By Rahul Bhatia
Running a finger over a row of books in a Delhi library one afternoon, I stopped at a title that promised danger. The stacks were abundant in books like RSS Misunderstood and Is RSS the Enemy?, which often turned out to be self-published polemics that were too long, however short they were. This one was different. On its front was the full title, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and the BJP of India, An Insider’s View. I read the first page, and then the next, slowly, with rising giddiness. Not long after, I was beside a Sikh gentleman at his photocopying machine. What pages, he asked. Everything, I said.
In the long hour that followed, I wondered if the book’s presence on these shelves was an oversight. This was the closest that any writer had come to describing the organisation from within. That night I swallowed its contents whole, scanned a copy for myself to store in several places for safekeeping, and wrote to its author. We mailed, and then scheduled a video call, and then arranged to meet two months later, when he travelled to India from the US to alert people to the dangers of the RSS before the 2024 elections began.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s members have long seen themselves as servants to an imaginary Hindu motherland that stretches from the Middle East to the far east. Its members would go to any lengths to protect this ideal from imagined threats. It was an RSS man who murdered Gandhi in January 1948. Forty-five years later, the RSS was one of the key forces behind the demolition of the Babri mosque, an event that triggered riots in which thousands of people were killed. There is no official list of members, but the RSS is usually said to be 4 million strong. The Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), the party that rules India at present, is the RSS’s political arm. Since its foundation in 1925, the organisation has existed as a kind of LinkedIn for the rootless, or a talent scout for people of a certain nationalist temperament; Narendra Modi, the prime minister, was a product of the organisation.
On the day we met, I waited for the author, whose name is Partha Banerjee, in a wide lane outside a mall in eastern Kolkata. I noticed him in the distance: a small man in a blue ikat-patterned kurta clutching a shopping bag bulging with vegetables. He had kind eyes behind his glasses, and his hair was short and grey. I followed him down one street and then another to his small flat. A maid brought out mangoes and sweets and placed them on a small table between us.
Partha told me he had left the RSS behind almost 40 years ago, and he said it as if he had firmly closed the door to that chapter of his life. But RSS people like to say that an RSS man will always be an RSS man, and there is a reason for this – it seduces through community and family, exerting a gravitational force on individuals. That was why, even though he had left the RSS, he thought about it often. He was once an insider marked for future greatness. Now, thanks to his book, he was an outcast. Its critique of the organisation was so clear-eyed that his father, an unbending RSS man, distanced himself from him. “He was completely heartbroken,” Partha said. “We stopped talking to each other for a very long time.”
This story was originally published in theguardian.com. Read the full story here.
