Yechury (CPI-M), and carry articles by Jayprakash Narayan and Madhu Limaye (Janata Party),” he said.

“Read us for getting a sense of the cultural nationalism ecosystem, but that’s not the same as being the mouthpiece of the RSS.” According to Sheshadri Chari, who edited the magazine in the tumultuous years of the 1990s and when BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, while the broad contours of ideology are shared, the magazine has criticised the NDA government in the past, but of course, never the RSS. “When Atalji was Prime Minister, I myself have written editorials in support of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch and against the government’s economic reform policy, as well as critiqued its Tibet policy,” he said.

RSS prachar pramukh Manmohan Vaidya agrees with both Ketkar and Chari. “There are at least nine publications which are brought out by swayamsewaks in various languages. They may pertain to the ideology, but it cannot be said that the RSS is responsible for everything published in them,” he told ET.

While Ketkar may be “technically right”, one still needs to understand the “connectivity between all these organisations”, said sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan. “At one level they are one, at another they pretend not to know each other in order to occupy all spectrums,” he said. Calling Organiser another shade of saffron, he said: “Red, or maroon, it’s the same spectrum of colour.”