'When All Indians are Hindus': RSS's 100-yr-old Paradox Revisited

As we sit to analyse the statements of Mohan Bhagwat, the Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at the centenary event held to mark 100 years of the RSS—particularly what he said about the attitude of the Sangh in relation to Muslims of India—the question that arises is, is there anything new, anything remarkable and anything very meaningful in what he said.

A. G. Noorani in his book, The RSS, writes: “Deceptive double talk marks the RSS utterances; to wit, that it is a cultural organisation, not a political one; it is a ‘nationalist’ not a communal body; all who live in India are Hindus, while defining the terms to exclude those who are not Hindu by faith…”

The phrase double-talk is derived from doublethink, which was coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel, 1984. His definition of the phrase arising from the official language of the ruling ‘Party’ that the book calls ‘Newspeak’ bears repetition: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, … to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”

The speech of the RSS Sarsanghchalak contains some interesting wordplay. He starts by defining what ‘Hindu’ means, and says the content of the term is what is important, not the word itself. He goes on to say that Indian Muslims are part of the same ‘sanskriti’ (culture), ‘matrabhoomi’ (motherland) and ‘purvaj parampara’ (ancestral traditions) and all that has changed is their worship. That, he says, does not define identity, and in his understanding, they are very much Hindu. The words Hindvi or Bharatiya or Arya or Indic, are all, in his opinion, synonyms of the term ‘Hindu’.

The mode of worship of Indian Muslims is, after all, just another manner of worship in the multitude of rites and customs of Hindus from different parts of the sub-continent. So, while the RSS continues to be an organisation dedicated to strengthening of Hindu society to the exclusion if not the detriment of others, by expanding the definition of the term ‘Hindu’, the work of the RSS is sought to be portrayed as being in service of all sections of Indian society.

This is actually consistent even with his earlier speeches, where he has said much the same thing. To cite just one example, in another speech at an RSS event in Indore on October 27, 2017, he had said: “Whose country is Germany? It is a country of Germans, Britain is a country of Britishers, America is a country of Americans, and in the same way Hindustan is a country of Hindus. It does not mean that Hindustan is not the country of other people…The term ‘Hindu’ covers all those who are the sons of Bharat Mata, descendants of Indian ancestors and who live in accordance with the Indian culture.” The emphasis repeatedly is on extending the definition of Hindu to include Muslims, provided they live in accordance with ‘Indian culture’, which is the culture of our common ancestors.

Let us first see if this definition of Hindu is in line with the definition traditionally adopted by the RSS over the last 100 years. The founder of the RSS, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, was deeply inspired by V. D. Savarkar, and relied upon the ideas of Savarkar in his book, Hindutva, published in 1923, for the ideological foundation of his organisation. Savarkar defines a Hindu as someone who looks to the land from the Indus to the seas as the land of his forefathers, who has inherited the blood of the Hindu race that inhabited this land, who claims as his own the culture of that race, including their language, literature, art, law, jurisprudence, ceremonies, festivals, and above all, who views this land as his holy land. And before the apologists of the RSS start doing acrobatics to try and fit Muslims into this definition, it bears mention that Savarkar did not leave that question open-ended. He said: “So although the root-meaning of the word Hindu like the sister epithet Hindi may mean only an Indian, yet, as it is we would be straining the usage of words too much—we fear, to the point of breaking—if we call a Mohammedan a Hindu because of his being a resident of India.”

He then elaborates further and says: “That is why in the case of some of our Mohammedan or Christian countrymen who had originally been forcibly converted to a non-Hindu religion and who consequently have inherited along with Hindus, a common Fatherland and a greater part of the wealth of a common culture—language, law, customs, folklore and history—are not and cannot be recognised as Hindus. For though Hindustan to them is Fatherland as to any other Hindu yet it is not to them a Holyland too. Their holyland is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of a foreign origin. Their love is divided.”

Adopting this philosophy, Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS in his book, Bunch of Thoughts, says that while the word ‘Bharatiya’ connotes the same meaning as ‘Hindu’, it is commonly used as a translation of the word ‘Indian’ which includes all the various communities like Muslim, Christian, Parsi etc. residing in this land. For this reason, “the word “Bharatiya” too is likely to mislead us when we want to denote our particular society. The word ‘Hindu’ alone connotes correctly and completely the meaning we want to convey”.

Thus, it can be seen that Savarkar in his conceptualisation of ‘Hindu’ specifically excludes Indian Muslims from its ambit, and Golwalkar categorically rejects the theory now being propounded by Bhagwat that ‘Bharatiya’, ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ are all synonyms. So, is Bhagwat marking a departure from the avowed philosophy of the RSS that has been in vogue for a century? That does not appear to be the objective, as Bhagwat himself says in his speech that he is saying nothing new and is simply taking forward the philosophy of the so-called seers who were the founding fathers of the RSS, which is being carried forward for the last 100 years.

So, if what Bhagwat is saying is fundamentally at odds with how Savarkar, Hedgewar and Golwalkar conceptualised the idea of a Hindu society that the RSS seeks to serve, but also simultaneously denies any departure from its founding philosophy, then how can these seeming contradictions be reconciled? The answer, I believe, lies in Noorani’s assertion that the RSS has perfected doublethink into a fine art. Orwell’s definition, of simultaneously holding two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory, springs again to mind.

It becomes relevant here to note that Bhagwat is not the first Sarsanghchalak to have so attempted to play with the definition of ‘Hindu’ in positioning the RSS as an organisation that did not work for only one religion. Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras, the third Sarsanghchalak of the RSS, similarly said in Nagpur on September 30, 1979: “All those who feel attuned to this life current of our national culture—irrespective of their religious creed—are Hindus.”

But a month earlier, in another speech, he had qualified this statement to say: “We consider all the natives of this land as Hindus, irrespective of religion; but the RSS’ main stress is on organising traditional Hindus.” But as Noorani in another book, The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour, points out, this was classic doublespeak as Deoras simultaneously spoke in those speeches of a Hindu majority in India and emphasised that minorities need not feel insecure living in a strong Hindu India because Hindus are known for their tolerance. If all Indians are Hindus, it begs the question as to what constitutes the Hindu majority and who are the minorities in India who are to feel secure in their care?

If the positions of the RSS and subsequently of its political wing, the BJP, since their inception are analysed, it becomes clear that the assertion of Deoras belies every single one of the policies and programmes of the Sangh in the decades since its establishment. According to the biography of Hedgewar by H. V. Sheshadri, the RSS was founded by Hedgewar in response to the ‘highhanded ways’ of Muslims of Nagpur who, despite constituting just four per cent of the local population, started objecting to the playing of music in front of mosques in 1923. Another biography by H. V. Pingle mentions that Hedgewar used to mobilise troupes to play music outside mosques, and in one initial incident, when the troupe hesitated, Hedgewar took the drums and started beating them himself to ‘rouse the dormant manliness of the Hindus’.

Shamsul Islam in his book, Hindu Nationalism and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, records that by 1926, the playing of drums outside mosques was the main reason behind a spate of communal riots in Nagpur. Thus, it is clear that the very foundation of the RSS was laid to show Muslims, or should we say the particular variety of Hindus that is colloquially called Muslims, their place and keep them in check. Coming from this origin story to a more contemporary record, what is the bogey of love jihad, if a marriage between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman is just a union of two kinds of Hindus? Why have anti-conversion laws been passed by several BJP-ruled States, if the conversion is merely from one form of Hindu worship to another? Why are Muslims from other parts of ‘Akhand Bharat’ treated differently from other Hindus from the same regions for purposes of citizenship when they seek refuge in India?

The answer, perhaps, lies in an analysis of what has been said in traditional RSS writings about what Indian Muslims are expected to do before they can be assimilated into the Hindu mainstream. Golwalkar in his book, We, Or, Our Nationhood Defined, says of Indian Muslims and Christians who had been converted ‘by force or deception’, that “it is our duty to call these our forlorn brothers, suffering under religious slavery for centuries, back to their ancestral home… come back and identify themselves with their ancestral Hindu way of life in dress, customs, performing marriage ceremonies and funeral rites and such other things”.

While he graciously conceded that they could continue in the form of worship they are used to, but qualified that by saying that in everything else, they must conform, and must look upon only ‘persons of our country’ as their ideal so that no room was left for disharmony. He offers no suggestion as to how the form of worship can continue, since Muslims turn towards a holy land outside the region of Sapta Sindhu when they pray, and follow the footsteps of an Arab Prophet in their everyday life as their ideal. Short of this form of ‘assimilation’, in a chilling reference to Nazi Germany in the same book, Golwalkar said that: “Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”

We may turn in conclusion to the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, where in his letter to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel on October 27, 1948, he writes about Mahatma Gandhi’s impressions of Golwalkar and the RSS: “I remember Bapu telling me after his first meeting with Golwalkar that he was partly impressed by him but at the same time did not trust him. After his second or third meeting he expressed a very strong opinion against Golwalkar and the RSS and said that it was impossible to rely upon their word. They appear to be highly reasonable when talked to but they had no compunction in acting in exact contradiction to what they said.

My own impression has been the same.” So unless Bhagwat’s statements mark a turning point in the politics of the RSS and its political arm, the BJP, and these statements are followed up with a reversal of the exclusionary policies of the two, including a repeal of the various anti-conversion laws, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, and an abandonment in public discourse of the bogey of love jihad, land jihad, IAS jihad and other such epithets describing Muslim participation in the otherwise ‘Hindu’ mainstream, to name just a few, these statements will remain just another instance of Newspeak using doublethink.

(Views expressed are personal)

Saiyyad Mohammad Nizamuddin Pasha is a Delhi-based lawyer.

This story appeared as One Hundred Years Of...Doublethink in the print edition of Outlook magazine’s October 21 issue titled Who is an Indian?, which offers a bird's-eye view of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), testimonies of exclusion and inclusion, organisational complexities, and regional challenges faced by the organisation.