AGRA: The quiet dumping of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s pracharak Rajeshwar Singh , the face behind the Sangh’s controversial ‘ghar wapsi’ drive in Uttar Pradesh, has left the outfit’s functionaries in the state baffled.

While RSS men maintain prominence within Sangh often comes with a price, political experts insist Singh’s cornering might be sudden, it is not without precedents.

“Singh’s outspokenness cost him dear. Nobody is bigger than Sangh and BJP within the outfit,” said an associate of Dharma Jagran Manch from Braj Prant.

The uproar over the frequent ‘reconversion’ events being reported from the state and elsewhere had derailed last month’s winter session of Parliament and also caused a dent in the Narendra Modi-led government's pro-development image in recent weeks.

Pleading anonymity, an RSS member from Lucknow said, “He had been conducting the 'ghar wapsi' drives silently for years, but his overenthusiasm to publicize these created a controversy. Sangh want its workers to lie low and not invite controversies.”

Political experts, however, believe action against Singh in not the first of its kind within Sangh.

Political analyst Sudhir Panwar, who is also a professor at Lucknow University, told TOI: “BJP and Sangh have a history of sending people who try to act smart on ‘silent leaves’. KN Govindacharya was a victim of the BJP and Sangh politics. After he called Atal Bihari Vajpayee a ‘mask’ for RSS, he was relieved of all the positions he held. Though RSS had claimed that he will be given new responsibilities, this never came true.”

In 2000, party general secretary KN Govindacharya, who was loaned to the BJP from RSS, was removed from the party at the instance of the then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Govindacharya, seen by many as the party's ideologue and the man behind party's experiment at social engineering, had incurred Vajpayee's wrath by describing him as a "mask", saying that it was Advani who called the shots.

Sanjay Joshi, another BJP leader and RSS associate, who had served on the BJP national executive, was also forced to resign in June 2012, supposedly under pressure from Narendra Modi.

“It was clear that Joshi, who was known for his strong ideological moorings and brilliant strategies, had started overpowering Modi and Sangh in Gujarat. He was shown the doors with no specific reasons,” Panwar said.

A detractor of Modi who played a role in the latter being banished from Gujarat during the chief ministership of Keshubhai Patel, Joshi had been in Modi's cross-hairs for long. Modi had threatened to resign along with other members of the BJP national executive from Gujarat, if Joshi had been allowed to continue.

Although Singh’s dumping is believed to be the fallout of a meeting between RSS leaders and Modi during which the PM is said to have expressed his annoyance at the ‘ghar wapsi’ campaign, different versions were emerging from local leaders of the right-wing leaders in Agra.

Bajrang Dal leaders claimed that Sangh acted tough as they goofed up during the much-publicized Madhu Nagar slum ‘reconversions’. According to them, 57 Muslim families here were actually ‘Bangladeshis’.

“This is the actual reason for Rajeshwar Singh’s removal, as it was he who led the campaign,” said a member of Bajrang Dal.

Inmates of Madhav Bhavan, the RSS regional office in Braj, said, “As Rajeshwar Singh was not ready to leave the ‘ghar wapsi’ campaign that he had been anchoring, he was pressured to quit and even asked to vacate his accommodation at Madhav Bhavan.”

