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If RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is worried about the supposedly higher population growth among Muslims, he should advocate the spread of education among Muslim women and oppose the hijab ban in Karnataka that is keeping Muslim girls out of educational establishments: Prabhat Patnaik, professor emeritus with JNU The first part was published on October 17.
Q: If you analyse the entire past of the RSS, do you come across a single example of sympathetic understanding on its part of the role and position, genuine and alienated, of the Muslim in the Indian scenario?
Patnaik: The Muslim, as the RSS sees him, is a pure construction, unrelated to reality. (This pure construction is different from the construction of concepts that characterises thought in general). In fact, the RSS uses this phantom notion of a Muslim to attack flesh-and-blood Muslims.
This construction, however, can retain its integrity only if it is not empirically grounded, only if the empirical Muslim is not allowed to intrude into the picture. That is why you will find that very few staunch RSS cadres have any acquaintance with any real Muslim; and that is also why, when ordinary Hindus have any contact with a real Muslim, the RSS dissuades them by giving all such contacts a fantastic interpretation. Thus, if a Hindu girl marries a Muslim man, it becomes “love jihad”, a union with an ulterior motive.
This is not to say that persons who follow the RSS do not have Muslim contacts at all, or that persons with Muslim contacts do not get into the RSS flock, but typically their justification in such cases would be: “My Muslim contact is an exception.”
The question of the RSS developing any sympathy for the empirical Muslim or appreciating his role in any context runs contrary to its construction of the Muslim. It would either not have any sympathetic understanding of any empirical Muslim, or if perchance it does, it would do so with the idea that the object of its sympathy is not really a Muslim.
Q: Lalu Prasad has declared that the RSS should be banned as well. Your studied comment on this weaving of equivalence?
Patnaik: The RSS had been banned by the then home minister, Sardar Patel, following Gandhi’s assassination, but the ban was lifted when it gave an undertaking that it would abjure all political activity. It has blatantly violated that promise. Even the argument that it has never directly engaged in political activity (though it has done so through political parties that constitute its front organisations) cannot stand scrutiny any longer.
If it were a pure socio-cultural organisation, then foreign ambassadors, industrialists, educationists and prominent Muslims, not to mention ministers and BJP bigwigs, would not be making a beeline to meet its chief, Mohan
Bhagwat. Hence, even if we ignore its active role at present in fomenting communal hatred, it would still be liable to the serious charge of having violated its original undertaking. And, of course, the principle on which the PFI is banned applies equally to the RSS.
I am, however, generally opposed to the idea of banning organisations. If they engage in any criminal activity like terrorism, then that should be dealt with under the law of the land. But as far as their influence on people is concerned, that should be combated through counter-influence and through political activity by progressive, secular forces.
This story was originally published in telegraphindia.com . Read the full story here