By Purushottam Agrawal / The Wire
As the country waves flags and celebrates the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, it is also time to take stock. What did India’s founders and citizens dream of, how has India fared, what have been our challenges and successes?
The Wire’s reporters and contributors bring stories of the period, of the traumas but also the hopes of Indians, as seen in personal accounts, in culture, in the economy and in the sciences. How did the modern state of India come about, what does the flag represent? How did literature and cinema tackle the trauma of Partition?
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) describes itself as a ‘cultural’ organisation, and it is correct in the sense that it aims at changing the very way of ‘being Indian’ and conduct of all private and public activities. ‘Culture’ in the RSS discourse does not refer to the vibrant reality energised by common everyday experiences and creative expressions in India. To the RSS, culture means the rhetoric of hatred and actual violence and a system for concealing those conflicts and oppressions through subterfuge. It also refuses to see the fundamentally diverse character of Indian cultural experience. The pre-independence national movement, on the other hand, recognised this diversity along with dialogue and historical ups and downs inherent in it. Hence the slogan ‘unity in diversity’.
Despite all its claims to being authentically Hindu/Indian, the RSS nationalism is wholly adopted from Western right-wing nationalisms. The admiration of Nazi methods of ‘purifying the national life’ contained in ‘We, our nationhood defined’ (published under the name of M.S. Golwalkar in 1938; only much later was its authorship denied) can be easily seen reflected in day-to-day informal conversation of any RSS cadre or sympathiser. The glorification of lynchings and other heinous crimes is nothing but putting those methods into practice.
The RSS has so far, fortunately, not denied Golwalkar’s authorship of Bunch of Thoughts (1966). The 12th chapter of this book lists ‘internal threats’; and they are the Muslims, the Christians and the communists – in that order. Something very significant is implied here. Religious groups – Muslims and Christians – have been clubbed together with communists, an ideological category. After all, nobody is born with a communist or any other political orientation; you adopt and may also discard it. In Golwalkar’s view, the Muslims and Christians can cease to be ‘internal threats’ to the nation only if they discard their faith altogether. This is V.D. Savarkar’s idea of only those being part of ‘nation’ who have their holy lands within India. Fortunately for the Hindutva types settled in the US, the idea has not gained ground there to ask Hindus to take their holy dips in the Hudson or Colorado instead of Ganga or Godavari.
The one nation-one religion formula extends not only to ideologies (you are a threat, or ‘anti-national’ in current parlance, if you hold any worldview other than that of the RSS) but also everyday practices, language, food. The idea is to forcibly impose an RSS-approved uniformity from above on every aspect of life. ‘One nation, one election’ is only the latest in the series. Not surprisingly, the organisational principle of the RSS is Ek Chalak Anuvartitva – ‘under the instructions of one driver’.
This story was originally published in thewire.in . Read the full story here