RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar had effectively prepared the ground for a robust organisation that would strengthen the discourse on Hinduism and Hindutva. But while his ideology and strategy were unambiguous, the argumentative edge needed to counter rivals on an intellectual plane was lacking. His successor, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, rose to the occasion, writes rajesh singh in his book, Portraits of Hindutva. An edited excerpt:

“All the time, circumstances are not going to favour us. We shall have to face obstacles and adversities. Fearlessness is the first virtue of a hero, the starting point of all other noble virtues.”

 — MS Golwalkar

Even as Hanuman Prasad Poddar and his Gita Press publications were reaching millions of Hindu homes and re-energising their religious identity — something that, decades later, the televised serials on Mahabharata and Ramayana would achieve in their own unique ways — a new crop of organisations and their leaders had emerged on the national scene that would significantly enhance the “‘Hindu nation” idea. They had aggression and unflagging commitment, which helped them draw hordes of supporters and sympathisers in the years to come. Further, these leaders and their outfits changed the very discourse of not just the Hindu-ness of India, but also the political response to it. During the freedom struggle, they linked the campaign to the anti-British rule movement, claiming that a Hindu nation could not remain subservient to foreign rule — more so a rule which professed a faith that was an import and not Indic in nature. These organisations and their key driving forces had also another target — the Muslim population, which was seen as not fully aligned to the idea of a Hindu oneness and which refused to accept the notion that they had a common cultural lineage with their majority Hindu brethren. Of course, none of these outfits accepted that they were anti-Muslim in the same way that they were anti-British reign, but they made it clear that the Hindu identity superseded all other claims, and those few ones from other faiths who happened to back the idea were quickly co-opted as “true nationalists”.

The foremost among these organisations was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It was around the time that Gita Press was finding its métier that the RSS came into being. There were several reasons which facilitated its arrival and subsequent astounding growth. Lokmanya Tilak had died in 1920, and Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from revolutionary politics. But the spirit of their zeal and pride in being a Hindu lived on.

Meanwhile, the Hindu-Muslim confrontation had taken a serious turn with the Shuddhi versus Tabligh clash. The Arya Samaj, led by Swami Shradhanand, heralded a movement to reconvert those who had left the Hindu fold to join Islam but still clung on to various Hindu customs. On the other hand, the Muslim religious leaders — the various Ulemas — launched the Tabligh drive, aimed at ensuring that such Muslim converts were not lured back into the Hindu fold. Both sides used provocative measures and the result was a charged communal environment, leading to frequent violence. The agenda of reconversion and blocking the move needed more than individual effort; an organised method had to be employed for long-term success. Prominent leaders such as Madan Mohan Malviya, BS Moonje, and Lala Lajpat Rai strongly advocated the formation of a sangathan to take the cause forward. The sangathan would not just keep an eye on converts, to get them purified at the first available opportunity and brought back into the Hindu fold, but also work towards promoting Hindu consciousness in a more strident way.

Leader after leader reminded his audience that the Hindus had been at the receiving end of Muslim violence because they were unprepared to use force if necessary (while the Muslims were always better equipped, both materially and temperamentally). The 1921 Malabar uprising was cited as one such instance. It began as a peasant rebellion against the British by the Mappila in the southern region of Malabar, triggered by the British crackdown on the Khilafat movement, but soon turned into mass atrocity against the Hindus by the Muslim Mappilas.

A shocked Annie Besant wrote: “They murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed and drove away all Hindus who would not apostate. Somewhere about a lakh of people were driven from their homes with nothing but the clothes they had on, stripped of everything. Malabar has taught us what Islamic rule still means, and we do not want to see another specimen of the Khilafat Raj in India.”

The sangathan, therefore, decided to impart physical training to its people. Interestingly, this drive attracted people from various parties, such as the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. It must be remembered here that the Khilafat movement had been supported by Mahatma Gandhi, much to the concern of many Congressmen, and his stand must have contributed to the later opposition by Hindu outfits and so-called extremists to his ‘appeasement’ methods. While the Hindu organisations, determined to ensure a non-repeat of the Malabar type incident, went about reframing their response, the Muslim outfits weren’t sitting idle. The Tanzim was initiated in 1923 by its leaders, most prominent among them being S Kitchlew. He appealed to various Muslim organisations, charitable bodies, banks, etc, to join hands and fund the Tanzim. He even launched an Urdu daily with the same name, which published anti-Hindu articles.

But for once, the reach and scale of the Muslim initiative could not match that of the Hindus’ sangathan. The success of the sangathan coupled with a burning desire to “show the Muslims their place” and aggressively promote nationalism as inherent to Hinduism, propelled the formation of the RSS on that Dussehra day in 1925, though it was named thus a few months later on Ram Navami in 1926. The formation of shakhas (or branches), the inculcation of deep reverence for Mother India, the physical training (represented by baton-wielding RSS workers at the training camps), and the repeated reminders of being Hindu (by religion, by nationhood, by cultural history), were to become the RSS’s hallmark. They also drew criticism: RSS’s opponents said the organisation promoted violence and communal divide. But the die was cast — five people led by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar got together in Nagpur to establish the RSS, with Hedgewar becoming its first head. Among the founders was Babarao Savarkar, brother of Vinayak Damodar ‘Veer’ Savarkar.

The choice of the outfit’s name was interesting: It brought in nationalism and voluntariness but did not deem it necessary to overstate its pro-Hindu credentials in its name. Perhaps this was because the use of the ‘Hindu’ word could have made it sound like the other important organisation, Hindu Mahasabha, which already existed. Or perhaps it had plotted a more inclusive agenda for itself, to the extent of equating Hindu-ness with India. The new chief insisted on having the slogan, Bharat Mata Ki Jai, alongside the prayers at the end of every shakha meeting — and this was his way of merging Hindu with nationhood. Whatever the case may have been, the omission was not to in any way diminish the RSS’s pro-Hindu reputation — its vision of the Hindu ideology driving a united and free India.

HEDGEWAR: DOCTOR-TURNED HINDU ACTIVIST

Hedgewar’s nationalistic fervour had been evident in his school days when he was rusticated for leading a Vande Mataram movement. Later in life, he drew inspiration from Tilak and BS Moonje, who became his guru of sorts. Moonje had built a reputation for himself as a hardliner when it came to the projection of Hindu rights and zero-compromise with the British. Moonje had been a strong Tilak supporter and had sided with him during critical moments, including at the Congress party’s annual conference in Surat in 1907. He founded the Bhonsale Military School in Nashik to impart military training to Hindu youth. Hedgewar’s task was cut out and he went about with single-minded focus. There was no time to be lost — the Hindus had to be mobilised effectively, the Muslims were to be made to understand that they could not take the majority religion for granted, and the British were to be pressured into leaving. If the RSS faltered in any of these steps, it would be not just the end of the organisation but also a betrayal of the very core ideals of millions of Hindus.

Hedgewar had studied medicine and graduated as a doctor, and so he would often apply logic to his thought processes. According to RSS literature —  there are far too many, churned out in enormous quantities by various units of the organisation spread across the country, to list them here — Hedgewar asked himself the question: “How could the Hindus, who have had a glorious past stretching from ancient to medieval times, so abjectly surrender to Muslim rulers, whether Turks, Afghans or Mughals? How could they then allow themselves to be enslaved by the British?” They had muscle power, they had money power, they had intellect; what they lacked, according to Hedgewar, was a sense of Hindu consciousness and cohesion. Developing those qualities was to become the RSS’s mandate.

Hedgewar took another key decision: That of keeping the RSS away from active politics. He must have believed that politics would lead his organisation to the sort of compromises that he wanted it to keep away from, at least in those initial decades. He was certainly more glued to the concept of Hindu Rashtra than Hindu Rajya, believing that the second would follow the realisation of the first. Thus, certain decisions he took in that direction have been viewed by his and the RSS’s critics today as evidence that while the RSS claims to be nationalistic, it had kept away from the Independence movement.

Here is one instance: Mahatma Gandhi gave a call for Satyagraha against the British Government. Gandhi himself launched the Salt Satyagraha, undertaking his Dandi Yatra. Dr Hedgewar decided to participate only individually and not let the RSS join the freedom movement officially. He sent information everywhere that the Sangh will not participate in the Satyagraha. However, those wishing to participate individually were not prohibited. He spent nine months in jail as a result of his role.

Two years before the Quit India Movement was launched, Hedgewar breathed his last, and his final message to the swayamsevaks was: “I see before my eyes today a miniature Hindu Rashtra.” His confidence came from the exponential expansion of the RSS during his lifetime. In 1931, the organisation had just 60 shakhas; by 1936, it had 200 branches and 25,000 members; by 1939, the numbers had risen to 500 and 40,000 respectively. In the year of Hedgewar’s death, the RSS had 700 shakhas and 80,000 members. Hedgewar had thus effectively prepared the ground for a robust organisation that would be capable of taking on its critics and strengthening the discourse on Hinduism and Hindutva. But while Hedgewar’s ideology and strategy were unambiguous, the argumentative edge and the precision needed to counter rivals on an intellectual plane was lacking. His successor, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, rose to the occasion.

THE GOLWALKAR ERA

‘Guru’ Golwalkar (he taught at the Benaras Hindu University, and thus the prefix) was an unlikely candidate to succeed Hedgewar. He was not among the Sangh seniors, had an inclination towards spiritual inward-looking rather than community-building, and generally kept to himself — not a good sign for a potential leader of a cadre-based organisation. But he had the advantage of being close to the founder-chief. Besides, one possible explanation is that Hedgewar was frustrated by the endless bickering among Hindu Mahasabha stalwarts... Therefore, he was keen to detach the RSS from the Hindu Mahasabha despite their ideological proximity and wanted a successor who would effectively keep his organisation away from these Mahasabha leaders.

Golwalkar met this criterion, as he was not close to the Mahasabha leaders. Golwalkar was erudite and a thinker. That he was a cut above the rest was soon to be evident in his writings and style of leadership. Some of his decisions drew the ire of nationalists of that time, and his rivals. One of these was to keep the RSS and its members away from the freedom movement. He also heeded the call of the British regime, caught in the vortex of the Second World War, for an end to military drills and wearing of military or military-kind uniforms by civilian outfits, and directed all RSS branches to discontinue the practice. His directives did create temporary discontent within the organisation, but Golwalkar was determined to adopt this strategy in order to avoid British ire and expand the organisation quietly, avoiding any public controversy.

The new RSS chief’s decisions must have certainly brought relief to the British, who were none too eager to take on the monolith that the RSS had become by then, and add to their already considerable troubles. These moves have been analysed in later years as evidence of the RSS not participating in the freedom struggle and thus helping the British. But Golwalkar was clear on his motive: He had to consolidate Hindu power, and this could not be done by confronting the Government every now and then. He had to work silently and wait for the right occasion to strike. Golwalkar’s outward compliance with Government orders was no more than a smoke-screen behind which to carry on secretly or in a modified form the very activities that he had renounced.

The RSS chief was not against the Independence movement, but he saw no merit in antagonising the foreign rulers to the detriment of Hindu interests. In this, he appeared to have followed Tilak’s public position on reforms within Hindu society, when the Lokmanya publicly opposed such reforms despite being personally in favour of them, because he feared the reform drive would take attention away from the freedom struggle. Also, in seeking to discontinue — at least for some time — the militant drills, Golwalkar was giving expression of his individualistic belief that the most important task at hand was the intellectual and moral uplift of the Hindu community in order to equip them to take on their opponents. The British were, of course, shrewd enough to realise the plan. Author Pralay Kanungo notes from Government records: “Their (RSS) policy is to wait until they themselves are better prepared and the state of the country offers better opportunities for intervention... the Sangh, though not now dangerous, might become a menace later in times of serious communal disturbances, etc.”

Two far-reaching events occurred during Golwalkar’s reign: Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the country’s Partition. The first came as a major blow to the RSS’s image, since the impression got created, which the RSS then did little to dispel, that the outfit was complicit in the murder — the killer Nathuram Godse had been with the RSS but went over to the Hindu Mahasabha; he was not an RSS member at the time he committed the crime. The RSS was banned, for the first though not the last time. Salt was rubbed on the wound when the supposedly pro-Hindu Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel took a dim view of the activities of the Sangh; the ban came during Sardar’s term as the country’s Home Minister. A little over a year later, the ban was lifted after the RSS committed itself to a written Constitution and transparency. The Partition took the RSS by surprise, because the organisation had not anticipated the British move to quit the country in this manner. The Hindu outfit squarely blamed Mahatma Gandhi and his “dangerously naive” approach to the Muslims for the resultant mass killings soon after Partition.

Excerpted with permission from Rajesh Singh’s Portraits of Hindutva: From Harappa to Ayodhya; Rupa Publications, Rs 295