RSS remains a Hindu Organization Part-2

The stubborn obduracy of Christians and Muslims that those who do not belong to those faiths no longer have a place in God’s plan for humanity added to their questionable behavior regarding territorial loyalty creates an atmosphere of disunity and distrust of the most ominous quality! So expecting Muslims and Christians with their exceptionalism and exclusivity cannot be expected to join the mainstream that RSS wanted to represent! Have you noticed, a bit queer, isn’t it, two years after Partition, Muslim members of Constituent Assembly, who represented the Muslims who preferred to stay back in secular India, could raise vehement demands for a separate electorate and could successfully stall the proposal for a common civil code, think of the Muslim leadership of India then! Six decades after Partition, we want dialogue with Muslims; we want co-existence; we want to build bridges!

Islam demands a black-and-white separation of believers and non-believers, and the Prophet too wanted Muslims to separate themselves from the rest after he fled Mecca for Medina. It is little surprise that this kind of mental partitioning makes all Muslims living as minorities anywhere think they must separate themselves from the rest to retain their identity. Muslim youth avoid certain attitudes, standard language, clothes and some behaviours because they consider them part of Hindu way of life. They fear that adopting Hindu ways would be detrimental to their collective racial identity and solidarity. The behaviours and attitudes to be avoided included, for example, striving for high grades, talking properly, hanging around too many Hindu students, and participating in extracurricular activities that were populated by Hindus. And Hindu parents tended to have higher academic expectations for their kids. Some teachers and education administrators expect less of the Muslim students in terms of performance, even going so far as to de-emphasize the importance of academic achievments. Eventually there is a “learning gap” and communal politicians and civil rights leaders encourage Muslims to see themselves as victims.

What is that the Hindu majority of India expected to do under the above circumstances? No people with a self-respectful notion of national identity can carry within a disillusioned history of themselves, and therefore some embellishments, some glorification of the past etc. are essential strategy. This is the essence of a new national identity called Hindutva. Hindus, unlike Xians and Muslims don’t divide humanity into those chosen by God and those eternally damned! Hindu dharma requires regarding all as brothers and sisters. Vedas declare "Ekam sat. Vipraa: bahuda vadanti" - "Truth is One. The learned speak of That in so many ways". While it's probably impossible to avoid ever offending anyone, Hindus really don't want to gratuitously offend deeply held non-Hindu belief systems. Tolerance, a virtue seeing other peoples’ point of view has been degenerating into if not exactly self-hatred, certainly a form of cultural relativism in which the unique achievements of the Hindu civilization are devalued. We can’t accept it! We believe that the acid test of secularism Muslims/Christians have to take is this: will they be tolerant to the extent they accept other religious beliefs on an equal footing with their own? 

In a land which had extended its hospitality over millennia to people of every faith, only Muslims saw themselves as a people apart refused to become assimilated and repaid India’s welcome by tearing the country in two. What did Dr.Ambedkar, not very pleased with the Hindu religion thanks to the bitter fruits of the caste system himself, think of the situation as an architect of the Democratic Republic of India? “...I felt that it was only by partition that Hindus would not only be independent but free. If India and Pakistan had remained united in one state, Hindus, though independent, would have been at the mercy of the Muslims....”(Ambedkar- Thoughts On Linguistic States, 1955)

Were Hindus conquered, subjected to hatred proselytization and persecution because we were different human beings, lesser mortals? Or is our Hindutva a meaningless the distinction that deserves no commendation and attracts animus and violence as an inferior faith? Shouldn’t we stand together to defend ourselves, and our rights as Hindus, recalling that we were subjected to a thousand years of subjugation, disdain, exploitation, conversions, divisions because of our disunity?

Is an unpleasant divisive politics preferable to the Hindutva which tries to hold together a large number of castes and communities under its umbrella? Is promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result more important than the principle of equality before the law? History is civilizational memory. It’s a way of seeing, understanding, and rendering the world as well as other forms of knowledge. Without it, “or the stories memories are suspended in, we cannot say who we are or what we are…we cannot…even dwell in society.” But to make sense of all the purportedly dry and boring facts and dates that relate who and what we are, we need some organizational narrative, a structure within which “facts arrange themselves and thereby take on significance.” Hindus have those stories, a great tapestry of mythology, great literature! Most of Hindu mythology is full of traditional humanizing myths. If and when they are removed from our lives, nothing much is left. Remember, cultures/civilizations die when they cease to believe in themselves! Myths, whether Indian or Roman, belonging to the Hindu culture of Christian, are the collective historical conscience of the respective communities; their instructions to the future generations. Preserving the memory of historical events, codifying religious rituals, and at times dramatizing contemporary social conflicts in aesthetic forms as poems or parables, they do forge a collective identity.

Hindus have very little recorded, verifiable, factual history, but there is another one: culturally constructed and embodied in popular memory, told, retold over and over again. Hinduism places time and history as of secondary importance in the realm of the phenomenal world. Thus Mahabharata, Ramayana, Vedas, Upanishads, and all our scriptures are messages permeating across time and generations. Mahabharata and Ramayana are the foundational texts of Indian civilization. They are not mere mythologies: they are Itihāsas. An Itihāsa is a history that has overcome historicism: a history that has become critical and self-conscious. They have transformed high abstract philosophies of the Upanishads into aesthetically appealing literary work which has touched the hearts of millions of Indians and has further manifested as performing arts which have been lived and experienced by common people throughout Indian history. The people who wrote the Mahābhārata were profound intellects. India has produced some of the greatest philosophical thinkers known to humankind. It has produced works we are still grappling with. If a nation is a historical continuity bound by such inheritance and also a shared culture, India is one of the oldest nations with a continuous history of several thousand years.

In his Discovery of India Jawaharlal Nehru shows his fascination with this mysterious unity of India that is Bharat through the ages: “the same national heritage and the same set of moral and mental qualities”, “some kind of a dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization” The Indian republic generally completed the metamorphosis from the artifact of colonial unification to a nation-state. The Indian nationalism or ‘Hindu nationalism’ if you will, mobilized the frustrations, emotions, affinities, and hatreds too attending the cultural humiliation of the encounters first with Islam (the Moguls) and Western Imperialism which devalued the Indian heritage. An overarching layer of common culture composed of the richly diverse symbols of Hindu Cosmology and history would perhaps help wipe out the cleavages of caste and community; provide a common ideology and a binding passion needed to unite a civilization and inspire it for progress.

Those who refuse to share this passion forces themselves out of the civilizational State; but not the administrative state as citizens. You have to accept that Hindutva is a heterogeneous movement and that most members reject the more extreme positions.   Hindus resent the idea that all other groups may advance their rights while only we - only the Hindus - may not. The RSS believes that Indians are united not only by a common past, and common heritage, but by a common and burning support and reverence for liberty, for pluralism, our commitment to our common future, and our common values, of inquiry. Religious identities and differences are not straightforwardly objective facts. It is a prior belief in separateness that leads one to construct narratives that exaggerate points of difference. According to the RSS world view, the attitude "separation is necessary for distinctiveness" could fairly serve as the tagline of an anti-national or anti-social ideology! The RSS stands athwart the “Left-liberal” secular narrative. It vouches for representative democracy, respect for all religions in public life, a responsible ethic of nationalism, and a duty-centric form of citizenship that encourages individuals to put the nation before themselves! Citizens in a democratic republic live in three planes: personal, social, and political. Freedom of worship exists at the personal level. Social traditions have to conform to the code of dos and don’ts defined legally. And the political role of the citizen emerges out of the concept of all Indians being part of the same nationhood. A moral idea like secularism appears too weak to bond disparate peoples together in a political union. Something denser and more tangible, like cultural identity, must be the glue that holds a nation together... building a public sphere constituted by a shared — often internally contested — moral language. It does not mean RSS is consciously keeping non-Hindus out of it. There were attempts to embrace all Hindus according to the RSS’ definition of Hindus into RSS. But they cannot be yet considered as moderately successful. This is the story of RSS so far!