It would do him a lot of good if, for a change, instead of relying on his advisors, Rahul Gandhi tries to find out on his own the basic tenets of the RSS' ideology
Is the Congress think tank being taken over by leftist hardlinersIJ The way Rahul Gandhi has been attacking the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on all and sundry issues seems to indicate that this process has begun.
By dragging the name of the RSS into every issue and running juvenile and distasteful online campaigns based on incorrect information, the Nehru-Gandhi scion and Congress president is surely making enough arrangements to strengthen his image of an anti-Hindu politician alienated from India’s cultural ethos which are deeply rooted in the Hindu society. This exactly is the ideology of the ultra left in India which Rahul is promoting. The tactical blunder committed by Rahul Gandhi for which he is going to pay a huge political price in the long run is that he is equating the RSS with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). There is a sharp difference between the two.
The BJP is the main political rival of the Congress as it has uprooted it from power at the Centre and in a number of states, marginalising the grand old party in an unprecedented manner. So, it is understandable when Rahul launches a scathing attack on the BJP and its leaders. Though it would help to scale up the level of debate in Indian polity if he talks more about issues and less about individuals.
On the other hand, the RSS is a socio-cultural organisation which always had an all-inclusive approach. In fact many Congress leaders have closely worked with the RSS on a wide range of issues. Rahul should check the recent history about the Ram Temple movement. One of the key persons who had floated the idea of launching this movement in 1983 was Dau Dayal Khanna, Congress stalwart from Uttar Pradesh who had been a cabinet minister in the Congress Government led by Chandrabhanu Gupta and was well respected.
One of the key events which acted as a catalyst for ultimately expediting the build-up for the Ram Temple movement was the religious conversion of Dalits into Islam in 1981 at Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu. There was an uproar in the country and to raise awareness about the threat of conversions, the organisation “Virat Hindu Samaj” was set up. The organisation’s President was senior Congress leader and a former Union minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet in 1970s, Dr Karan Singh. The organising secretary of this organisation was Ashok Singhal, the then RSS’ Prant Pracharak(full-time worker looking after the work in whole state) of Delhi. Singhal was later drafted to Vishwa Hindu Parishad and played a stellar role in this movement and on many other fronts. Virat Hindu Samaj organised a massive “Virat Hindu Sammelan(Mega-convention of Hindus)” where more than five lakh people converged in the capital of the country a few months after the Meenakshipuram incident.
The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took this issue seriously and for the first time since India’s independence, a comprehensive debate on the issue of conversions was initiated which ended up with a consensus cutting across party lines that such conversions are detrimental for the society. These are not the isolated incidents. There are hundreds of such incidents. The problem is that it is the Marxists and the Maoists who consider the RSS their enemy. As they have lost popular support on the ground, they have been trying to manipulate the Congress leadership to implement their anti-RSS agenda. For the time being, the Congress leadership seems to be walking straight into this trap. A sustained misinformation campaign against the RSS is now led by none other than Rahul. It would do him a lot of good, if for a change, instead of relying on his advisors and copywriters, he tries to find out on his own the basic tenets of the RSS’ ideology.
The RSS believes that anyone who considers this country to be his motherland is a Hindu. To be a Hindu means to follow a way of life based on core human values of peace, co-existence and prosperity for all and it has nothing to do with the religion or any any particular way of worshipping God. Vidya Bharati, an organsation run by RSS volunteers has more than 32 lakh children in their schools comprising of lakhs of Muslim and Christian children. There is no discrimination there. Such facts are available all around, one only needs to have the intention to look at them.
The second tenet of the RSS’ philosophy is that its primary work is to prepare volunteers/workers who transform the society on the above mentioned lines. And all the credit should go to the society itself for this transformation in any field, the RSS doesn’t want any credit. The ultimate goal of the RSS is that Bharatiya (Indian) Society should get transformed into a model state, the RSS should vanish and when history is written, no one should even remember this organisation.
You get to know these things by talking to any of the RSS functionaries. In fact, if RSS can invite its vocal critic former President Dr Pranab Mukherjee to its platform, why doesn’t Rahul Gandhi also invite some of the RSS functionaries to a Congress programme or for a meeting to know its ideology and functioningIJ Or he can also announce, that if invited by the RSS, he would like to go and share his views with them. The RSS is unlikely to spurn any such invitation as one of the key elements of its all-inclusive philosophy is that that whole society can be categorised into two categories — those who have joined the work started by the RSS and those who will ultimately do that.
So for the RSS, no one is an enemy and all are welcome. Finally, all have to come together for progress of the nation. It doesn’t matter how much you have criticised the organisation or how much you have opposed it, the RSS looks at you as their own.
(The writer is CEO of Indraprastha Vishwa Samvad Kendra and author of “Know About RSS”. The views expressed are personal)