I had a ringside seat with Badshah Khan that year. "The Statesman" had loaned my services to function as the Frontier Gandhi's press adviser. This was at Jayaprakash Narayan's behest. Since Indira Gandhi had split the Congress, Badshah Khan's utterances were being carefully weighed by both sides. Was he favouring Indira Congress or the Syndicate Congress?
The issue of which way Badshah Khan would tilt was settled by the horrible communal situation in Ahmedabad. He was pained at Chief Minister Hitendra Desai's alleged communal bias during the riots. And he saw the chief minister a political descendent of the Patel line.
At this stage Badshah Khan had more or less accepted Ram Manohar Lohia's list of the Guilty Men of India's Partition. These “Guilty Men” were, in his book, not terribly averse to association with the RSS as Gurumurthy makes quite clear.
Gurumurthy quotes Patel's speech in Lucknow in which he chastises his “powerful” colleagues in the Congress who wished to “crush” the “patriotic RSS”. The “powerful” Congressmen being referred to must be those led by Jawaharlal Nehru. Did this galaxy include Maulana Azad, president of the Congress from 1939 to 46? I doubt it.
