With Modi as PM, no one in India with any concern on the secular future of the republic would doubt the importance of understanding the RSS and the VHP. Khaki Shirts and Saffron Flags – A Critique of the Hindu Right (By Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen), the first in the ‘Tracts for the times’ series published by the Orient Longman (1993), is still a good resource for an academic grasp of the powerful but venomous movements. The book, “written and printed before the Babri Masjid was destroyed”, is a research on the origin, growth and the then current status of the RSS and the VHP. The authors identify the “communicational and economic integration of the last quarter of the nineteenth century” as a significant factor which enabled the easy consolidation of the Hindu communalism envisaged by the parivar. The fact that Hindutva is an independent political ideology premised upon the dreams of a Hindurashtra and not an output of the fear of supposed Muslim attacks is rightly pointed out. In Maharashtra, where the RSS got birth, Muslims “were a small minority and hardly a threat and there had been no major riots in this region during the early 1920s”. The continuity as well as the break of the RSS history with the reform/revival movements of Dayanand and Vivekananda is pinpointed in the book at various instances. The work successfully reveals the working mechanism and the organizational structure of RSS and VHP, and pages are devoted to record the details of the setup. The second chapter, namely “The VHP: Organizing Mass Communalism”, includes some paragraphs dealing with the media enterprises of the VHP as well as its intrusions to the mainstream media.
The RSS in itself has become a particular religious cult. The traditional Hindu epics are placed primarily in an anti-Muslim framework rather than in their conventional/real contexts. “They have made Ram irrevocably associated with not with Ravana” but “with Babur and Muslim rule.” For Hindutva, the traditional Hindu festivals and rituals along with the ones newly innovated by RSS constitute political mobilization (read communalization of the Hindu community) and not devotion. VHP proved highly instrumental in the realization of this agenda. To attract the youth, the saffron pavilion does incorporate even the features of modern entertainment industry into the realm of Hinduism.The authors, “encountered the amazing spectacle of a bhajan session which featured a band that had a saxophone, an electronic keyboard and drums topped by a look-alike Amitabh Bacchan crooner” at the Jhandewala Mandir in Delhi. In “Ram ki nam le, a cassette available in Ayodhya panders”, Sita plays the “seductive damsel calling out to ram in a tune which imitates the hit song Dil diwana bin saajana ke mane na”.
The fraud behind, and the reactionary connotations of, the ‘unity in diversity’ rhetoric of the Hindu nationalists are exposed by the authors. The way in which the Hindutva exponents portray the history of India-a monolithic and utopian ancient India turned topsy-turvy by the Muslim invasions-is confronted with academic vigor. The gender and class insensitivity of the movement is underlined throughout. It is argued, as expected for the Marxist-inclinations of the authors, that “socialism is more disturbing for Hindutva than the ideology of Islam, for the RSS-VHP world-view is singularly ill-equipped to deal with questions of social conflict”.
The “cultural nationalism” of the RSS is distinguished from the “territorial nationalism” put forth by the Congress, and the conspicuous absence of the Hindutva brigade in the Gandhian phase of Congress activism is projected. The authors were anyhow in no illusion that they did not issue a clean chit to the proponents of “territorial nationalism”.The Hindu Mahasabha-Congress ties that persisted till 1930’s is critiqued and the Congress leaders ranging from Patel to Rajiv are questioned for the role they played in promoting “cultural nationalism”. At the same time, a soft corner is maintained towards the socialist face of the Congress which was championed by Nehru. Indeed Nehru was not like Patel, Malaviya or Savarkar. But how shall we amount for the naivety he had shown in removing the ban on RSS which was imposed on it in the context of Gandhi’s assassination? Do the simple statements like “the RSS agreed to adopt a written constitution, maintain regular registers of members, not to admit minors without parental permission, and work openly and in the cultural field only” and “the RSS won back its legality on 12 July 1949” suffice here to articulate the irresponsibility demonstrated by the prime minister? Interestingly, a perforce personal attack on Nehru is once again avoided in the book when “the government permission given to” the RSS “to participate as a separate contingent in the Republic parade of 1963” is delineated.
The historical elucidation of the paradoxical aloofness of the RSS cadres-the self professed sentinels of patriotism-from the mass movements launched by Gandhi can undoubtedly enhance the potential of the critique. But while attempting this, the Muslim League is added to the list of the (condemnable) anti-nationals with haste and the neutrality of the charges is ensured! Thus, “the early and mid-1940s remained a period of rapid growth (for RSS), with the number of shakhas doubling between 1940 and 42, and with 10,000 swayamsevaks being trained by 1945 in Officers Training Camps. Like the Muslim League and the other Hindu communal groups, the RSS too, benefited from the fact that it was never a target for British war time repression”. And important to note, the communist party, which also kept itself apart from the Quit India movement as international struggle against fascism was more important for it at the moment, is avoided from the discussion for obvious reasons. I feel that the reluctance to accept the Muslim self-assertion of the community identity as something qualitatively different from the Hindu communalism (nationalism) haunts our secular historians, thanks to the legacy of the “territorial nationalism!”