Amid BJP's South push, RSS' key meet in TN's Ooty; UCC to figure

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, July 11

Amid the BJP’s ongoing electoral push in South India where it is weak so far as Lok Sabha penetration goes, the ruling party’s ideological mentor RSS has called a key strategy meeting of its top brass in Tamil Nadu.

Upcoming polls to BE DISCUSSED too

The annual meeting will also discuss organisational issues ahead of MP, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana Assembly polls and the 2024 General Election

The ‘All India Prant Pracharak’ meeting of the RSS will be held from July 13 to 15 at Ooty in the Nilgiris district. The meeting is expected to take a call on the ongoing Uniform Civil Code debate, with the Law Commission of India calling for public comments until July 14 and the Uttarakhand Government’s expert panel on the subject finalising the draft report.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will attend the event along with the top RSS hierarchy—general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale and joint general secretaries Krishna Gopal, Manmohan Vaidya, CR Mukund, Arun Kumar and Ram Dutt.

The RSS chief has so far maintained that a national consensus should be evolved to implement the UCC through democratic ways.

Sangh’s frontal organisation working among tribals—Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram—today urged the Law Commission not to finalise the UCC in a haste and to first study tribal customs and practices. Earlier, the Ashram had welcomed parliamentary panel on law and justice chairman Sushil Modi’s remarks to keep tribal communities out of the UCC purview.

“Discussions will be held regarding the planning of programmes for the next four-five months and the current situation,” RSS national publicity chief Sunil Ambekar said about the annual meeting which will also discuss organisational issues ahead of MP, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana elections followed by the 2024 General Election.

The choice of the venue for the meeting reflects the thinking in the Sangh family to make aggressive inroads into Tamil Nadu, which has 39 Lok Sabha seats with the BJP holding none. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has personally led the party’s Tamil Nadu outreach, with the recent installation in the new Parliament of the Sengol, the Chola dynasty symbol for transfer of power and primacy to Tamil Nadu in the government’s ‘Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’ campaign.

In September 2019, the PM had, during his UNGA address, invoked Tamil poet Kaniyan Pungundranar.