Beyond numbers and borders

THE 100-YEAR journey of the RSS has a unique feature. For most of its history, its legitimacy remained contested by the Nehruvian state and the left-liberal intelligentsia. Instead of discourses on the perspectives the RSS stands for, there has been a perpetual political war against it.

- BY RAKESH SINHA

The organisation was blamed for everything under the sun—from the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi to communal riots, links with the CIA and being a semi-fascist entity. Under the pretext of secular democracy, a naked majoritarianism was practised against the RSS by predominant Nehruvian-Marxist intellectuals to the extent that there has been hardly any difference between propagandist political literature and textbook descriptions of the RSS. This has harmed the evolution of the idea of India and its social and cultural philosophy more than it has harmed the RSS itself.

If opposition to ideas, historical incidents or movements earns credit points for critics to claim a secular democratic identity, it inevitably leads to the decay of critical thinking. Obsessive thinking and recycled writings dominate the intellectual world. Exactly this happened with the critics of the sangh.

Two important observations, by two votaries of socialism whose public life credentials were above board, exposed their own intellectual tradition. At the national convention of the Sampradayikata Virodhi Committee (SVC) in 1968 in New Delhi, Socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan expressed his displeasure at rants against the RSS and said, "It seems that the only purpose of the convention was anti-RSS propaganda."

A decade later, in 1978, at another SVC convention, prominent CPI(M) leader Zahoor Siddiqui was stunned to find speeches blaming the RSS for coercion of minorities during the Emergency. "There was no Golwalkar in Turkman Gate, Pipli, and Muzaffarnagar," he said.