RSS Proud of its calling

[Guest guest]

Title: Proud of its calling

Author: Victor BanerjeePublication: Telegraph India

Oct 12, 2000

Seventy five years ago, to this Bijoya Dashami day, the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh was formed. Today, its relevance, in a society

that is still caste-ridden and consumed by the subliminal brainwash

of multinational commerce and globalization, is questioned by

everyone that suffers under the hilarious delusion that Nehru and

Gandhi were responsible for making Hindus "secular".

 

Distinguished editors write caveats that are always full of insight

and well researched. Although by definition a caveat is a caution or

warning that the notifier be given a hearing, yet it usually helps

stall rather than alter a situation. Laid back individuals like

myself who love to read newspapers over scrambled eggs and

percolated coffee at breakfast and review it during a paid-for lunch

at work, seldom act beyond discussing it while stirring the soup to

cool it.

 

In the evening, lulled by the callousness of another day of

sameness, we cast the issue upon a stack in a proscribed corner of

our homes, for consignment to the kabariwalla at the end of themonth.

Eminent columnists can justly claim to know more about and have

greater insights into all the problems that our societies confront.

But they are not the sole proprietors of commonness. The knock at

K.S. Sudarshan of the RSS and the simplistic interpretation of what

the man said makes you wonder if columnists address the same people

as Sudarshan does everyday.

 

In other words, those who, in the name

of a ludicrous "democracy", are conned to put a stamp on a cow or

lantern or bicycle or rose to elect goons and hoodlums to

Parliament, to the utter disgrace and disgust of the rest of the

nation. As for the sop we continually offer missionaries, it would

take no major journalistic scoop to unveil some of the detestable

activities of modern-day Christian missionaries, in the name of

Jesus who, given half a chance, would probably cast them out of his

temple.

My cop out with such political incorrectness, like yours, is that

some of my best friends are Christian or Muslim. Ask them sincerely,

and they too will endorse the hypocrisies of today's evangelism and

mismanagement of church properties and funds. Our leaders and the

press, paranoid about the foot-in-mouth disease, are forever on the

defensive: shameful of our pantheistic heathenism and caught on the

self-righteous backfoot. Bollywood, for the moment, desists from

depicting all Christians as deeply religious alcoholics and all

Muslims as secular saviours of the community.

 

There is no such pussyfooting in China, England or in the United

States when it comes to defending the faith in their countries. It

is not considered prejudice, nor bias. However, the West also has

the proprietorship in a specific definition of "human rights" that

the eastern bloc, Africa and Asia are fast learning to incorporate

into their ethos if they want their bogies attached to the economic

gravy train: our only priority. One never needs to condemn a faith

but nor should one shy away from pointing a finger at an individual

who uses it for the wrong ends or whose means of achieving an end

are honestly questionable.

 

I have publicly condemned our

politicians' rath yatras and their pathetic disacknowledgment of any

responsibility for the destruction of the Babri Masjid, for the same

reason. I also think Mulayam Singh's shooting down of unarmed

rowdies was a horrific example of how little we value life.

If one flips through the pages of Madhavrao Golwalkar's (Guruji's)

Bunch of Thoughts, the RSS handbook so to speak, one might be

pleasantly surprised to discover that most of the work is simple

commonsense and morally upright. Something you can safely hand to

your children. Golwalkar's book is not, and the RSS ideologies are

not, nearly as inflammable and fundamentalist as is popularly dished

out by respectable intellectuals to an impressionable public which

has also been taught to believe that Gandhi and Nehru and other

imports and clones from the British educational system are the ones

responsible for making us xenophobic Hindus "secular".

 

Every Hindu, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist who lives below the

poverty line and at the mercy of floods, droughts and cyclones will

tell you that the RSS is more sinned against than sinning. I know

from personal experience in Orissa and Uttarkashi that while

governments were still sleeping, tucked under the warmth of

ill-gotten wealth and sycophantic worship from acolytes, the RSS was

out in a matter of hours, if not minutes, with organized rescue

operations. Even when the fashion of "relief work" has moved on to

newer calamities, the RSS continues its work silently. Every

international agency, whose Christmas cards we charitably purchase

and distribute, will vouch for the fact that the RSS does more work

in devastated parts of India than any government agency, from

Arunachal to Dwarka and Kashmir to Kanya Kumari.

 

Today the RSS is cursed. It is responsible for the Babri Masjid and

Hindutva and every other item on the Bharatiya Janata Party's

"covert" agenda. Anyone, who has known the RSS, will tell you that

it never needed the BJP to give it muscle. On the contrary, the

members of the RSS are the ones who lent their muscle to the BJP,

when the party came begging for it in pursuance of its

"nationalistic" ideals and an akhand Bharat.

 

Atal Behari Vajpayee

was an RSS member first and a Jan Sangh man later. Just because he

writes and speaks Urdu, as most of his generation do, a language

quaintly associated with Muslims to the sad cultural detriment of

the Hindu Hindi-speaking belt, Vajpayee is given the stamp of

approval for being a liberal and not a fundamentalist Hindu. Claims

he can justly endorse in spite of his longstanding allegiance to the

RSS that we consider a plague.

 

Shyamaprasad Mookerjee and Vallabhbhai Patel are fondly referred to

as "great nationalists" that Sudarshan has no business identifying

with because they had nothing in common with what is preached now.

Shyamaprasad was a close friend of the family and I know different.

The fact is if Patel had toed the line then and not spouted much

more than Sudarshan dares utter today, Nehru would not have become

prime minister.

 

Perhaps Sudarshan should have referred to Veer

Savarkar who led the Hindu Mahasabha and was the first to define the

Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 as a "war of Independence" but was also

manipulatively shunned by those aspiring to govern a partitioned

India. He was later prosecuted by the Congress and tried for

Gandhi's murder, for his was a "cult of violence", like Aurobindo

Ghosh's and Subhas Chandra Bose's. To get Savarkar and the rest of

the accused, the government extended the "Bombay Public Security

Measures Act" (yesteryear's TADA), with retrospective effect, to

cover Delhi, before constituting the special court. That the

partition of India killed more people and caused more bloodshed than

the tragic holocaust in Europe is something seldom talked about or

remembered, even though its ramifications shed innocent blood tothis

day.

 

So what about our favourite whipping boy, Nathuram Godse? A small

quote is bound to leave you thinking. After his retirement, Justice

Khosla, who presided over the appeals after the high court had

passed its sentence, wrote the following: "The highlight of the

appeal before us was the discourse delivered by Nathuram Godse in

his defence. (He made no appeal against his conviction under Section

302 nor against the death sentence.) The audience was visibly and

audibly moved. There was a deep silence when he ceased speaking.

Many women were in tears and men coughing and searching for their

handkerchiefs. I have no doubt that had the audience of that day

been constituted into a jury and entrusted with the task of deciding

Godse's appeal, they would have brought in a verdict of "not guilty"

by an overwhelming majority."

 

The history of the 20th century will soon be researched and history

books revised and it won't need the BJP or the RSS to do it. A

century later our great grandchildren shall have a better

perspective on what is happening in India today. They shall judge us

fairly and squarely. God knows we must try and develop a greater

understanding amongst the peoples who constitute "the wonderful

mosaic that is India", if we expect to receive a pat on our dead

backs for having moved the country forward and made the rightchoices.

Yes, we can all get hot under our collars and argue over this piece

like the seculars we profess to be. We can call ourselves nothing

else for fear of its colour sticking to us. Eventually, we shall

collapse on our steaming sofas with a Rooh Afza on-the-rocks to

nostalgically contemplate Balmoral's reaction to Diana's affairs and

Charles' greying temples or ruminate over a ubiquitous cigar and a

night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

 

Let us stop throwing stones at the Missionaries of Charity one day

and the RSS the next, when we don't lift a finger ourselves to serve

humanity. Donating money is easy, giving time a whole different ball

game. Wheareas the RSS may stick in your throat every time you

mention it, find an alternative for all the good work it does. Try

and create an army of disciplined selfless social workers, like it

has, in a world where the ladies of the "Time & Talents Club", the

"Spastics Society", the "Friends of the Trees", the "World Wildlife

Fund" and the "Calcutta Foundation" flounder for support and

membership even though they are embryonically connected to all the

moneybags that buy and sell India's future every day.

 

I know I am sticking my neck out by writing to remove some of the

misgivings that we nurture about the RSS, but as Nathuram said to

the jailer before he was hung, and I quote, "I must have a cup of

coffee before I swing". So it's on to breakfast and today's

headlines. Death tolls? Mere statistics; our nation's caveat?

Ignoreit.

And, by the way, for those who might be interested, I am not, nor

was I ever, a member of the

RSS.---------------