Shikha Mukerjee | Hindu Rashtra & RSS: Where’s The Pushback?

Fate bestowed the honour of leading the RSS into its second century of existence on Mohan Bhagwat. Over the past century, the social-cultural organisation has grown into a dominant authoritative voice on how “Hindustan” should be shaped and what shall be its cardinal principles, with several million members, though the exact number is not known, adding to the mystery of what makes it tick.

From Keshav Baliram Hegdewar, via Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, M.S. Golwalkar to Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS has transitioned from a bit player to what it is now, an organisation of power that determines the course of events, mostly political and by extension, social and cultural. The vision of the organisation, according to Hegdewar, was to strengthen “Hindu culture”, because it “is the life-breath of Hindustan”. To that end, the RSS enrols young men, who join “shakhas”, or cells, wield sticks and form the vanguard, with the aim of mobilising “the entire society… in such a vigilant and organised condition that no one would dare to cast an evil eye on any of our points of honour”.

Since times have changed, the RSS plus its 50 or more affiliates and the BJP, with which it shares an umbilical connection, are in power in India and in 16 states and as National Democratic Alliance partners in power in 19 states and a couple of Union territories, the thoughts of Mohan Bhagwat, as expressed over three days in a conference with invited guests from diplomats to RSS functionaries, carry a significance that its founders just 100 years ago could not have imagined. Unsurprisingly, the RSS chief didn’t announce a change of course or a new plan of action.

What he did was cover all the points that are vital to the RSS now so that it can be sustainable in the future.

For three days, Mr Bhagwat’s discourse was a keenly watched performance; it was a master class of the “bait and switch” routine. On one hand, he said Bharat is “akhand” (undivided), adding: “There’s no need to declare a Hindu Rashtra, it already exists. The sages and seers have declared it a nation. It is not dependent on any official announcement. It’s a truth: accepting it will benefit you, denying it will harm you. You can test it for yourself.”

As the self-evident truth, the RSS could carry on with the pretence that the Hindu Rashtra would be governed in accordance with its wishes. The Constitution and its basic structure, which includes secularism, equality, fundamental rights and freedoms, was a text the RSS could dismiss as irrelevant.

Therefore, when Mohan Bhagwat said the Hindu Rashtra was “inclusive,” it was bait; when he declared that Muslims as a community should voluntarily surrender their property rights to the sites of the Gyanvapi Mosque in favour of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, and the disputed land over the Krishna Janmabhoomi-Shahi Idgah site in Mathura should also be unconditionally handed over.

Modestly, Mr Bhagwat said the RSS as an organisation would stay out of the ongoing dispute, though its members were free to decide for themselves what they would do. Powered by self- evident truth, Mr Bhagwat obviously felt he was above the law, especially the 1991 Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, which freezes the status of temples and mosques as on August 15, 1947. It’s a different matter that the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple relocation to the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, in effect, paving the way for RSS affiliates and its members to pursue the demand for a switch.

While political parties, including the CPI(M), have attacked Mr Bhagwat’s pronouncements on the mosque-temple issue as a flagrant disregard for the Constitution and the law, the point is, the RSS chief issues directives according to what he knows as the truth, that India is already a Hindu Rashtra, where his writ runs. There are two problems with this: first, what is this Hindu Rashtra and who decides what it is?

The RSS’ Mohan Bhagwat, minus the 11 years of Narendra Modi being in control of the Government of India, is not the supreme patriarch of Hindus, the concept of Hindus as a nation, nor is he the sole source of legitimising a person’s identity as a Hindu. He certainly has no business, except as an instigator of vigilante raids by persons directly or remotely connected to the RSS, to declare: “If your home doesn’t have a prayer room, you are not practising Hinduism.”

This one statement can be read in two ways: bait to bhakts to go looking for prayer rooms in other peoples’ homes and switch to attacking the Indian identity of anyone who doesn’t have a prayer room. Practising Hinduism in a prayer room is an open invitation to single out communities that are congregational in the practice of religion, such as Muslims, and it is incitement against others for being “anti-national”, because the Hindu Rashtra already exists, as declared by unnamed “sages and seers”. The call to peek and pry into peoples’ homes is obnoxious, assuming that all Indians have homes large enough to allocate space for a “prayer room”.

Why Mohan Bhagwat imagines that an increase the birth rate among his cadres, unaffiliated bhakts, self-serving fellow travellers and similar other sorts will produce a demographic transformation is a puzzle. The RSS-BJP obsession with bodies, including women’s bodies, is weird. The similarity to the concept of “Lebensborn”, or Nazi eugenics, is chilling.

The consequences of the Opposition’s heedlessness of how the BJP-RSS codes on worship, dress, food and babies have become the stylebook for eager-to-prove-themselves-Hindus is the absurdity of recommending “shikanji” (lemon drink) as sales of imported liquor zoomed from about $600 million in 2018 to over $1 billion in 2024. With Indians guzzling videshi (foreign) liquor, over two lakh Indians surrendering citizenship, over 3.3 lakh Indians travelling to the United States for an education, the call for self-reliance and “swadeshi” is a gimmick.

If the CPI(M) and the opposition to the symbiotically connected BJP-RSS had paid greater attention to what Mohan Bhagwat said, there would have been a comprehensive and careful pushback on all the obfuscations, ambiguities, layers and open to multiple interpretations speeches that he delivered as a roadmap for the future of Bharat-Hindustan-India. The failure to do so by the Opposition is like the stable gates being left wide open, an invitation to the RSS to believe it is indeed the self-proclaimed patriarch of the Hindus and the Hindu Rashtra on a mission to control the gullible and through them India’s future.