Long-term fall-out of the Mahatma murder

(FirstPost, 27 May 2022) + The +topic of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948 still comes up regularly for discussion. Mostly this is +to embarrass the RSS and the party associated with it, the BJP, which was actually founded in 1980, that too as reincarnation of the Jan Sangh, wh+ich had equally been founded after the murder, in 1951. This then is the best-known long-term effect: the unrelenting allegation that anything s+melling of Hindu nationalism, and certainly the RSS, necessarily leads to such crimes. But are we missing something? + Chitpavan massacre The first conseque+nce of the murder was immediate: Godse’s own community, the Chitpavan Brahmins, was targeted for mass murder. The comparison with the mass kil+ling of Sikhs by Congress secularists after Indira Gandhi’s murder in 1984 is fairly exact, except that that massacre is well-known (even ecli+psing the memory of the larger number of Panjabi Hindus murdered by Sikh separatists in the preceding years) whereas this one has been hushed up.+ The New York Times first drew attention to it, reporting 15 killings for the first day and only for the city of Mumbai. In fact the killing we+nt on for a week and all over Maharashtra, with VD Savarkar’s younger brother as best-known victim. Arti Agarwal,+ who leads the research in “Hindu genocide”, estimates the death toll at ca. 8,000. On mass murders, estimates are often overdramatiz+ed, but here we must count with a countervailing factor: the Government’s active suppression of these data, as they would throw a negative li+ght on Gandhism. But research on this painful episode has now started in earnest, and those presently trying to get at the real figures include Sa+varkar biographer Vikram Sampath. Crackdown+ The secon+d consequence came right after: the Government’s crackdown on the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Their offices were closed down, their office-b+earers imprisoned for a year or so, their stocks of literature impounded. It clipped their wings for years to come. The Hindu Mahasabha lost it+s president Shyam Prasad Mookerjee, who went on to found the Jana Sangh. The HMS would never recover from this blow. Its last MP was to be Mahant+ Avaidyanath, best known as a leader of the Rama Janmabhumi movement and as Guru of present UP CM Yogi Adityanath, defected to the BJP in 1991.+ By cont+rast, the RSS did survive quite well, and even generated a whole “family” of like-minded organizations, including a new political party. In a nume+rical sense, it was to thrive; but in two other senses, it paid a high price. The t+hird consequence was a drastic change in the political landscape. After Partition, the Hindutva movement had the wind in the sails. All Cong+ressite assurances that warnings against Islamic separatism were mere British-engineered paranoia, had been refuted by reality. Gandhi’s pro+mise that Partition would only come over his dead body, had proven false. The new-fangled ideology of secularism stood discredited at its bi+rth. And yet, overnight, the Hindutva current was marginalized and Nehruvian secularism started its triumphant march. By his murder, Godse had s+mashed the window of opportunity of his own political movement. + Amputated backbone Finally, the fo+urth consequence would only materialize over the long term: the Hindu movement began to lose its defining convictions. Rather than continuing to +see India as an essentially Hindu nation, it bought into the secularist notion of a mere “Hindu community” juxtaposed to “minority communities” +that were endowed with equal rights and increasingly with privileges vis-à-vis the Hindus. When Jawahar+lal Nehru was widely criticized for having facilitated the Chinese invasion, the RSS halted the publication of a Nehru-critical serial by Sita Ram+ Goel in Organiser: Rather than clamouring that its guest author’s judgment of Nehru stood vindicated, it feared that if anything were to happen +to Nehru, the RSS would again get the blame. As the Gandhi murder had shown, it wasn’t necessary to be actually guilty to still incur the punis+hment, viz. by “having created the atmosphere” for the crime. The RSS bought into the secularist narrative that the Hindu ideology had caused t+he murder and started amputating its own ideological backbone. When in+ 1980 the BJP was founded, the party flag it adopted was significantly divided in orange and green, in the communal sense (no, not green for gr+eenery). Not only the nation was to be partly Islamic, but even the Hindu party itself. This prefigured Mohan Bhagwat’s 2018 statement that a Hindu Rasthra is not complete without Islam. The RSS founded within its ranks a Muslim Morcha, abandoning its founding belief in national unity for c+ommunal appeasement. It became the RSS family’s most successful member, not by spreading the national idea in the Muslim community but by serv+ing the latter’s sectional interests. Ind+eed, under Narendra Modi, minorityism, once the BJP’s bogeyman, became the party’s principle of governance. All kinds of schemes of state la+rgesse favour the minorities; no, not real minorities like Parsis and Jews, but the India chapters of the Christian and Muslim multinationals. I+n its publicity campaigns, the party boasts that it has done more for the minorities than Congress ever has. The 1990s’ eminently secular BJP slogan “Justice for all, appeasement of none” has been given up in favour of: “I am better at appeasement than you!” If Nathuram Godse had foreseen these consequences of the act he contemplated, he might have thought twice about going through with it. +
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Tapan Ghosh: cometh the hour, cometh the man

(Contribution to an obituary volume for Tapan Ghosh edited by Prokash Das, July 2020)

"When catastrophe is at its highest, salvation is near", at least according to a Flemish proverb. It was born more from wishful thinking than from experience, for often catastrophe rises to a peak only to invite even newer sources of trouble. This is especially the case when you have squandered earlier opportunities and are in a hurry to save the day after all. Such was the situation in West Bengal, where several generations of Hindus allowed anti-Hindu rule and massive Bangladeshi infiltration to push them ever farther into a corner, without fighting back. 

Perhaps all these Pujas for Durga have more effect than sceptics would give them credit for. Suddenly, without having done anything to deserve it, the Bengali Hindus found a saviour among them. In 2007, an RSS pracharak was so dissatisfied with the RSS-BJP's ostensible lack of fighting spirit, even when it came to saving their own activists, that he broke away. Tapan Ghosh never became disloyal to their original programme of service to Hindu society, which is why in his last words, he paid homage to the historical RSS leaders Doctorji and Guruji. But disappointment in their ever-softer positions (to the point of  denying the once-central conceptual distinction between Hindu and non-Hindu) convinced him of the need to make a choice 'between the organisation and its programme'. He started his own platform, the Hindu Samhati.

The challenges before it were clear enough, and rising. The need of the hour was to transmute the idea of Hindu survival into action. Hindu Samhati would meet the threats head on.

We met him several times in his modest headquarters in Kolkata. Two of his priorities were curbing Love Jihad and promoting Ghar Wapasi ("homecoming", reconversion to Hinduism). In 2016, we encountered three young women there who had found refuge under his care and testified how two had been saved from pressure into an Islamic wedding, one was a convert from Islam. Over the years, such cases were numerous, and contemplating the alternative, that they had all been Islamized and enlisted into Islam's demographic war effort, you wonder just how fast Hinduism is losing ground. 

A third concern was the ever-increasing effort needed to merely keep Hindu communal life going, since the enemy forces show ever more effrontery in e.g. forcing closure on Hindu festivals. Hindu Samhati rendered a necessary service, so outsiders despair of how this work can continue now. But that is not where the problem lies. As a responsible leader, Ghosh made sure to surround himself with equally capable activists, who are ready to take it further. The only problem, as the fighters in the field know best, is that the challenge is becoming ever more formidable, a magnitude that ultimately calls for the involvement of Government power.

Tapan Ghosh, who bravely rushed in where higher powers feared to tread, will be vindicated. But in this imperfect world, he won't live to see the day.

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Western TV about the RSS

(Pragyata, 15 November 2017)

On Friday 3 November, the Flemish broadcaster VRT Canvas, in its programme Terzake ("To the point"), presented a Dutch documentary from the series De Westerlingen ("The Westerners"), in which young Dutchmen meet youngsters in countries across the world to explore the differences in culture. In the past, the impression was that all cultural differences were on the way out because the non-Westerners were simply Westernizing. Now, it has become clear that some differences are here to stay, and that even in non-Muslim countries, there is a tough resistance against too much Westernization.

This time around, we were taken to India where a Dutch youngster called Nicolaas was meeting young Hindu Nationalists. According to the announcement on the TV station's website: "In India extremist associations acquire ever more influence. Nicolaas Veul meets activist young Hindu Nationalists in the holy city of Allahabad. He goes around with Divya, Ritesh and Vikrant. They fight for a Hindu India, and against influences from outside."


Hindu fascism?

At the outset, in the car on the way to an event of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha ("National Volunteer Corps", RSS), he was quickly briefed by an Indian Secularist about the Hindu Nationalists. These were said to be "increasingly powerful", to be issuing for use in schools "textbooks rewritten in a pro-Hindu sense", and  to be "openly linked with the Nazis".

This was a nice summary of the power equation in the reporting on India worldwide and in all the different segments of the media: all press correspondents in and "experts" on India look at Indian society and esp. the communal conflict through the glasses that a handful of Secularists have put on their noses, reproducing the latter's anti-Hindu bias and disinformation. For the average viewer, every topic in the ensuing meetings came under the cloud of these initial "revelations", eventhough nothing in the RSS performance effectively filmed confirmed or illustrated any of them.

Since the 1980s, I have never heard the term "Hindu Nationalists" without the addition that they are "emerging" or "increasingly powerful". They should have been all-powerful by now. The only (partial) exception was the few years after the 2009 elections, when the BJP had been defeated even worse than in 2004, so that supporters of the socialist-casteist parties, including partisan experts like Christophe Jaffrelot, concluded that Hindu Nationalism was on the way out. However, instead of building on the existing power equation to push Hindutva deeper into oblivion, the Secularist Congress wasted its chance because it got too wrapped up in driving corruption to unprecedented levels, too much for the electorate to stomach. Once the next electoral campaign got under way, even the Secularists soon conceded that a BJP victory was becoming inevitable.

However, contrary to what the observers all think or say, the present BJP government under Narendra Modi, while numerically strong, is ideologically extremely weak. It is not in any way Hinduizing or "saffronizing" the polity or the education system. It is continuing the Congressite-Leftist anti-Hindu policies mandated by the Constitution, or at best looking the other way but not changing the Constitution to put a definitive stop to such policies. Thus, subsidized schools can be Christian or Muslim, but not Hindu: in the latter case, either they get taken over by the state and secularized, or at best, they have to do without subsidies. Temples are nationalized and their income channeled to non-Hindu purposes, a treatment against which the law protects churches and mosques. And this is no less the case in BJP-ruled states, where the Government could have chosen not to avail of the opportunities given to it by the Constitution.

Nowhere in this documentary would you pick up any hint to the main communal reality in India: the anti-majority discrimination. It is admittedly hard to explain to outsiders, and therefore easy to conceal or deny, but Hindus are indeed second-class citizens in their native country. I am aware that right now, many non-Indian readers will refuse to believe me, but it is really like that. Anywhere is the world you can download the text of the Indian Constitution, so please verify for yourself, starting with Art.25-30.

So, what did you get to see? Many people in the city were on the streets converging on an open ground where a meeting of a local RSS unit (shakha, "branch") with physical and ideological training was about to take place. They were wearing (or in the case of newcomers, buying) the RSS outfit with white shirt and black cap and trousers. It was the new uniform, for till recently the black trousers would have been brown knickers, even more colonial-style. Their military style was highlighted, though everyone could see for himself that all the "weapons training" they did was with sticks, rather harmless in the age of the Kalashnikov. Naturally, there was no hint that an endless series of murders of RSS men has been committed by Kerala Communists, Khalistanis in Panjab, and others. The RSS youngsters also did not bring it up, or if they did, that part was not shown. The persistent suggestion was that they were the perpetrators of violence, not its victims, though no such violence was actually shown.

When interviewing these RSS activists, Nicolaas repeatedly remarked that this or that guy was actually impeccably friendly and quite nice. Not at all how we would picture the fascists announced initially by the Secularist. Then what was wrong with them?


Valentine Day

The real topic of this documentary series was the culture clash and the native resistance against Westernization. And indeed, these young people refused to absorb the flood of Westernizing influences. One example of a pernicious influence was Valentine, taken straight from the existing Western commercial pop culture. More ideologized people denounce it also as a "Christian" holiday. Valentine was a Roman priest who performed tabooed weddings, and when martyred and sainted, the Church gave him a day in the Saints' calendar, 14 February, coinciding with the pre-Christian fertility feast presided over by the goddess Juno Februa ("clean, purifying") of 13-15 February. It took a thousand years, to the age of the troubadours and courtly love, before he graduated to patron-saint of romanticism.

As such, commerce catapulted him to the fore, and made the saint's day into an occasion pious Christians would frown upon: the feast of sentimentalism and getting carried away with infatuation. Since the late 18th century, there is a whole literature, and later movies, about youngsters following their hearts and overcoming the resistance of their unfeeling narrow-minded parents. This is now re-enacted in India, where commerce and the Secularist-promoted fondness of all things Western is spreading the highly artificial celebration of Valentine's Day. This has become the symbol of Western decadence, in which the pursuit of emotional kicks takes precedence over long-term institution building, marriage and the resulting children's well-being. Nicolaas's Indian interlocutor wants to spare his country the breakdown of family life that has come to characterize the modern West.

But in the documentary, in the interview with the RSS activist, we only see a humourless spoilsport's jaundiced rant against a day of innocent fun. The Dutch lad just doesn't see that there is another side to it, and that the Hindu critique of Valentine has its legitimacy. This RSS fellow was voicing a very positive viewpoint, one in favour of the precious fabric of traditional social values, of the time-tested mos maiorum ("ancestral custom"), which is being undermined by modernist influences symbolized by Valentine's Day. Possibly it is not good enough to overrule modernization, but that remains to be seen, and the traditionalist view deserves a proper hearing.

In the streets, the Dutch newcomer to India saw Westernization all over the place. Western fashion, neon lights, shopping malls, Kentucky Fried Chicken, young couples kissing in public. Even an RSS spokesman admitted he sometimes goes to the Mc Donalds. So, the final impression that the viewers will take home is that, in India at least, Westernization is unstoppable. It is not uncontested, true, but the nativists, though not convincingly put down as "fascists" anymore, are not very competent and are at any rate unable to stop it.


Communication

But then, come to think of it, the RSS fellow didn't have the required communication skills to overturn an anti-Hindu bias instilled in the Western public since decades. And by "anti-Hindu", I do not mean the kind of grim animus seen in the Missionaries or the Secularists, but a background conditioning: Nicolaas has no quarrel with the Hindus as such, and he is probably not even aware of his implicit anti-Hindu bias, but like most Westerners with an interest in India, he has innocently absorbed the partisan view of India fostered by the really hostile people.

It is unrealistic to expect this one fleeting television conversation to change a bias built up over decades. Still, the RSS spokesman could have defended his position better. On the other hand, his peaceful and civilized but weak argumentation was a logical illustration of a deliberate policy pursued since the 1920s. It was in line with the old RSS's boy-scout mentality of disdain for all communication ("do well and don't look back"). Founder KB Hedgewar, who had started out as member of a revolutionary wing of the Freedom Movement, with secretive and purely oral communication to avoid discovery by the police, installed in his new organization a hostility to any concern for outside approval, and to the media and their narrative. A consequence today is that RSS spokesmen are gravely lacking in communication skills. On average, they have a far better case than their clumsy performance in interviews and TV debates would suggest.

Twice the RSS refused a media presence. I was somewhat surprised to see this. In the early nineties, when I went around to RSS/BJP centres to interview Hindu Nationalist leaders, there was still plenty of distrust for outsiders, and communication was largely excluded. I knew then that I was exceptionally privileged to be allowed access, as a result of my lone pro-Hindu conclusions in my book on the Ayodhya temple/mosque conflict. But then private TV stations conquered India, gaining entry in the remotest villages, and finally the internet made communication unavoidable, even for the RSS. I had thought that this seclusion had by now become a thing of the past, but the RSS appears to have retained some of it. 

The result is that RSS spokesmen, while not at all the "fascists" of Secularist mythology, come across as village bumpkins. In this case, an interviewed RSS man suffered from a lack of serious historical knowledge, or of a chauvinist type of gullibility. He explained that India has invented plastic surgery and, as proven by the Ramayana, the airplane. This story has two related drawbacks: as far as evidence can tell, it is not true; and it is bad publicity, for while it may make a handful of gullible folk admire Hindu culture, it turns Hinduism into a superstitious laughing-stock for many more. When the Dutchman brought up homosexuality, the RSS man said: "That doesn't exist in our country." Just like it didn't exist in the Soviet Union ("a symptom of bourgeois decadence") nor in Africa according to Robert Mugabe ("they may be gay in America, but they will be sad people in Zimbabwe"). Again, even those Westerners who condemn odd sexual behaviour will laugh at these clumsy attempts to make it stop at your country's border. This way the RSS tendency is particularly weak in the prime precondition for communication, viz. seeing things also through the eyes of your interlocutor.

Grim

Today, the image of Hinduism is less grim than when Hindu Nationalism realistically coveted power of for the first time came to power (1990s). One reason is reality: all the grim Doomsday predictions about the Hindu Nationalists "throwing all Muslims into the Indian Ocean" and "turning the clock back regarding Dalit emancipation", failed to come true. Recently, Narendra Modi has conducted a very successful foreign policy, and the Western powers can only dream of the economic growth figures India takes for granted. Less importantly but tellingly, the Hindu parents are making progress in the California textbook affair, where some negative portrayals of Hindu culture will be amended, contrasting with the total defeat inflicted on the Hindus in 2006. The anti-Hindu lobby in American academe, largely consisting of NRIs and Indologists, has lost considerable steam.

(The same impression could be had from Sona Datta's documentary about Hindu art and temple architecture, a few days later. Over-all quite informative as well as full of awe for Hindu brilliance, it nonetheless started out with familiar secularist lies about pluralist Moghuls who "built their magnificent mosques next to Hindu temples" and presided over a peaceful and tolerant empire "when Europe was savaged by wars of religion". But unlike in the recent past, this propaganda was not that obtrusive.)

And so, this Dutch young man approached the RSS men with an open mind, in spite of the hateful briefing he had initially received from a secularist. He had good things to say about the nativists he met. But he also carried his prejudices with him, less against the "Hindu" than against the "Nationalist" element, and less intense than 10 or 25 years ago, but still palpable. Conclusion: the power equation on the publicity front is still favourable to the secularists but not unfathomably desperate for the Hindus anymore.

(Still visible till 3 December 2017: https://www.vrt.be/vrtnu/a-z/terzake-docu/2017/terzake-docu-s2017a84/) (Dutch subtitles but all the talking is in Hindi or English)

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Guha’s Golwalkar

(Pragyata, October 2016)

Ramachandra Guha’s column “A question of sources – The unholy holy book of the RSS” (The Telegraph, 17 Sep. 2016) draws attention to the fiftieth anniversary of a major ideological manifesto of Hindu Nationalism: “Guru” Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar’s book Bunch of Thoughts. After the death of Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940), who in 1925 had founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or “National Volunteer Association”, the BHU-trained biologist Golwalkar (1906-73) was the second Sarsanghchalak, “Chief Guide of the Association”, until his own death. He is credited with greatly expanding the RSS’s presence in Indian society by creating a Parivar (“family”) of specialized organizations, including a pan-Hindu religious platform, a trade-union, a student organization, a network for tribal welfare,  and a political party.

This party, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS, “Indian People’s Association”), founded in 1951, was a venture into explicit politics which Golwalkar agreed to against his wishes, after the Hindu Mahasabha (“Hindu Great-Council”, °1922) had irredeemably fallen from grace with the murder of Mahatma Gandhi by one of its members. Reportedly, Golwalkar gave his consent to the party’s creation with the words: “Alright then, a house also needs a lavatory.” The party existed until 1977, when it fused with others to form the Janata Party (“People’s Party”), and was reconstituted in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ruling party at the time of this writing.

The book’s title was inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru’s collection Bunch of Old Letters, effectively a “bunch” or random collection of disparate writings. This was not the best choice for what was intended to be an ideological guidebook.

Books in Hindu Nationalism

Guha misrepresents (probably because he misunderstands) the role of books in the Sangh. His inference that the book somehow determines today's BJP government's policies is a typical secularist fantasy, if only because the BJP has emancipated itself from the RSS. Most BJP men today are not from the RSS, and even the RSS men inside or outside the BJP have rarely read this Hindutva manifesto. The short attention span of many Hindus (as an outsider, I would not dare to say this, but Hindu intellectuals themselves keep on bewailing this tendency) militates against reliance on hefty volumes like Bunch of Thoughts. Ploughing through demanding books is only given to few, among ethnicities mainly the Chinese, Northern Europeans and Jews, and even there not exactly the majority. Whenever you present a book to an RSS leader, he is bound to say: "Can't you summarize this volume to a small pamphlet?" (On the bright side, Hindu consciousness-raising is currently getting a tremendous boost by the developments in communication technology: through less demanding means like Twitter messages, and through the return to oral culture, as in webinars.)

This aversion to reading is especially true in the RSS. This has a historical cause as well as a conscious decision behind it. The historical cause is the circumstances of the RSS’s founding: Dr. KB Hedgewar came from the Bengal revolutionary faction of the Freedom Movement, and brought its secretive methods along. Like the revolutionaries, wary of feeding written evidence of their designs to police informers, RSS men never communicated in writing but travelled around to pass information orally. Hence the enormous physical locomotion performed by RSS officers. As the wife of an RSS veteran confided to me: “It is a status symbol for them.”  

The (indeed real) influence of Bunch of Thoughts in RSS discourse is mainly through oral sermons by bauddhik officers selecting a few nice passages. Most RSS men won't recognize the more difficult passages that Guha draws grim conclusions from. It is like the Bible in Roman Catholicism, where the raw passages are kept out of hearing distance: the flock is only fed the elevating passages through selected Sunday readings.

There is a big difference between BJP texts of thirty years ago and today, having become more sophisticated but also more secularist and less Hindu. In BJP discourse, pace Guha, the term Hindu Rashtra (“Hindu State”), dear to Golwalkar, is now unthinkable. While Congress has evolved from secular nationalism to making common cause with the Breaking India forces, the BJP has evolved from Hindu nationalism to secular nationalism. (Which, on the bright side, makes it the natural party of government.) This is to a lesser extent true of the RSS, but it is still closer to Golwalkar. However, the person-cult of Golwalkar, still as strong as ever, is unrelated to the influence of Bunch of Thoughts. The RSS position regarding Golwalkar's ideas might well evolve, all while the devotion to Golwalkar remains the same. Secularist intellectuals like Guha may find this absurd, but it is the reality. 

We

Guha’s critique is certainly not the lowliest kind of anti-Golwalkar polemic. In articles of that category, used unquestioningly as source in the majority of introductions to Hindu Nationalism, the targeted Golwalkar book would not be Bunch of Thoughts (1966) but his slim maiden volume, We, Our Nationhood Defined (1939). That attempt at ideological contemplation of the political challenges before Hindu society has earned notoriety because of two overquoted passages. In one, Golwalkar is selectively cited as seemingly supporting Nazi Germany. I have analysed this passage in the context of the book and of its time (one chapter each in The Saffron Swastika, 2001, and Return of the Swastika, 2006, or online at https://www.academia.edu/14793753/Disowning_Golwalkars_We), and found this common allegation, present in every introductory text on Hindutva, totally wanting. Thus, anti-Semitism was the core doctrine of National-Socialism, yet the Jewish people was the foremost role model upheld by Golwalkar for the “Hindu nation”. As for the Nazis’ militarism, he contrasts Germany’s champions of martial virtues with the sages who form the Hindu role models “in serene majesty”. This oft-quoted passage is irrelevant for the contemporary debates, except to show to what mendaciousness secularists and foreign India-watchers can stoop.

The other passage could have more to do with contemporary politics. It clearly distinguishes Christians and Muslims from the Hindus, as mere guests vis-à-vis the host society, entitled to protection and an honourable life, but to nothing more. Golwalkar proposes that they (“re”)-assimilate, or else accept a protected status as foreign residents “claiming nothing, not even citizens’ rights”. Yet, as the book disappeared from circulation in 1948 and Golwalkar vetoed its reprint for being “immature”, most Sangh members have never even seen that line. It doesn’t reflect the current party-line of the RSS let alone the BJP.

The only incriminating fact that still attaches to We is its disowning by the RSS. It officially disowned the book in 2006, only confirming half a century of the book’s factual non-existence, and with that decision, we have no quarrel. But it also claimed, quite mendaciously, that the book had not been written by Golwalkar and did not reflect his ideas. Nobody got fooled except the most obedient among the RSS’s own volunteers.

Bunch

By contrast, the contents of Bunch of Thoughts remains a central part of most Sanghis’ ideological formation. The only book to rival it, is Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism (1965), adopted as official ideology by the BJS and (after some confusion with “Gandhian socialism”, finally agreed to be but another name for the same ideology) its successor body, the BJP. If you would want to honestly criticize the BJP through a book, it would be Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism, but even the sheer mention of that book is absent from the immense majority of “expert” publications about the BJP. Bunch of Thoughts only plays a role for the party’s old guard that was groomed in the RSS. The party has moved away from its parent body and most members today don’t have an RSS past.

While Bunch of Thoughts is of limited consequence to our evaluation of the presently governing BJP’s policies, it has a historical link to the party and may of course form the object of research. Without being fooled by the secularists into thinking that any fault found in it can be applied to the party, we will nonetheless take note of the Hindutva gems that Guha has discovered in it. 

Golwalkar does indeed remain “the chief ideologue of the organization”, meaning the RSS, and till today, his “bearded visage is prominently displayed” at RSS functions. It may also be true that as an RSS veteran, Prime Minister Narendra Modi “hugely admires Golwalkar”. Yet, in general, it is a big stretch of Guha’s to claim that Bunch of Thoughts is “of enormous contemporary relevance” and is for the ruling party what the Koran is for Muslims. Firstly, the RSS impact on the BJP is limited and waning. Secondly, Islam is a “religion of the book” and is heavily determined by the contents of the Koran, to which it explicitly pays obeisance; but Hinduism is not that book-oriented, even when it pays plenty of lip-service to the Scriptures.

This counts even more for its Hindutva variety. Indeed, Golwalkar himself was emphatically anti-bookish and berated his volunteers when they were caught “idling” by reading a book. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the RSS’s anti-intellectual orientation, which has been very consequential: (1) a complete absence from the public debate;  (2) a propensity to make fools of themselves with fantastic claims, e.g. that “ancient Indians had airplanes”, as if India’s real contributions to science and technology weren’t good enough; (3) a complete passivity when Nehruvians and Marxists moved in to to monopolize the cultural and educational sphere; and (4) to really drive the negative implications home, an utter inability to give a credible defence of Golwalkar’s own books.

Nationalism

Golwalkar was a nationalist, and the movement he led, is known worldwide as “Hindu Nationalism” till today. Contrary to what the secularists allege these days, the RSS was very much rooted in the Freedom Movement, in anti-colonial nationalism. It started as a security force to protect a Congress meeting in 1925, and its founder, KB Hedgewar, had been trained by the Bengali revolutionary wing of the Freedom Movement. (This explains a working principle of the RSS, viz. its secretiveness and reliance on direct communication.) Its slightly older sister, the Hindu Mahasabha (1922), was originally a Hindu lobby within Congress.

This nationalism was a logical choice, at least in the 1920s. The immediate pressures from the anti-colonial struggle, and the international after-effect of the national passions of the Great War, made nationalism honourable and obligatory. Even associations for sports or music took the habit of marching in uniform as if they were armies marching to the battlefield. The RSS followed this pattern.

Emotionally, this nationalist appeal undoubtedly works. Election campaigns fought on a national issues tend to unite the ciizens around them, transcending and trumping the usual contests between collective self-interests (commual, casteist or regional), which are divisive.

 It is another question whether it still is such a wise choice after 1945, when nationalism got a bad name through its identification with the losing side in WW2; after 1947 and the decades of independence, when India has other concerns than its relatively assured national freedom; after 1947 again, as the year when many Hindus became citizens of the suddenly separate countries of Pakistan and (what was to become) Bangladesh; after the resettlement of millions of Hindus abroad and their acquisition of a foreign nationality (apart from those already in Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Afghanistan); and after quite a few non-Indians have become Hindu. As I have argued elsewhere, “nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns”.

Thus, the reason why Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu temples, was not that they were “foreign invaders”, as claimed in most RSS pamphlets, for then they would have imposed “foreign temples” on the Hindu sites. No, it was because they were Muslim, a word avoided nowadays in RSS parlance, and they imposed mosques. In the discussions about Ghar Wapasi (“return home”), the reconversion of Christian converts to Hinduism, promoted by the RSS, I often hear the justification: “Christianization also entails Westernization” – as if Christianization without Westernization were alright. But that is not the problem: Hindus themselves are fast Westernizing (without the RSS-BJP doing anything against it), but this doesn’t make them non- or anti-Hindu. And at least the Catholic missionaries are responding to this complaint by “inculturation”, i.e. Christianization without Westernization. So that is alright for the RSS: Indian Christians smashing Hindu “idols”, as long as they duly wear dhoti? For “nationalists”, blind to the religious dimension, it is.

Hindu Rashtra

Why was the nation conceived as “Hindu” rather than “Indian”? In Hedgewar’s analysis, Hindu society constituted the Indian nation, while the minorities were mere guests. In older documents of the RSS and the Jan Sangh, you still find this idea of a “Hindu nation”, as evidenced by the oft-quoted Golwalkar sentence about minority inhabitants having “not even citizens’ rights”. However, even then the RSS and the BJS adopted terms like Bharatiya (Indian) and Rashtriya (national), and thus prepared the ground for a more recent shift away from Hindu identity politics and towards “secular” or “inclusive” nationalism. This shift, very outspoken in the BJP but also affecting the RSS, leads to inventive constructions such as that of the Indian Muslims as “Mohammedi Hindus”, a term repeatedly insisted on by LK Advani during the Ayodhya campaign of ca. 1990. Not that Indian Muslims will ever accept this contradictory label, but their honest opinion is not asked. The rationale for this term is the post-Golwalkar doctrine that “Hindu” is syonym with “Indian”.

Earlier, “Indian” was reduced to “Hindu” (subtracting any non-Hindu Indians from the “Indian” category, as in Golwalkar’s quotes above), but in the RSS discourse of the last decades, “Hindu” is being reduced to “Indian”. This purely geographical and thus “secular” notion was the meaning of the Persian word “Hindu” fifteen hundred years ago. But when the Muslim invaders imported it into India, it immediately had a religious meaning: all Indian Pagans in the broadest sense, i.e. all those who were not Jews, Christians or Muslims. This, then, is the original Indian meaning of Hindu: any Indian Pagan, whether Brahmin, Shudra, Buddhist, Tribal or any other grouping or denomination; but emphatically excluding Muslims and Christians. Since it is the historically foundational meaning, those who insist on giving it a different meaning, have the burden of justification on them. In this case, it is the RSS that owes us, already for a few decades, a justification for its absurd redefining of “Hindu” as simply “Indian”, including Christians and Muslims.

Haven’t the “experts” on whom Guha relies, noticed this shift in meaning of the all-important term “Hindu”? It explains, to name a current and important example, the grim and determined passivity of the Modi government regarding specificaly Hindu demands, such as the abolition of the blatantly anti-Hindu (so, communally partisan and hence anti-secular) Right to Education Act, which has forced hundreds of Hindu schools to close down. A Hindu party would be up in arms against anti-Hindu discriminations (and the BJS was, but did ot have the power), but in their present state of mind, the Hindu movement simply cannot conceive of “anti-Hindu” discriminations anymore, as this would mean “anti-Indian”.  

A government advisor confided to me that the BJP now, having learned its lesson from the AB Vajpayee government’s passivity on Hindu issues, wants to “keep the pot boiling”. It wants to throw some crumbs to its Hindu constituency, such as a punitive strike against Pakistani terrorist camps, to buy sufficient loyalty from its Hindu support base; but without doing anything substantive on important Hindu demands. The most important of these is not risky projects pregnant with communal violence, such as the Common Civil Code dear to the erstwhile BJS, but the perfectly reasonable and secular abolition of all legal and constitutional discriminations against Hinduism. (I invite the BJP to prove me wrong, not with denunciations but with legislative action.)  

This shift also means that both organizations, the BJP formally and the RSS effectively, have renounced one of Golwalkar’s core ideas: Hindu Rashtra, the “Hindu state” (though the RSS used to fussily insist that it means an ill-defined “Hindu nation” instead). It was an un-Hindu idea to start with: the Gupta or Chola empire or any other premodern Hindu political entity was coronated with Hindu rites and facilitated Vedic and Puranic traditions, but never called itself Hindu Rashtra. Further, Hindu states have always been pluralistic, regardless of the ruler’s personal orientation.

In India this is now termed ”secular”, an infelicitous term deviant from its original meaning of “non-religious” or “not acknowledging as consequential any religious identities”; but one that has been accepted by the RSS itself in its 1990’s slogan: “Hindu India, secular India”. By the RSS’s own post-Golwalkar logic, Hindu Rashtra, when analysed, would only mean: “a (genuinely) secular state”. Why then uphold a Hindu Rashtra as a distant goal in contradistinction to the present principle (admittedly very imperfect in its realization) of a secular republic? Golwalkar’s and the present RSS leadership’s positions on this question, and the probable difference between the two, would make an excellent topic for a thorough intra-RSS debate, followed by an authoritative publication explaining the whole question in detail and finally offering clarity. Are they capable of doing this?    

India’s unity

Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, Golwalkar didn’t see this nationhood as a project, a “nation in the making”, but as an ancient heritage: "Long before the West had learnt to eat roast meat instead of raw, we were one nation, with one motherland." Indeed, in many RSS writings, it is claimed that the Vedic expression matrbhumi, “motherland”, meant “India”, in the sense of “the Subcontinent”.

That is not true, but the belief has a long tradition. A close reading of the Vedas shows a geographical horizon stretching from roughly Prayag to the Afghan frontier. The only Vedic seer credited with crossing the Vindhya mountains was Agastya, and that was noticed precisely because it was an exceptional adventure, not a visit to a province of his familiar motherland. In the Mahabharata, an epic based on a historical war of succession in the Vedic Bharata dynasty ca. 1400 BC, the geographical ambit of the events and persons involved is similarly limited. Yet, by the time of the final editing, around the time of Christ, dynasties from the farthest ends of India had had themselves written into the narrative. They wanted to belong to the expanding Vedic civilization, which is also why they invited Brahmin families and donated land to them, in order to have them confer Vedic legitimacy on their dynasties.

Not since a God-given eternity, but at least for more than 2000 years, all of the Subcontinent has had a sense of unity. This is far more than most countries can say, and it is enough to justify its political unity today. The pilgrimage cycles, the narration of the same epics in village squares all over the country, and the visible presence of the otherwise self-contained Brahmin caste and the monastic orders, created a degree of self-conscious cultural unity. This sometimes approached but never fully reached political unity, which at any rate only concerned the elites: changing borders made little difference to ordinary life. Clearly, poliical unity existed at least as an ideal.

Fact is that here, Golwalkar gave utterance to a feeling common among Indians. Whatever the details about the past, Indians believe in national unity. And this is not a nationalism “in the making”, on the contrary: the Nehruvian elites dish out all kinds of reasons why not Indianness but the separate communal identities are “real”, yet when push comes to shove, Indians stand united.  Before the Chinese attacked in 1962, Tamil Nadu was in the grip of separatist fervour; but when the invasion came, the Tamils, all while remaining wedded to the Dravidianist cultural demands, abandoned the separatist camp and threw their lot in with India. Also, history shows that the surest way to win an election lies in having just won an Indo-Pak war. The local and communal identities are real, but so is the “national” identity.        Hence Guha’s Golwalkar quotation: "Hindu Society developed in an all-comprehensive manner, with a bewildering variety of phases and forms, but with one thread of unification running inherently through the multitude of expressions and manifestations." Here Golwalkar’s observation is impeccable, though I would call this unity “civilizational” rather than “national”. Guha comments: “What precisely this unifying thread was is never defined.” Well, it is Hinduism. This is a vague and capacious notion, but adequate enough to explain India’s self-conscious unity. Guha’s Golwalkar – 2 (Pragyata, October 2016)  In part 1, we saw Ramachandra Guha drawing grim conclusions from the supposed influence of MS Golwalkar’s 50-year-old book Bunch of Thoughts on the ruling party. Here we discuss some more aspects of Golwalkar’s vision that, in Guha’s understanding, should be cause for worry. World Teacher According to Ramachandra Guha, another “assumption that Golwalkar works with is that despite their fallen state today, Hindus are destined to lead and guide the world”. He cites Guruji as asserting that it "is the grand world-unifying thought of Hindus alone that can supply the abiding basis for human brotherhood", so that world leadership, no less, "is a divine trust, we may say, given to the charge of the Hindus by Destiny". It is not as if other nations are waiting for India’s contribution. Then again, what they did take or accept from India was the most precious contribution. China had no mean philosophy sprung out of its own soil, but nonetheless accepted and integrated Buddhism. Among the Greek philosophers, Pythagoras and later the neo-Platonists were but the most explicit in copying Indian concepts and even practices, and they influenced the whole of European philosophy a well as a bit of Christian theology. A much later revolution in European thought was wrought by Immanuel Kant, who admitted the decisive influence (“awakened from my dogmatic slumber”) from David Hume’s sudden development of a quasi-Buddhist view. Hume doesn’t mention Buddhism, and would perhaps have been laughed out of court if he had, but recently we have discovered that his philosophical awakening had been triggered by his reading two detailed accounts of Buddhist thought by Catholic missionaries posted in Tibet c.q. Thailand. Modern thinkers like AN Whitehead, CG Jung and Ken Wilber tapped directly into Indian thoughts and practices, even if not always acknowledging it (an attitude discussed by Rajiv Malhotra in his innovative thesis of the “U-turn”). On the other hand, translating this natural attractiveness of Indian traditions for outsiders into a missionary spirit is not very Hindu either. When real Evangelists meet someone from a different religion, immediately their missionary mechanic sets to work: what buttons are there in him that I can click to make him open to my message? Hindus don’t have this at all. When they meet someone from a strange religion, they become naturally curious. They feel no need to destroy that foreign religion and replace it with Hinduism, but assume that there must be a core of wisdom in it, something essentially the same as what makes Hindus tick. Moreover, this international appeal as a “world teacher” sits uncomfortably with Golwalkar’s nationalism. It is now the need of the hour to stress that Indian contributions are really from India (against e.g. American attempts to obscure the Sanskrit terms and Indian references in yoga), and that in some respects India has indeed been a "world teacher". But apart from that, the further propagation of Indian contributions abroad, as of foreign contributions inside India, will go on for some time. In a footnote of their schoolbooks, the brighter among Chinese or European or Latin-American pupils will still learn that yoga originates in India, or that the zero originates in India, but otherwise it will simply be part of their own life, c.q. their own mathematics. Just like rocket science came from Germany, the train from England, gun powder from China, and mankind from Africa. So many world teachers! The Buddha’s cosmopolitanism Like most Hindus, Golwalkar praised the Buddha. The Buddhists, by contrast, he accuses of beginning to “uproot the age-old national traditions of this land. The great cultural virtues fostered in our society were sought to be demolished." It could have made sense to accuse the Buddhists of neglecting certain virtues because they emphasized other virtues more. A slightly earlier Hindu Nationalist, VD Savarkar, had already considered the Buddhist (but not Buddhist alone) value of non-violence harmful for India’s defence. But the destructive design of “seeking to demolish” anything of value is not normally associated with Buddhism. While there is no doubt that foreigners were important in the history of Buddhism, especially the Indo-Greeks (Menander/Milinda) and the Kushanas (Kanishka), Golwalkar surprises us with the information that "devotion to the nation and its heritage had reached such a low pitch that the Buddhist fanatics invited and helped the foreign aggressors who wore the mask of Buddhism. The Buddhist sect had turned a traitor to the mother society and the mother religion." This is bad history, and rather nasty towards the Buddhist fellow-Indians. But we can agree that Buddhism never set great store by defending India’s borders, which were not threatened in the north or east, where the Buddha lived and worked. The northwestern frontier was known to the Buddha, and indeed culturally familiar, not felt to be a foreign land at all, for his friends Prasenajit and Bandhula had studied there, at Takshashila University. (Yes, it existed before Buddhism: contrary to the Nehruvian received wisdom, the university as an institution was not a Buddhist but a Vedic invention.) But he was not in the business of defending it: at that very time it was not threatened either, and he indeed had other priorities anyway. But neither he nor his followers ever shot anyone in the back who felt called upon to fight aggressors. Something similar counts for other Indian sects. The Vedas and Epics report a number of wars, but never a defence against foreign aggression. Once there was real aggression, by Mohammed Ghori, defender Prithviraj Chauhan was betrayed by Jayachandra, the latter as much a Hindu as the former. They were aware of some cultural unity stretching from Attock to Cuttack, but politically they were attached to their own part of the Subcontinent, and to hell with the neighbours. The RSS notion of a Deshbhakt (“patriot”, “devotee of the country”, meaning a devotee of the whole Subcontinent) did not exist in premodern Hinduism.    Sects with any kind of spiritual goal had another purpose than nationalism: Liberation, Self-Realization, Knowledge, Isolation (of Consciousness from Nature), Awakening, or anything the different sects chose to call the ultimate state of consciosness. None of the classical manuals for the seekers of the ultimate mention India. If in recent centuries it does come up by way of geographical detail, it is still not invest with value pertaining to their goal. The Motherland is where you come from, a natural given; not where you go to, not the norm you aspire to reach. It is just there. Then again, you do get the notion of India as a Punyabhumi, a territory fit for earning merit, which you have to purify yourself to re-enter after a stay abroad. Here you get the bridge between Hindu spirituality and Hindu nationalism. In my opinion, like in that of cosmopolitan secularists, this was a degenerative trend, but as an outsider I don’t want to tell Hindus what to do or to believe. So here we do have to admit that Golwalkar had a traditional basis for his assertion of India’s uniqueness. Caste Buddhism had come into the limelight in 1956, shortly before the book was written: with Dr. BR Ambedkar’s adoption of, or (in Guha’s borrowed-Christian construction of the event) “conversion” to Buddhism. Ambedkar had wanted to show a fist to caste Hinduism, yet that did not make him into a "traitor to the mother society and the mother religion", on the contrary: he explicitated that conversion to a foreign religion would harm the nation, which he did not want, hence his embracing a sect born in India. As Savarkar had commented: Ambedkar’s “refuge” in Bauddha Dharma was “a sure jump into the Hindu fold”. That is why the RSS, thanks to advancing insight, has gradually included Ambedkar in its pantheon. But that development was not on the horizon yet under Guruji. Guha correctly notes that Golwalkar “does not so much as mention the great emancipator of the Dalits”. For people involved in a crusade against Hinduism, like the Nehruvian secularists, it was a foregone conclusion that whatever a Hindu leader ever wrote, he would most of all be judged for his position on caste. That this will always be a negative judgment, is an equally foregone conclusion. Hinduism, for them, is “caste, wholly caste, and nothing but caste”. This implies that a nominal Hindu is deemed to have turned against his religion if he takes an approvedly egalitarian position; only then is he the good guy. If he spits on his Mother, bravo! But if he chooses to defend Hinduism, as Golwalkar does, every possible position he takes will always be deemed an intolerable discrimination on caste lines. Even if he pronounces himself in favour of full equality, he is still lambasted for being patronizing and exercising his “Brahmin privilege”. According to Guha, “Golwalkar vigorously defends the caste system, saying that it kept Hindus united and organized down the centuries.” Yet, what follows is something else than a “vigorous defence”, it is a nuanced historical understanding that a social system at variance with modern homogenizing nationalism may yet have had its historical advantages: "On the one hand, the so-called 'caste-ridden' Hindu Society has remained undying and unconquerable... after facing for over two thousand years the depredations of Greeks, Shakas, Hunas, Muslims and even Europeans, by one shock of which, on the other hand, the so-called casteless societies crumbled to dust never to rise again." Whether a causal relation can be established between caste and the survival of Hinduism, should be investigated, but it is a reasonable hypothesis that deserves better than Guha’s blanket condemnation. “Bunch of Thoughts altogether ignores the suppression of Dalits and women in Hindu society.” Look at these double standards. Pray, Mr. Guha, show me a book written in defence of Islam that expounds on the mistreatment of women in Islam. After you have done that, you may ask this very similar question about Hinduism. As a prolific writer, have you published anything about the oppression of women in Christianity, a critique developed by the very originators of feminism in the world? Why do you single out Hinduism here? We have never seen you ask feminist authors why they haven’t contributed anything to the struggle for Hinduism’s self-respect against its many enemies, so why the reverse? Further, we may speculate that the women’s viewpoint just didn’t occur to Golwalkar as a confirmed bachelor leading an all-male organization; and that in the India of the 1960s, women’s issues were not as high-profile as today. By contrast, caste inequality has continuously been on the agenda in the Indian republic. Golwalkar was not silent about it, but gave much less prominence to caste than anti-Hindu authors do, who assume that “Hinduism is caste, wholly caste, and nothing but caste”. RSS veterans who still knew Golwalkar in person told me he took a nationalist and non-conflictual view of the issue: as a nationalist, he believed in the minimization of all divisive factors and in a large measure of equality for all members of the Hindu nation, but not in social engineering, much less in quota or reparative discrimination (“affirmative action”). Thus, when a Brahmin neophyte at first refused to eat together with the other castes, he allowed him to eat separately, until he was familiar enough with the RSS attitude that he himself came around to eating with the others. That way, his acceptance of inter-caste commensality was much better anchored then if imposed on him. The RSS boasts of being the only caste-free civil organization in India. By contrast, the political parties that for historical reasons call themselves “anti-caste”, practise naked caste advocacy. They typically are informal or even self-designated interest groups of a particular group of castes. Communalism Guha accuses Golwalkar of paranoia vis-à-vis Indian Muslims and Indian Christians, and quotes him: "What is the attitude of those people who have been converted to Islam and Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt. (…) Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion to the nation." The memory of the Partition was still fresh, and of the fact that a vast majority of the Muslim electorate had voted for it. The missionaries too had considered it likely that with Independence, India would lapse into chaos, so that some Christian-dominated areas in Kerala and the Northeast could declare their independence. It had also been noticed in the Northeast that non-Christianized tribals gave “Indian” as nationality to census officers, while Christians gave their tribal identity. So, Golwalkar’s suspicion of the minority, while not to be accepted like that, still had a core of truth in it. Then, Guha goes in for the kill: “There is a striking affinity between the questions Golwalkar asks here and those asked by European anti-Semites in the 19th and early 20th centuries. French, German and British nationalists all suspected the Jews in their country of not being loyal enough to the motherland.” Aha! So Golwalkar was a Nazi after all! Well, not exactly. First of all, before the Jews became the object of World Conspiracy suspicions, the allegation of a foreign or international loyalty originally concerned not the Jews but the Catholics, with the Jesuit Order as their main weapon of aggression. The Protestants, somewhat like the Orthodox Christians, were organized nationally and accepted docrinal differences, at least within the confines laid down by the Bible; by contrast, the Catholic Church was a global monolith with aspirations for world domination. My own country, Belgium, was a Catholic frontline state, with institutions for Irish, English and Dutch Catholics to support them and eventually allow them to topple the Protestant domination of their countries. There were also real-life incidents that nurtured the suspicion of a Popish Plot, most famously the “gunpowder plot” by Jesuit agent Guy Fawkes to blow up the British Parliament. So, there was a core of truth to those suspicions.  Even in demography, these suspicions were not baseless. As late as the 1950s, Dutch Protestants used to warn: “Be careful with those Catholics, with their large families they may overtake our country.” And indeed, today the percentage of Catholics is larger than that of Protestants,-- only, between them, they are not even the majority anymore, and the Protestant-Catholic dichotomy has become irrelevant. Also, the Cathoic birthrate has plummeted to the national average. The suspicion of a Jewish World Conspiracy was mainly based on a forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, originally fabricated by the Czarist secret police, though dispproved of by the Czar himself. When Islam critics in the West point out that Islam has ambitions for world domination, the Guhas in our midst try to be funny and allege that we fantasize, after the same model, a “Protocols of Mecca”. No: the Zion Protocols were a forgery, the so-called Mecca Protocols for world domination are real. The Quran itself, authoritative for every single Muslim (though ignored by many, fortunately but un-Islamically), says: “War will reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone.” The Jewish Bible has a doctrine of domination too, but only of the Promised Land; while the Quran speaks of world domination. So, the difference between the anti-Jewish and the anti-Islamic suspicion is one between a falsity and reality. I am aware that for propagandists, reality doesn’t count, only perception does. With the studied superficiality typical of Nehruvian secularism, the seemingly similar perception of the anti-Jewish versus the anti-Islamic suspicion is enough. They can throw that around as a grave allegation, as here in Guha’s article, and be confident that no one will step in to correct them. The endless mendaciousness of the secularists would have been remedied to a large extent if there had been a counterparty capable of responding to them and diagnosing their errors. But the only counterparty to be reckoned with was the Hindu Nationalists, and they had been fixed in argumentative impotence by Golwalkar himself.  Christians have a similar doctrine of world conquest, though less confrontational. In its formative first centuries, Chrristianity lived as a minority in the vast Roman Empire, and unlike Islam, it had to accomodate national laws not of its own making. This fitted Saint Paul’s repudiation of the Biblical Law: it is the spirit (viz. of charity) that counts, not the letter of the law. This means that Christianity became naturally secular: it separated the religious sphere, thoroughly Christian, from the worldly and political sphere, dominated by non-Christian forces. During the heyday of Christian power, Christianity impinged ever more on the political sphere, but in the modern era, it did not have too much difficulty returning to its original “secularist” position of accepting the separate identity of the political sphere. A telling criterion: comparatively few people were killed in the struggle to wrest worldly power from the Churches, compared e.g. to the struggle between secular ideologies in the 20th century. And in this struggle, the secular forces were more violent than the Christian forces, witness the French Revolutionary genocide in the Vendée or the persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union. However, in a more moderate and sophisticated way, Christianity does have an ambition of world domination too. Like in Islam, all non-believers are deemed to go to hell, though few Christians now take this seriously anymore. Jesus’ injunction to “go and teach all nations” means that India too is on Christianity’s conversion programme. When the Pope came to India in 1999, he said openly and in so many words that his Church wanted to “reap a great harvest of faith” in Asia, which implies destroying Hinduism the way the native religions of Europe and the Americas were destroyed. He thereby badly let his secularist allies down, for they had always ridiculed the Hindu Nationalist suspicion that Christianity only meant destruction for Hinduism. Yet, after being put in the wrong so bluntly, here is the secularist Guha again shamelessly ridiculing Golwalkar’s suspicion against Christianity. On one point, though, Golwalkar is blatantly wrong: it is not India that the Christians want to destroy, but Hinduism. Here again, nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns. Not the nation is their target, but the religion. Christians were loyal to the Roman empire, of which the 5th-centuriy Germanic enemies were already Christian too, but when the Empire fell apart, they adapted: after all, their main loyalty was not a political structure but a religion. And then they became loyal citizens of Wisigothic Spain, of Ostrogothic Italy, of Frankish France, a political loyalty that was inevitably secondary. They were not Deshbhakt, they were Yesubhakt. And similarly, they sing the Indian anthem with as much conviction as their Indian compatriots. And they will do so even more when they come to live in a “post-Hindu India” (of which Christian convert Kancha Ilaiah dreams). But if a different political structure comes to replace the Indian Republic, they will effortlessly adapt to that too. Defending the nation against the Christian onslaught leaves their real target undefended: the Hindu religion. Gandhi Guha quotes Golwalkar as asserting that "the foremost duty laid upon every Hindu is to build up such a holy, benevolent and unconquerable might of our Hindu People in support of the age-old truth of our Hindu Nationhood". This was never said in the Upanishads, it is not part of the fabled Hindu spirituality. But then, Hinduism has survived because of other factors than spirituality. At times it is simply right to emphasize the martial virtues. Proof a contrario: Buddhism was purely about spirituality and didn’t practise self-defence, so when it was really attacked, during the Muslim invasions, it was wiped away from Central Asia and India in one go. In spite of Golwalkar’s unhistorical view of “Hindu Nationhood”, he was right to extol the project of “unconquerable might”. Guha compares this “supremacist point of view” with what M.K. Gandhi regarded as the duty of Hindus: “to abolish untouchability and to end the suppression of women”, and to “promote inter-religious harmony”. Indeed, Mr. Guha, “there could not be two visions of what it takes to be a Hindu, or an Indian, that are as radically opposed as those offered by Golwalkar and Gandhi respectively”. There are several things wrong with this picture. Factually, it is not true that the Mahatma opposed “suppression of women”; on the contrary, he notoriously practised it. Perhaps his wife Kasturba accomodated the arrangements Gandhi imposed on her, but there cannot possibly be an illusion that their relation was one of equality. Towards his wife as well as his children, he was an unmitigated family tyrant. His relation to the young women with whom he carried out his “experiments with chastity” was also perversely exploitative. As for untouchability, Gandhi made it his priority, and at that junction in history it was indeed a necessity; but to make it a defining trait of Hinduism is simply wrong. For thousands of years, Hindu society didn’t know of hereditary untouchability, which is not mentioned in the Rg-Veda (and no, you shrill screamers out there, not even in the Purusha Sukta). Later it did, and was comfortable with it. For opposite reasons, Hindus in those periods were not preoccupied with abolishing untouchability: first because it wasn’t there, then because they thought it was alright. One can be a Hindu without practising untouchability, but also without being fired up to abolish untouchability. Today’s Hindu communities I know in Holland (Bhojpuri-speaking Rama worshippers from Surinam) have only the faintest notion of caste and none of untouchability, but are very much Hindu. In the same spirit, the RSS ranks were not tainted with untouchability either. In that respect, Golwalkar’s vision was different from but by no means “radically opposed” to Gandhiji’s. Abolishing untouchability is a good thing to do, but it is not the essence of Hinduism, nor of anti-Hinduism. Hinduism is a lot more and a lot bigger than caste. It is only the ignorant Nehruvians who can’t pronounce the word “Hindu” without manoeuvering the word “caste” into the same sentence. If Gandhi put an unusual stress on this, it may have been a necessity of the times, and that is not what I want to hold against him. What was wrong with him, however, was that, regardless of caste, he had a very warped view of Hinduism. Thus, Gandhi was wrong to equate Hinduism with non-violence, which is extolled as a virtue on the spiritual path, but not a virtue for the warrior. No matter how the warrior class is recruited, at any rate it is deemed necessary in the real world. Hinduism is a complete system: it accounts for society’s needs as much as for the requirements of the spiritual path. Gandhi’s version of Hinduism was very unbalanced and morbidly moralistic. It ought to be a warning sign for Hindus that the secularists are so insistently dangling Gandhi as a role model before them. Likewise, “interreligious harmony” was a natural practice between the many sects within Hinduism, and partly even towards Christianity and Islam. When Muslims pass a mosque, they greet it, but not a temple or church. It is only Hindus who greet any building or object that is deemed sacred to anyone. This was the practice long before Gandhi. But these Hindus, or certainly their intellectual vanguard, had the power of discrimination, sharpened by their many debates between the different sects. Being nice to Muslims and sympathizing with the piety that finds its expression in prayer or fasting, is different from assenting to the illusory Islamic doctrine, starting with the funny belief that Mohammed was God’s exclusive spokesman. In Gandhi’s days, this critical role vis-à-vis Christianity and (at the cost of a number of murders) Islam was taken by the Arya Samaj, which Gandhi lambasted. His role in this regard was entirely negative, abolishing the power of discrimination in the Hindu worldview. He thus prepared the ground for the wilful superficiality characteristic of the Nehruvians. He also, through his wider inflence on all Hindus, prepared the ground for the complete ideological illiteracy among RSS men, along with Golwalkar. The differences between Gandhi and Golwalkar are dwarfed by one overriding influence on their Hindu contemporaries that they had in common. It is that both of them sold a voguish Western import as quintessentially Hindu. Gandhi’s view of non-violence came from some quietist Christian sects. Remaining unmoved and without fighting back when thugs manhandle you, is typical for the Amish and similar Christian pacifist sects. Through Tolstoy and other exalted Christians, Gandhi inserted a lot of Christian infuence into Hinduism. Similarly, Golwalkar’s nationalism was a belated import of a 19th-century influence, particularly through the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, whose political manifesto had been translated by VD Savarkar. Today in the West, nationalism has gone out of fashion; but in India, nothing ever dies, and so nationalism keeps on working its distortive influence on the movement for Hindu self-defence. What Hindus should urgently do, is to forget both Gandhi and Golwalkar. (That means two idols less on Narendra Modi’s house altar.) Gandhi is now only artificially kept alive by the secularists and some sentimental Hindus, purely for Hindu consumption. (Nobody is telling the Muslims that Gandhiji was there for them too, and that they should emulate his very Christian message of turning the other cheek.) The problem is not that what they imported, came from abroad. As the late Bal Thackeray said: “You cannot take this Swadeshi [= own produce, economic nationalism]  thing too far, for then you would have to do without the light bulb.” So, if Gandhi’s moralistic sentimentalism or deliberate lack of discrimination had something positive to offer, we shouldn’t mind it being of Christian origin. If Golwalkar’s nationalism helped in properly diagnosing the problems facing Hindu society, we should not complain of its Italian origin. But the thing is that they are not beneficial at all; or if they ever were, they definitely have outlived their untility. Another very important thing they had in common, was their emphasis on emotions, as opposed to thought. As RSS activists are wont to say: “Do you need to read a book to love your mother?” Working on the emotions quickly creates a popular appeal: both Gandhi and Golwalkar were hugely successful at getting crowds marching. The Marxists were never equally popular, but more successful in determining actual policies. They worked on people’s minds instead, and that had a more penetrative and lasting effect. Instead of following false prophets like Gandhi and Golwalkar, Hindus had better return to their real role models: to Dirghatamas and Vasishtha, to Rama and Krishna, to Canakya and Thiruvalluvar, to Vishnu Sharma and Abhinavagupta, to Ramdas and Shivaji. Their contribution in ideology and the art of living should be made relevant to the present, they had everything in them that we need. Hindus should not follow Western categories, like “national” vs. “anti-national”, or like “Left” vs. “Right”, not because they have been imported, but because because by now they have been sufficiently put to the test and found wanting.   Vanguard of Hindu society According to Ramachandra Guha, the RSS fancies itself the vanguard of Hindu society: “Golwalkar further assumes that if Hindus are destined to lead the world, the RSS is destined to lead the Hindus.” In better days, and even recently, the rest of the world has eagerly drunk from Mother India’s nipples. In spite of all her defects, she has a lot to offer, and this has been proven already from the distant past onwards. This much is indisputable. By contrast, the RSS’s claim to leadership over the Hindus (or more up-to-date, over the Indians) is a tall claim that deserves to be put to the test. Certainly, the RSS does a lot of good work at the basic level. Best known in India, though passed over in silence by the world media in emulation of the English media in India, is their disaster relief work. This indeed cannot be praised too much, if only to compensate for the culpable silence about it in every anti-Hindutva article, including this one by Guha. Whenever a flood or earthquake strikes, RSS men immediately come on the scene and do the thankless jobs that secularists feel themselves too precious for. It is all the more tragic that all these constructive energies of millions of ordinary Hindu volunteers are not channeled towards a higher goal. The RSS at one time wanted to serve Hindu society; today it is only busy perpetuating itself. The RSS leadership has failed to set useful and attainable goals for Hindu society. It has failed to map the Kurukshetra or do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis of the different forces in the field. According to the ancient Chinese strategist Sunzi, knowing both your enemy and yourself yields constant victory, knowing only one of the two sometimes yields victory and sometimes defeat, and not knowing either will end in assured and ignominious defeat. By this criterion, the RSS, in spite of its size, is headed for complete defeat. And effectively, for advertising itself as the “vanguard” of Hindu society, the RSS has little to show. Is India more Hindu today than in 1925? Several parameters show a definite decline: demographic percentage of Hindus; percentage of Hindu-controllod schools (not to speak of the hard-to-quantify degree of Hinduness of those schools); percentage of Subcontinental territory where Hindus can live with honour; percentage of soil and other assets controlled by Hindu temples; percentage of men who wear dhotis or of women who wear saris; and the proportion of conversions to the different religions relative to their demographic weight. Ah, the RSS will say with a triumphant smile, at least we managed to bring our political party to power! Yes they did, and that precisely is where you can see their failure. Just compare the programme with which the BJS started in 1951 and the actual policies of the BJP in power. Rather than Hinduizing secularist India, the Hindu party has been secularized. In 1947, the Hindu forces deplored the inclusion of the green colour in the Indian flag; but by 1980, they themselves put green into their party flag. This is a visual symbol of how they now wholeheartedly support what they originally condemned as “minority appeasement”. Let me state at this point what has made me write this article. A BJP worker of RSS background asked me to write a reply to this article by Guha. In response, I pooh-poohed Bunch of thoughts: while not endorsing Guha’s critique, I still expressed my skepticism of Golwalkar’s worldview. He got angry with me, a case of “turning a good man into an angry man” by banking too much on his goodwill and understanding. I owed this man a lot, and it was rude and inconsiderate of me to belittle his Guru like that. I sincerely apologize for it, and I hope to repair it a little bit by writing this counter-critique. Yet, at the same time, I cannot help noticing that this incident at the personal level is a very small part of the very large tragedy wilfully wrought for decades on end by the RSS leadership, including Golwalkar. There cannot bet wo opinions about the idealism and loyalty of numerous RSS men; but the leadership has channeled this enormous reservoir of constructive energies towards nothing better than the RSS itself. What their own rank and file had assumed to be a service to Hindu civilization, is diverted away from that goal. If the RSS had not existed, many of those activists would not have found an outlet fort heir dedication to the Hindu cause. Yet, many others would have set up their own initiatives, and the net result is that the Hindu cause ould have advanced much further than where it has landed uder RSS tutelage. India’s unitary structure Ramachandra Guha raises the issue of the Constitution’s place in the Hindu Nationalist scheme of things: “Narendra Modi may swear that the Indian Constitution is his only holy book, but his guruji, Golwalkar, believed that document to be deeply flawed and that it must be rejected or at least redrafted”. The logical conclusion would be that after fifty years, Golwalkar’s ideas have given way to new ideas. That Modi, in spite of his personal veneration for his Guruji, had evolved away from Golwalkar’s opinions. But instead, the same way committed Muslims always go back to the Quran and live as if in 7th-century Arabia, Guha expects Modi to live by the old book, without any changes. Guha quotes Bunch of Thoughts: "The framers of our present Constitution also were not firmly rooted in the conviction of our single homogeneous nationhood." He thinks Golwalkar “was angry that India was constituted as a Union of states, for in his view the federal structure would sow ‘the seeds of national disintegration and defeat’.” The framers did indeed sow the seeds of divisive politics steered by sectional interests, though not with their purely symbolic definition of India. On the other hand, their responsibility should not be exaggerated: a good political structure is not all-powerful and cannot indefinitely prevent the eruption of divisive tendencies. Golwalkar’s obsession with this “single homogeneous nationhood” is historically incorrect, but so is the Constitution’s claim that “India is a Union of States”. An example of a union of states is the European Union, where separately existing countries threw in their lot together. Or the budding United States, where thirteen separate British colonies, upon their gaining independence, formed a union. In India, even the nominally independent princely states were effectively part of British India, so the Indian Republic was but a continuation of an existing unitary political entity. According to Guha, “Golwalkar wanted the Centre to be all-powerful. Modi may now speak of the virtues of co-operative federalism, but his guru, Golwalkar, wrote of the need ‘to bury deep for good all talk of a federal structure of our country’s Constitution’.” Here again, we see that Modi simply, and quite normally, doesn’t follow the Book written by Golwalkar. In this respect, though, Modi does stand in a Hindu tradition and even a BJP tradition, from which Golwalkar was deviating. Ancient Hindu empires had to respect each vassal-state’s swadharma: it had its own ways, and even the inclusion i a larger political structure should not interrupt that vassal-state’s attachment to its distinctive ways. As for modern India and the BJP, the AB Vajpayee government split the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh to give political expression to the relative distinctiveness of the Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Uttarkhand areas. It also extended recognition as official language to several “tribal” languages. Like in some other respects, Golwalkar’s and the RSS’s view deviates from the wise Hindu attitude encapsulating the wisdom of millennia. Modi sets an example for all RSS followers by abandoning the pro-monolithic Golwalkar view and re-embracing the Hindu tradition of pluralism and differentiation. An unexpected positive side to Golwalkar’s stand is that it is more democratic in spirit than Modi’s or anyone else’s veneration for the Constitution: "Let the Constitution," he insisted, "be re-examined and re-drafted, so as to establish [a] Unitary form of Government." Regardless of his doubtful concern for the unitary form of government, he very correctly refused to worship the Constitution. In a democracy, laws are a human product, which we can choose to keep unchanged or to amend. They are not above us, we ourselves make them. Modi had better stop treating the Constitution as holy writ and give it a critical look to see for himself that some articles in there are undesirable and in need of being amended.      Conclusion Ramachandra Guha concludes thus: “No one who reads Bunch of Thoughts can reach a conclusion other than the one the (entirely representative) quotes offered above suggest -- namely, that its author was a reactionary bigot, whose ideas and prejudices have no place in a modern, liberal democracy. If ever the prime minister has the courage to give an unscripted, no-holds-barred press conference, the first question an honest journalist should ask him would be, ‘Sir, how do you reconcile your (long-standing) admiration for Golwalkar on the one hand with your (new-found) respect and regard for Ambedkar and Gandhi on the other?’" Guha’s passing assurance of representativeness is false. Just as has happened in the usual references to Golwalkar’s book We, here too passages have been cherry-picked for the virtue of making him look bad. Bunch of Thoughts is a repetitive and mediocre book, but is on the whole rather harmless. It rarely raises the reader’s indignation. If it were not like that, i.e. if things with the book were as bad as Guha claims, then this indictment of the book would at once be a serious indictment of its faithful readers. And not just of its actual readers, a minority of RSS activists, but of everyone alleged by Guha to be an obedient reader, including Narendra Modi. Now to the contents of Guha’s advice to Modi. It is a doubtful trait of Hinduism that in can reconcile contrasting entities. At best, this means finding common ground underneath a seeming opposition. But often it means untruthfully papering over real conflicts of interest. Hence Guha’s suspicion that Modi juxtaposes these three characters on his home altar yet is unable to reconcile their worldviews. To reconcile Golwalkar with Gandhi is not so bizarre, they actually have fundamental traits in common, as argued above. To reconcile Ambedkar with Gandhi is already harder, though this is a couple whose like-mindedness Guha seems to take for granted; in fact, they had a sharp conflict between them, which neither of them had with Golwalkar. Not only was their outlook on both religion and modernization very different (rationalist versus crassly sentimental), but they actually clashed on what to Guha is clearly the most important topic in the universe: caste. However, the real challenge here is to reconcile Ambedkar with Golwalkar. Well, first off, they were both ardent nationalists. Even when Ambedkar collaborated with the foreign occupiers of his country by serving on the Viceroy’s Council, he did so because in his judgment, British rule was best for his country, and in particular for his own Depressed Castes constituency. It is to Jawaharlal Nehru’s credit that he took Ambedkar, who had been his opponent during the Freedom Struggle, into his first national cabinet so that the country could avail of his service. His rejection of the Christian missionary seduction in favour of Swadeshi Buddhism was nationalist par excellence. It did not endear him to Golwalkar in so far as we know, but it won him the sympathy of the later RSS including Narendra Modi. To some, this element of nationalism is less essential, but to RSS men, it is all-important. Secondly, while Ambedkar was more emphatically egalitarian than Golwalkar, the latter’s nationalism equally had egalitarian implications. In the feudal system, the nobility was not tied to a nation. Till today, the remaining royal dynasties in Europe are biologically the most pan-European families. By contrast, the commoners were mostly tied to a particular nation and easily rallied around the banner of the modern nation-states. Moreover, nationalism allowed those commoners to feel equal to their upper-class compatriots. And historically, it is nationalism, frst through the initiative of Otto van Bismarck, that created a social security system and its consequent strong bond of self-interest between the commoners and their nation. Likewise, even if Golwalkar was a Brahmin (and already for that reason fated to be forever hated by the Ambedkarites and the foreign India-watchers in their pocket), he advocated a common identification of everyone with the nation, regardless of caste. Contrary to the secularists’ hazy assumption, Hindu Nationalism is distinct from Hindu Traditionalism, and the central point of contrast is precisely caste. Genealogically, in the 1920s Hindu Nationalism sprang from Hindu reformism as incarnated in the Arya Samaj, intended as a stalwart Hindu movement (“back to the Vedas!”), but emphatically anti-caste. The foundational insight of this Vedic egalitarianism was that Vedic society had no castes,-- which is accurate at least for the age of the Rg-Vedic Family Books. Several leading early Hindu Nationalists had been Arya Samajis. The main self-imposed task of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS was Hindu “self-organization”, Sangathan. This was the practical application of Swami Shraddhananda’s book Hindu Sangathan, Saviour of the Dying Race (1924). If one book can make you understand modern Hindu activism in general, of which Hindu Nationalism and a fortiori the RSS is only one current, it is that one, far more than Bunch of Thoughts. But Swami Shraddhananda, murdered by a Muslim in 1926, had been a radically anti-caste Arya Samaji.    Undoubtedly, Ramachandra Guha’s comment has the merit of drawing attention to Guru Golwalkar’s main political manifesto. However, to a moderate extent, it suffers from the main flaws of the Nehruvian depiction of Hindu Nationalism. Based on a very hazy knowledge of the facts on the ground within the Hindu movement, it cultivates a stereotypical enemy-image. It also conflates very distinct strands, such as Hindu traditionalism vs. Hindu reformism, and anachronistically takes past states of affairs to be still in force. It further imagines the Hindu movement to be a powerhouse and fails to realize its weaknesses.

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