My father was in RSS, why I dread men in khakhi knickers
The Hyderabad and JNU fracas reveal Sangh’s fascist bent in bold relief.
After watching the last of the films I
had chosen to during the recently-ended Bangalore International Film
Festival, I was walking back home and on a large playground southeast of
the mall where the week-long event was held, I felt what struck me as
something akin to dread and even terror.
An RSS man, khaki knicker-clad, was standing and addressing a
group of about 35 to 40 young boys, including some who seemed to be
five- or six-year-olds seated on the bare ground. As I walked by, on the
road, some distance above the playground, I could make out some faint
sounds of chants or prayers.
Why do I say "dread" and "terror"? The thought that lingered
in me was this: apart from prayers and stuff, what sort of Hindutva
poison – and how venomous – was he funnelling into those young kids? As a
late riser and not given to morning walks, I am spared the sight of RSS
"shakhas". And so this was a relatively unusual spectacle for me even
though I am aware that tens of thousands, if not more, of such "shakhas"
plague many parts of India.
Also, it brought back, rather vividly, memories of an
incident from when I was ten or 11 years old: on a side-street near
where I lived then and live now, I had been accosted by a man who asked
me whether I played anywhere and invited me to join other kids at a
playground next to a temple nearby. I did as bidden. On that playground,
I was told at the outset to hold my right hand at a right angle just
below the heart, with the palm facing down and salute a triangular
saffron flag that I was seeing for the first time.
Unlike in the case of US nationalists who merely hold their
hands covering the upper left part of their chests but keep their heads
high, the RSS volunteer is expected to duck his head. HIS obviously,
there being no female RSS members. I thought that odd.
And the next day I narrated the experience to someone who
was either a schoolmate or friend. How I wish I knew and remembered who
that good soul was and could thank him deeply for a query of his that
was life-altering!
"Don't you know they killed Gandhi?"
If anyone has doubts as to Nathuram Godse's membership of
the RSS and the culpability of his co-conspirator VD Savarkar, whose
portrait now hangs in the central hall of India's Parliament, to its
shame (it was put there during the first NDA regime), kindly consult
Google or some good library. AG Noorani's brilliant writings in this
regard need to be savoured both for legal acumen and argumentation.
Now, there are several opinions on Mahatma Gandhi and
especially after the recent researches and books focusing on his South
Africa years, his reputation has taken a bit of a beating, especially
his failure not only to identify with the black majority and siding with
the white colonisers. Quite apart from his casteism, that is. Be that
as it may, for a young person in the 1960s, Gandhi was "Father of the
Nation". Period.
During my stint in the Kannada-medium school situated right
behind a block housing a Ganesha temple and a Rama temple as well as an
Ubhaya Vedanta Pravarthana Sabha (an outfit dedicated to propagating
Vedanta), I began to note that fervent devotion to assorted deities had
little correlation to the results obtained at the end of annual school
exams.
Seeds of unbelief got sown.
And then my father shifted me overnight to an
English-medium Central School (since renamed Kendriya Vidyalaya),
reserved for children of Central government employees. Among the texts
we had to read in the late 1960s were those by Bertrand Russell, Fred
Hoyle, George Orwell, JBS Haldane (the last named had become an Indian
national), assorted Tagores and others in English.
Predominantly male authors, needless to say. But there were
a few female ones as well among the poets included in English, and in
Hindi that was imposed on us south Indians despite the heroic resistance
by many Tamils who martyred themselves in opposing it in the mid-1960s.
Exposed to such sceptics at an early age, I naturally turned towards a
sceptical view of the world.
Now, whenever I see men in khaki knickers I feel uneasy.
When I was very young, khaki knickers were a subject of much ridicule
and snide remarks. The police in Mysore state (renamed Karnataka) then
wore khaki knickers: baggy ones about five or six times the
circumference of the wearer’s thighs, heavily starched and ironed.
Sensibly, they were dispensed with in favour of trousers, perhaps
starting in the mid- or late-1960s.
The cops had and continue to have a reputation for
squeezing anyone and everyone for massive bribes, so much so that many
circle inspectors' jobs are said to be auctioned by politicians for
astronomical amounts. "Thiganemari", the Kannada for bed bug, was the
name we had for cops then.
And no, it was not as if I was a kid living among
ne'er-do-wells or slum-dwellers: I was very much from a savarna or
dominant or oppressor caste, living in a well-established locality that
is home to a range from lower-middle-class to upper-middle families.
Meaning, we had no trouble from the cops except the traffic
ones who twice dragged me and my bicycle to the police station and made
me cough up Rs 5– a tidy sum in the early 1970s while I was riding to
college. A teenager living in a tiny, single-income home with five
others, riding a bicycle and getting squeezed by a cop for a
“transgression” that got overlooked most of the time except when it came
to filling the particular police station’s monthly quota.
My disgustand pity for the cops is combined with a need to
understand what turns them into monsters, and living as I do back in
Bangalore after a gap of several decades and knowing how they behave
with street vendors, women seeking to complain of attacks, indigent sex
workers, African students and others, it is a work in progress.
No, the khaki knickers that terrify me are the ones now
worn by reportedly increasing numbers of the brainwashed boys and men of
the RSS, mostly dominant/oppressor caste people but there are major and
quite successful efforts underway to recruit Dalits and adivasis by
injecting anti-Muslim and anti-Christian poison into their innocent
brains.
For the record, my now 89-year-old father had once been an
RSS member: whenever I mention this while introducing him to friends of
mine who visit us, he unconvincingly and somewhat under his breath
intones, “Once an RSS member, always an RSS member”, which is obviously
incorrect as quite a few members have woken up and smelt the decaf over
the decades and years, including SH Deshpande, whose most balanced essay
on the issue was once published in the now defunct journal, Quest (and included in the anthology, "Best of Quest", coedited by the Sanskrit scholar Arshia Sattar, author of Lost Loves: Exploring Rama’s Anguish and translator of Valmiki’s Ramayana and Kathasaritsagara into English).
In fact, my father has been, over the past few years, quite
critical of the BJP’s corrupt rule in Karnataka (as well as that of the
Congress) and I believe he voted for other – losing – candidates in the
past two or three occasions.
However, during and immediately after visitations by a
couple of his friends from the same sub-caste and who are virulent khaki
knicker types, his and my 86-year-old mother’s opinions turned
rightwards.
The question for those with faculties about them and not
completely conked out on the Sanghi kool-aid is this: does India want to
remain a mostly peaceful, tolerant, accepting land as it has been for
millennia or do the khaki-knicker-wearers have other plans for it?
Going after Dalits as in the case of Hyderabad University
or Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students with violent attacks
mounted by Sanghi students and lawyers might be minor and hopefully
temporary nuisance seen from a historical perspective but do they want
to try doing what was attempted in Germany and Italy in the last
century?
The Germans and Italians have spent decades cleansing their
body politic of the effects of a few years of storm-troopers’
marauding. Should the Sanghis impose that kind of fascism on India, they
can forget about the country emerging as an influential power in the
comity of nations.
A number of countries are trying to move away from narrow
nationalism and towards coalitions of nation states: people in Europe
have been trying to squeeze out of narrow national confines through the
European Union (EU) – and occasionally failing spectacularly as has been
shown up in the recent crisis over Greece’s debt, not to mention narrow
nationalist sentiments as displayed on football fields – and a far more
modest experiment is underway in Asia – the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (Asean). Take a look at the political map of Africa and
note those straight lines dividing some of those “countries”.
Who drew those lines and when and with whose permission or
lack thereof, and why should peoples living on either side of those
lines be obliged to owe allegiances to anthems, flags and football teams
based on the accident of residence a kilometre/mile or more on this or
that side of those lines?
Getting back to Europe, incidentally, the last film I saw
during the film festival mentioned at the outset was 'Corn Island'
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1863192/), a gently flowing tale of toil by
a farmer chancing upon an island formed seasonally in a river dividing
Georgia and Abkhazia and working hard to grow corn (maize) there and
building a cabin to help guard it, eventually joined by his young
granddaughter who draws unwelcome attention from men in uniform – khaki,
obviously – passing by in motorboats or on a nearby river bank.
What stands out in the film is the near total absence of
dialogue. And when the characters speak at all – very few minutes in
total in the whole film – they are in Abkhaz, Georgian and Russian
languages. Russian, because Abkhazia is something of a Russian
protectorate, though the real situation is more complex than that. The
now defunct Soviet Union’s last foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze was
Georgian as, more importantly, was Joseph Stalin – real surname
Djugashvili.
In the film, the old farmer and his granddaughter are
Abkhaz. They suddenly find a Georgian soldier washed up on their tiny
island, nurse him to health and get visited by both Georgian and Russian
patrol boats full of well-built khaki-clad men who speak to the old,
harmless farmer minding his own humble business in offensive tones.
What I am getting at is the meaninglessness of nationalism,
let alone jingoism around the globe where changing courses of rivers
intervene as question marks over our allegiences and where landmasses
now named China, India or Iran have been homes to rich and continuing
civilisations but in each of which there have been and still are
mind-numbing attempts at suppressing what had stood them in great stead
earlier – acceptance and inclusion.
Our non-human fellow beings, not only migratory birds but
other species as well, have perhaps a wiser understanding of the way
Mother Earth works than the khaki knicker crowd whose professed love for
Mother India papers over blind hatred for far too many of its daughters
and sons based on which imaginary god they worship or don’t.
