It took the Centre five decades “to realise its mistake” in banning government employees from joining the “internationally renowned” Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, said the Madhya Pradesh High Court on Thursday, The Hindu reported.
“It took almost five decades for the Central government to realise its mistake; to acknowledge that an internationally renowned organisation like RSS was wrongly placed amongst the banned organisations of the country and that its removal therefrom is quintessential,” the High Court said, according to The Indian Express.
The court said several Union government employees’ aspirations of “serving the country in many ways, therefore, got diminished in these five decades because of this ban, which got removed only when it was brought to the notice of this court vide the present proceedings”.
The comments were made by a bench of Justices Sushruta Arvind Dharmadhikari and Gajendra Singh while disposing of a petition by Purushottam Gupta, a retired Union government employee. Gupta had moved the court in September challenging the ban.
The plea was disposed of as the Centre, earlier this month, lifted a 58-year-old ban on government employees being members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindutva group, is the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. It has been banned three times since Independence. Critics say it promotes Hindu supremacy and intolerance of minorities.
The Sangh was placed on the list of organisations government officials could not be associated with in November 1966.
On Thursday, the court said it would have simply disposed of the petition as having rendered infructuous. But it was making the observations since the problems raised in the petition have “national ramifications, especially pertaining to one of the largest voluntary non-governmental organisations, viz. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh”.
The bench asked why the ban had been imposed in the first place. It asked on what basis the activities of the organisation “as a whole were treated in the decades of 1960s and [1970s] as communal or anti-secular”.
“What was the empirical report, statistical survey or material, that led the then government of the day to arrive at an objective satisfaction that involvement of Central government employees with the RSS?” the High Court questioned, according to The Hindu.
The court directed the Department of Personnel and Training and the Union home ministry to display its July 9 order on their website’s home page. They were also told to inform all government departments about the decision within 15 days.
The Centre’s decision to lift the ban on government employees associating with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been criticised by the Congress.
“In 1966, a ban was imposed – and rightly so – on government employees taking part in RSS activities,” said Congress leader Jairam Ramesh. “After June 4th 2024, relations between the self-anointed non-biological PM [Prime Minister Narendra Modi] and the RSS have nosedived. On July 9, 2024, the 58-year ban that was in force even during Mr [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee’s tenure as PM was removed. The bureaucracy can now come in knickers too I suppose.”
Ramesh was referring to the khaki shorts that were part of the Hindutva organisation’s uniform for its members until October 2016.
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