Why RSS is a ‘Hindu organisation’?

The idea that RSS is not inclusive in the sense it keeps Muslims and Christians out is either a misunderstanding or mere liberal “virtue signalling”! Those who have studied history will know that while Veer Savarkar’s Hindu Maha Sabha and RSS more inclusive while the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP Hindu-centric).

Savrkar’s social philosophy had identified  that the Hindu society was bound by seven shackles (bandi): 1) Restrictions on touch (sparshabandi) of certain castes.2) Restrictions on inter-dining. (rotibandi) 3) Restrictions on inter-marriages (betibandi) 4) Restrictions on pursuing certain occupations (vyavasayabandi) 5) Restrictions on crossing the sea (sindhubandi) 6) Restrictions on rites sanctioned by the Vedas (vedoktabandi) 7) Restrictions on re-conversion (shuddhibandi)!

Savarkar was more against Christianity (obviously because its association with the British who came here with “a Bible in pocket and a gun in the other”) and wanted Hindus and Muslims to join the fight against the British. The founding of the All India Muslim League in 1906 and the British India government's creation of separate Muslim electorate under the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 was a catalyst for Hindu leaders coming together to create an organisation to protect the rights of the Hindu community members to form a political entity called the Hindu Mahasabha. Savarkar wrote that “the conception of a Hindu Nation is in no way inconsistent with the development of a common Indian Nation, a united Hindustani State in which all sects and sections, races and religions, castes and creeds, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Anglo-Indians, etc., could be harmoniously welded together into a political State on terms of perfect equality”! The Hindu Mahasabha joined hands with the Muslim League and other parties to form governments, in certain provinces after the 1937 elections. Such coalition governments were formed in Sindh, NWFP, and Bengal. He was dissuaded from trying to continue this alliance because the Muslim League started showing its fangs by then. They went closer to the British, unlike sections of the Hindu Community. Gandhiji tried to forge a Hindu-Muslim alliance against the British later, even supporting the Khilafat movement and failed! Though the Hindu Mahasabha identified India as "Hindu Rashtra" (Hindu Nation), it broadly supported the Indian National Congress in its efforts to attain national independence. But HM criticised the Congress commitment to non-violence and secularism, as well as its efforts to integrate Muslims and engage in dialogue with the separatist All India Muslim League,(having tried it earlier and failed!) which the Mahasabha thought as appeasement. So, as a Hindu Mahasabha leader, Savarkar was in politics, and CPM leader, and former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee’s father Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, a  jurist served as president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha and was Burdwan MP of the party which Somnath won when his father expired in 1971! As in the case of RSS, Hindu Mahasabha was not a watertight compartment in India politics; many of its leaders joined Congress. Shyamaprasad Mukherjee started the Jan Sangh, which after the Janata Part experiment in 1977 became the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)!

RSS was founded on cultural nationalism and its Hindu “agenda” was about holding together a civilisational state, and give it the glory it deserved after centuries of alien rule. It is significant that name given was Rashtriya (National) Swayam Sevak (Voluntary) Sangh (Corps), not  ‘Hindu Swayam Sevak Sangh’. A civilisational-state doesn’t just represent an ethnic or linguistic community or a single religious community, but a unique civilisation distinct from others. It was a very conscious decision that Sangh will not be just a Hindu outfit. But didn’t Vincent Smith (Indologist and historian) write that the “unity underlying the obvious diversity of India may be summed up in the word ‘Hindu’”? Hindutva came into existence as an anti-imperialist construct answering the challenge posed by the modern world built on the concept of a nation-state. Proponents of this worldview naturally saw India as a nation, and Hindutva provided the intellectual foundation for it. RSS Sarsangh Chalaks have repeatedly said that the Sangh defined Hindus as Savarrkar had: “Aasindhu sindhu paryantaa Yasya Bharata Bhoomika/Pitrubhu Punyabhuchaiva Tavai Hinduriti Smritah”(‘Those who regard this land of Bharat spread between river Sindhu (in the north) to the ocean Sindhu (Sindhu Sagar – Indian Ocean in the south) as their Pitrubhumi – Fatherland and Punyabhumi – Holy land are called as Hindus’.) Shri M.S. Golwalkar ‘Guruji’ told an Iranian scholar Saifuddin Jeelani in 1971 that: “According to our ways of religious belief and philosophy, a Muslim is as good as a Hindu. It is not the Hindu alone who will reach the ultimate Godhead. Everyone has the right to follow his path according to his own persuasion. That is our attitude.”Recently, the present Sarsangh Chalak, Dr.Mohan Bhagwat repeated it.

The British Home Department’s 1939-40 report on volunteer organisations shows RSS was 150000 strong then. The British government initiated a recruitment drive for the army, ARP and Civic Guards when World War II broke out. Please note, Nathuram Godse’s Hindu Rashtra Sena decided to join the British army to get military training. (24. The persistence of alleged responsibility for Gandhi murder and other tropes can be explained in part by confirmation bias, which is currency today than ever before thanks to the instant and widespread dissemination of personal opinions over social media.) The RSS refused to co-operate with the recruitment to British and had to suffer the wrath of the British rulers. In June 1939, the Home Department suggested the Central Provinces government use Section 16 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (XIV of 1908) to ban RSS in retaliation but the province’s chief secretary GM Trivedi wrote to the central government on May 22, 1940, that it was not feasible as it would lead to huge protests in the province! The Sangh’s decision to participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement erased the government’s delusion that it was a tail of the Hindu Mahasabha. CP & Berar police’s fortnightly report stated that RSS founder Hedgewar’s participation had invigorated the movement. He led thousands of sataygrahis and suffered a year’s rigorous imprisonment. The Sangh’s anti-British stance now invited suppression by an infuriated government. The Home Department report stated, “Of late, the Sangh has started taking interest in political movements of the country, as a result of which the CP government in their circular letter No 2352-2158 IV; dated 15/16 December 1932, was compelled to issue an order warning government servants of the communal and political nature of the Sangh, and forbidding their becoming members or participating in the organisation’s activities.”

There is nothing fanatical about India’s Hindu heritage Sangh Parivar swears by. To the contrary, being loyal to that heritage means not only that Indians of all walks of life, all religious creeds can feel at home in India, and all non-Hindu citizens can integrate into the mother society without having to surrender their unique cultural and religious identities. Anthropologist France Boss has written that “if we wish to take over the direction of a society we must either  guide it from within its cultural framework or else eradicate its culture and impose a new culture”. Hindutva forces prefer to operate from within the frame work of our ancient culture. Communists try to eradicate the past culture and create a new one. Did they succeed anywhere yet?

The contemporary reality is that Christianity and Islam are the world’s two major missionary religions, which between them claim half of humanity as their followers, with Christians numbering over two billion and Muslims over a billion of a global population of approximately six billion. These religions try to convert the followers of non-missionary religions to their own faith, thereby generating the phenomenon of religious conversion. Hindus are open towards other views, unlike ‘good’ Christians and Muslims who feel obligated to make everyone believe what they believe, if necessary by deceit or force. What is the logic behind conversions? It is, simply put, is “my religions is better than yours”. That is fine. But what if they say the Hindus are pagans and infidels, and need to be converted eventually so that they deserve God? Jesus said:”I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto Father but by me!” Christians, a minuscule 3 percent of India’s population, can put up with unrelenting and murderous persecution in Muslim countries but various Xian Churches in India worry about ‘hate speech’ as their focus is soul harvesting! Christian evangelists have been doing great harvest of souls for centuries and still they are no nearer now than they were in 52 AD, 190 AD or 1757 AD! A tolerant multi-religious society is the last thing supremacists of any evangelist faith want! We can see Christianity, even now, centuries after coming to India, as a new and uncertain graft upon the Indian trunk!

With respect to Islam, in India we do have a cultural baggage of alienation with it because India was under the subjugation of Islamic rulers who were passionately following the commands of Prophet Muhammed to convert Hindus, kill them or charge a tax jizya for allowing them to live as Hindus. The length and breadth of the two princely States of Malabar and Kochi are strewn with Temples vandalized by Tippu Sultan. Mughal empire, despite the whitewashing by Leftist historians, was known for its denial of basic human rights to the subjects belonging to the majority religion, denied them the right to practice their religion freely and destroyed their places of worship with continued brutality, some of the holiest of the holy ones being pulled down several times, their building material used in lavatories, or used in Mosques upside down, idols and carvings defaced and used as pavement stone and so on. Please remember, blaming RSS/BJP/and the demolition of Babari structure in Ayodhya for the Islamic terrorism in India is a hoary cliché these days!

The point of friction, not only in India but worldwide, has been the propensity of Christianity and Islam to proselytize. Remember, the Minorities subcommittee of the CAI altered the wording of Article 25 was modified to include the right to propagate!  As a wit has put it, “a seemingly equal right to peddle one’s religion becomes unequal and unfair, much like giving wolves and sheep the right to eat one another”. In India as elsewhere, the two Abrahamic faiths have been known to poach followers from each other besides targeting Hindus and indigenous tribes.