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LRB, Vol. 42 No. 6 · 19 March 2020
Strictly Technical
by Aijaz Ahmad
The RSS: A Menace to India
by A.G. Noorani.
LeftWord, 547 pp., £33.75, September 2019, 978 81 934666 8 1
Messengers of Hindu Nationalism: How the RSS Reshaped India
by Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle.
Hurst, 405 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 78738 025 7
Rashtriya swayamsevak sangh (RSS), India’s National Volunteer
Organisation, is the oldest, largest and most successful far-right group
in the world today. It is also the effective ruling power in India. The
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is merely a political front – one of
numerous fronts – for the RSS. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has
been a functionary of the RSS all his life and it was the RSS that
decided to field him first as chief minister of Gujarat (2001-14) and
then as India’s prime minister (from 2014). Few cabinet ministers in BJP
governments, past or present, have not been loyal members of the
organisation, which has never given a transparent account of its
finances or its members. It claims exemption as a self-styled ‘cultural
organisation’ – or, on occasion, ‘charity’ – even though it isn’t at all
clear whether it has ever registered itself as such.
The RSS has also normalised Hindu nationalist violence. In 2014, around
the time of the election, a number of intellectuals and journalists
known for their promotion of rationality and secularism were murdered,
most of them shot at point-blank range: Narendra Dabholkar, Govind
Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh. None of them was Muslim, but
their opposition to the Hindutva project meant they were classed as what
the RSS likes to call ‘anti-national’. The assassinations were
apparently carried out by members of a group that doesn’t profess to be
an affiliate of the RSS but is undeniably its imitator. Clones are now
proliferating across the country. Lynchings of Muslims have become
commonplace, with more than a hundred incidents reported since 2015.
Parliament was told last month that 97 Muslims were killed in the course
of 751 attacks in 2016, and 111 killed and almost 2500 injured in 822
attacks in 2017.
Modi was re-elected in May last year. On 5 August, the government
stripped Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, dividing it into two separate
territories, thus violating not only the state constitution but the
Indian constitution as well. Jammu and Kashmir was the only Muslim
majority state in India and enjoyed special constitutional safeguards.
Abolishing these has effectively turned it into an Indian colony. A few
weeks earlier, on 19 July, parliament had introduced the Citizenship
(Amendment) Bill and the home minister, Amit Shah, announced the
introduction of a National Register of Citizens to determine which of
the country’s residents are citizens and which illegal immigrants
(‘infiltrators’, as the newspapers put it; ‘termites’ according to
Shah). The Act stipulates that illegal immigrants from Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Nepal who came to India before 2014 as a result of
religious persecution and subscribe to religions other than Islam will
be given an expedited route to citizenship. This means that Muslims who
faced religious persecution in those countries – Ahmadis in Pakistan or
Hazaras in Afghanistan – do not qualify. Myanmar isn’t one of the
countries covered by the Act because the Rohingyas are Muslim and the
Indian state is already busy deporting them. Michelle Bachelet Jeria,
the UN high commissioner for human rights, wrote to the Indian Supreme
Court pointing out that the Act contravenes any number of international
statutes to which India is a signatory.
The proposed register of citizens would require every Indian to produce
documents to prove their citizenship; it is estimated that around 70 per
cent of the population have no such documents. This is especially true
of the low castes, the rural and urban poor, forest dwellers and
religious minorities. The register was immediately identified as an
attempt to deny citizenship to large numbers of Muslims. Students at
Jamia Millia in Delhi and at Aligarh, the two major universities
historically associated with Muslims, responded with non-violent
protests. Police stormed both campuses in December, invading libraries
and dorms to attack students (they also destroyed CCTV cameras).
After these atrocities a far larger protest movement emerged. Large
numbers of ordinary Muslim women, most of them poor and socially
conservative, neither young nor well educated, staged sit-down protests
near the universities in defence of their right to citizenship. Many
more such groups gathered all over the country, inspiring an
extraordinary movement involving hundreds of thousands, possibly
millions, of people and crossing all boundaries of class, caste and
religion.
The atmosphere among the protesters was largely peaceful and festive.
The government provided the menace. Anurag Thakur, the finance minister,
addressed huge rallies of RSS supporters with the chant ‘Desh ke
ghaddaron ko, goli maro saalon ko,’ which translates (in polite
language) as ‘These anti-national traitors, shoot them all.’ Leela Ram
Gurjar, the BJP MP from Haryana, told a crowd: ‘Today’s India is not the
India of Nehru; this is not Gandhi’s India. Today it is Modi’s India and
if we get a sign from him we will wipe them out in an hour.’ ‘Them’
clearly meant ‘Muslims’. Parvesh Verma, another BJP MP, warned the women
staging a sit-down protest at Shaheen Bagh, some of them holding copies
of the preamble to the Indian constitution, that ‘hundreds of thousands
are gathering there. They will enter your houses, rape your sisters and
daughters, kill them. There is time today, Modi and Amit Shah will not
come to save you tomorrow.’
These are just a few examples. Such incitements to violence were
repeated hundreds of times in Delhi and the states around it, where the
RSS is strongest. By mid- February, ultimatums were being issued to the
protesters to give up their sit-ins. The onslaught began in the third
week of February. The Delhi State Minority Commission estimates that
around two thousand people were brought in from outside Delhi in the
preceding days. By 23 February there were Hindu nationalist squads all
over north-eastern Delhi – killing, raping, setting fire to houses,
businesses and mosques – while Modi was busy entertaining Trump. At no
point did the prime minister or any member of his cabinet condemn the
violence.
Two months earlier, on 12 December, Gregory Stanton, the founder of
Genocide Watch and the author of The Ten Stages of Genocide, had
addressed a group of Congressional and US government officials in
Washington. According to him, India was then at the eighth stage. Things
have only got worse. The comparison of recent events to Kristallnacht,
widely made in the Western media, is not misplaced.
The RSS is estimated to have sixty thousand branches all over the
country. It also commands dozens of affiliated fronts – organisations of
women, workers, peasants, students, forest dwellers, caste communities
and so on – not to mention paramilitary groups. In The RSS, A.G. Noorani
helpfully includes a list of known affiliates that takes up two dozen
lines of small print. Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle – less
helpfully – tend to repeat verbatim information given out by the RSS
itself. According to them, the RSS has 36 affiliates and another hundred
or more that it counts as its own but which don’t have official
affiliate status. They give a figure of one and a half to two million
participants in daily RSS branch meetings, along with six million
‘alumni and affiliate volunteers’ (whatever that means). Together, these
affiliates and milling crowds of veterans and members constitute the
‘Sangh parivar’ (family of the Sangh); the RSS itself is said to be the
mata (mother) of all.
The violence stirred up by the RSS has sometimes escalated into
fully-fledged ethnic cleansing, as it did, for example, during the
Gujarat pogrom of 2002, which took place soon after Modi became the
state’s chief minister. For the most part, though, violence has been
administered in homeopathic doses. Since Modi consolidated his power
last year by winning a clear parliamentary majority, the RSS has gone on
the offensive not only against Muslims but against large sections of the
democratic opposition. Key state institutions – the Election Commission,
the higher judiciary and the police – have fallen into line. Indeed,
much of the police force has been acting in consort with RSS thugs in
the cities and small towns of the northern states, as well as in cities
like Bengaluru (known until recently as Bangalore) in the south; in
January, they did nothing to prevent – and even encouraged – a lengthy
rampage at Jawaharlal Nehru University. In Hyderabad, large contingents
of armed RSS paramilitaries have staged marches through the city centre
and Muslim neighbourhoods, with the co-operation of the city and state
administrations. Mohan Bhagwat, the current head of the RSS, said
recently that the organisation
could assemble its cadres to fight much faster than the Indian army in a
situation of war ... The Sangh will prepare military personnel within
three days, something that the army would do in six to seven months.
This is our capability. Swaymsevaks [RSS cadres] will be ready to take
on the front if the country faces such a situation and the constitution
permits us to do so.
This is classic RSS rhetoric. Bhagwat invokes the constitution, national
need and patriotic duty in ‘a situation of war’ – but no such war is
even remotely at hand. The threat of irresistible power is clearly
directed at the numerous ‘internal enemies’ whom the RSS like to call
‘anti-nationals’.
The way the RSS poses the question of culture goes to the heart of the
Indian variety of majoritarian nationalism. Its primary claim is that
culture is not simply an aspect of social life but fundamental to
identity; not something acquired in the course of history, but
constitutive of a people. The basic grammar of this belief comes from
the earliest days of Europe’s own right-wing nationalisms. V.D. Savarkar
(1883-1966), who did more than anyone else to give modern Hindu
nationalists their lexicon, invented the word ‘Hindutva’ to designate a
blood-and-soil cultural essence unique to India, and claimed that the
religious beliefs codified as Hinduism are simply aspects of this
essence. The RSS presents Hindu nationalism as a cultural nationalism of
which Hinduism per se is the defining ingredient. Indian culture, it’s
argued, is so deeply defined by its Hindutva essence that no non-Hindu
can be fully admitted; religions that didn’t originate on Indian soil –
Islam and Christianity in particular – are alien essences. Should
Muslims and Christians even be allowed to live there? There have been
various answers. Savarkar once claimed that the solution the Germans had
found for the Jews would be appropriate for Indian Muslims. At the time
he was writing, in pre-Partition British India, Muslims constituted
around a quarter of the population; the number has dropped to closer to
a sixth, but this still is around two hundred million people. Genocide
on this scale may be unrealistic, but thoughts of it have never been
entirely absent from the hearts and minds of many Hindutva zealots.
More diplomatically, religious conversion is recommended. It’s sometimes
said that Muslims and Christians could have a place in India if they
accepted the supremacy of Hindu culture and religion, becoming
hyphenated Hindus: Christian-Hindus, Muslim-Hindus. More recently, the
RSS suggested setting up an organisation for Muslims: they cannot join
the RSS itself but might be permitted to come under its umbrella and do
its bidding. Proclamations of this sort are designed to illustrate the
RSS’s ‘liberal’ spirit, its willingness to re-indigenise those led
astray by foreign religions and include them in the fold, even if as a
slightly inferior breed.
The next step in the RSS’s programme is the conversion and consolidation
of the religio-racial majority, the Hindus, into a permanent political
majority, and for citizenship itself to be determined by religious
affiliation – hence the new citizenship legislation. But many of the
Indians who lack proof of citizenship are Hindu – poor, low-caste, rural
Hindus in particular. How will the RSS square that circle? Perhaps
Hindus will be able to claim citizenship simply by virtue of being Hindu
while all others will need to present documentation. No one knows how
the plan will take shape.
The rss was founded in 1925, during a decade that saw the rise of the
multi-denominational, national movement that is generally associated
with Gandhi and Nehru; it was also a time of great labour unrest,
strikes and the growth of communist groups. The RSS and similar
organisations emerged in opposition to such activism, committed to the
revivalist project of rebuilding the fallen ‘Hindu race’ after centuries
of ‘Muslim tyranny’ (‘race’ and ‘nation’ were used synonymously – a
linguistic hangover from British rule). Like other nationalist
formations of that period around the world – such as the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt and the Phalangists in Lebanon – the RSS was
inspired by both the Italian and German variants of fascism. Nehru never
wavered in his insistence that the RSS was ‘fascist in the strictly
technical sense of the word’. But the RSS has never been merely
imitative, and three aspects of its originality deserve special emphasis.
First, the RSS was founded on the principle that the Hindu nation needed
a religious, cultural and military renaissance before it would be strong
enough to attempt a final confrontation with its adversaries. It
therefore set out to instil among the majority the idea of an
all-encompassing Hinduness that followed the definition provided by the
RSS itself – and that was defined, too, in opposition to its imagined
enemies. Only by achieving this goal would the RSS be able to convert a
demographic majority into a political majority. The catch was that in
post-Independence India there were too few non-Hindus to prevent Hindus
from monopolising political power in any case, and – more significantly
– most Hindus did not subscribe to the RSS’s project. At this point the
majoritarian project revealed itself to be an aspect of a much larger
far-right mission. Power was wanted not for all Hindus, but for those
tutored, trained and even armed by the RSS. Any Hindus who opposed the
RSS – communists, liberals, atheists, ‘pseudo-secularists’, Hindus who
believed in religious tolerance and plurality – would be converted or
denounced as ‘anti-national’.
The second striking feature of the RSS is that unlike European
irrationalisms and fascisms it didn’t fashion a discourse in opposition
to the country’s institutional framework, instead preparing itself over
the decades for a long march through the institutions, capturing one
rampart after another. Its ability to wait for almost a hundred years –
without jumping the gun after many interim triumphs – has been
impressive. This raises, on a much larger scale, the question that has
arisen in many parts of Europe: is it really all that difficult for the
far right to come to power through liberal institutions?
Finally, there is the organisational labyrinth that the RSS has
fashioned in order to carry out a revolution from the right in a country
where a democratic system of representative government, with all its
constitutional intricacies, has been entrenched for more than seventy
years. The solution the RSS has devised is ingenious. As an organisation
it is profoundly hierarchical and secretive, shunning electoral politics
in its own name. Its mass political front, the BJP, is headed by veteran
RSS members who implement policies that conform to guidelines set by the
RSS high brass. When needed, for instance, during provincial and
national election campaigns, tens of thousands of trained RSS cadres are
thrown into the fray as full-time ‘volunteers’. RSS cadres have a
distinctive uniform and are given rudimentary military training; they
stir up trouble and are sometimes implicated in killings – which are
usually carried out by men in civilian dress. Over the decades, the RSS
has become very adept at this combination of parliamentary and
extra-parliamentary mobilisation.
Noorani, a distinguished lawyer and a scholar of India’s judicial
history, has produced the most comprehensive one-volume history of the
RSS to date. He begins with a summary of the religiously defined,
Hinduised nationalism that rose up in the late 19th century, much of it
aggressively militant in tone. Several similar organisations were
founded before the RSS. Secular Indian liberals have tended to want to
see the RSS as a marginal social pathology in an otherwise healthy body
politic, but Noorani suggests that the RSS gives organisational form to
a structure of feeling that has been widespread from the earliest days
of colonial society: believers have included some leaders of the
Congress party, senior members of the bureaucracy and judiciary,
literary intellectuals, historians and so on. The idea that Hindus and
Muslims are fundamentally and irreconcilably different seems to be more
widespread and persistent among the Hindu intelligentsia than among
their Muslim counterparts. In 1924, as Noorani relates, Lala Lajpat Rai,
a leader of the Congress and the right-nationalist Hindu Mahasabha
Party, proposed a partition of India on religious lines, a territorial
division almost identical to that enacted by Radcliffe and Mountbatten
in 1947. The idea of Indian nationhood emerges as a contested terrain,
with contrary articulations sometimes coexisting in the same person. In
his early writings Savarkar advocated Hindu-Muslim unity within a
composite nation; but once he discovered the special Hindu claim to
Indian nationhood, he decided that Muslims and Christians were eternal
outsiders. Noorani is sensitive to such complexities.
The liberal cosmopolitanism of late colonial bourgeois Bombay still
shapes Noorani’s outlook. Andersen and Damle, however, are old intimates
of the RSS. Andersen tells us that the RSS’s affiliates outside India
are typically called Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS); Damle was for a long
time the Sanghchalak (chief convener) of the HSS in Chicago and
introduced Andersen to the RSS, and even to M.S. Golwalkar, its then
head, when Andersen came to India as a doctoral student in the late
1960s. So their joint association with the RSS goes back half a century.
Their co-authored book of 1987, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism, was one of the
earliest monographs on the subject. Damle also tells us that this latest
book (published in India as The RSS: A View to the Inside) was written
at the suggestion of Modi himself. Over the years Andersen has divided
his time between academic institutions and the South Asia Division of
the State Department, serving at one point as chief analyst for the
region. Noorani has gathered his facts from hundreds of diverse sources;
Andersen and Damle cull theirs largely from RSS functionaries, along
with its affiliates and publications. But there is an advantage to their
partisanship: much of the data they provide is not available from
independent sources, though for that reason it’s also hard to say how
reliable it is. For anyone who wants to know how the RSS would like to
present itself to a mainstream, middle-class, centre-right and
academically competent audience, this is a useful book to read.
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