False Harmony

WHEN MS GOLWALKAR died in Nagpur, the seat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, there were some unexpected celebrations in parts of the city. Golwalkar had led the RSS for thirty-three years—longer than anyone before or since—shaping it into a powerful Hindu nationalist force in independent India, a country that had promulgated a secular constitution. He was a staunch defender of the caste system: in his Bunch of Thoughts, he wrote that the four-fold division of Hindus was at the “very core of our concept of ‘nation.’”

And so, on the evening of 5 June 1973, nearly a hundred people gathered around Indora Chowk. “It was a sweltering night, but the heat did not stifle our excitement,” Saroj Meshram, who was present in the crowd, told me. The 17-year-old was part of the Nagpur chapter of the Dalit Panthers, a revolutionary anti-caste group formed in Bombay by Dalit poets and activists in 1972, modelled on the Black Panthers in the United States. The local leadership, including Prakash Ramteke, Bhimrao Naik, Babban Katane, Suresh Waghmare and Suresh Ghate, decided to march through the heart of the city to the RSS headquarters in the Mahal locality.

“We don’t celebrate death,” Meshram, now 70 years old, said. “But Golwalkar was different. He was the foremost advocate of chaturvarnya”—the fourfold caste system—“and we could not hold back our joy on the news of his death.” As they marched through the streets with sticks and torchlight in hand, their numbers kept growing. He added that some members even distributed sweets to mark the occasion.

“We were shouting slogans: RSS Murdabad! Golwalkar Murdabad! Brahminism Murdabad!”—Death to the RSS! Death to Golwalkar! Death to Brahminism! “For a while, we stayed outside the RSS headquarters and continued to shout slogans, but no one came out.” They moved ahead to the RSS office about a kilometre away, at Reshimbagh. “There, too, we shouted slogans, but no RSS man showed up.”