- >>
- OPINION
Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was also in the Hindu Mahasabha like his mentor VD Savarkar. Nathuram’s brother Gopal Godse, was a co-conspirator. After serving his prison term, Gopal conceded in interviews that neither he nor Nathuram had ever left the RSS but told lies in court to protect the RSS as well as Savarkar.
Clip from War and Peace: Gandhi Funeral – 1948
Why Gandhi is hated, yet appropriated. 1885 to 2014
By the late 19th century the British desire to create an educated Indian elite that would do its bidding had begun to yield unexpected results. Education helped spread emancipatory ideas from the Enlightenment, which fed into already growing aspirations for freedom. By 1885 Congress was founded mainly by newly emerging classes of businessmen, industrialists and lawyers from the educated middle class. After the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi, the freedom movement acquired mass character and began to include workers and peasants. For the princely rulers and feudal and religious elite the alarm bells had rung right at the beginning. In August 1888 barely 3 years after the Congress was founded, Sir Syed of Aligarh and Raja Sheo Prasad of Kashi formed the United India Patriotic Association to convey their loyalty to the British. Later their constituents branched into religious offshoots like the Muslim League in 1906, the Hindu Mahasabha in 1915 and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925. It is this last body created by upper caste Brahmins in the city of Nagpur that has left the largest footprint.
Neither Muslim nor Hindu communal formations fought British rule. Virtually no RSS or Hindu Mahasabha people went to jail. An early exception was Savarkar who was arrested in 1910 and sent to the Andamans.
At this point Savarkar was not yet communalized as his 1857: The War of Independence published in 1909 eloquently shows. Renaming what the British had dubbed the “Great Mutiny” Savarkar praised both Hindus and Muslims who made common cause in the war against the British. In the Andamans Savarkar turned into an ideologue for Hindutva – the term he coined to distinguish his Hindu nationalism from the religion, Hinduism. In 1921 he finally emerged from Andamans jail only after giving numerous undertakings to the British that he would never oppose them again. He kept his promise. The rest of his life went in propagating Hindutva and attacking Gandhi whom he branded as a Muslim appeasing traitor.
When the Congress launched the Quit India movement in 1942, Savarkar opposed it and asked Hindus to enlist in the British armed forces instead to learn the “arts of war”. As President of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937, he had advanced the slogan “Hinduize all Politics and Militarize Hindudom”.
Guru Golwalker, for 33 years the chief of the RSS and its most influential ideologue, was equally opposed to fighting the British. On August 14, 1947 at the dawn of Independence, the Organiser, the English organ of the RSS openly denigrated the choice of the tricolour as the National Flag in the following words: “The Tricolour will never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country.”
The RSS and other allies of Hindutva like Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray have often declared their preference for dictatorship over democracy and openly expressed admiration for Hitler.
Small wonder that Mein Kampf is a runaway best seller in this country.
In his1938 book We or Our Nationhood defined , Golwalker approves the Nazi extermination of Jews:
“To keep up purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races, the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into a united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”
Manusmruti
Amongst the many infamous edicts enshrined in the ancient Hindu Law book, the Manusmriti and its related texts, are these:
Woman is an embodiment of the worst desires, hatred, deceit, jealousy and bad character. Women should never be given freedom. (Manu IX. 17 and V. 47, 147)
Killing of a woman, a Shudra or an atheist is not sinful. (Manu IX. 17 and V. 47, 147)
If the Shudra intentionally listens for committing to memory the Veda then his ears should be filled with molten lead and lac (MS III-4)
In 1927 Dr. Ambedkar, a Dalit who had broken the taboo against education, together with multi-caste followers set fire to a copy of the to protest its misogyny. The man who lit the fire was a Brahmin Ambedkarite named Sahastrabuddhe.
But the Manusmriti continued to be held sacred by the architects of Hindutva. Savarkar, stated that the Manusmriti was “the scripture that is most worshippable after the Vedas” and “the basis of the spiritual and divine march of the nation”. Golwalkar called Manu “the first, greatest and the wisest lawgiver of mankind.”
Opposing the Indian Constitution in 1950, the RSS demanded that Manu’s law be made the law of the land.
Long before Gandhi came to be hated as an appeaser of Muslims he was already despised for cleaning his own toilet and breaking Manu’s code against pollution by upper castes.
Clip from Jai Bhim Comrade: A scene from the play ‘I am Nathuram Godse speaking’
After Gandhi’s assassination, Golwalkar and other RSS workers were put in jail. Ramchandra Guha writes: “On December 6, 1947 (2 months before the assassination), Golwalkar convened a meeting of RSS workers in the town of Govardhan, not far from Delhi. The police report on this meeting says it discussed how to ‘assassinate the leading persons of the Congress in order to terrorise the public and to get their hold over them’.
Sardar Vallabhai Patel of whom Narendra Modi has promised to build the world’s tallest statue, had this to say: “All the (RSS) leaders’ speeches were full of communal poison. As a final result of the poison…an atmosphere was created in which such a ghastly tragedy became possible…RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.” Excerpts from Sardar Patel’s letters to M.S. Golwalkar and S.P. Mookerjee.
Fortuitously for the RSS it had no written constitution and no official list of members so it could never be proved that RSS was involved in Gandhi’s murder. The ban on RSS was lifted in June 1949.
The condition of Dalits
Thanks to Gandhi’s intervention Dr. Ambedkar had drafted India’s Constitution and become India’s first Law Minister. As a step towards a Uniform Civil Code, Ambedkar drafted a Hindu Code Bill, which for the first time treated Hindu women on par with Hindu men. The bill was fought tooth and nail by Hindutva conservatives within and without the ruling Congress. Despite Nehru’s assurances, the Bill failed to pass and in 1951 Ambedkar resigned in disgust. Later virtually the same bill passed in stages but Ambedkar was no longer there to push on towards a Uniform Civil Code.
As casteism continued and Hindus failed to live up to Gandhi’s assurance that the upper castes could be transformed from within, in 1956 Dr. Ambedkar with more than a hundred thousand Dalit followers renounced Hinduism for Buddhism. It was the largest mass conversion in history.
Clip from Jai Bhim Comrade: Vitthal Umap sings ‘I will not die a Hindu’
Conversion brought Dalits self esteem and a hard won reservation policy brought economic benefits for some, but the attacks on Dalits never ceased. In fact it can be argued that with two Dalits killed and 3 Dalit women raped every day on average, there is a perpetual caste war in India that cuts across party lines.
Education
Despite the wonderful sounding Right to Education Bill passed by the Congress in 2009, the neo liberal enterprise had already begun the exercise of dismantling the egalitarian principles embedded in our Constitution. The 86th Constitutional Amendment passed by a BJP ruled government in 2002 left out of its ambit children from the age of 0 to 6, thereby denying them early education and a mid day meal that gives crucial nutrition vital for the development of the brain. In 2004 just before its electoral defeat, the BJP led coalition compromised a constitutional right and offered education as a consumable commodity to the WTO GATT process thereby drastically diluting the State’s responsibility in education and opening the door to privatization.
The fact is that neither Congress nor BJP demands a common school system whereby the children of the rich and the children of the poor would go to the same schools. Instead in the name of “excellence” the emphasis is on privatization of education, which only means that a modern day caste system is perpetuated in which the poor are offered substandard and incomplete schooling so as to remain coolies, artisans and clerks in a large pool of cheap labour that serves a small global elite, educated to populate the corridors of international bloodsuckers.
To this horror scenario that is common to both large parties, add the communalization of education that the current regime stands for and the mind boggles. Dinanath Batra’s Vedic flying machines and rockets are a mere tip of the iceberg.
In Modi’s Gujarat, Hitler is a textbook hero from The Times of India, Ahmedabad, Sept 30, 2004.
Gandhi is not so great, but Hitler is. Welcome to high school education in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, where authors of social studies textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks have found faults with the freedom movement and glorified Fascism and Nazism.
While a Class VIII student is taught ‘negative aspects’ of Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, the Class X social studies textbook has chapters on ‘Hitler, the Supremo’ and ‘Internal Achievements of Nazism’ presenting a frighteningly uncritical picture of Fascism and Nazism.
Rehabilitation of the RSS
For 2 decades after the Gandhi murder the RSS remained abhorred by the mainstream. But away from scrutiny, it continued to organize local centres called shakhas, recruiting children from the ages of 6 to 18, getting them up at 4 am, imparting militaristic physical training and instilling in them loyalty, discipline and a brand of “patriotism” which included the inevitable dose of anti-minority hatred.
One such child, recruited from the age of 8 from a relatively poor family, is Prime Minister Modi. Another is Party Chief Amit Shah. 5 Chief Ministers and 17 of the 23 Cabinet-level senior ministers are current or former RSS members. In March 2014, The Guardian reported that the RSS has at least 50,000 branches across the country with over 40 million members. It also runs a network of 18,000 schools across India.
Anyone who hopes that the current Prime Minister has distanced himself from his roots should read his eulogy to Golwalkar, Shree Guruji: Ek Swayamsevak published in 2010.
And those who believe that the killing of Gandhi was an isolated act need only to scratch the surface.
Clip from Ram Ke Naam: Ayodhya bridge sequence
Back in 1948, a banned RSS began to give birth to new and sometimes “legitimate” organizations that remained controlled by the parent body. The first to emerge was the student wing, the ABVP, formed in 1948. In 1951 the Jan Sangh was created to engage in electoral politics. In 1964, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or the World Hindu Council that recruited both nationally and internationally, reaching out the to a well heeled but poorly informed Indian diaspora. In 1952, the Vanwasi Kalyan Ashram to proselytize amongst adivasis. In 1984, the Bajrang Dal to target the 16th century Babri mosque. Together along with ever emerging newer outfits they form the hydra headed, multi armed and multi tongued, Sangh Parivar.
I am getting ahead of the story. After decades of unpopularity, the rehabilitation of the RSS came from an unlikely source, the Gandhian Socialist, Jayaprakash Narayan(JP). During the Bihar famine in the1960’s JP encountered RSS cadre doing relief work. Impressed by their dedication, JP began to see them as potential allies in nation building. When in 1974 an anti-corruption student movement in Bihar chose JP as its leader, people from Left to Right joined in. The most disciplined group was the RSS. I was then a volunteer in the Bihar movement and because my uncle Achyut had been a comrade of JP’s in the 1942 Quit India Movement and a co-founder of the Socialist Party, I had access to JP. JP expressed confidence that the communal mindset of the RSS would be transformed by contact with the broader Bihar movement. When Indira Gandhi called the RSS fascist, JP famously declared “If the RSS is fascist then I’m a fascist too.”
From this point on the popularity of RSS rose, despite minor setbacks. During the Emergency of 1975 to 1977 many RSS members went to jail along with thousands of others. Although from jail RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras wrote an infamous letter to Indira Gandhi begging to be freed, praising the Emergency and specially its forced sterilization campaign that had targeted Muslims, public perception of the RSS did not suffer. In 1977 a Janata Party coalition that included the Jan Sangh defeated the Congress and RSS leaders like LK ADVANI and Atal Vajpayee became cabinet ministers for the first time. In 1980 the government collapsed when some socialists objected to the dual loyalty of those who took their orders from the RSS. The Jan Sangh then morphed into a new party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(TOMORROW: SECOND PART)
