By Ashutosh Bhardwaj / Outlook India
A small delegation of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad visited Moscow during the Janata Party rule in the late 1970s when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the External Affairs Minister. Unable to find a place to hold their RSS shakha, the young men chose a park and organised what they fondly named ‘Pushkin Shakha’. Among them were Arun Jaitley and Dattatreya Hosabale, currently sarkaryavah (general secretary) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), number two in the organisation after sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat.
Decades later, another swayamsevak Rajesh Asher hoisted the saffron flag at an improbable place, when he held a solitary shakha at the South Pole under -45°C temperature in 2012. A few years on, now 60, Asher held a shakha at a height of over 6,000 m, when he climbed the Island Peak, Nepal, in 2016.
This article first appeared on outlookindia.com
