Economic Times, Nistula Hebbar, 7 Feb, 2014
NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party may be daggers drawn with BJP now, but a long-time ideologue of the Hindu right has for the first time revealed that Arvind Kejriwal had close links to a loose federation of groups, including some RSS-backed ones, that act in concert.
RSS ideologue KN Govindacharya has admitted to ET that AAP has his support as a “political means of fighting the ills of corruption, where political contest between different parties looks like a fixed match”.
Aam Aadmi Party’s ideological allegiances and whether it has links to the Hindu right have long been a matter for discussion ever since the party first burst into prominence.
MANY EXPERIMENTS HAPPENING, SAYS GOVINDACHARYA
In an interview to ET, Govindacharya said Kejriwal, whom he has known for nearly two decades now, had met him at his office in 2011 to synergise activities aimed at taking on the current status quo on corruption and related issues.
Govindacharya places AAP on the same continuum as yoga guru Baba Ramdev‘s movement against black money, his own Swabhiman Andolan backed by RSS and outfits such as former civil servant Jayaprakash Narayan’s Loksatta Party in Andhra Pradesh and RK Mishra’s Nav Bharat Party.
“Many experiments are happening, and jo goal maarne ki sthiti main ho woh goal karey, aur doosra usko paas de de (the one in a position to score should do so, and the others should pass the ball),” he said, using football analogy to describe what he said was the link between the disparate political groups.
“That generosity in this loose group of experiments is important,” he added, explaining the kind of cooperation that exists between these various political and civil society outfits.
AAP, however, denied claims that it had anything to do with RSS.
“AAP had nothing to do with RSS. The period of time referred to by Govindacharya was when AAP was not even conceived,” said Deepak Bajpai, AAP’s media coordinator.
“It was also the time when India Against Corruption was meeting everyone from Kapil Sibal to Sandeep Dikshit (of Congress). These claims are therefore unbelievable to me,” he said. Bajpai told ET that he would try and get Kejriwal to comment on Govindacharya’s claims,
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