The Hindu : The RSS message from Bangalore

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Mar 19, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

The RSS message from Bangalore

By V. Krishna Ananth

The message from the three-day meet of the RSS Pratinidhi Sabha cautioning Muslims against falling prey to the machinations of "extremist leaders'' may at first sight sound like a sermon from liberals. No one can support the fundamentalist prescriptions handed out by elements of the clergy who, in the name of defending their faith, strive to keep members of the minority community in a backward condition.

But extremism is not the monopoly of leaders of the Muslim community. There are influential men (and women too!) within the Union Cabinet and in the various State Governments who celebrate such odious practices as sati and caste in the name of tradition. This, after all, is what they mean by insisting that school texts describe the Vedic civilisation as the golden age.

The Pratinidhi Sabha is certainly not a forum of liberals. To be fair, the RSS does not make such claims either. Instead, as an organisation it strives hard to deny even the scope for a liberal discourse that exists within the Hindu religious tradition.

The call from Bangalore that Muslims should realise "their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority'' is one more instance of the Sangh reaffirming its faith in the idea of cultural nationalism as expounded first by Veer Savarkar and elaborated by M.S. Golwalkar later in his "We or our nationhood defined'', first published in 1939.

Golwalkar said: "Non-Hindu people in Hindustan must adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but glorification of the Hindu race and culture...they must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen rights.'' (We or Our Nationhood Defined, Nagpur, 1947, pages 55-56).

It is this prescription that has been reaffirmed at Bangalore. The Sangh has conveyed to the outfits under its control that there shall be no dilution of the majoritarian agenda in the days to come. Golwalkar's prescriptions were delivered at a time when the Indian nation was in the making. During the nationalist struggle against imperialist domination, such denominational identities as Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, melted to generate a nationhood wedded to the modern notions of democracy, pluralism and, above all, a set-up based on the rule of law.

By saying that Muslims' safety in India depends on their earning the "goodwill of the majority'' and that "winning goodwill means respecting, tolerating and cooperating with the majority community'', (as explained by Madan Das, who interacts with the BJP on behalf of the Sangh), the RSS has made its intentions so explicitly clear that its cadre will not care to respect the Constitution and its spirit — pluralism, democracy and the rule of law.

The message is that the RSS and its front organisations (including the BJP whose luminaries were present in strength at the Bangalore meet) are categorically committed to Golwalkar's prescriptions for the minorities.

The implications of the Golwalkar worldview are self-evident. Rather than viewing the killing of Muslims in Gujarat with as much loathing (and pain) as the massacre at Godhra, the Golwalkar mode of thinking condones the violence all over Gujarat as merely a "reaction'' to the "action'' at Godhra.

This is the implication of defining nationalism in the denominational terms contained in Golwalkar's prescriptions, to which the Sangh and its `parivar' are wedded. It is this mindset that leads the VHP to explain the storming of the Orissa Legislative Assembly as an unfortunate incident, but then qualifies it by saying that it was a reaction to the policy of "appeasement''.

Recall the infamous words a couple of years ago by B.L.Sharma `Prem', the VHP storm trooper from Delhi, when nuns were allegedly raped in a Madhya Pradesh village, that it was an expression of patriotism.

It is time Atal Behari Vajpayee and others in the BJP who have liberal pretensions and, more important, such leaders as George Fernandes, Nitish Kumar, Chandrababu Naidu, M. Karunanidhi and others in the NDA explained how far they are willing to go along with the RSS agenda (which now no longer carries a mask), all in the name of the NDA's national agenda for governance.

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