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COVER
STORY: RSS
VISION
HINDUTVA
On its
75th anniversary, the organisation unveils an agenda that is a negation
of everything representing the modern and global
By
S. Prasannarajan
The
view from Mount Govardhan: The idyllic expanse of Hindu Rashtra, the most
perfect karmabhoomi of the east, is bathed in civilisational lassitude.
It's all green, greener than the usual green as the plants are fed on
cowdung. It's all countryside, the leafy richness of which is a bucolic
rejoinder to chemical conspiracies. Look, adorned cows, ever-giving mothers
with liquid eyes, are grazing in the meadows and the bovine symphony in
the grass is conducted by cowboys in khaki shorts. Oh, they are little
Krishnas with flutes on their lips and peacock feathers in their hair,
their blue bodies still exuding the fragrance of the Kamadhenu brand toilet
soap, made entirely of cowdung, and their teeth are so white because they
use toothpaste made of-what else?-the same divine cowdung. Beyond the
meadows, there are churches and mandirs and mosques, where the citizens
of this punyabhoomi, the holy land, pray in the holiest of languages,
Sanskrit. All of them, all of those Samuels and Shankars and Salims, are
proud of being the descendants of Krishna and Ram, the cross and the crescent
are the cultural cousins of the trident. And in the museum of modern blasphemies,
items of amusement are many: Colgate, the Pope, potato chips, the missionary,
Nehru ... In the Sovereign Republic of Hindustan, everything is pride,
nothing is temptation, and bliss is equally distributed.
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| RSS
cadres at the Agra conclave |
It's the
ideal, praise the Lord (Krishna), it's still a fiction.
The reality was there in the outskirts of Agra between October 13 and
15, a sprawling, spectacular reality, and there was downsized mythology,
Mount Govardhan, a 75-ft mountain of wood, iron and tarpaulin. The temple
on the mountain, the conquest of which was made easier by a makeshift
lift, was the stage from where the paramount leaders of the rss unleashed
Vision Hindutva. For the three days that shook the neighbourhood of emperor
Akbar's tomb, a miniature Hindustan was conducting its business with clockwork
precision, without a note of discontent or disillusion-it was textbook
communitarianism in ironed khaki. In a republic of 400 acres, of 35 townships,
around 50,000 swayamsevaks (volunteers) lived their lives according to
the dharmic code of Hindu Rashtra. They rose before sunrise, did their
morning drill in the open air, dedicated their body and soul to the service
of the motherland, ate breakfast cooked in the community kitchen, listened
to the wise words of the leader, relaxed in the afternoon, again listened
to words that reminded them of the advantages of being born in this sacred
land. After a day of dedication and education, as they slept on spartan
floors, brothers kept the vigil from watch towers on the border, for the
enemies of Hindu Rashtra could be coming from anywhere. Hindu Rashtra
needed protection.
Enemy and
protection. They were the most invoked themes at the rss mega-celebration
of its 75th birthday, a controlled bash with a message: Rashtra Raksha
(national security). The protector-in-chief, Sarsanghchalak Kuppahalli
Sitaramaiyya Sudarshan, 69, couldn't have hoped for a better platform,
a vantage point to supervise the virtuous ways of the complete Hindu.
Perhaps, for once, mythology provided the perfect metaphor.
Once upon
a time, goes the myth, the people of Brindavan worshipped Lord Indra,
and prayed for rains. Krishna didn't like this, this worshipping of the
wrong lord, and he stopped them from doing it. A provoked Indra expressed
his anger in the form of a fierce torrential downpour. Krishna the protector
lifted Mount Govardhan and used it as a shield against Indra's watery
curse.
In Agra,
there was no watery assault from above; it was all heat and dust and demagogy.
Still, in Agra, Sudarshan played the protector part by inventing enemies,
enemies from the church as well as the state. Though the supreme swayamsevak
was benevolent enough to invite the enemies to become servants of the
holy land. For, what was missing in India was Indianness, the culture
of swadeshi, and a sense of ancestral solidarity.
One of Sudarshan's
parables to stress the point. "A soldier was standing there with
swords in both his hands. The enemy came, slapped the soldier hard, and
walked away laughing. When a friend asked the soldier why he couldn't
defend himself despite having two swords, the reply was: I couldn't do
much because both my hands were occupied." The name of the soldier,
you know it, is India, a nation that continues to fail in self-defence-economically,
culturally, spiritually.
Who is the
enemy? He has many faces: the foreign free marketeer, the missionary who
has contempt for any saviour other than Jesus, or the so-called Euro-Indian
who has, in a Faustian bargain, sold his Hindu soul for the bodily pleasures
of the West. India has failed in spite of being so well armed-so many
cows, so many gods, and so many Hindus. "Take France, England, Portugal
or Spain. They have no confusion about national security. Why are we alone
talking about ourselves as a nation in the making? Why do we forget our
karmabhoomi?" Lack of self-confidence?
Or is it
the contemptible Euro-Indian? "They are making attempts to crush
the Hindu smita (pride). But the country is waking up. There is no need
to launch campaigns against them. Jaise-jaise Hindu samaj jagega, Euro-Hindu
bhagega (As Hindu society rises, the Euro-Hinds will flee)."
It is more
than that. Going by Sudarshan's argument, India is fast giving in to the
confidence of the tormentor. Torment No. 1: Non-Indian church plus missionary
imposition. This from his Organiser interview: "The foreign churches
are interested less in religion and more in politics. It was because of
this that Joseph Cornellius Kumarappa, the eminent Gandhian economist,
once remarked that the western nations had four arms-the infantry, navy,
air force and the church."
In Agra,
Sudarshan challenged the my-God-is-partial vision of the Pope, the unipolar
salvation theology of the Vatican. After all, in the beginning, there
were only Hindus, and, in Sudarshan's view, the majority of Christians
and Muslims seems to forget that. So, why can't, asks Sudarshan, the Muslims
of India accept Krishna and Ram as their forefathers, if not their gods?
Or, why can't they be like Haji Altaf Husain? This Husain was a see-me,
ask-me item at the Mahashivir press centre. The owner of Zeeshan Opticals
was so eager to explain his Hindu self: "Yes, I regularly attend
the shakha (the RSS camp). Yes, I don't wear khaki knickers for they make
namaz difficult, painful. Remember, Hindu Rashtra is a must, also remember,
whoever stays in Hindustan is a Hindu." Fortunately, Husain sounds
more funny than fanatical.
Add the economics,
Torment No. 2, to the religious, and you get a rough idea of the rss world
order-cowdung capitalism and Hindu antiquity. Use go-dhan (cattle wealth)-cow
dung, cow urine-and banish chemical fertilisers. That was a repeated call
from Mount Govardhan, no matter who the speaker was-Sudarshan or Mohanrao
Bhagwat or Madandas Devi or H.V. Sheshadri. They all sounded remote and
distant, voices from the recesses of a Great Yesterday. Their Hindu Rashtra,
an exclusive republic of eternal bliss, of a uniform culture code, despite
the occasional vocabulary of pan-Indian brotherhood, despite the preserving
benevolence of Mount Govardhan, was a homage to hate. It was an awesome
factory of demonology. It was the civilisationally superior "us"
against the patriotically challenged "them".
The irony
in Agra, certainly not accidental, was: one of "them" was the
bjp, whose first avatar was as the political arm of the RSS. Today, with
the BJP in power, that too with the most popular politician of the country
at the helm, RSS has every reason to be politically satisfied. But its
cultural agenda and moral superiority complex have become a politically
destabilising factor for the BJP. So party President Bangaru Laxman had
to admit that "the RSS is not our conscience-keeper or our master".
RSS spokesman Madhav Govind Vaidya has a different point though: When
the popularly elected Hindu party fails to uphold the Hindu consciousness,
it's the RSS' duty to keep Hindutva moving, for "the RSS is not bound
by those compulsions and constraints the BJP is faced with".
Try telling
that to External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh who has to reassure a
mortified West that Christian churches won't be forcibly nationalised
in India. Tell that to Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha who has to tell
nervous foreigners that there won't be bonfires of foreign goods. And
tell that to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who will have more than
medicine to explain to his nervous allies after Diwali. Maybe they will
all quote Sudarshan's great laissez faire wisdom: "The Government
is not a medium of social change. It's there to maintain law and order."
In Agra,
however, those compulsions and constraints were visible in the person
of L.K. Advani. The symbolism was overwhelming. As Sudarshan occupied
the high point of the mountain, Advani, a "civilian" in a front
row of khaki-white-black, sat in the audience. He went through the rhythmic
salute and Sanskrit invocation of the Motherland, stoically suffered the
assault of the lenses, withstood the heat and dust, and patiently listened
to the supreme knowledge of the supreme swayamsevak. He was at ground
level. And he had the courage to express the ground reality: "The
RSS exercises a moral influence on the government and both Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee and I share a historical bonding with it." Unity
is not only in diversity, it is there in double-tongue as well.
The Hindu
unity, however, lay orphaned outside the world as seen from Mount Govardhan.
Despite its massive size-45,000 shakhas with a daily attendance of 5,40,000
swayamsevaks, and around 100 front organisations-and militant vigour,
the RSS has long ago lost the Hindu as well as Hindustan, also the world
where gods appear invariably as a screen saver. What has it got? Volunteers
in thousands, agreed, and enemies ranging from, according to an English-speaking,
second-generation swayamsevak, the first invader Muhammad bin Qasim to
the last tormentor John Dayal, that is, from the terrible to the trivial.
And oodles of political notoriety.
It's a male
make-believe with its pracharaks obliged by rule to remain unmarried,
live a spartan, unnatural life. The RSS leadership is steeped in a kind
of nameless tragedy-or innocence? And in Agra, triumph was not upward
mobile, the flag of simulated Hinduism couldn't go up despite the best
efforts of a determined swayamsevak on the final day. Everyone waited,
including founder K.B. Hedgewar, his walrus moustache in purest white,
and Guruji M.S. Golwalkar, his beard in flowing black, both immortalised
on cardboard.
The wait
could be eternal. And eternity is very much a great Hindu idea. So it's
not hope abandoned when you see the world from the man-made Mount Govardhan.
Even if the world looks at you with museum-worthy fascination.
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CII’s
conference on Friday on corporate governance is called Independent Directors:
Why, How and Who. Why Not, How Not and Who Not, would have been better,
says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor, V Shankar Aiyar