In his memoirs, A Traveller and the Road, highly respected communist ideologue Mohit Sen recounts a meeting with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a few days after the Congress party had suffered a crushing electoral defeat at the hands of N.T. Rama Rao’s Telugu Desam Party. After listening to Sen’s analysis of why Andhra Pradesh voters had shifted their affections to a matinee idol, she talked of “the steady deterioration of the state apparatus at the Centre and her fear that this weakening was known to those abroad who were hostile to India.” A prime minister was conscious of a very subtle element of statecraft: outsiders, whether friendly or inimical, will take advantage if they sensed weakness at the core of the governing arrangement. Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has just inflicted a massive weakness on the Narendra Modi regime, precisely at a time when a hostile United States and its vindictive president are out to shake us by our neck. On a minor note, the RSS boss has put an end to the speculation about the 75-years rule instigated by the Sangh crowd. The invocation of the 75-year milestone was full of potential consequences. For weeks, the prime minister’s position was needlessly pushed into doubt. In one way, Bhagwat has declared a cease-fire in the cold war he had initiated against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Of course, the prime minister was the first to offer the olive branch when he praised the RSS from the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day. But, at the same time, Bhagwat’s clarification – that the delay in naming the next president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was not due to any objection or caveat from the Sangh – shows the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo in poor light, indecisive and unsure. That, of course, is entirely between the BJP and its Nagpur-based handlers. What should be a matter of grave concern is that the RSS chief has re-opened the Mathura and Kashi issues. This can only have deleterious implications for social harmony and communal peace in Uttar Pradesh and beyond. According to The Times of India, the RSS chief declared that its members were free to join the agitation for restoring Varanasi’s Gyanvapi mosque and Mathura’s Shahi Idgah to the Hindus. And, according to The Indian Express, it was “only a matter of three (sites)” and “the other side should offer [them] for brotherhood’s sake.” Bhagwat’s words constitute an invitation to the mobs to come out on the streets in defence of or against the two places of worship, currently under control of the minority community. Bhagwat has put the onus on the leaders of Muslim community to be reasonable for the sake of “brotherhood” or be prepared for an Ayodhya-type “movement”. This is not an invitation to reason but a demand made at gun-point. The country has been warned of a replay of the 1990s’ riots.It is quite possible that the RSS chief has sparked this controversy, most cynically, purely in the context of the upcoming Bihar elections, where the NDA has its electoral back to the wall. A communal clash here and there would be deemed by the Sangh strategists as a clever ploy to ramp up the Hindu vote consolidation. And, after Bihar, we shall move on to the battle-ground in Uttar Pradesh, where a boisterous chief minister is always ready to play the police sub-inspector. Obviously, the RSS boss appears to be confident of the Union home minister’s ability to tame the Muslim community and control the streets. Since the brutal crushing of the anti-CAA protests four years ago, the new rulers of new India have become cockily aggressive in “handling” the streets; the lower judiciary, too, has pitched in on the side of the police. The ruling clique thinks that the Muslim underclasses have been taught a lesson. Any disruption of the fragile Hindu-Muslim relations at this time would be a national disaster because it could indicate a “weakening” of the kind that Indira Gandhi talked about in 1983. At a time when India should be presenting a united face to the world, Bhagwat has thoughtlessly stoked the embers of old fault-lines.As it is, the Modi regime is floundering in making sense of the challenges posed almost on a weekly basis by our “strategic partner” the United States. Our much vaunted diaspora and its clout in Washington seems to have evaporated in thin air. And we are embracing the Chinese just months after they helped Pakistan in real time during Operation Sindoor. Half of our ruling establishment wants to fight it out with Donald Trump’s America and the other half is keen to sign a treaty of surrender. To these woes, Bhagwat has added his bit. Under American instigation, the Gulf countries and the Saudis may not be all that understanding of our entrenched majoritarianism. Bhagwat presides over an organisation that is completing 100 years of dubious history. He has disappointed every “deshbhakt” who looks to the RSS as a custodian of moral values and ideas that once animated the ancient Hindu civilisation. He is satisfied with a Z-plus security and all other amenities and comforts that a ruling dispensation can divert in his direction. The so-called swayamsevaks are already intimately familiar with the nuances of rent-seeking. Bhagwat stands diminished as the sarsanghchalak, as does the RSS in its centenary year. Harish Khare is a former editor-in-chief of The Tribune.