The BJP’s month-long “Sampark for Samarthan”, an outreach programme in which senior leaders would meet “influencers” in various walks of society, saw Environment Minister Harshvardhan meet Archbishop Anil Couto on Saturday, weeks after the latter had written a letter apprehending a “turbulent political atmosphere” that could lead to a subversion of the Constitution.
Whether the meeting would “influence” Archbishop Couto to change his opinion or not, the campaign has emerged as a talking point. The roots of the BJP’s campaign, however, lie in the RSS’s own “Vishesh Sampark Abhiyan” launched in the mid-2000s to correct what the organisation felt was a lack in terms of its reach.
“The RSS’s biggest handicap has been that it hadn’t reached out to influential, opinion-shaping sections of society. They, along with any scholars who would write about India or even South Asia, depended on mainstream media for information about us, which would be a limited view. It was important to develop an idiom and articulation for an outreach and to prepare material on what we were about,” said a senior office-bearer of the RSS.
“A core group was set up around 2005-06 to carry out our ‘Vishesh Sampark Abhiyan’, including two joint general secretaries, Dattatreya Hosabele and Suresh Soni, then spokesperson Ram Madhav, and people like Bajranglal Guptaji and Anirudh Deshpandeji. In two years we prepared a list of around 5,000 eminent people, political, social, business people for this programme,” he added.
An “eminent person” or “influencer” was defined as someone with a “following” — that is, someone whom others in that sector would follow or listen to.
In this process, apart from RSS men meeting an individual, the source said, a breakfast meeting was organised in 2009 at a BJP MP’s house in New Delhi for a meeting with young MPs across the political spectrum, including two from the Congress. This meeting was attended by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.
In the diplomatic circuit too, such meetings were held. One such meeting held in 2009 saw the participation of 25 heads of missions of European Union countries.
Expanding horizons
“This programme helped us enormously in reaching unreached sections who thus far had a very limited understanding of the RSS. It was a surprise for the RSS too in terms of the feedback that we received, and continues in some form even today,” the source said.
The BJP’s programme has been basically structured on these lines, with BJP president Amit Shah asking 4,000 leaders of the party across the country to reach out to 25 eminent persons each, totalling up to one lakh people by June 30.
“This is one of the party programmes that has been very enthusiastically adopted by leaders and workers of the party, and its effect will be for all to see in the coming days,” said BJP media cell chief and Rajya Sabha member Anil Baluni.
Political outreach programmes are never designed for a 100% success rate, but with the 2019 Lok Sabha elections looming, this is the route that the BJP is most likely to persist with.
