The Anna Movement's RSS Shadow: Raju Parulekar's Reckoning With a Protest He Watched From the Inside

"Anna Was Never a Fellow Traveller"

Raju Parulekar, the senior journalist known for confronting power directly, opens his conversation with Nous host Bushra Khanam by rejecting the idea that Anna Hazare's 2011 anti-corruption movement was ever the ideologically neutral, grassroots uprising it was widely taken to be. "We knew Anna long before this," he said. "Anna was never RSS-aligned in name — Anna was an opportunist." Parulekar says he first interviewed Hazare a decade before the movement, after Hazare forced the resignation of three Shiv Sena ministers through a hunger strike, and knew him well enough, he says, to recognise that Hazare's fasts had long been effective precisely because the Congress governments of the time treated him gently, settling matters quietly rather than confronting him.

What troubles Parulekar in hindsight is not that people joined the movement, but who was actually directing it. He alleges that Arvind Kejriwal's political instincts trace back to an anti-reservation movement he was involved with early in his career — one Parulekar says put Kejriwal at odds with India's reservation policy from the outset — and that the core team coordinating movement strategy, in his account, met regularly with the late BJP leader Arun Jaitley. He describes Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Manish Sisodia as functionally aligned with the BJP even then, while distinguishing Prashant Bhushan as anti-Congress without being pro-BJP.

An Anti-Reservation Past

Parulekar traces what he calls the RSS's fingerprints on Kejriwal's politics well before the Anna movement began. He points to Kejriwal's early opposition to caste-based reservation — a position, he says, that also drew protest during Kejriwal's time at IIT and later — as evidence of an ideological continuity rather than coincidence, noting that Kejriwal replaced a portrait of Gandhi with one of Ambedkar to court voters in Punjab, then reversed course to pay respects at Gandhi's memorial once legal troubles mounted, evidence, in Parulekar's telling, that Kejriwal has "no philosophy of his own" beyond expedience. He also recalls a specific incident in which activist Swati Maliwal was assaulted and police in Delhi, then under Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, allegedly refused to register an FIR against Kejriwal's associates — a reluctance Parulekar attributes to sympathetic officials already embedded within the administration.

A Hospital, a Phone Call, and a Blog That Changed the Outcome

The interview's most vivid anecdote concerns the movement's own internal rupture. Parulekar says that during Hazare's climactic fast in Delhi, Kejriwal wanted Hazare to become a "martyr" — to die during the fast — believing, in Parulekar's account, that Hazare's death would clear his own path to national leadership. Frightened, Hazare allegedly slipped out of Delhi's hospital with activist Medha Patkar's help and phoned Parulekar, who was in Europe at the time, asking him to return to India immediately and help dissolve the movement's "core committee." Parulekar says he met Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi, where Hazare told him his own voice was no longer reaching the public — that the core committee had effectively taken over the movement in his name. Parulekar attributes the falling-out partly to disputes over how movement funds were being allocated, noting that "India Against Corruption" was, in his telling, not a registered organisation at all, with donations instead flowing through the separate NGOs Kejriwal and Bedi ran — an arrangement he argues violated the terms of their foreign-funding registration. Parulekar says he then published a Marathi blog under Hazare's own signature that publicly ended the standoff and, in his account, dismantled Kejriwal's political ambitions of the moment.

"If We Were the BJP's B-Team, Why Are We in Jail?"

Parulekar addresses head-on the argument the Aam Aadmi Party now makes in its own defence — that a party facing prosecution and imprisonment over the Delhi liquor policy case, and the unseating of its Rajya Sabha MPs, cannot plausibly be a BJP proxy. He rejects this reasoning entirely, comparing it to the real dynamics of organised crime: "the real fights happen between brothers," he argues — between partners, not strangers — pointing to the BJP's own falling-out with former RSS pracharak Sanjay Joshi as a parallel case where proximity, not distance, produced conflict. Kejriwal's political mathematics, in his telling, always required manufacturing his own path to power — "Modi in the nation, Kejriwal in Delhi" — expanding from Delhi into Punjab, where he argues the AAP's rise served as a "test case" for displacing Congress in states the BJP could not win directly, opening a path the BJP could ultimately walk through itself.

The "Cockroach Janata Party" and a New Digital Trap

Much of the conversation turns to what Parulekar identifies as history threatening to repeat itself: a newly viral, self-styled "Cockroach Janata Party," an online movement whose name references a dismissive comment likening unemployed youth to cockroaches. Parulekar warns his audience against joining it, arguing its leadership — some of it based abroad — shares the same organisational DNA as the original India Against Corruption campaign: unregistered, unaccountable and rapidly amplified to millions of followers in an implausibly short span. He notes that one of its central figures previously worked as a consultant to Delhi's chief minister's office and within AAP's education department, calling the new outfit "AAP's B-team" and cautioning that its platform, in his reading, offers nothing concrete for Muslims despite claiming to speak for India's most disenfranchised. "This is another trap," he said, urging listeners not to mistake viral growth for authenticity.

An Ideological War, Not an Ordinary Election

Parulekar frames India's current politics as what he calls "an ideological political war" rather than a contest between parties. He argues the opposition will remain unable to occupy the space vacated by such movements until it accomplishes three things: aligning the India bloc by excluding what he calls BJP "moles" — naming both Kejriwal and Sharad Pawar's faction of the NCP — building genuine grassroots movements rather than relying on digital mobilisation alone, and constructing a coherent alternative ideology capable of directly countering Hindutva's messaging rather than merely reacting to it. He is critical of secular parties and civil society more broadly for a hypocrisy he sees running through Indian public life: even self-described democrats and constitutionalists, he argues, do not genuinely regard Muslims as equal citizens.

Reviving the Left as a "Shock Absorber"

Describing himself as a Gandhian rather than a leftist, Parulekar nonetheless argues that only the political left has historically functioned as a check on the RSS's advance — a "shock absorber," in his words — and that wherever the left has been weakened, the BJP has moved directly into the vacated space, citing West Bengal as the clearest example. He faults the Congress for actively hastening that decline, arguing that during its years in power it starved Left trade unions and organisations of support while doing comparatively little to check the RSS's own institution-building — memorials, offices, schools — even as, in his account, the first UPA government's welfare achievements owed much to the parliamentary weight of 83 Left MPs. He draws an explicit line between the Congress's own idea of "antyodaya," or the upliftment of the last person, and the left's traditional emphasis on the working class, arguing the two are functionally the same idea by different names.

The Trap of "High Moral Ground" Politics

Parulekar is dismissive of the "Cockroach Janata Party's" pledge to refuse interviews with pro-government television and to live modestly without official cars or bungalows, arguing he has heard this script before — from Kejriwal at the outset of his career, and from RSS pracharaks long trained to present frugality and self-denial as proof of virtue. Invoking a teaching he attributes to the Buddha, he argues that no genuine leader governs from the "high moral ground": life itself, not a performance of austerity, is the only real moral ground a person has, and politicians who most loudly claim moral superiority are typically, in his framing, disguising something else. He also notes, in passing, that Kejriwal's government was conspicuously absent during the Shaheen Bagh protests against the CAA and NRC and during the 2020 Delhi riots that followed, despite being the sitting government of the capital — evidence, he argues, of where the party's real sympathies lay even at moments of direct communal crisis in its own city.

A Closing Word to India's Most Vulnerable

Parulekar ends with a direct appeal to Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, farmers and labourers, urging them to stay well clear of digital-only movements run by distant, unaccountable leadership, and instead to stand with grounded, local leaders "shoulder to shoulder" — even leaders he concedes are imperfect. The way out of what he calls this "blind age," he argues, runs through the ground beneath people's feet, not through whatever appears, however dazzlingly, on a screen.