Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah launched a scathing attack on Union Home Minister Amit Shah for his remarks on B.R. Ambedkar in Parliament. Siddaramaiah said Shah would have been a "Gujari" (scrap dealer) if there wasn't Ambedkar's Constitution. He also criticized Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar for not taking action against Shah for his comments. The Congress leader further accused the BJP and Sangh Parivar of hating Ambedkar and the Constitution. Siddaramaiah also recalled the RSS's opposition to the Constitution and Ambedkar in the past, citing articles from the RSS mouthpiece 'Organiser' and Golwalkar's book "Bunch of Thought."
'Undeniably, Modi's position has stabilised and he has staged a comeback of sorts from the weeks after the Lok Sabha results.' 'Coalition partners are likely to be more tolerant of Modi... The forthcoming elections in Delhi and Bihar will determine whether this continues or not.' 'To win Delhi and Bihar, Modi will have to work in conjunction with the RSS.' 'However, because of the 'truce' that has been worked out within the Sangh Parivar, Modi will have to be more consultative than he has been in the past ten years,' reveals Modi biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Addressing diplomats, the RSS chief says his organisation doesn't support online trolling.
BJP and RSS leaders are once again pushing to remove the words 'secular' and 'socialist' from the Constitution's Preamble, showing a deeper effort to change India's identity from a diverse, multi-religious republic to a Hindu-first nation, even though they don't have the numbers in Parliament to officially change the Constitution, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Sangh leaders flay BJP for 'diluting' ideology \n\n\n\n
Besides the not-so-hidden unease between Modi and Adityanath, Modi chose to address the Lok Sabha to ensure that he could personally claim all the kudos, observes Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
The Opposition has alleged that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh runs the Narendra Modi government.
A 28-year-old man was injured in an explosion that took place on the terrace of his house near Vatakara while allegedly attempting to make country bombs, the police said in Kozhikode on Thursday.
Taking the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena head-on, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on Sunday said that it has asked its volunteers to protect north Indians in Maharashtra and prevent the spread of anti-Hindi feelings. "The Sangh Parivar has asked its volunteers in Maharashtra to try and prevent the spread of anti-north Indian and anti-Hindi feelings," said RSS leader Ram Madhav.He said the RSS was opposed to discrimination on the basis of language.
'Maharashtrians are facing a dual battle -- numerical battle with North Indians and financial battle with Gujaratis and Marwaris.' 'This has created anxiety about survival and ownership over Mumbai and Maharashtra.'
An increase in the farmer income support scheme PM Kisan Nidhi, the introduction of a 'robot tax' to fund reskilling of people who lose their jobs to artificial intelligence (AI), and a reduced income-tax (I-T) to bring relief to the middle classes - these are some of the items in the Budget wish list submitted by Sangh Parivar affiliates to Finance Minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman. Representatives of the affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), such as the farmer organisation Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (BKS); trade union Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS); Laghu Udyog Bharati, which works for micro and small industries; and Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), which works on economic and policy issues, met the FM and other officials over the last couple of weeks as part of the pre-Budget consultations.
The Bharat Mata controversy in Kerala shows how political and symbolic fights between the state and the Centre have taken attention away from education, throwing the state's oldest university into confusion and disorder, observes Shyam G Menon.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh held demonstrations in several parts of the country accusing the Congress of hatching a "political conspiracy" to malign its image and "falsely" implicating its senior leader Indresh Kumar in the Ajmer blast case.
By getting Jagdeep Dhankhar to resign at short notice, Narendra Modi has sent a message to his own ideological clan that he brooks no one trying to get too big for their boots, observes Modi biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
Despite the presence of top Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leaders in Gujarat over the last two days to discuss the future strategy of the Sangh Parivar, no meeting took place between them and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, fuelling speculation that all is not well.
Describing the unrest among party members as just the "tip of the iceberg," the report shed light on the underlying discontent within the BJP.
The Emergency greatly influenced the RSS' makeover from a fringe force in the Indian political imagination to one that could have its own man sworn in as prime minister in two decades' time. A riveting excerpt from Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil's India's First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-1977.
The BJP sources said Advani was extremely upset with the leakage of the letter as it poured cold water on his recent attempts to patch up with the RSS.
Opposition members in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday expressed serious concern over reports that some Sangh Parivar leaders had allegedly sought to take "revenge" on the minority community for the killing of a VHP leader.
While it is almost certain that Gadkari won't get a second term as BJP president, the RSS wants to ease him out without diminishing its own clout within the saffron pariwar. Sheela Bhatt analyses the situation.
But it insisted Islamabad make its intentions clear through actions on the ground.\n\n
Striking a strident note, the Congress has renewed its attack on the Sangh Parivar asking the government to take strong and tough action against them, in the wake of a top Sangh functionary Swami Aseemanand admitting that he and his colleagues were involved in the Samjhauta Express blasts.
According to him, the purpose behind such allotment was to help these organisations grow and with that its ideologies should also grow.
Former Union minister C K Jaffer Shareif, in a letter to Mukherjee, expressed surprise over the move and said he like other secular people was 'stunned' to hear about his attending the RSS function.
'It showed me that this man had courage. He makes his own decisions, but he also trusted me enough in that moment to walk with me into the crowd,' Modi tells Lex Fridman on his podcast.
Ahead of Bharatiya Janata Party's "Chintan baithak" in Shimla from Wednesday, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha on Tuesday gave clear signals to the party that it should think in terms of younger leadership and ending factionalism.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge accused the BJP-RSS of carrying out a "well-planned conspiracy" against national heroes and said that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's ideology was contrary to the RSS' ideas. He defended the relationship between Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, saying they were "two sides of the same coin". He also criticized the BJP-RSS for their alleged attempts to appropriate the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel.
'Bhagwat, aware of the advantages of keeping the BJP in power, is wary about the RSS taking steps that would undermine the popular standing of either the PM or the party.'
Modi, in his book Jyotipunj, written in Gujarati and released in Ahmedabad on Monday, has written on unsung heroes of the Sangh Parivar who worked in oblivion throughout their lives to build the organisation in Gujarat. Modi says that he has obtained his sanskars from these RSS leaders. In the 200-page book, he has written about the lives of 16 leaders of the Sangh Parivar.
A senior politician Naidu respected once tried to convince the firebrand student leader to quit the Jana Sangh.
A broad range of internal security issues, including those related to Jammu and Kashmir and the naxal problem, were at the centre of the ongoing three-day deliberations between the Sangh Parivar and the government.
Much depends on the BJP's electoral performance in next year's assembly elections. If the party fares well in UP and some states like Goa and Gujarat, it will be able to fob off the attempt at a reappraisal of its Hindutva doctrine, observes Amulya Ganguli.
Rahul made his clash with the Sangh ideology clear amid growing speculations about BJP leader and his cousin Varun Gandhi's entry into Congress, as he said that their ideologies do not match.
Even as the race for the Congress president's post is hotting up, its veteran leader and Rajya Sabha member Digvijaya Singh on Friday said he is not interested in becoming the party chief.
The government has to specify what it intends to do with caste census data. It will be closely tracked if the government would simultaneously move towards removing the present 50% bar on reservations using means which are permitted in law. If this is not done, the entire exercise will become meaningless and could boomerang on the BJP, observes Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay.
\nIn an apparent shift in its stand, the Sangh fountainhead has also said that it would work along with other non-Parivar positive movements and organisations to play a crucial role in the country's destiny.
'Mamata needs to address the anger and resentment among various sections of the Hindu community because low-scale communal violence has always paid richer electoral dividends for the BJP.'