In the run-up to the Delhi Assembly elections, Kiran Bedi was asked to comment on the remarks of Mohan Bhagwat, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) chief, that India is a Hindu rashtra. His comments had gone viral with many of the followers claiming that all Indians were Hindus and the nation was Hindu too.
Of course most shrugged off the comments like dust from lapels. However, it was not as easy for Bedi. Not given to quick repartee, as she ably proved during the election campaign, Bedi merely uttered that she was a Hindu. Reminded that the RSS which is the ideological fountainhead of the BJP believes that the nation is a Hindu Rashtra, she shied away under the excuse that she was not an expert and still studying the RSS!
She must be a slow reader, for a cursory glance at the history of the organisation — and indeed the Hindu Mahasabha, now in news for allegedly threatening to marry off couples seen in public places on Valentine’s Day — would have told her that the RSS was formed with the express motive of defending the majoritarian right.
It was formed to propagate the concept of Hindutva, not the values of Hinduism. Though much has been written down the decades about the RSS as well as the Hindu Mahasabha, one of the newer books in the market, “A History of Modern India” by Ishita Banerjee-Dube has put it all so succinctly, so unpretentiously that you would not even think she is talking of the organisation most in news these days. With a style that is different from the approach taken by most historians of modern India — she infuses elements of social currents into political history, nuggets of politics while talking of the economy — she lays open the bare essentials of the Hindu Right wing bodies.
Talking of the days of Hindu-Muslim riots during the freedom struggle, she writes, “Voices that had been drowned in the non-cooperation wave now found expression.
The Hindu Mahasabha, formed in 1915 as a part of the Congress but with radical Hindu nationalist objectives, emerged as a strong critic of the Congress in the 1920s….The Mahasabha had a very limited base in its initial phase; it was composed almost entirely of upper-caste and upper-class Hindu males and had branches only in a few towns and cities of north India.” Interestingly, the Muslim League composition was on similar lines too.
A little later, it was the emergence of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar that gave a new impetus to the Mahasabha. “Savarkar had begun his ‘political career’ at the age of ten in 1893 by throwing stones at a village mosque during the cow-killing riots.
Savarkar, who came to head the Mahasabha in the 1930s, provided the organization with the ideology of Hindutva, which was to have far-reaching consequences. In his book Hindutva , written in Andaman Jail in 1917, Savarkar expounded the idea of a Hindu rashtra, state/nation.”
She goes on to write that Savarkar’s ideology of Hindutva stimulated activities in Maharashtra and indirectly influenced the establishment of the RSS in 1925 by K.B. Hedgewar.
Interestingly, like most proponents of the concept, Hedgewar believed that “since the ‘Hindu society’ had lived in the country ‘since times immemorial’ and was the ‘national society’, and since the ‘same Hindu people’ had built the ‘life values, ideals and culture’ of the country, their nationhood was ‘self-evident’.”
It was a value system that greatly affected the Congress with a section abiding by it, the other moving further away. Among the former was Madan Mohan Malviya.
Ishita goes on to analyse further the role played by the Swaraj Party, the dwindling fortunes of the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. But what stays in one’s mind is her portrayal of the Mahasabha, the beginning of the RSS.
With her lucid ways, she helps put the current controversy against a historical backdrop, making it easier where the new assertion is coming from. It has less to do with Modi, more to do with history, just that the circumstances seem more propitious now.
But all that begs a question: Isn’t everybody an immigrant here? All that matters is how far back you go in time. Some put 1947 as the cut-off date; others, like the Prime Minister who referred to a thousand years of foreign rule in his address, put the time roughly around the age of the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni, thereby equating India with Hindus. They believe that whosoever came after Ghazni, namely the Sultanate rulers, the Mughals and the British, were all outsiders, never mind if millions made it their home, contributing to its life and culture, indeed its freedom from colonial rule. They argue that those who came here earlier, like, say, with the Aryan invasion around 1500 B.C. were the original settlers of the land. Hence, the assertion that India is a Hindu rashtra.
But, if you take time back all the way to 3000 BC? Or bring it forward to 1857? Or even 1947. Then who is an immigrant? And whose rashtra is it?
