The RSS today not only has a vibrant and growing Muslim wing but works in Muslim-dominated areas too. Moreover, its rank and file is populated by Dalits, tribals, and OBCs and its reach has increased among other marginalised Indians. While an avowedly “social-cultural” organisation, the RSS has used its growing appeal to nourish and influence its many affiliates. – Rahul Shivshankar
The setting isn’t prepossessing. A small dusty, mostly grassless, strip that falls within the perimeter of an out-of-the-way temple in the Chinhat locality of Lucknow plays host to a group of portly elders and weedy young men. They assemble here every day as dawn breaks. The assemblage is a “shakha” (branch) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The shakha has been a fixture on this ground for the better part of fifteen years.
In the words of the third Sarsanghchalak (chief) of RSS, the late Balasaheb Deoras, the shakha is a place where Bharatiyas pledge to be “good citizens” inspired by the values of Sanatana Dharma, so that they can be made “available to the service of the nation.” The doctrine has been neatly summed up in one word: Hindutva.
Why would a group, redoubtably committed to such an elevated dharmic value system, evoke hate and fear in others? Especially when its work is in plain sight.
But it does. Hate and fear were triggered against the RSS in Chinhat just a few days ago. A violent mob of Muslims descended upon the shakha at Chinhat and pelted stones at its hapless members. The mob’s leader was categorical: “Disband and never return.”
The attack on the RSS shakha is just the latest in an alarmingly growing list of targeted strikes (verbal and physical) upon the organisation and its ‘swayamsewaks’. Most, even the dastardliest, attacks don’t make it into the news cycle. It’s as if vast preserves of the Indian intelligentsia are happy to normalise hate against a vital pillar of Bharat’s cultural and democratic tapestry.
How did it come to this?
The answer lies in analysing the so-called “secular left” intellectual reaction to any organisation or individual committed to the reclamation of the civilisational ethos of Bharat.
Bequeathed “Western progressivism”, a view patronised by their British intellectual mentors, some Indians on the Left have considered it their bounden duty to militantly impose this credo. Thus, the rootless anglicized Leftism privilegentsia has viewed those involved in the legitimate appreciation of the grandeur of Hindu civilisation as anti-secular.
Left zealotry has bred conflict with those committed to Bharat’s civilisational ethos: Sanatana Dharma.
As RSS ideologue, Rakesh Sinha, writes, “Hindutva forces the RSS to believe that India’s civilisational deficit cannot be resolved by a compartmental approach to secularism, liberalism, nationalism and multi-culturalism and Hindu civilisation”.
As the sutradhar of Hindutva, the RSS obviously argues against the Leftist tradition. It is hardly surprising therefore that the Left has come to depict the RSS as the “boogeyman”.
In fact, the typecasting began under the British itself. Colonial-era bans on bureaucrats from mixing with the RSS were revived, and the RSS was falsely linked to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and banned. And soon, even avowedly Constitutional pursuits of the RSS, like rooting for a Uniform Civil Code or the abrogation of Article 370 were linked to anti-minority Hindu revivalism. The movement for the construction of a Ram Mandir was a particular trigger for the Left.
The Left immediately got “just cause” to brand the RSS a “divisive Hindu upper caste interloper”, committed to stripping Indian democracy of its secular veneer. Muslims were mobilised to “fear” the RSS. All of this labelling defies the facts.
The RSS today not only has a vibrant and growing Muslim wing but works in Muslim-dominated areas too. Moreover, its rank and file is populated by Dalits, tribals, and OBCs and its reach has increased among other marginalised Indians. While an avowedly “social-cultural” organisation, the RSS has used its growing appeal to nourish and influence its many affiliates. One of them being India’s largest political party – the BJP.
With the BJP ascending the ladder to political power at break-neck speed, the Indian Left is feeling particularly vulnerable. More so as its own umbilical cord to relevance—the Congress party—has dramatically lost heft. So much so that the Congress party has been forced to declare, on behalf of its Leftist ecosystem, “a fight to finish the BJP and its guiding force, the RSS”.
This culture war is playing out as a no-holds-barred contest. Even violence against the RSS is now a justifiable means to an end. Consequently, in the Left-liberal ecosphere, hate (a patently undemocratic impulse) against the RSS is now normalised, and viewed as but a small price to pay. – News18, 1 August 2024
› Rahul Shivshankar is Consulting Editor at Network18.
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