The impact of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to demonetise high-value currency notes on 8 November 2016 was not limited to just the economy. It also dealt a fatal blow to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s oldest shakha—the basic unit of its organisational structure that conducts physical exercises and indoctrination sessions—in north India. But unlike India’s economy, which spluttered in the immediate aftermath of the note ban, it took almost two years for this RSS shakha to crumble under the pressure of the centre’s unprecedented decision.
Varanasi, also known as Kashi or Benares, was the first place in the Hindi belt where the RSS, originally a Nagpur-centric body, started its operations. The Dhanathaneshwar shakha, located in the Pakka Mahal area of Varanasi—Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency—was established eight decades ago, under the guidance of GD Savarkar, one of the co-founders of the RSS and the elder brother of Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar. Set up in the late 1930s, the shakha has experienced several ups and downs and even survived the three bans imposed on the Hindu supremacist organisation: in 1948, after the assassination of Gandhi; in the mid-1970s, during the Emergency; in 1992, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
For some time after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, this shakha, like most others in north and west India, benefitted from the RSS’s synchronised political acceleration. But the story changed after Modi implemented demonetisation, leaving shop-owners and small businessmen—traditional supporters of the RSS—gasping for breath.
Kamal Narayan Mishra, who is the karyavah, or officer in-charge, of the shakha, told me, “As far as I remember, the shakha always had two chapters—the morning shakha and the evening shakha. The evening shakha stopped functioning about a year back. The morning shakha survived for some more time. But it kept dwindling because of the lack of swayamsevaks. Now it is rarely held.”
Mishra, a staunch supporter of Modi, started attending the shakha sometime in the mid-1990s. In March this year, he was appointed as its karyavah. “When I took over as karyavah, the evening shakha had already stopped and the morning shakha had started becoming irregular. Now the situation is such that it is not held for weeks together,” Mishra said. “Swayamsevaks attending this shakha mostly belong to local business families, and they seem to have lost interest in it,” he added.
According to Mishra, “Earlier the swayamsevaks attending this shakha were mostly Brahmins. Later, as the composition of the area changed so did the composition of the shakha members.” He added that, “For last few decades most of the swayamsevaks attending this shakha have belonged to traders and business families who have shops in nearby Chaukhamba”—a congested bulk-trade market dealing in steel, brass and copper products as well as gold and silver jewellery.
Tracing this evolution of the Dhanathaneshwar shakha’s membership, I discovered that the shakha finds mention in one of the autobiographical articles written by Bhaurao Deoras, the younger brother of the third RSS chief, Balasaheb Deoras. It was Bhaurao who oversaw the expansion of the RSS’s activities in Uttar Pradesh, starting his work in the state in 1937, three years before the death of Dr KB Hedgewar, the founder chief of the Hindutva body.
Bhaurao wrote in his article, titled “Weh, Main Aur Uttar Pradesh”—He, I and Uttar Pradesh, that this shakha was started sometime between 1938 and 1939, when GD visited Varanasi along with Hedgewar. GD inspired Bhaurao Damle, a priest from Maharashtra living in the temple town, to start a shakha. With GD’s help, Bhaurao wrote, “Damle started a shakha in the lawns of a small temple. The temple was called Dhanathaneshwar. Dhanathaneshwar shakha was the first shakha of Kashi.”
For long, this shakha in Pakka Mahal, a locality of havelis and extremely narrow lanes overlooking the ghats of Varanasi, was attended primarily by Maharashtrian Brahmins living in the area. During the early 1990s, most of the original inhabitants migrated and the shakha shifted from the Dhanathaneshwar temple to another location in Pakka Mahal, the Nana Phadnis Wada.
According to a senior office-bearer of the RSS’s Kashi “prant”—one of six artificial divisions of Uttar Pradesh created by the RSS for organisational purposes—“Swayamsevaks belonging to business families do not seem enthusiastic about attending shakhas.” He continued, “Our understanding is that this is happening because of the demonetisation decision, which hit these families so hard that they are still struggling to come out of the crisis. This has affected the functioning of shakhas which depend on swayamsevaks belonging to this community.”
The senior office-bearer further claimed that the Dhanathaneshwar shakha was not an isolated example. “A large number of shakhas which draw swayamsevaks from business families are affected by the latter’s disenchantment with the Modi government. That’s the most disturbing anxiety of the Sangh.”
But, the office-bearer said, “the impact cannot get reflected in our register.” He added, “In our system of counting, shakhas never die even if they stop functioning.” He explained that inactive shakhas are qualified as “shupta,” or dormant shakhas, “which may become active anytime, and so they get counted along with jagrit shakhas” —active shakhas. “For example, on paper there are 94 morning shakhas in North Varanasi, but on the ground not even half of them are operational,” he said.