Anwesha Dash, Pune
The Madhya Pradesh High Court, while disposal of a plea against the ban after the Centre uplifted it, said that the Centre took five decades to realise that banning government employees from joining the Rashtriya SwayamSevak Sangh (RSS) was a mistake that diminished the aspirations of many such employees from serving their motherland.
The petition that was disposed off, was filed by a retired government employee, Purushottam Gupta. He had approached the High Court in 2023 to seek an upliftment of the ban through his petition. But as the Centre decided to remove RSS from the list of banned organisations for government employees, a bench of two judges disposed of the plea.
The two judges, Justice Sushruta Arvind Dharmadhikari and Gajendra Singh benched the disposal of the petition after an affidavit was filed by the Union Department of Personnel and Training informing the court of the removal of RSS from the banned list. They said that ideally they should have simply proceeded with the dismissal but since the petition was of national interest the High Court had some observations.
In their observations, the first question raised by the court was why was RSS banned in the first place in 1966. The Sagh was also called an “internationally renowned organisation” that was wrongfully placed in the banned list. The question of why the organisation was treated as communal and anti-secular was also raised by the HC.
These statements from the Madhya Pradesh HC come after the Centre removed RSS from the list of organisations that government employees are prohibited to associate with. Apart from this prohibition, the Sangh has been banned thrice. First was after one of their members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi. The second was during Indira Gandhi’s emergency. And the third time was after the Babri Mosque demolition in 1992, in which they played a primary role.
Hence, in the course of India’s history, RSS has been a controversial catalyst in many major political events. Therefore this new directive by the centre comes with public speculation where RSS stands now with its newfound legitimacy in the whole Indian political discourse.