One Hundred Years Of... Creating Heroes

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the second sarsanghachalak (or chief) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was possibly the most complicated and contradictory figure of modern India.

- Dhirendra K. Jha

Inside the RSS, he is regarded as an ascetic figure—a demigod of Hindutva politics—and is often accorded a status higher than even the founder of the organisation, K.B. Hedgewar. Outside, he is considered the biggest communal instigator, an icon of true evil who wanted to destroy India’s plural ethos and secularism.

Golwalkar, or ‘Guruji’, took over as the RSS chief after the death of Hedgewar in 1940 and remained its sarsanghachalak till his own death in 1973. When he assumed charge, the RSS lacked any major presence outside the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. Under him, the organisation passed through many ups and downs but kept growing all the while. It played an incendiary role in the Partition violence and was banned after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. 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: his books—We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1966)—provided the core of the Sangh's credo.

THOUGH Indirectly, Savarkar was the first to defend the Nazi's treatment of jews in the Third Reich. Golwalkar, with his own keen sense for the effectiveness of primitive emotions, quickly went ahead of the Hindutva ideologue by pushing this line of thinking to extremes. In