By Kavita Mistry 
Soon enough, it was made clear to Goel, the firebrand Hindutva historian, whose work was making waves across the board, that his articles were no longer needed by the Organiser.
Determined to know why, Goel, who was by then already a critic of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), asked an unnamed “big boss” of the RSS why his series was stopped. “Kabhi kabhi likhiye,” was the response.
Then again, a few months later, Goel asked another “big boss” of the RSS the same question. This time, he said, the cat was out of the bag. “You…you go out and attack Islam. How will then any Muslim come to us?” the second “big boss” replied, angrily. “But do you really want the Muslims to come to you?” Goel asked him. “As a strategy…,” he began. Goel stormed off.
The incident related by Goel in How I became a Hindu, describes the culmination of his gradual, but conclusive disillusionment with the RSS, which he, according to former IPS officer Nageswara Rao, described as “the biggest collection of duffers that ever came together in world history,” and which was an organisation that needed to perish if Hindu society was to flourish.
Over four decades later, as the RSS turns 100, Goel’s unforgiving criticisms of the organisation have got a new lease of life. As reported in the first part of this series, a new generation of firebrand Hindutva writers, activists, and social media influencers has cropped up. They are the new Alt-Right Hindutva brigade.
They relentlessly question the Modi government and the RSS’s overtures to minorities, especially Muslims and Christians. For them, a compromised Hindutva is no Hindutva at all. They strive for a pure, fully secularism-free Hindutva. Far from being the Hindu Hriday Samrat and a Hindu nationalist organisation, Modi and the RSS, are instead hindrances for this fiery, Alt-Right brand of Hindutva supporters.
As lawyer and author J. Sai Deepak—who too has criticised the RSS in the past—said during a book launch last year: “This is the most raging internal debate that has to be addressed because this virus has infected our ideology.”
While social media has made these voices louder and more extreme than ever before, challenges to the RSS, the Jana Sangh and the BJP’s monopoly over Hindutva are as old as the RSS itself. As the RSS and the BJP seek to overcome this internal challenge, ThePrint looks at how versions of these ideological battles have played out before within the Hindutva movement. In what ways have the RSS and the BJP ‘betrayed’ Hindus according to their fellow Hindu nationalist critics? And what exactly is the RSS’s position on the question of Muslims, which these critics find too soft?
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A phenomenon as old as the Sangh
In 1996, two documents by a Swayamsevak of the RSS, Shreerang Godbole were published in a brochure titled Time For Stock Taking: A Swayamsevak Speaks.
The first was his speech at a seminar in Pune attended by K.S. Sudarshan, Murli Manohar Joshi, Dattopant Thengadi, and K.R. Malkani, among others, where Godbole tore into the RSS’s views on Muslims. Point by point, Godbole delineated the RSS’s stand, and then rebutted it. The fourth in a list of eight points was “If Muslims are told of their common ancestry, they will unite with Hindus”—a point belaboured by the current Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat too.
“How foolish!” Godbole said. “As if Muslims are not aware that their forefathers were converted to Islam. However, for Muslims, pre-Islamic period is a period of darkness (jahiliya).”
“Let us read (the) Quran, Hadis, Sunnah (Life of Prophet),” he pleaded. “Then we will realise that to assimilate Muslims into BJP/RSS is like assimilating Marxists into BJP/RSS.”
The second document was Godbole’s letter to Sudarshan, then Sarsanghchalak of the RSS. In 1994, the RSS had founded the Sarva Panth Samadar Manch, which loosely translates to a platform for equal respect for all religions. The Manch, which was inaugurated by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, Godbole said, was unacceptable to him.
“The concept of ‘Sarva Panth Samadar’ is even more dangerous than the concept of ‘Sarva Dharma Samabhav’ mouthed by secularists,” he wrote. “With the latter, you are at least allowed equidistance from all religions. With the former, you actually ask me to show equal respect to Sanatana Dharma and Islam. This is not acceptable to me.”
Godbole could have been one of the first voices from within the RSS to publicly criticise the organisation. But he was certainly not among the first from within the Hindutva ideology to do so. For many decades before him, more militant Hindutva thinkers and activists, including the founder of the ideology, had already done so.
Aghast by the RSS’s decision to not enter politics, nor work for any political party—in the initial years, it was hoped that the RSS would supply cadres for the Hindu Mahasabha— V.D. Savarkar famously said about the Sangh: “The epitaph on a Sangh Swayamsevak will be: ‘He was born; he joined RSS; he died’.”
It was not just Savarkar. In the pre-independence period, the RSS lived under the constant fear of a ban. The fear made the organisation make some strategic maneuvers.
As argued by Walter Anderson in the paper The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—I Early Concerns published in 1973, while its founder, K.B. Hedgewar, had put a high priority on military training in the Sangh, after 1940—the year he died and M.S. Golwalkar became the Sarsanghchalak—this virtually ceased. With the colonial government coming down heavily on paramilitary organisations, in 1943, Golwalkar explicitly said in a circular, that the Sangh will abolish its military department, and never open it again.
Hindu activists, including Nathuram Godse, the assailant of Gandhi, and a former Swayamsevak of the Sangh, were utterly disillusioned. As Nathuram’s brother, Gopal, who also left the RSS, told Anderson, “Nathuram Godse and others felt that this lack of involvement in politics that had come over the RSS was not helpful to the Hindu cause and decided that more militant Hindu volunteer groups must be organised.”
‘Worse than Gandhi, Congress’
On his visit to an RSS shakha, Mahatma Gandhi once purportedly asked M.S. Golwalkar, how many Harijans there were in the Sangh. “All are Hindus in my eyes”, responded Golwalkar. When Gandhi insisted, Golwalkar said that along with Harijans, people of several castes lived there, but without even once thinking about each other’s castes, they participate in all the activities of the Sangh, including dining and playing.
Relating this incident in his book, RSS aur Hindu Dharm, Karpatri Maharaj, a prominent Hindu godman and revivalist, who was one of the main agitators in the 1966 anti-cow slaughter protests, said, “a believer of the varnashrama can, thus, immediately understand that the Sangh is a congregation of the enemies of varnashrama.”
“Even Gandhi ji and the Congress are not such a big threat for the varnashrama as the Sangh is,” he added. “The Brahmins and Harijans of the Sangh, all bring roti from their homes, and mix it, and serve and eat it amongst each other. It was under the influence of these sanskar that Sangh leaders like Deendayal Upadhyaya, Atal Bihari Vajpayee have also had the dream of assimilating Muslims by sharing roti-beti with them.”
Such was his frustration with the Sangh that in 1948, Karpatri floated a political party of his own, called the Ram Rajya Parishad. “The party was quite successful given the hegemony of Congress in those days,” says Nageswara Rao, who is a strong anti-RSS campaigner, which he feels is anti-Hindu. The party won three Lok Sabha seats in the 1952 election, and dozens of Vidhan Sabha seats in different states. “But the Sangh strategically eliminated it much like other political opponents like the Hindu Mahasabha.”
Karpatri Maharaj, whose videos, pictures and excerpts are widely shared among the contemporary Alt-Right on social media, represented what many mainstream Hindutva voices describe as the “conservative” backlash to political Hindutva. At its heart, they say, is caste—even today.
“He (Karpatri Maharaj) was so casteist that Advani famously refused to eat with him,” says defense analyst and right-wing commentator, Abhijit Iyer Mitra.
According to Mitra, it is these same streams of criticism—the Savarkarite one, which sees the RSS as too conservative and non-confrontational with regard to Muslims, and the Karpatri Maharaj one, which sees it as working against the principles of Sanatan Dharma—that continue even today.
“They cannot talk about caste openly,” said a professor, who is part of the Sangh Parivar. “So, for them, religion becomes a fig-leaf to vent out their caste frustration. If you investigate where these people come from, a lot of them would be upper-caste Brahmins and Thakurs posting out of flats in Mukherjee Nagar…For them, Modi washing the feet of sanitation workers is indigestible.”
“It is a fallacy to call these people Hindutva supporters or belonging to the Hindutva family,” he added. “They have been the number one enemies of Hindutva from the start. They are either traditionalists or orthodox,” he said.
‘De-ritualised Hinduism’
“The term Hindutva was coined by 19th Century Bengali linguist and intellectual Chandranath Basu as many traditionalists in Bengal did not accept the term ‘Hinduism’, given to their religion by the British,” Nageswara Rao tells ThePrint. “The word ‘Hinduism’ was a linguistic hybrid—neither fully Prakrit nor fully English…They wanted to give their Sanatana Dharma a native name, so Chandranath Basu came up with the word ‘Hindutva’ in 1892.” The word very much had religious connotations, he said.
Savarkar, who was 9 at the time this word was first coined, hijacked it and applied it on his ideology, Rao added. An atheist himself, Savarkar changed the meaning of the word to refer to territorial nationalism. “He took the culture of India, not its religion…and thus, a religious, spiritual term was hijacked.”
The RSS, which adopted Savarkar’s ideology, did the same, he said.
They (the Sangh) are absolutely irreligious and decultured, says author and founder of Manushi, Madhu Kishwar, referring to the RSS. “They are so utterly anti-intellectual that they do not even read their own granth…Look at their uniform itself, so decultured!”
“They want Hindus to pray to Bharat Mata alone—Bharat Mata is not our goddess. Yeh toh moorti khandit karne waale log hain,” Kishwar says.
Rao and Kishwar’s criticisms go at the heart of the Alt-Right angst—the impression that for the RSS and BJP, religion occupies an inferior position viz a viz politics.
In 1953, at a meeting with Deendayal Upadhyaya, Karpatri suggested that the Jana Sangh should be based on a Hindu holy book. This would be impossible, Upadhyaya told him. “By avoiding textual fundamentalism, the party could remain free to define both the ground and the content of its doctrine chiefly with reference to historical tradition and only incidentally with reference to the religious books which belonged to that tradition,” Bruce Graham wrote in Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics.
That is to say, from the beginning, the RSS and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the BJP were choosing to mould religious precepts and texts freely to meet political needs of the times.
In a piece titled The Conservative Challenge to Hindutva, political scientist Sajjan Kumar explains this phenomenon as the “deritualisation of the Hindu religion by Hindutva”. While the interplay between religion and politics is hardly new, earlier, texts and traditions would be interpreted differently to mobilise people politically, Kumar argued. Political Hindutva not only interprets religion, but also seeks to mould it to suit its political needs.
“Here, religion is not only relegated to an inferior position but has also been effectively vanquished and used as a handmaid by the political,” Kumar wrote. More than the secular, the Left, the Ambedkarites and the assertive religious minorities, in its populist avatar, Hindutva is wary of this opposition from within, he argues. “(Mainstream) Hindutva seeks to show them their marginal place in the age of subaltern religiosity. However, in doing so it faces a challenge as it ends up alienating a section of the core support base.”
Asked if the Alt Right poses a threat to the RSS-BJP, a professor of political science, who requested anonymity, said, “These voices and outfits really are the fringe, in a way that the RSS never was. For 100 years, they have been working towards entering the bloodstream of the nation through the system of shakhas and affiliates. The outfits and individuals criticising the Sangh do not and cannot have the same hold.”
“The thing with the Sangh is that it has a larger aim of hegemony through unity—you see this from the time of Golwalkar, they have always kept a door for Muslims who want to ‘correct themselves’ open,” he added. “From Dalits to Muslims—nobody’s their eternal enemy.”
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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