The recent lifting of the ban on government servants enrolling as members of the RSS assumes extra significance in that it has come about on the eve of the centenary of the organization in 2025. Reports indicate that arrangements are afoot to observe the centenary in a massive way on a pan-Indian scale. Is this Narendra Modi’s way of mending fences with Mohan Bhagwat and the rest of the RSS hierarchy?
“To understand militant Hinduism, one must examine its domestic roots as well as foreign influence. In the 1930s Hindu nationalism borrowed from European fascism to transform ‘different’ people into ‘enemies’. Leaders of militant Hinduism repeatedly expressed their admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler and for the fascist model of society. The influence continues to the present day.” In a paper entitled Hindutva’sForeign Tie-up in the 1930s, published in the January 22, 2000 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly, Marzia Casolari, an Italian research scholar, had presented copious archival evidence on the “would-be collaborators”.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the icons of the SanghParivar in general and the RSS in particular, found great merit in authoritarianism of the Nazi and Fascist varieties. Casolari quotes from Savarkar’s speech on ‘India’s foreign policy’ given to about 20,000 people in Pune on August 1, 1938. At the time, he was president of the militant Hindu Mahasabha.
Savarkar said: “Surely Hitler knows better than Pandit Nehru does what suits Germany best. The very fact that Germany or Italy has so wonderfully recovered and grown so powerful as never before at the touch of the Nazi or Fascist magical wand is enough to prove that those political ‘isms’ were the most congenial tonics their health demanded.”
It is for readers to judge whether Savarkar was justified in criticizing Nehru for his opposition to the Nazi nightmare, then gradually coming into its own. Savarkar commented: “India may choose or reject a particular form of government in accordance with her political requirements. But Pandit went out of his way when he took sides in the name of all Indians against Germany or Italy. Pandit Nehru might claim to express the Congress section in India at the most. But it should be made clear to the German, Italian or Japanese public that crores of Hindu Sanghatanists in India whom neither Pandit Nehru nor the Congress represents, cherish no ill-will towards Germany or Italy or Japan or any other country in the world simply because they had chosen to form a government or constitutional policy which they thought suited best and contributed most to their national solidarity and strength.”
One thing led to another in Savarkar’s way of thinking, causing in the end his anti-Muslim rhetoric to become more and more pronounced. Casolari says that at the 21st session of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1939, “Savarkar made one of the most explicit comparisons between the Muslim question in India and the Jewish problem in Germany.” She quotes from Savarkar: “… the Indian Muslims are on the whole more inclined to identify themselves and their interests with Muslims outside India than Hindus who live next door, like the Jews in Germany.”
Hindutva was a book that Savarkar had clandestinely written during his detention in the Andamans. The manuscript had been sent to India secretly in 1917 and published underground in 1923. Not surprisingly, the book is some kind of a Bible to many of today’s advocates of so-called Hindutva. Referring to the Muslims, he had asserted in the book: “… their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently, their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin.”
Madhavrao Sadashiv Golwalkar, ‘Guruji’ to his followers and the man who gave the RSS its mass character, shared Savarkar’s enthusiasm for the extreme form of nationalism that was the hallmark of the German polity under Hitler. In We, or Our Nationhood Defined, Golwalkar wrote: “German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures having differences to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”
Golwalkar’s attitude towards the Muslims was even more severe than that held by Savarkar. He postulated in this regard: “In one word, they (Muslims) must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen’s rights.”
To return to Savarkar, his admiration of a racist and regimented Germany under the Nazi banner and the dictatorship of Hitler bordered on adoration. The Kesari of Pune, founded by BalGangadharTilak, was one of several Marathi publications that gave wide coverage to Savarkar’s views glorifying Nazism and Fascism. These newspapers seemed to revel in the supposed belief thatfascism was superior to democracy and that it had risen from the ruins of a failed democratic order.
On March 25, 1939, the Hindu Mahasabha, under the leadership of Savarkar, issued the following statement that spoke, and speaks, for itself: “Germany’s solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan culture, the glorification of the Swastika, her patronage of Vedic learning and the ardent championship of the tradition of Indo-Germanic civilization are welcomed by the religious and sensible Hindus of India with a jubilant hope. Only a few socialists headed by Pandit J. Nehru have created a bubble of resentment against the present government of Germany, but their activities are far from having any significance in India. The vain imprecations of Mahatma Gandhi against Germany’s indispensable vigour in matters of internal policy obtain but little regard in so far as they are uttered by a man who has always betrayed and confused the country with an affected mysticism. I think that Germany’s crusade against the enemies of Aryan culture will bring all the Aryan nations of the world to their senses and awaken the Indian Hindus for the restoration of their lost glory.”
When, in the late 1990’s, the late Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, pooh-poohed criticism of the RSS as a rabidly communal and highly politicized outfit and said, in its defence, that it was only a cultural and social organization, he was clearly out to hoodwink the Indian people. The majority of youths in this country today are not aware of the disturbing history of the organisation or the sinister intentions that lurk behind the deceptively innocuous face of some people doing drill in khaki shorts (now, changed to trousers in some places) early in the morning. The anti-Muslim, anti-democratic rantings of the late RSS ‘guru’, Golwalkar, are daily drilled into thousands of vulnerable minds. Those who value the diversity of this land and its democratic temper should recognise Golwalkar and other RSS men for the admirers they were, and are, of the monster in human frame that was Adolf Hitler.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society and politics
