Wishing for a Hindu War

Modi's Pakistan policy bears Golwalkar's imprint

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Sixty years ago, during the second India-Pakistan war, the Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri invited MS Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to join an all-party meeting in Delhi. “In that meeting a certain gentleman said ‘Let us first define our war aims,” Golwalkar recounted, while addressing Sangh workers in March 1970. The address is recorded alongside several of his other foreign-policy adventures in Shri Guruji: Pioneer of a New Era, a biography of Golwalkar published by a Sangh-affiliated organisation. “We must win the war at any cost,” Golwalkar recalled saying at the all-party meeting. “It is for those who commit aggression on others to define their aims. Our aim is clear as day light. It is victory, nothing short of total victory. It is to make the aggressor bite the dust. Talking of defining war aims would amount to hindering the war efforts.”