One Hundred Years Of... Doublethink

It is clear that the very foundation of the RSS was laid to show Muslims their place and keep them in check

- Saiyyad Mohammad

AS we sit to analyse the statements of Mohan Bhagwat, the Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at the centenary event held to mark 100 years of the RSS—particularly what he said about the attitude of the Sangh in relation to Muslims of India—the question that arises is, is there anything new, anything remarkable and anything very meaningful in what he said.

A. G. Noorani in his book, The RSS, writes: “Deceptive double talk marks the RSS utterances; to wit, that it is a cultural organisation, not a political one; it is a ‘nationalist’ not a communal body; all who live in India are Hindus, while defining the terms to exclude those who are not Hindu by faith...” The phrase double-talk is derived from doublethink, which was coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel, 1984. His definition of the phrase arising from the official language of the ruling ‘Party’ that the book calls ‘Newspeak’ bears repetition: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it,... to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”