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NEW DELHI: RSS has resumed its training camps after a long break when it diverted its cadre towards the goal of accomplishing regime change at the Centre.
 
In the Sangh’s scheme of things, training activities are supposed to be a ceaseless affair which go on throughout the year, but this year the Nagpur-based leadership had decided to break from what is treated as sacrosanct so that lakhs of its cadre worked to bring about the change.
 
Sources said the Sangh leadership broke down lakhs of booths in 428 constituencies contested by BJP into "friendly", "favourable", "battleground" and "difficult" categories.

The booths where BJP has consistently scored over its rivals and those with chunks of voters sympathetic to the party were tagged" friendly" and "favourable", in that order. However, Sangh focused on "battleground" seats — those which could be wrested from rivals — and "difficult" ones which have traditionally been averse to supporting the BJP.
 
Details of voters in each booth, especially house numbers and phone numbers through which they could be contacted, were uploaded on a portal ’Bharat Vijay’ which was secure and could be accessed only by designated functionaries and was also uploaded on tablets which were distributed among district-level office-bearers.
 
The focus was on ensuring a big turnout, especially of the youth.
 
Talking to TOI, RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav refused to confirm these details, saying he would not respond to speculation. However, he acknowledged and defended the involvement of RSS workers in the elections, saying it was only the second time after 1977 when Sangh cadres worked on such a scale to ensure that the government at the Centre changed.

However, Madhav did not agree that the massive deployment of RSS cadres contradicted Sangh’s claim that it was an apolitical organization which never worked for BJP in elections. "BJP has contested each election, but RSS has not mobilized its cadre each time. We worked for a change in 1977 because the then Congress government had muzzled democracy. We campaigned against authoritarianism through the Emergency and as a result, as many as 10,000 RSS workers were arrested. We worked for the overthrow of the Congress government because that was the only way democracy could be restored," he said.
 
The Sangh functionary also said that in the just-held election, RSS decided to work for change of government because it concluded that it was an imperative even though it did not ask voters to vote for a particular party or individual candidates. "Our newsletter to the cadre emphasized the need for change, and for enhancing the turnout," Madhav said.
 
Identifying the four reasons which goaded RSS to overcome the organizational aloofness towards polls, he said worsening of security environment, both internal and external, were among the factors which helped the Sangh leadership make up its mind. "Government failed to tackle the Maoist challenge and the threat of homegrown jihadi terror. Worse, it sought to create a terror equivalence by raising the bogey of Hindu terror so that the threat of jihadi terror could be de-emphasized," Madhav said.
 
He said economic decline and the feeling of despair and unrest it spawned, corruption and the creation of religious and caste divides and their exploitation for political considerations were other reasons why the Sangh threw itself into the elections.
 
"These are the reasons why we launched our Jan Jagran Abhiyan," Madhav said.