Golwalkar's controversial legacy

Except for slightly more than a decade, in almost a hundred years of its existence, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been perceived as a shadowy organisation.

- NILANJAN MUKHOPADHYAY

For a highly restrictive collective that harps on privileging the sangathan (organisation) over vyakti (individual), it has had just seven sarsanghchalaks (chief), excluding stop-gap head, L V Paranjape, for seven months in 1930-31 when founder-sarsanghchalak Keshav Baliram Hedgewar was in jail after participating in a protest movement that ran parallel to the Civil Disobedience Movement.

Extraordinarily lengthy tenures in the saddle have been the primary reason for so few people being in command – Hedgewar and his successor, the second sarsanghchalak and subject of this magisterial biography, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, were at the helm for 48 years – the former for 15 and the latter for 33 years. Even the third chief, equally important for significant policy shifts, social and territorial expansion during his tenure, Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras, was in the saddle for the next 21 years, till 1994.

Dhirendra Jha begins the book with a stunning claim – a curtain-raiser to one of the many principal contentions in the book. His version on the controversy surrounding one of the two books for which Golwalkar is revered by clanspersons and closely scrutinised by adversaries. Golwalkar's two most contentious books, also held as gospel by Hindu nationalist individuals or groups, are We or Our Nationhood Defined and Bunch of Thoughts. The first edition of the former book was published in 1939 when Golwalkar was yet to carve a niche for himself in the RSS hierarchy, and it considerably enabled him to secure legitimacy within the tightly-knit circle of the organisation.