National

Inside The RSS

All the Sangh's spheres of activity — armed forces, intelligence, education, science

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Inside The RSS
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OPINIONS on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh may vary, but the evidence is clear: since its inception at Nagpur in 1925 under Keshav Baliram Hedgewar with a handful of followers, it has emerged as the organisation articulating Hindu revivalism. All along, its goal too has been clear: establishing a "vibrant Hindu nation" with the ethos of the alleged Golden Vedic Age at its core. Simultaneously, it has sought to consolidate the Hindu community from within. This long-gestation project has been worked on with a single-mindedness, with an instinctive penchant for absolutes.

Historians explain its birth as a Hindu revivalist response to the Hindu-Muslim communal tensions of the early 1920s. The cosmopolitan Nehru and the radical Communists were the ideological enemies. But the real threat was Gandhi who made free use of Hindu symbols and projected his personal religiosity as an asset but rejected the RSS notion of Hinduism completely. And he gained wide acceptability for his propagation of non-violence and conciliation towards Muslims. Both facets that severely undermined the "energism" espoused by the RSS.

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There is, of course, a duality in the RSS sense of identity. At one level it speaks of reforming Hindu society, with a new emphasis on anti-casteism, even if touched by the Brahmanical spirit. But the RSS was also a response to the Other; the perceived threat of a proselytising 'Christian' British Raj and the sword-arm of Islam. This being the core, the outer form has appropriated an array of figures whose world-views offer a wide gradient—Vivekananda, Gandhi, Patel, Bhagat Singh, Ambedkar—and acceptability.

In its search for absolutes and its vision of a casteless motherland stretching from the Hindukush to the Indian Ocean, the RSS has been a secretive, its critics say sinister, body. In close to 75 years it has had only four sarsanghchalaks—Hedgewar (1925-40), M.S. Golwalkar (1940-73), Balasaheb Deoras (1973-94) and present incumbent Rajendra Singh. Succession has never officially been a problem, but murmurs have persisted because the heir is nominated by the chief, often on his deathbed. Despite Hedgewar's dissuasions, the sarsanghchalak has been mythified as the guide for the "corporate Hindu nation defined as the living God".

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RSS members are taught martial arts in Sanskritic military terminology, Hindu military heroes are venerated and its membership can't be quantified. Funds have traditionally been collected at the Guru Dakshina festival where swayamsewaks offer money to the RSS flag, but to avoid taxation, individual shakhas are authorised to collect money. The RSS has been banned thrice—after Gandhi's assassination, during the Emergency and after Ayodhya, though it claims a non-political turf for itself. It has also spawned a parivar: over 80 affiliates in various fields working to change attitudes and cast Indians in the Sangh mould. Character building, in RSS-speak.

The early RSS insisted its ties with the Hindu Mahasabha and the Jana Sangh were "symbolic"—there is a catalogue of angry, critical exchanges between V.D. Sarvarkar/S.P. Mookerjee and Hedgewar and Golwalkar—but links with the BJP are certainly symbiotic. Compare Sarvarkar's (Hindu Mahasabha chief from 1937) public criticism of the RSS—"the epitaph of the RSS volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the RSS and he died without accomplishing anything"—with joint general secretary K.S. Sudarshan walking up to A.B. Vajpayee's house, influencing aspects of cabinet formation.

When Golwalkar finally agreed to "lend" men to the Jana Sangh, he cautioned them not to transgress the "role of actors," as "you have to perform your role like an actor in a play". Mere footnotes? Or a live tension? That's the question for the 21st century.

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