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21 February 2006
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SANITISING THE SUPREMO !
ON THE BIRTH ANNIVERSARY OF GOLWALKAR GURUJI
by Subhash Gatade
[In George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984 the Rulers of Oceania, by their
language of newthink and process of doublethink, convinced the masses
that statements formerly considered irrational were rational. In other
words, virtual reality became actual reality. The Party’s slogans,
accepted by the ruled, were “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery”, and
“Ignorance is Strength” . Our US Rulers seem to have us well along these
same paths, with new realities surfacing each year. ..
Luis Posada Carriles: When Injustice is Justice , Tom Crumpacker ,
Monday, 17 October 2005]
RSS, the biggest 'cultural' organisation on the face of the earth has
had five supremos 'Sarsanghchalaks' since its
inception. Starting from founder member Hedgewar and leading upto KS
Sudarshan the present incumbent, the interregnum was filled by
Golwalkar, Deoras and Rajendra Singh. If one takes a synoptic view of
each of these periods then one can definitely discern the definitive
impact each of them has had on the organisation. Ofcourse none of them
proved as controversial as the second incumbent namely Madhav Sadashiv
Golwalkar whose birth centenary is being celebrated by his followers
this year.
Plans are afoot to have year long activities which would begin from
February 24 with a grand inaugural function in Nagpur. And the
concluding ceremony of the celebration has been planned in New Delhi on
February 18, 2007. A team of 122 members, belonging to different spheres
of social life, besides 53 prominent saints and spiritual leaders of the
country as patrons, has been constituted for the birth-centenary year
celebrations.
It has been decided to have 'social harmony' (samajik samrasta) as
central theme of the year long celebrations during which “Hindu rallies
will be organised at the block level all over the country. Meetings of
caste and religious leaders will also be held with the objective of
promoting social harmony. Seminars, symposia, lectures, etc. will also
be organised to propagate the ideas and vision of Shri
Guruji.”(Organiser 29, 2006) Reports coming in from MP tell us that a
film on the life and times of Golwalkar is also under preparation which
would be ready by the end of March. Recently a children's magazine
coming out of the same state which has a vast network also published a
special issue of the same which was released by vice president Shekhawat.
Coming to Golwalkar, his biographers tell us that Madhav Sadashiv
Golwalkar got the alias Guruji for his brief stint in the zoology
department of Banaras Hindu University in the early thirties as a
teacher. We are also told that he was a latecomer to the RSS, as he was
more keen to undertake a spiritual journey via the Ramakrishna
Mission.Despite his late entry to the organisation, he earned the
confidence of the founder-member Hedgewar in a very short time
supposedly because of his brilliance and sharpness of logic. It was
logical that when the supremo breathed his last, he left a note asking
his followers to make him the next Supremo.(1940) Golwalkar carried on
with this responsibilities for a span of 33 years till his death, a
period which saw lot of turmoil within the organisation and also
witnessed a consolidation and expansion of the same via a network of
organisations.
Insiders to the organisation as well as many external wathchers agree to
the fact that he could be considered the key figure who provided a
theoretical background to the project of Hindutva and laid down the
seeds of the vast organisational network. As of now the plethora of
anushangik ( affiliated) organisations which owe allegiance to the
ideology of Hindutva would run in hundreds, each catering to a section
of society. Scholars as well as activists, who may posit themselves
diametrically opposite vis-a-vis the weltanshauung of this Hindu
Supremacist organisation , also need to study in detail the way an
organisation which was on the margins of Indian society for a long time
could reach the centrestage of Indian politics. One still remembers how
RSS people were made a butt of jokes in popular culture in Maharashtra
especially --Marathi dramas in late sixties-early seventies - mainly
because of their remaining limited to Brahmins or their insistence on
mechanical style discipline. It is true that this era in RSS history it
is long passe.
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Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar spanned a period in world history which could
be said to be unique in many ways. It was a period when Nazism-Fascism
was ready to swamp the whole of Western Europe, a period when national
liberation struggles in many of the third world countries were near
culmination and the great experiments of Socialist construction
undertaken in Soviet Russia coupled with the rising tide of communist
led militant movements were proving to be a defining characteristics of
the era.
Retrospectively one can say that it was such a juncture in world history
when the old world of feudalism, colonialism, was crumbling down and a
new world was emerging. And it would not be incorrect to state that due
to his peculiar weltanshauung which yearned for building a Hindu Rashtra
based on the ‘glorious traditions of Hinduism’ and which looked towards
Muslims as bigger adversary vis-a-vis British colonialism and which
sought inspiration from the experiments in ‘social engineering’
undertaken by Nazism-Fascism, he completely failed to have a pulse on
the march of history. In fact due to his intrasigence he not only kept
himself personally aloof from the surging anti-colonial struggle but
also did not chalk out any positive programme for his organisation to
participate in it.
As already mentioned the first of his theoretical contributions for the
cause of Hindutva appeared in the form of a pamphlette called ‘We or Our
Nationhood Defined’ ( 1938). It was so straightforward in its
appreciation of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Jews undertaken by Hitler and
such an unashamed proponent of the submergence of ‘foreign races’ in the
Hindu race that later day RSS leaders have tried to create an impression
that the said book was not written by Golwalkar but it was merely a
translation of a book ‘Rashtra Meemansa’ by Babarao Savarkar.
It is a different matter that in his Preface to We or Our Nationhood
Defined dated March 22, 1939, Golwalkar himself described Rashtra
Meemansa as ‘one of my chief sources of inspiration and help. The
American scholar Jean A. Curran who did a full length study on RSS in
early fifties, in his sympathetic book, Militant Hinduism in Indian
Politics: A Study of the RSS (1951) confirms that Golwalkar’s 77-page
book was written in 1938 when he was appointed RSS General Secretary by
Hedgewar and he calls it as RSS’s ‘Bible’.A. G. Noorani in his famous
book ' The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour, {Pgs. 18-39} Leftword
Books) also tells us that :Rajendra Singh and Bhaurao Deoras made an
authoritative statement on that book in Para 10 of their 1978
application: ‘With a view to give a scientific base to propagate the
idea India being (sic) historically from time immemorial a Hindu Nation,
late Shri M.S. Golwalkar had written a book entitled, “We or Our
Nationhood Defined”,’ In Para 7 they ‘placed on record’ his book Bunch
of Thoughts (1966) in order ‘to clarify and understand the true purpose,
the exact nature, the ambit and scope of the RSS work… and its activities.’
A quote from the 77 paged book would be opportune at this moment.
“The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and
language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion,
must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race
and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must loose their separate
existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly
subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s
rights. There is, at least, should be, no other course for them to
adopt. We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do
deal, with the foreign races, who have chosen to live in our country”.
( Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar’s, We or Our Nationhood Defined)
A third arena where Golwalkar proved much behind his times was his love
for Manusmriti’s edicts. When leaders of newly independent India were
struggling to have a constitution which was premised on the
inviolability of individual rights with special provisions of positive
discrimination for millions of Indians who had been denied any human
rights quoting religious scriptures, it was Golwalkar again who espoused
the same Manusmriti as independent India’s constitution.'Organiser' (
November 30, 1949, p.3) the organ of RSS complained :
But in our constitution there is no mention of the unique constitutional
developments in ancient Bharat. Manu's laws were written long before
Lycurgus of Sparta or Solon of Persia. To this day laws as enunciated in
the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous
obedience and conformity. But to our constitutional pundits that means
nothing.
When attempts were made under the stewardship of Ambedkar and Nehru in
late fourties to give limited rights to Hindu women in property and
inheritance through the passage of the Hindu Code Bill , Golwalkar and
his associates had no qualms in launching a movement opposing this
historic empowerment of hindu women which was to take place for the
first time in history. Their contention was simple : This step is
inimical to Hindu traditions and culture.
One can go on innumerating instances to communicate the ideological
limitations of the Golwalkarian project which acted as a hindrance to
the building of modern India. It is clear to any impartial observer
that, the way he tried to divide a wedge between the broad unity of the
Indian people on the basis of religion , the way he lauded experiments
in ethnic cleansing in Western Europe and the way he glorified
Manusmriti till the end of his lfe, demonstrate that his project was
essentially inimical to the cause of social harmony.
It is a different matter that despite espousing a sectarian agenda the
Golwalkarian project of remaking of Indian society continued to move
ahead albeit slowly. The 'success' of the Golwalkarian project in
winning over a chunk of our society to its side definitely demands a
separate treatment which is beyond the purview of this short note.
0 0
For the followers of Golwalkar the birth anniversary of one of their
Pratasmaraniya ( worth remembering in the morning) icons has also been
an occasion to revisit that period during which the second supremo held
sway. And surprisingly they are not finding themselves much comfortable
with it for various reasons. It is evident in the way in which on the
one hand they are lauding him for his 'contributions' but are also
simultaneously engaged in surreptiously sanitising him and presenting
him before the guillible public under a more acceptable, humane face.
Ofcourse not that they have second thoughts about the vision espoused by
him, rather they have continued to show their adherence to it by
organising the 'successful experiment' in Gujarat in 2002. The only
problem they have is the presentation of the vision. Looking at his
controversial pronouncements from time to time on various issues of
social-political concern and his transcending the 'calculated ambiguity'
on many a occasions which is a hallmark of the organisation which he
built, it is not surprising that he has always come under barrage of
attack from all those people/groups/organisations who differed with the
weltanshaaung of the RSS or who oppose/d the project of Hindutva on
various grounds.
The feverish and foolish attempts undertaken by the Swayamsevaks to show
that Golwalkar was not the author but basically the translator of the
controversial book , the way in which they are engaged in presenting
concocted proofs to show that they did participate in the independence
movement ( while their very own Golwalkar Guruji had the audacity to
make a fun of the tremendous sacrifices made by the people in the anti
colonial struggle)or the way they have dedicated the year long
celebrations in his honour to the cause of 'social harmony' all goes to
show their keenness to present the Second Supremo in a Sanitised form.
It was Ben Johnston, who divides history into three categories :
Remembered history, recovered history and inverted history. Independent
analysts have produced tonnes of literature to prove how the loyal
soldiers of the Guruji were engaged in 'inverting history' during their
six year tenure at the centre. Ofcourse nobody could have had the
premonition then that a day would come when they would unashamedly
'invert their own history'. The way we are being presented with a
repackaged Golwalkar just goes to show that their 'mission rewriting
history' is really endless.