New Delhi, Dec. 27: At first glance, Sanjay Joshi was the quintessential RSS pracharak: he always wore white kurta-pyjamas, was loath to be seen with a cellphone, stayed in a sparsely furnished room in the BJP headquarters, shunned the media and like a pious adherent, only read literature published by the Sangh.

These attributes made him the most unlikely candidate to court controversy, one would think. But he has landed in the middle of one and how!

Some five months ago, when Uma Bharti bared her talons at the BJP brass, she sunk her claws into Joshi. As BJP general secretary (organisation) ? notionally second only to the president ? and the conduit with the Sangh, Joshi was suspected by Uma of thwarting her return as Madhya Pradesh chief minister.

According to the BJP grapevine, Uma, with her unerring sense of timing, called on Joshi at 11 Ashoka Road a day before Rakshabandhan and asked her “rakhi brother” what gift he had to offer his “sister”. When Joshi hemmed and hawed, she reportedly lost her cool and called him names.

Mortified, Joshi picked up his phone and beseeched a senior BJP functionary staying next door to send his wife so that someone else would be able to give an “eyewitness” account of the sadhvi’s shenanigans.

Uma then allegedly grew more furious and disconnected the phone. But the functionary’s wife arrived and reportedly called a top leader and told him what Uma was up to.

Whether by design or coincidence, the accounts of a salacious audio and videotape allegedly involving Joshi began to be talked about in BJP circles.

Almost every beat correspondent claimed to possess the purported tape though nothing came out in the media. It was even said there was a “Gujarat angle” to the campaign because Joshi and Narendra Modi were at daggers drawn.

Both belonged to Gujarat (although Joshi hails from Nagpur) but Joshi was seen as a prot?g? of Keshubhai Patel. He was brought to the central party after Modi became chief minister.

BJP correspondents received an unsigned letter in print from a woman who claimed she was “raped” in custody by Joshi and had approached Girija Vyas, chairperson of the National Commission for Women, to “punish” him.

While the truth of the allegations have not been established, Joshi ? shuttling between the BJP and the RSS’s Delhi headquarters when L.K. Advani was under siege post-Jinnah ? was never seen after that.

So, what led to the revival of this campaign and his resignation?

RSS sources believe it had to do with the battle for one-upmanship with its political offspring. If K.S. Sudarshan had put down Advani and his “loyalists” after the Pakistan visit, BJP leaders were bent on showing up the Sangh pracharaks as men of straw who inhabited the same political universe, the sources said.

Sangh sources maintained the “so-called” problems with Advani had less to do with his Pakistan visit and more with the individuals he had propped up who were “less committed to ideology and principles and more to their own interests”.