Author: Sunando Sarkar
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: January 21, 2003
Naxalbari, home to the movement
that sired the word Naxalite, will occupy pride of place on a progress
report that awaits RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan when he arrives here tomorrow.
Sample the "achievements" on the
self-appraisal prepared by the state unit for the sarsanghachalak's biennial
inspection:
* The Naxalbari-Kharibari belt,
which gave the state and the country its first violent Left "revolution",
now has one of the largest bases of the Akhil Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan
Ashram (the same which Narendra Modi used with telling effect to swamp
the tribal belt in the just-concluded Gujarat Assembly poll) in the state.
* The RSS, the fountainhead of the
parivar, has recorded an increase of 400 shakhas in the last calendar year;
by far, it is the largest expansion for the organisation in the state since
1947.
There is no doubt that Sudarshan,
who used to stay at the Bidhan Sarani office of the Purbanchal Kalyan Ashram
(state unit of the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram) during the 1980s, is going to
speak in Bengali when he addresses the open session of the RSS at Shahid
Minar on Wednesday.
The report card, claimed senior
RSS pracharaks, could not have been better, especially in a state ruled
by Marxists for the last 26 years. The two-pronged expansion of the twin
organisations' base and its consolidation have managed to unnerve the state's
ruling party, they claim, giving examples of speeches of senior CPM leaders
which have targeted them.
The state now has 1,500 shakhas
of the RSS. But, perhaps, of much greater use to the parivar are the 191
shishu shiksha kendras (permanent educational centres for children) run
by the Purbanchal Kalyan Ashram, 534 krira kendras (sports centres) also
run by the same organisation, 12 hostels for students who come from the
less affluent families and hundreds of other programmes, concentrating
on the tribal areas and the financially weaker sections of society. These
include handicraft-teaching centres, permanent medical camps and women's
education centres.
Most of the 12 hostels (three of
them for girls) are stationed in the tribal belt of Purulia, Bankura, West
Midnapore and Birbhum. Some, however, have come up as far as Kharibari
and Kalimpong in Darjeeling district - hitherto thought to be free of the
Sangh parivar's influence.
