RSS: Time To Step Back And Take Stock

Ten days after the RSS passed some resolutions at a conclave in Channenahalli near Bangalore the reverberations still are echoing in the media, and depending on whether one is a Sangh supporter or a Sangh critic, the resolutions have been read in certain ways.

According to a highly placed source in the RSS it seems the RSS conclave in Bangalore had considered a suggestion by some members to condemn the violence in Gujarat in the aftermath of the Godhra massacre, but the suggestion was rejected in favour of the other, more muted and ambivalent condemnation that was finally used. He did not elaborate on why the RSS leadership had rejected the very sane and mature proposal of condemning the post-Godhra violence without equivocation. If indeed such a proposal had been put forward and was rejected, I believe that it is possible the senior Sangh leadership cannot think out of the box, and their ambiguous and grand pronouncements clearly have done enormous harm not just to the Ayodhya movement but also to their own survival as a group representing Hindu and Indian interests.

A second generation Indian-American who works for Sangh affiliates in the U.S. bemoaned that he has had a difficult time understanding how the Sangh deals with the media, and that while he is frustrated with what he sees as incompetence on the part of the leadership, he would continue working for the RSS because "this is the time they need most help". I am sure that many in the Sangh feel the same way, but not all of them may be as committed to the Sangh as my friend is. Therefore it is high time that the RSS leaders do some serious soul searching and take careful stock of their worth, their commitments, and their liabilities before their membership dwindles and their support from sympathetic Indians vanishes.

Let us read the resolution, which by the way, I don’t believe any newspaper has published in full. It reads: "Resolution 3: GODHRA AND AFTER -- The ABKM (Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal of the RSS) strongly condemns the horrible, ghastly Godhra massacre and feels it imperative to present it in the proper perspective. From the details available from Gujarat newspapers and other impartial sources it is obvious that on 27th February it was an unprovoked and premeditated attack on Sabarmati Express carrying peaceful, devout Ramsevaks returning from Ayodhya. It is evident from the ganging up of about 2,000 strong Muslim mob fully equipped with petrol cans, acid bulbs, swords, stones etc. The Sabarmati Express was deliberately stopped, heavily stoned; and when the passengers closed the door to protect themselves from the heavy stoning, the Muslim mob threw the petrol bulbs inside the bogie setting it on fire. As a result, men, women and children inside, nearly 60 in number, were burnt alive. The reaction of this murderous incident in Gujarat was natural and spontaneous. The entire Hindu society cutting across all divisions of party, caste and social status reacted. It is unfortunate that a number of people died in the violence that erupted (italics mine). But, certain political parties in their usual greed to garner en bloc Muslim votes turned a blind eye to the original action and only shouted against the resultant reaction linking it with Ayodhya movement. This has hurt the Hindu psyche deeply".

The resolution goes on to read: "The same jehadi mentality was evident in the attacks on World Trade Centre and Pentagon in America on September 11, 2001 and on the Parliament of Bharat on December 13. The same mentality was discernible in the attacks on the Amarnath Yatra durin last July, on Jammu and Kashmir assembly in Srinagar on October 1^st, on American centre in Kolkata on January 22, on pilgrims proceeding to Sabarimalai and on Hindus in the Kozhikode district. The massacre of Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir and desecration of Hindu temples in Karnataka also betray the working of the same sinister mentality".

The following paragraph contains the other problematic part of the resolution (in italics). It reads: "Although, a few Muslim leaders hold the current interpretation of Jehad as absolutely wrong and in no way support the jehadi terrorism, it should be admitted that these people have not been able to influence the present day extremist jehadi leaders and stubborn mullahs and maulavis. The ABPS wants to make it clear that it does no credit to the Muslim community to allow themselves to be made pawns in the hands of such extremist Muslim leaders and Hindu baiting political elements. Let the Muslims understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority (italics mine).

The resolution concludes: "The ABPS also urges the media to project the incidents in their truthful perspective and help in setting the right trend in restoring national harmony. The ABPS also appeals to all our countrymen to be alert towards such aggressive communal elements and try their best to avert any such elements from getting an upper hand and thereby rupturing the social fabric of the country".

The RSS leadership not only lost an opportunity to gain the high ground in Bangalore by condemning the post-Godhra violence outright, but they further compounded their misery by passing the verbose resolution in which they pontificate about Muslims having to understand that "their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority." What a colossal blunder!

Having studied the RSS closely for the past four years, I believe that the leadership is now caught in some kind of a "time warp". Meeting with them and talking to them at various locales -- in Bangalore, in New Delhi, and in San Francisco -- I found that these otherwise thoughtful men, who choose their words carefully, have not understood that conveying messages to different constituencies at different periods of time require different skills. They are too used to shuttling around India talking to the simple, mostly rural and semi-urban young men about the need for commitment to the integrity of India, the support for Hindu ideas and ideals, and about the threats facing the nation. Therefore the messages they have crafted for such audiences, which in turn they have come to believe in passionately, are periodically passed on as "resolutions" or are conveyed without finesse or skill, which then the English language media and the longtime RSS enemies gleefully tear to pieces. Resolution #3 is a clear symptom not only of the disease called "verbal diarrhea" but also of the inability of the leadership to act effectively.

While it may be a "fact" that in any society the minority thrives if there is mutual goodwill between the majority and the minorities, it should also have been evident to the RSS leaders that in modern societies and constitutional democracies all citizens are granted equal rights and that the onus of protecting those rights falls on the government and not on any "majority". In "organised civil society" the minority need not fear as long as the legal system works effectively and when everyone is subject to the laws of the country. Of course, one may argue that the majority can shape and frame the laws, but this ignores the basic features of constitutional democracies that assure all citizens the same freedoms and rights. A minority community does not live under the protection and guardianship of the majority community as much it does so under the rubric of the Constitution. Surely, this must be evident to the RSS leadership, but one wonders what reason they had at this point in time to open their mouth and put their foot in it! As the BJP secretary Mukhtar Abbas Naqui said "The RSS statement ‘Let the Muslims understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority’ would be interpreted differently by different people but the common perception would be that the RSS did not trust the Muslims".

It seems as if the RSS leadership does not understand the ramifications of their own methods and modus operandi. What was the need to make such a pronouncement at this time, when one state has burned and its citizens traumatized, and when the country itself is struggling to deal with the aftermath? The RSS is not a political party, it is not a party to governance, and its locus standi as "the" representative of Hindus has never been proven. Even its identity as an organisation representing Hindu interests puts it in the untenable position of having to assert continuously that it is also concerned with the welfare of the whole nation. With this weight on their collective backs, has the leadership lost sight of the organisation’s goals? All the good that it does every day -- running schools and orphanages, helping victims of natural disasters and accidents, running hospitals and leadership camps -- is ignored and forgotten when ideological blinkers and a bunker mentality leads them to make foolish and dangerous statements.

It is important to try and understand why the RSS leadership thought it imperative to pass those resolutions that they did in Bangalore last week. The statements could be meant to read as a threat to the Muslim community, or it could have meant as a grand philosophical statement on the nature of human society. That most English language newspapers and minority groups have read those resolutions as a threat was not unexpected. So, does it come as any surprise when every reporter and every editorial writer, and every commentator piles on the RSS leadership? Somini Sengupta, reporting for The New York Times, declared breathlessly, "The group at the apex of the fundamentalist family (sic), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S. as it is known, issued a chilling resolution Sunday from its national convention in Bangalore: In order to be safe in India, Muslims must earn the good will of the country’s Hindu majority". This latest India correspondent of The New York Times was merely toeing what is now considered the "correct" line on the RSS and its affiliates. She describes the Sangh parivar as a "fundamentalist family", without basis or clarification. But who cares how uninformed or meaningless the reports and descriptions are when the harm has been done by those resolutions. It is a thankless task therefore for those who write in support of the RSS and its work to explain the quirks of this "fundamentalist family"! Their task is like that of janitors at parades picking up the trash left behind by people and the droppings of horses.

So, what does the RSS resolution actually mean? I found the first few days of silence of the RSS spokespersons even more baffling in the aftermath of the reactions to the resolutions. I thought they were once again mistaken about their own ability to generate stories that have very long legs. Unless the resolution drafters understand how their pronouncements are going to be interpreted, and unless they hasten to explain or clarify, they are doomed to being tarred and feathered as fascists and fundamentalists. Their initial silence led me to think that the Sangh leaders have an enormous appetite for seeking and receiving abuse. It is a kind of masochism that then feeds into their persecution complex. "Look how much we have done for the country. Look how much we love the country. And look at how much abuse we get for defending the culture and civilisation of this country" they seem to be saying to themselves and the swayamsevaks. Unfortunately, they don’t understand they have become their own worst enemies: they can’t speak precisely, and they can’t act quickly.

A week after the resolutions were adopted, K.S. Sudarshan, the RSS chief, tried to explain what the resolutions meant. My sense that the RSS leadership not only does not understand the dynamics of media presentations but that they have little sense of timing was reinforced reading his explanation. The Hindu reports (March 23, 2002) that "Mr. Sudarshan chose the occasion of the sixth dialogue between the RSS and the Christian religious leaders in 18 months to point out that everywhere in the world, the minority groups had to ‘learn to keep peace with the majority group.’ However, he evaded a question at a press conference later on how the minority could earn the goodwill of the majority. He merely said thousands of Hindus were hounded out of Kashmir. They were a mere three per cent of the population, yet they were not allowed to live in peace in their homeland". Mr. Sudarshan should have known that the resolutions came in the aftermath of Gujarat, not in response to the decades-long conflict in Kashmir! Why don’t these leaders understand that whatever the complexity of the Hindu-Muslim relationship in India, that responses and resolutions have to be specific, and should be in the context of the issue at hand. Of course, the Sangh leaders will say that this was their annual meeting of the executive committee, and that they were commenting on issues in the past year, that Gujarat was merely the latest, and that the resolution should be read in full, and so on and so forth. Strangely enough even this was not said, or as may be the case, the newspaper did not report it.

I got a response from another friend that the resolution reflected sentiments similar to the one expressed by some British journalists about the ghetto-mentality of Muslims in England. This friend sent me a copy of the article that Clifford Longley, wrote for The Times, July 8, 1989, in which Longley says: "The presence of a million or more Muslims in Britain does not by itself represent a radical threat to social stability. But when this million or more are largely concentrated in certain areas of half a dozen large towns and cities; and when they are mobilized to demand, in return for their peace, terms which the majority just will not concede, then real danger looms". It is the same in India, my friend implied, and therefore the resolution was justified. But this does not make sense once again. Yes, the British journalist was pointing out to the aggressive posturing of British Muslims in the wake of the "Satanic Verses" and other matters. He was not writing in the wake of a White-Muslim conflagration when Whites had murdered hundreds of Muslims and burned down their houses and raped their women after a busload of Whites had been burned down by Muslims. The RSS resolutions came in the wake of the 600 plus Muslims murdered, scores of women raped, hundreds of businesses looted, and whole communities traumatized in the wake of the Godhra massacre. Context is important, very, very important, when we propose measures and when we proffer explanations. Another friend said, "The RSS should have categorically repudiated the Ahmedabad riots and thereby disassociated itself from the savagery. The half-hearted statement is dangerous for the RSS as it makes it too easy indict the Sangh Parivar (whatever that means in reality) as a responsible party for coordinating the ‘pogrom’ (too many writers are having fun with this word and all of its Nazi connotations) in Ahmedabad. Furthermore, so many of us felt that the Islamic community had to take some responsibility for the WTC attacks as no Islamic spiritual leader or organisation of note had been unequivocal in rejecting terrorism or the perpetrators of the crime. The RSS-VHP, if it can truly claim representation of a large segment of Hindus, cannot make the identical mistake by not forcefully rejecting Hindu terrorism--whatever its supposed justification".

Other friends have said that whatever the RSS does and says doesn’t matter, for they will be abused anyway. Thus, I have heard RSS leaders respond to the likes of Koenraad Elst, who has been advising them to be more pro-active in approaching the media, and more aggressive in countering the slander and libel directed against the RSS, that the RSS is a social and cultural organisation, and does not have the resources to counter or challenge the daily dose of abuse heaped by the media and the "secular" academics. Yes, it is sometimes difficult to deal with the well-orchestrated smear campaigns but that does not mean the RSS can afford to be not only lax in their response, but even more tragically, compound their own miseries by mindless pronouncements on the nature of Indian politics, society, and history.

Yet another explanation that has been put forward is that the RSS is a bottoms-up movement, like the pre-independence Congress party, and that it needs to talk in a language that is accessible to the common man on the street. They claim that the RSS will be sidelined if an attempt is made to couch what are essentially "mainstream political statements" in a language that merely caters to the cocktail party circuits either in India or abroad. Readers have written me asking if I have for a moment considered what the effect on Hindus would have been if the RSS had come out with a statement that did not reflect the opinion of the ordinary Hindu on the street. "Who is to give voice to the anguish of Hindus in India?" they ask. They point out that if we measure the importance given to the Godhra incident and the reaction to it in the English language press, by measuring column inches devoted to each issue one will find out that Godhra commanded less than two percent of total news reported (This is from a letter published in the Indian Express). They assert that the RSS is there to give voice to what a lot of Hindus think and feel and that it is not in the business of hoodwinking the media.

These defenders of the RSS say that if the RSS indeed had unequivocally condemned the post-Godhra riots the RSS action would merely have been described in newspaper headlines as "Hindu fundamentalists back off to avoid loss of face", "RSS tries to hide its agenda", "RSS tries to soften stand to garner more minority votes", and so on. For these defenders of the RSS, speculating about the moral high ground RSS lost or gained is a pointless exercise. "Who decides where the moral high ground lies?" they challenge. They accuse Indian and Western journalists of double standards and point out that the violence perpetrated by Muslims or Christians in India is brushed off, and the violence perpetrated by Hindus highlighted. They say that the RSS is an organisation that straddles the social, political and cultural landscape of India, and they trust its leaders to know what will and will not work in India.

All these lead me to conclude that the RSS leadership and some of its followers are not just quaint and old-fashioned but desperately in need of a different dose of reality. Despite their constant travels in India and even visits to foreign countries, the leaders are in some ways caught in a time warp. The leadership does not recognise that among its supporters are now the lumpen, both in India and in the West, who do not have the discipline and the training of the old RSS swayamsevaks, who lived and worked and were educated in a very different era. The vulgar language used by some Sangh "supporters", even in criticising the Prime Minister, or in characterising the judgment passed by the Supreme Court were indicative to me of the lack of control or the feeble control the leadership has over the vast network of its affiliates and members.

Unless there is a major housecleaning, a retraction of the two dubious clauses in the resolution, and a serious reconsideration of the temple movement (to let the courts decide, and/or have the Shankaracharya of Kanchi act as the arbiter on behalf of the Hindus) I believe the pressure is going to mount on the RSS leadership, and it will be forced back on its feet to face a situation akin to the one in 1948 after Gandhiji’s assassination when it faced its first ban. If so, that will mean forty more years of "vana vaasa" before the organisation could recover again. Or, if the leaders cannot display some nimbleness and foresight, or, if they are not led astray by their hard-line supporters -- those who are more than willing to cut their nose to spite their face -- the RSS could soon face the fate of the dinosaur.

The RSS should also seriously rethink its ties with the various "affiliates". The RSS was started in 1925, and its first affiliate was the women’s wing, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, which was started in 1936. Every other wing of the RSS, started later -- the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad in 1948, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (1951) which after many evolutions is the current Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh in 1955, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (1964) and its women’s wing Durga Vahini and the youth wing Bajrang Dal, and the more recently organized Hindu Jagaran Manch and the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch -- should be re-organized or let go to pursue their own agendas so that they don’t come into conflict with each other or with the mother organisation, the RSS, or the political wing, the BJP. Or else, one affiliate’s agenda may undermine another affiliate’s, and the net gain for the movement overall ends up as a big zero.

To wrap up, the RSS should rethink the two problem clauses in the resolutions passed in Bangalore. It should be willing to include fresh clauses, one condemning all the violence in Gujarat and seeking stern punishment to those who murdered, raped, and pillaged, and the other seeking help and co-operation from all in building a multi-cultural India where no one group is privileged over the other/s. It does not matter what kind of political games the Muslim leadership is playing or the JNU types or playing or the John Dayal types are playing: what matters is that the RSS repudiate the violence in Gujarat, and re-affirm its faith in the democratic governance of the Indian state.

Ramesh Rao, March 27, 2002

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