One Hundred Years Of... Borrowed Pride

The RSS thrives on OBC amnesia, offering borrowed pride in Hindu identity in exchange for complete obedience

- Anand Kshirsagar

Pune of the 1990s was not the “Oxford of the East”.

It was across the Mula-Mutha River, in its underbelly: Yerwada, Nagpur Chawl, Housing Board colonies, and Ambedkar Nagar. These were neighbourhoods of Dalits, Bahujans, Muslims, and Christians, stitched together with narrow lanes, tin roofs, broken drains, and a stubborn will to live. For upper caste Pune, Yerwada evoked only three images: the Cellular Jail, the Mental Hospital, and the Bahujan slums. To them, we were the muck of the city—unseen, unnamed, and best left forgotten.

Outside our basti, India itself was in turmoil. The Babri Masjid lay in rubble, Kashmir convulsed with militancy, and Mumbai reeled from Hindu-Muslim riots and serial bomb blasts. Bal Thackeray was reinventing himself—from “Marathi Hriday Samrat” to “Hindu Hriday Samrat”—stitching Shiv Sena’s nativism to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Hindutva political project by mobilising the Ma-Dha-V formula (Mali, Dhangar, Vanjari castes) in Maharashtra.

Meanwhile, Pune was also transforming. IT parks rose in Hinjewadi and Kharadi. The road past Yerwada Jail, once burdened with stigma as “Jail Road”, was rebranded as “International Airport Road” to erase that shame. But inside our basti, history arrived as rumour and riot—from milk-drinking Ganesha idols to mobs smashing Muslim-owned hotels over the loss of India in the India-Pakistan cricket match. Other devastations were quieter, more cruel: HIV-AIDS hollowed out families, while women were burned alive for dowry demands, their deaths dismissed as sudden “kerosene stove explosions”. It was in this atmosphere that my family introduced me to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakha. They believed a Brahmin shikshak (teacher) would instil "better sanskars (manners)" in me, protecting me from the chaos of our immediate world.

Inside the Shakha