The prime minister has said little in recent months that has been either inspiring or worthy of comment, but last week when he attacked Hindutva's foot soldiers for their general stupidity and bad behaviour it was hard not to agree with him. He was so fed up, he told the Rajya Sabha, with what was going on that he was ready to "sit in the Opposition" if he was not going to be allowed to govern. There were serious economic problems that needed his attention, he said, and he would like to deal with them so that the economy could grow at the 8 per cent he dreams of. But how was he to concentrate on the economy when on a daily basis he was forced to confront a new Hindutva-related problem?

Since the violence in Gujarat, the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) have gone from one evil deed to the next. It was their men with the active backing of disgruntled politicians who attacked the Orissa Assembly, their men who have continued murdering Muslims in Ahmedabad and Vadodara, their men who nearly brought Ayodhya back to the brink. And if this was not a grim enough record, we had Ashok Singhal threatening to fast unto death for some silly reason and the RSS passing a resolution saying, "Let the Muslims understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority."

No goodwill and no safety, the RSS explains, unless Muslims "respect, tolerate and cooperate" with the Hindus. What remains unclear is who is going to decide whether the Muslims are behaving themselves or not, or when open season begins. Should Muslims consider themselves unsafe in India because they are not "cooperating" in allowing mosques in Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi to be turned into temples? Should they consider themselves unsafe because Muslim terrorists kill Hindu villagers in Kashmir? So soon after the terrible bloodletting in Gujarat (the RSS believes it was "natural and spontaneous") a resolution of this kind is not just dangerously stupid but sick, and if the RSS thinks it helps the cause of Hindutva it is horribly mistaken.

Not only does it damage the cause, it also distracts attention from the agenda we need to act on urgently if India is ever to become a prosperous, proud country instead of always being counted among the poorest, most backward countries in the world. The prime minister is right when he says that we need the economy to grow at 8 per cent. What he should add is that if we somehow manage this over a sustained 10-year period it would still take us a hundred years to reach the current income levels in the US and 25 years to get where Thailand is today. This is how backward we are and if the RSS forces its former swayamsewak A.B. Vajpayee to adopt the economic ideas of its Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) we have to reconcile ourselves to remaining poor forever.

The SJM, for instance, would like the Government to pour even more money into our defunct, money-guzzling public sector. It believes, as do Nehruvian socialists and the Left, that selling public-sector companies amounts to selling family heirlooms without once bothering to stop and think if the thousands of crores of rupees we have spent on bad business investments would not have been better spent on schools, hospitals and roads. There are other swadeshi ideas the RSS economists have thrown up which if followed would guarantee permanent poverty for India. So it is to Vajpayee's credit that he has resisted them.

The prime minister's disobedience does not please the RSS and it now seems clear that it, along with its sister organisations like the Bajrang Dal and the VHP, is out to get him. In the process, though, it is doing us the unintended favour of exposing the ugliness of Hindutva's underbelly. As long as the cause had as its main proponent someone like Union Home Minister L.K. Advani it was possible to concede that there could be a point to it.

There is no question that Muslims should follow Indian laws instead of their own, no question that something had gone wrong with our idea of secularism. So when issues like these were in the forefront people were prepared to listen. But who is going to listen to those who justify Gujarat's violence on the grounds that it was "natural and spontaneous"?

It is now generally accepted that the BJP is unlikely to win any more elections. Part of the blame for this must go to the prime minister who has been for most of his term a weak and ineffectual leader. But we also need to acknowledge that his Government might have done a lot better if his Hindutva pals had not been a permanent thorn in his side. Ironically, the one person they have helped most through their obduracy is Congress President Sonia Gandhi. When the next election gives us our first Italian prime minister the RSS can take full credit. It would be interesting then to listen to them explain why out of more than 800 million "proud" Hindus we cannot find a single leader. Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain.