The Instigator: How MS Golwalkar’s virulent ideology underpins Modi’s India. By HARTOSH SINGH BAL
EVERY CULT OR
ORGANISATION typically
carries forward the legacy of its founder, and it is rare for those who build
upon that legacy to exercise the same influence—let alone exceed it. But the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, has never been a typical organisation,
and, in this regard too, it stands out. It was founded in 1925 by Dr Keshav
Baliram Hedgewar, but it bears the far more emphatic stamp of his successor,
Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. While Hedgewar is referred to as Doctorji within the
RSS, Golwalkar is known as Guruji.
Golwalkar took over as
the RSS’s sarsanghchalak, or chief, after Hedgewar’s death, in 1940, and held
the post till his own death, in 1973. When he assumed charge, the RSS—also
known as the Sangh—was still establishing itself, and did not have a major
presence outside Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region. Under him, the organisation
passed through great turbulence: it played an incendiary role in the Partition
violence, and was banned after the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. But under
Golwalkar’s leadership, the RSS also set down its written constitution and
began to expand beyond its shakhas, or local branches, and into front
organisations such as the Jan Sangh in politics, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi
Parishad among students, the Vishva Hindu Parishad in religion, and the
Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh among industrial workers.
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By the time Golwalkar
died, the RSS had extended across the entire country, and its network of allied
organisations - the Sangh Parivar - had penetrated almost every aspect of Indian
society. His ideological influence did not end with his death: Bunch of
Thoughts, a text that distils the vast spread of Golwalkar’s writings and
speeches, remains the Sangh’s bible to date. In 2004, MG Vaidya,
currently the RSS’s leading ideologue, articulated what amounts to the
organisation’s official view on Golwalkar. Vaidya, according to the RSS
mouthpiece, Organiser, “described Shri Guruji as the biggest gift
to Hindu society in the 20th century. He said that the credit for today’s
importance of the Sangh in national politics should be given to Shri Guruji,
who worked tirelessly for spreading the Sangh work in every nook and corner of
the country.”
I met Vaidya early in
June at his home in Nagpur. In his living room, which is lined with
book-shelves, he spoke to me for nearly an hour, often getting up to pull out a
book and make me read a particular paragraph to emphasise a point he was
making. His energy belied the fact that he was 94 years old; at the end of our
interaction, he hopped onto a motorcycle and rode pillion to see a colleague
admitted in hospital. “When I joined the RSS in 1941,” Vaidya told me during
our conversation, “I took a pledge to make India independent.” After this goal
was attained in 1947, he added, “a conceptual storm hit us: what should we do?”
Golwalkar, Vaidya said, “inspired the Sangh with a fresh purpose. He said that
we have to consider the organisation of the whole society, not just one aspect
of it. Life has many fields, like education, industry, agriculture, religion.
We have to inspire and organise people in all these areas.”
Golwalkar’s continuing
influence is clear from the reverence in which the country’s only two Bharatiya
Janata Party prime ministers have held him. In 2006, speaking on the occasion
of Golwalkar’s centenary, Atal Bihari Vajpayee described his first meeting with
Golwalkar, in 1940, when Vajpayee was studying in the tenth standard. His
account of the experience, published in a 2006 issue of Organiser,
has an almost spiritual overtone to it. “Shri Guruji had come to Gwalior
station,” Vajpayee said. “I was also among those who reached there to welcome
him. When I met him he looked at me as if he recognised me. In fact, there was
no reason of recognising, as it was our first meeting. But that meeting left a
lasting influence on me. It was at that time that I decided to work for the
nation.” In 2008, Narendra Modi
authored a book titled Jyotipunj (Beams of Light), in which he
retold the biographies of 16 RSS men who had inspired him. The
longest piece was on Golwalkar, later translated into English by the writer and
journalist Aakar Patel. In it, Modi compared the RSS leader to the
likes of Buddha, the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji and the freedom fighter Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, concluding, in a rare moment of humility, “We are not
capable of knowing or analysing Guruji’s life. This is a humble
attempt to recount those beautiful moments of his life.”
Golwalkar’s critics
have seen him rather differently. The writer and historian Ramchandra Guha has
referred to him as the “guru of hate,” while the political scientist Jyotirmaya
Sharma titled his book on Golwalkar’s ideology Terrifying Vision.
Today, when the RSS wields more control than it ever has over Indian politics
and society, matching or perhaps even exceeding the Congress at its zenith, the
India that we are dealing with, for better or worse, does not make sense
without making sense of Golwalkar.. read more:
see also
India's
ruling party is sponsoring an assault on the Indian state // Tavleen Singh - Is
this Hindutva
State protected hooliganism in Ramjas College
State protected hooliganism in Ramjas College
What is
to be Undone
The law of killing - a brief history of Indian fascism
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The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
