Why Mohan Bhagwat’s Recent Statements are a testament to the RSS’s core ideology

Barely a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed that every individual in India “has an undeniable right to retain or adopt” any faith on 17 February, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) supremo, Mohan Bhagwat, courted controversy by saying that Mother Teresa’s service was motivated by the incentive to convert the people she served to Christianity. While this is the latest incident in which the RSS chief has articulated his disdain for minorities in India, it is not the first. Not too long ago, on 8 February, Bhagwat had created a furore by asserting that every person in India should consider himself or herself a Hindu. In this story that was published in our May 2014 issue, Dinesh Narayanan explores how the identity of the RSS has evolved to constantly emphasise its aggressively Hindu-nationalist and anti-minority stance.

THE RSS UNDER BHAGWAT may have updated its economic approach while retaining its ideological soul (the sarsanghchalak’s alleged tolerance for corrupt Sangh workers notwithstanding), and thereby partially overcome one of the most important challenges it has faced in recent decades—how to respond to the cultural upheaval wrought by economic liberalisation. But the organisation has failed to rid itself of a more longstanding existential threat—the bigotry of its members, especially against Muslims. Perhaps these trends are interlinked, and the Sangh, as it adopts a more market-oriented economic position, has found it advantageous to simultaneously reaffirm its aggressively Hindu-nationalist core.

Despite the RSS’s continual public denials that it is bigoted or fosters violence in its members, large and small examples of extreme intolerance in the Sangh family—Modi’s Uttar Pradesh campaign manager using the language of “revenge” and “honour” in riot-affected Muzaffarnagar; the head of the VHP calling for vigilante action to evict Muslims from their homes—seem to leak out into the press constantly. Bhagwat himself frequently accuses Muslim men of carrying out “love Jihad” by courting Hindu women. Former RSS members say that these are the attitudes in which the Sangh brought them up.

In January, I went to meet Shyam Pandharipande, a former journalist who grew up in an RSS family, at his sixth-floor apartment in Nagpur. “I joined the RSS before I joined school and I completed my RSS training before I graduated from college,” Pandharipande told me. He recalled a revealing episode from his third year of the Sangh’s officer-training camp, in 1970, the last step in becoming a full-time RSS worker. During a question-and-answer session, a volunteer asked Yadavrao Joshi, then the head of Sangh workers across all of south India, “We say RSS is a Hindu organisation. We say we are a Hindu nation, India belongs to Hindus. We also say in the same breath that Muslims and Christians are welcome to follow their faith and that they are welcome to remain as they are so long as they love this country. Why do we have to give this concession? Why don’t we be very clear that they have no place if we are a Hindu country?”

According to Pandharipande, Joshi replied: “As of now, RSS and Hindu society are not strong enough to say clearly to Muslims and Christians that if you want to live in India, convert to Hinduism. Either convert or perish. But when the Hindu society and RSS will become strong enough we will tell them that if you want to live in India and if you love this country, you accept that some generations earlier you were Hindus and come back to the Hindu fold.”

The RSS ideology has not always been so extreme. In the decade after Deoras took over, the Sangh managed to wipe away much of the stigma associated with its communalism. But then came the Ram temple movement and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which indelibly stamped the Sangh as a fundamentalist organisation. Although the radicalisation that took place during the movement still defines the RSS for many people, I was told it created a generational rift within the Sangh family. A state executive member of the RSS in Kerala, who has been a pracharak since the 1950s, said that Ayodhya was never discussed at Sangh forums in the early days. “In the collected works of Guruji, there is no mention of Ayodhya or the Ram temple even once,” he pointed out. “A senior leader once told me that RSS’s participation in the Ayodhya movement was a case of the tail wagging the dog.”

He added that that single act—the destruction of the mosque—alienated thousands of people who were Sangh supporters. “I remember Kerala High Court judges openly participating in VHP conferences,” he said. “Similarly, many Muslims and Christians wanted to join the Jan Sangh. Now they do not want to associate.”

Of course, the RSS and its offshoots have never had a monopoly on bigotry and communal violence in Indian society. This is even true for the Ram temple agitation. Two people in the Sangh—Devendra Swaroop and one of the organisation’s dozen national leaders—told me that the movement grew out of a seed planted by the Congress. This is supported by Christophe Jaffrelot, who writes in his book The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics that Dau Dayal Khanna, an octogenarian Congressman and former Uttar Pradesh minister, was the first to lay before the VHP a plan to build a campaign around Ram’s purported birthplace, in 1983. This followed a period in which Indira Gandhi began making pilgrimages to sacred rivers, shrines and temples across the country, and speaking of a Hindu hegemony in the Hindi heartland. Several years later, when the Ram temple movement was gaining steam, Rajiv Gandhi arranged for secret talks between the sarsanghchalak, Deoras, and a Congress emissary, the former cabinet minister Bhanu Prakash Singh. At their conclave, Singh told Deoras that Gandhi was prepared to allow foundation stones for a Ram temple to be laid in Ayodhya, provided the RSS backed the Congress Party in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections. Deoras agreed. The Congress government permitted a foundation-laying ceremony to be performed, but changed course after an outcry from the Muslim community.

In the Bhagwat era, the Ram temple movement has largely been relegated to the increasingly minor domain of the VHP, though it also receives a mention in the BJP’s latest election manifesto. A couple of years ago, at a baithak in Tripunithura in Kerala, Bhagwat was asked about Ayodhya, “How long will it take to build a Ram temple there?” He replied that the dispute “won’t be solved for at least the next thirty years.” He then smiled, and added, “It will be the VHP’s biggest problem, too—to keep the issue alive for that long.”

Other pernicious strains in the Sangh seem to have thrived in the past decade. The RSS national executive member Indresh Kumar is named in the chargesheets for the bombings carried out by Swami Aseemanand and other Hindu terrorists between 2006 and 2008, when Bhagwat was the RSS general secretary. Although the investigations are proceeding at a snail’s pace, there is still some chance that Kumar may be charged. (Officials at the National Investigation Agency declined to comment on the cases.) In theory, Bhagwat, too, could come under investigation after Aseemanand told The Caravan in January that the RSS chief sanctioned the attacks.

An excerpt from 'RSS 3.0' published in The Caravan's May 2014 issue. Read the story in full here.