EARLY AUGUST LAST YEAR, a cohort of journalists gathered in Kolkata for a two-da

y seminar on Islamic fundamentalism convened by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,

the worlds largest non-political voluntary organisation and the eighty-eight-yea
r-old bedrock of Hindu nationalism in India. This was the first time the RSS, al
so known as the Sangh, had held such a workshopone in a series of four, aimed spe
cifically at journalists, on issues of significance to the organisation, includi
ng politics in Jammu and Kashmir, scheduled castes, and development. Only ideolo
gical devotees were allowed in. According to the RSSs annual report, the four eve
ntsthe others were in Delhi, Bangalore, and Ahmedabaddrew 220 participants from ac
ross the country.
In Kolkata, the RSSs prachar pramukh, or head of promotion, and the chief organis
er of the event, Manmohan Vaidya, laid out the objective: to help journalists un
derstand the nuances of the RSSs position so they could better project the Hindu
nationalist point of view. The participants were instructed that the seminar was
not to be reported on, or talked about outside RSS circles. During some sessions
, we were asked to let it go in one ear and out the other, a journalist and swaya
msevak, or RSS volunteer, who works for a regional newspaper, told me.
At one point, Shrirang Godbole, a homeopathic doctor from Maharashtra who serves
as an Islam pundit within the Sangh, explained that the Muslim community is not
monolithic, but is riven by divisions just like Hindus are by caste. He then ex
pounded on how even benign sects such as Sufism have a violent past. Some of our le
aders pay homage to Sufi saints without proper understanding of history, Godbole
told them, as a slide showing the BJP leader LK Advani at the dargah in Ajmer, R
ajasthan, popped up on a screen. The swayamsevak-journalist said it generated a
lot of laughtereven from Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS sarsanghchalak, or supreme comman
der, who was present throughout the workshop.
The problem is Hindus have started thinking about themselves as minorities, Bhagwa
t later told the group. Hindus should have an aggressive, nationalistic stand.
During a tea break, the journalists got chatting with Bhagwat. Inevitably, the c
onversation veered towards the Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi, who two
months earlier had been chosen, with the backing of the RSS, to spearhead the B
JPs parliamentary election campaign. Modi is the only person who has remained root
ed in the RSS ideology, Bhagwat told the group, adding that the RSS had told part
y leaders, You find good candidateswe will do the rest.
Bhagwat said the journalists should tell BJP leaders that the party must embrace
its core valueshonesty in public life, and service to Hindu society. If they dont
, the party will become irrelevant. If we win in 2014, the BJP can be in power fo
r the next twenty-five years, Bhagwat said. If not, even if all of us try, they ca
nt be saved for the next hundred.
The way he said it, the journalist told me, it felt almost like the RSS is giving t
he BJP one last chance.
MOHAN BHAGWAT is arguably the most powerful outsider in Indian politics today. A
lthough the RSS publicly eschews politics, Bhagwats organisation supplies much of
the ideological and strategic direction, as well as many leaders, to roughly th
ree dozen affiliate groups across India. This includes the countrys largest trade
union, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, which boasts over ten million members; the
countrys largest student union, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad; and the c
ountrys main opposition party, the BJP. The Sangh and its various offshoots, coll
ectively known as the Sangh Parivar, or Sangh family, run more than 150,000 proj
ects across the country, including educational, tribal welfare and Hindu religio
us programmes. The sarsanghchalak is considered the guide and philosopher of the e
ntire movement. Since he was elevated to the post in 2009, Bhagwat has skilfully
rallied the RSS and its affiliates to help the BJP prepare for and fight what h
ave become the most significant elections since 1971, when Indira Gandhi took th
e Congress party to a massive victory and consolidated her personal power.
Bhagwats comments in Kolkata captured a large part of what now seems to be at sta
ke: the ascendancy of the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate, Modiand theref
ore of the RSSs vision for India as a Hindu nation. But they also reflected long-
standing frictions between the RSS and its most conspicuous offspring. For two d
ecades, since the climactic destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the s
ubsequent establishment of the first BJP-led government, there has been a wideni
ng chasm between the RSS, whose full-time members are supposed to practice a cel
ibate austerity meant to keep them singularly focused on the fulfilment of the o
rganisations aims, and the leaders of an increasingly fractured BJP, who are ofte
n seen to be lusting after modern luxuries and personal power. Many in the party
believe that the RSS does not understand politics. The Hindutva element of the p
arty has increased over the years, a senior BJP leader and former cabinet ministe
r in the partys National Democratic Alliance government told me. People with inade
quate political understanding are pitchforked into the party. For their part, RSS
leaders contend that the party has compromised its ideology and strayed too far
from RSS influence.
The reality, however, seems to be that the RSS and the party need each other if
they are to thrive, or perhaps even survive. Although Modi has been the focal po
int for much of the media debate about the BJPs chances of success, Bhagwat, more
than anyone else, may govern the partys fortunes. The Sangh family has a highly
disciplined volunteer army that is the envy of every political outfit in the cou
ntry, and the BJP understands that it would be severely crippled without the sup
port of this force. At the same time, Bhagwat appears to realise that the RSSs be
st chance of achieving its goalsassimilating Indian society to a particular set o
f Hindu norms, and achieving Param Vaibhav, or ultimate glory, for Bharat (as th
e organisation prefers to call India) by making it the vishwa guru, or guide to
the worldis with the active support of a strong, sympathetic government. As one j
oint general secretary of the RSS put it, as long as no party in India is in a po
sition to get at least 40 percent of the votes or a two-thirds majority, you cant
get anything done.
Although Bhagwat seemed to imply in Kolkata that he is giving the BJP a final sh
ot, the RSS, too, has been battling with problems that strike at the core of its
existence. Since its inception in 1925, the organisations central pillar has bee
n the shakha system of local branches, where volunteers are trained and potentia
l full-time workers, or pracharaks, are recruited; some young swayamsevaks begin
attending shakhas soon after they learn to walk. The RSS has an impressive fort
y-five thousand of these branches nationwide, of which two thousand reportedly s
prouted up during the first quarter of this year. But several people within the
Sangh family, including a swayamsevak who is also a former Madhya Pradesh state
minister, told me that, in recent years, many of these branches were thinly atte
nded; the organisation struggled to attract child volunteers and full-time worke
rswho must dedicate their most productive years to the Sangh and are in return as
sured of nothing but a cot to sleep on at an RSS officeespecially in the face of
proliferating career and lifestyle opportunities. Widely reported examples of th
e all-male RSS displaying sexism, homophobia, and religious bigotry have also al
ienated it from less extreme sections of the population.
Perhaps more threatening to the organisation is its reputation for breeding into
lerance and violence among its members, whose actions have led to the RSS being
banned several times by the government. Recent allegations made to The Caravan b
y the Sangh leader Swami Aseemanandthat senior RSS members including Bhagwat sanc
tioned his plot to launch a series of bombings in which 119 people were eventual
ly killed between 2006 and 2008briefly renewed a debate about whether the organis
ation should be allowed to exist at all. (After several attempts to arrange an i
nterview with Bhagwat, Manmohan Vaidya told me it would not be possible, not beca
use of the Caravan story, but because he is not talking to the media until the e
lections are over.)
According to the political analyst and editor of the Hindi weekly Yathavat, Ram
Bahadur Raiwho along with KN Govindacharya was part of the Bihar Chhatra Andolan,
the first RSS-backed political movement (which eventually snowballed into an an
ti-corruption campaign spearheaded by Jayaprakash Narayan against the Indira Gan
dhi government, and culminated in the Emergency)Bhagwat has two tasks before him.
One is to reform the BJP. The other is to reform the Sangh.
To a great extent, Bhagwat has already begun to stall the drift in the Sangh fam
ily. In the five years he has headed the RSS, he has displayed a remarkable prag
matism in the way he combines authority and persuasion to govern the organisatio
n and its offshoots. He has clawed back a significant amount of control over var
ious affiliates, reining in openly militant arms such as the Vishwa Hindu Parish
ad and the Bajrang Dal. Shakhas have begun to modernise, with training sessions
now occurring at more (and more convenient) times, and even being conducted over
the internet, for RSS members abroad. The organisations prachar vibhag, or publi
city division, has gone into overdrive, creating a powerful presence on social m
edia. Bhagwat has also deepened the RSSs influence in the BJP, helping to choose
party presidents, mobilise Sangh workers and volunteers ahead of the elections,
and smooth the way for Modis ascent.
Modi, who joined the RSS at age eight and once served as the organisations offici
al liaison within the BJP, has also been a boon to, and a lodestar for, the Sang
h. In the persona of the Gujarat chief ministerwho projects a masculine Hindu pri
de while seeming to embrace a pragmatic economic philosophy and sporting a Movad
o watch, Bulgari spectacles, and Montblanc pensthe RSS may have found a way to re
solve, or at least dissipate, the tensions between its ethos and the exigencies
of contemporary political life. He has also helped to fire up the Sangh cadre.
Bhagwat has just over a decade before he turns seventy-five, the Sanghs unofficia
l retirement age. Coincidentally, that will be in 2025, the RSS centenary. Betwe
en now and then, the organisation has planned a three-phase strategy aimed at ex
panding its work. Although the details of the strategy are not known, the phases
recall a credo articulated by the RSSs third sarsanghchalak, MD Balasaheb Deoras: O
rganisation, mobilisation, and action! The RSS says its nearing the end of stage o
ne; it seems that the next step, for which Bhagwat has been preparing the ground
, is to win political power. If the BJP becomes dominant in the next government,
the Sangh juggernaut will likely begin rolling, entering a period of potentiall
y unprecedented activity to fulfil its broader social goals. As Deoras once put
it, Organisation does not continue ad infinitum.
|TWO|
ON FRIDAY, 13 September, a month after the Kolkata workshop, Modi was officially
named the BJPs prime ministerial candidate. At the beginning of October, Vidya S
ubrahmaniam wrote an opinion piece in The Hindu titled The forgotten promise of 1
949, in which she argued that Modis appointment showed that the RSS had reneged on
a guarantee in its constitution, written in 1949, to keep out of politics. A fe
w weeks later, the Congress minister P Chidambaram told a public rally in Tamil
Nadu that the 2014 general elections were going to be a Mahabharath yudh, an epic
war, between his party and the RSS, an organisation that has all along claimed to
be non-political but chose to take indirect control of its political face.
The former NDA cabinet member with whom I spoke told me of a common saying in th
e BJP: soochna aai, sochna bandhthe direction has come from the RSS, so stop thinki
ng. But the RSS has always maintained that politics and politicking are not its
proper work, even though it admits, sometimes grudgingly, that it shares an ideo
logy, advice-on-demand and workers with the BJP. At least half a dozen senior RS
S leaders, including the national executive member Madan Das Devi, who was forme
rly the Sanghs official liaison to the BJP, told me that the RSS has nothing to d
o with the partys internal affairs, and that the BJPs decisions are the BJPs alone.
LK Advani, once a full-time RSS worker, has compared the RSSBJP relationship to
the one between Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress.
All of this makes the RSSs open involvement in the partys current election campaig
n a significant aberration. Around the time of Chidambarams rally, about three hu
ndred RSS pracharaks gathered in Amravati, Maharashtra, for an informal RSS bait
hak; the main topic of discussion at the meeting was the Lok Sabha elections of
2014. It was clearly stated and unanimously agreed that the Sangh family had to
come to power. A few days later, I met the deputy to one of the RSSs national lea
dersas well as regional domains, there are roughly a dozen national streams in RS
S work, including physical training, organisation and promotionat Keshav Kunj, th
e organisations regional headquarters in Jhandewalan, Delhi. He ridiculed Subrahm
aniams article (What is the RSS constitution? Most people in the RSS have not seen
it. I am sure most swayamsevaks are not even aware that we have a constitution.)
and readily agreed with Chidambaram that these elections are essentially an ide
ological clash between the Congress and the RSS. He compared the current politic
al moment to the period before the Emergency: The situation in the country is ver
y similar to those days and we are gearing up to fight it.
Since then, the RSS has carried out a massive mobilisation of its volunteersthe bi
ggest since Emergency, the deputy told me. Thousands of its workers are on the gr
ound registering voters, updating electoral rolls and campaigning door-to-door t
o achieve 100 percent voting. Officially, Sangh volunteers are not allowed to ca
nvas for any particular party, but this is an order honoured mostly in the breac
h. One swayamsevak I spoke with in Delhis Sarojini Nagar area said he went around
to nearly four hundred houses handing out a flyer on important issues: one side
of the sheet discussed urban economic concerns, such as roads and utilities; th
e other side touched on the RSSs pet political themes, including terrorism, Pakis
tan, and flying the tricolour at Lal Chowk in Srinagar. The sheet also read, Do you
know who has achieved all of it? One ordinary man in Gujarat. After handing it o
ut, we would tell people to vote for Modi, the swayamsevak said.
Bhagwat has said that the RSS actively participated in only four previous genera
l elections: at the end of the Emergency, in 1977; and in the three elections in
the second half of the 1990s, when the BJP came to power. But he has also long
acknowledged the importance of politics to the RSSs mission. In an unpublished in
terview from the early 1990s, perhaps his first ever, he told the documentary fi
lmmaker Lalit Vachani that the Sangh gets into politics whenever political devel
opments are adversely affecting the future of the nation; its objective, Bhagwat s
aid, is only to give the right direction to political happenings, and then it wit
hdraws.
The RSSs ambiguous relationship with politics, and by extension with the BJP, has
its origins in the RSSs early decades, long before the founding of the party, in
1980. Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar formed the RSS, in 1925, to create a large poo
l of disciplined, physically strong leaders who would provide direction to Hindu
society. Hedgewar modelled his organisation on the British army, with a similar
uniform and training in armed and unarmed combat.
Devendra Swaroop, the former editor of Panchajanya, the RSSs Hindi mouthpiece, to
ld me that the organisation has a split personality that goes back to Hedgewar. He
was a political man through and through, Swaroop said when I met him at his modes
t home in East Delhi. But he had also created the RSS as a time-bound organisatio
n that was supposed to dissolve into society after achieving its goals. He did not
see it continuing beyond twenty-five years.
Swaroop said, the crisis of goal started in the RSS after Independence, because t
he goal of Independence was achieved without RSS. In this period, a combination o
f influential leadership and historical cataclysm forced the organisation away f
rom a direct engagement with politics. The highly revered second sarsanghchalak,
MS Golwalkar, took over in 1940 and subsequently became venerated as Guruji. (Hed
gewar briefly handed the RSS over to LV Paranjape in 1930, but Paranjape is usua
lly not included in the reckoning of its chiefs.) Golwalkar saw the RSS as prima
rily a social, cultural, and even spiritual body that ought to shun politics, an
d he kept it out of the anti-colonial Quit India movement. This apolitical stanc
e solidified in 1949, when the government lifted a ban on the organisation (whic
h was imposed after the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, the previous year, by
members of a Sangh affiliate). The RSS reciprocated with the promise made in its
constitution.
Ever since, the RSSs involvement with politics has often been at arms length in pu
blic, but intimate and complex behind the scenesmainly because most of the top le
aders of the now defunct Bharatiya Jana Sangh party, founded in 1951, and later
of the BJP, came from and owed their primary allegiance to the RSS.
Unlike Golwalkar, subsequent sarsanghchalaksparticularly Golwalkars successor, Deo
ras, who was chief for twenty years beginning in 1973embraced official power as a
necessary instrument in the achievement of the RSSs aims. Deoras was an acutely
political man who understood the potential of the RSSs highly disciplined volunte
er force and wanted to use it to influence the countrys politics. When the organi
sation assumes a certain strength or mass, he once theorised, the manpower put to a
ction in the various fields of national life creates the desirable change.
While Golwalkar was chief, Deoras had abandoned the RSS for at least half a doze
n years because of a dispute with the sarsanghchalak over the organisations direc
tion. As soon as he took over, Deoras plunged the Sangh family into several poli
tical agitations, including the one that led to the Emergency. Afterwards, the p
olitical scientist Pralay Kanungo writes in his book RSSs Tryst with Politics, De
oras realised that to remain in the mainstream of national politics the RSS had to
publicly opt for the politics of accommodation. This realpolitik led the Sangh to m
erge its political arm, the Jan Sangh, into the ideologically diverse Janata Par
ty in 1977.
In the past fifteen years, first in the powerful post of RSS general secretary a
nd then as chief, Bhagwat, too, has worked hard to assert the organisation in th
e political sphere, and to contain the conflicts between it and the BJP. That th
e party is now so openly reliant on the RSS is partly a mark of his profound inf
luence. Many Sangh veterans told me that Bhagwatwhose father and grandfather were
both RSS members and whose walrus moustache gives him an uncanny resemblance to
Hedgewarhas picked up where Deoras left off.
DEORASS BELIEF THAT electoral politics could help the RSS refashion the nation in
the organisations own image got its first major test in the late 1990s, when the
BJP came to power at the head of an NDA government led by the RSS swayamsevak A
tal Bihari Vajpayee. Ironically, the BJPs years in power proved to be difficult o
nes for the RSS, as the partymade popular by a vigorous economy, and a dynamic fo
reign policy that projected supremacy over Pakistan and reset relations with the
United Stateselevated itself above its parent organisation.
From its inception, the RSSs emphasis on Hindu exceptionalism had brought it into
conflict with the brand of secularism espoused by the then dominant Congress. W
hen the Jan Sangh was resurrected as the BJP, in 1980, the party explicitly adop
ted Gandhian socialism as its guiding principle in order to keep allegations of
communalism at bay. In the 1984 general elections, the BJP was reduced to two se
ats in parliament; many believed that the RSS had refused to campaign for the pa
rty and even voted for the Congress.
In the following years, the BJP embraced Hindutva when it saw the amount of publ
ic support the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad attracted during the movement t
o build a Ram temple in Ayodhya. In June 1989, the BJPs national executive met at
Palampur in Himachal Pradesh. It passed a resolution drafted by Advani that for
mally put the party at the vanguard of the movement, thereby paving the way for
the most communally divisive period in the history of India since Partition. Fro
m that day, the BJP, which had been one among many galleons in the RSS armada, b
ecame the flagship of the Sangh in the public imagination.
Riding on the temple movement and the mobilisation of Sangh cadres, the BJP capt
ured power in 1996, for thirteen days. In 1998, it formed an alliance government
, which lasted for thirteen months, exploded a nuclear weapon and fought a war w
ith Pakistan. After the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP-led National Democrati
c Alliance began five years of rule during which the government redirected Indias
economic and foreign policy. But Vajpayee, who was prime minister in all of the
se governments, practically ignored the Sangh agenda of building a Ram temple, i
ntroducing a uniform civil code and repealing Kashmirs quasi-autonomous status un
der Article 370. The former NDA cabinet minister told me that the prime minister
gave RSS leaders adequate izzat but set his own course.
Vajpayee demonstrated his independence from the RSS early in his premiership. On
6 August 1999, four pracharaks were kidnapped from a Sangh-run student hostel i
n Tripura and taken to a camp in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The RSS blamed the Bapt
ist Church and separatist insurgents of the National Liberation Front of Tripura
, and pressured the government to send troops across the border. But both Vajpay
ee and the home minister, Advani, were reluctant to create an international situ
ation, and the government never took military action.
Eventually, all four pracharaks were found murdered. Bhagwat, who had just been
appointed the RSSs general secretary, lashed out: From the day of their abduction,
the RSS has been trying hard to get them released. But its desperation was reci
procated by the union and state governments insensitivity.
A slower burning but ultimately more incendiary conflict ignited over the Ram te
mple movement. Madan Das Devi told me about a meeting at the prime ministers resi
dence, early in the NDAs term, at which he, Vajpayee, Advani, the RSS sarsanghcha
lak Rajendra Singh (who took over from Deoras in 1994), the RSS joint general se
cretary KS Sudarshan (who would take over from Singh in 2000) and the Vishwa Hin
du Parishad leader Ashok Singhal were present. Singhal really fired into Advani, D
evi said. The feeling was that the Ayodhya land could have been given to the VHP.
The VHP leadership felt the NDA government belonged to them, and was letting dow
n the causethat the swayamsevaks and pracharaks in the government had ditched the
ir ideology and roots. One of the leaders of the government at the time said, Why
are we calling ourselves a party with a difference? We are the Congress with a t
inge of saffron, KN Govindacharya, who was then a party general secretary, told me
.
After Sudarshan became sarsanghchalak, those in the RSS themselves began to belie
ve that the BJP leaders had become bigger than them, Sudhir Pathak, the soft-spok
en former editor of the RSSs Marathi newspaper, Tarun Bharat, told me. A decade e
arlier, at the height of the Ram temple movement, the RSS leadership had seniori
ty and authority over the BJP. But by 2000, that was no longer the case; Advani,
the second most powerful person in the party, became a full-time member of the
RSS far before the new chief did. For the first time, there was a tussle over wh
o should guide whom.
Within the BJP, Sudarshan, who was considered autocratic and whimsical, was an u
npopular choice to lead the Sangh. Dilip Deodhar, a businessman in Nagpur, where
the RSS has its national headquarters, grew up in an RSS family, is a long-time
swayamsevak, and has been close with many senior leaders of the RSS; he said th
at when an ill Rajendra Singh first hinted that he was considering Sudarshan as
his successor, in 1998, BJP leaders, including Vajpayee, asked Singh to postpone
the decision. They told the organisations then general secretary, HV Sheshadri,
that it would be difficult to run the government even for a day if Sudarshan becam
e the RSS chief, Deodhar said.
Soon after taking over the RSS, Sudarshan tried to exert himself over the rest o
f the Sangh, including the BJP. Before an RSS function at a stadium in Delhi, fo
r example, he issued instructions that nobody, including the press and NDA minis
ters, should be allowed in if they did not turn up in the RSS uniform, including
the black Gandhi cap, long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up above
the elbow, and khaki shorts. None of the ministersincluding Vajpayee, Advani and
the education minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, all of whom had been swayamsevaks
for several decadesattended. The then BJP president, Kushabhau Thakre, who was wi
dely credited with building up the Sangh in Madhya Pradesh, arrived in the unifo
rm but forgot to bring the bamboo staff that completes it. According to Deodhar,
Thakre was asked to go back.
Delhi was Sudarshans base for much of the time that the NDA was in power. He freq
uently criticised the government in public, and meddled in ministries. In one ch
aracteristic episode, Sudarshan used a combination of Sangh organisational stren
gth and government access to act as a cultural censor. When the director Deepa M
ehta was shooting Water in Varanasi, filming was interrupted by RSS and VHP men
who burnt down sets and shouted slogans against her, Mehtas daughter Devyani Salt
zman wrote in her book Shooting Water. Mehta was asked to get permission from th
e RSS chief in order to continue production; otherwise the protests would carry
on. When she went to the RSS headquarters in Delhi one wintry morning, Sudarshan
came to meet her wearing a heavy shawl, and a saffron balaclava over his face.
He walked up to her and quoted a passage from Dantes Inferno in perfect Italian,
then sat down and told her not to misjudge the RSS.
The Ganga is precious to us, Sudarshan told Mehta.
Have you read the script for Water? Mehta asked. The RSS chief placed a copy of it
on the table. Where did you get that? she said. Only one script had been shared o
utside of the production teamwith the ministry of information and broadcasting.
Sudarshan said, After all, whose ministry is it anyway? He asked Mehta to work wit
h Sheshadri Chari, then the editor of the RSS weekly Organiser, on correcting th
e script.
WITH THE IMPERIOUS SUDARSHAN at the top of the RSS, and an increasingly self-con
fident BJP in power at the centre, relations between the organisation and the pa
rty grew more and more frosty. Following the BJPs shock defeat in the general ele
ctions in summer 2004, the RSS started appointing more of its pracharaks to work
in the party. The acrimony soon became public; in a television interview with t
he Indian Express editor Shekhar Gupta the following year, Sudarshan asked of Va
jpayee and Advani, What have they done for the country? He instead ranked Indira G
andhi as Indias best prime minister.
The RSSs disaffection with the BJP had become so acute that for a time the organi
sation contemplated abandoning the party altogether. Among other things, the RSS
leadership worried that the power-hungry ways and opulent lifestyles of BJP pol
iticians were corrupting swayamsevaks, many of whom were losing interest in Sang
h work. Following the 2004 elections, the RSS top brass, including Sudarshan, Ma
dan Das Devi and MG Vaidya (whose son Manmohan is now the head of promotion) met
at a farmhouse in Jhinjholi, on the outskirts of Delhi, to take stock of the or
ganisations involvement in politics. Many of the leaders, including Sudarshan, fe
lt that the RSSs experiment with politics should come to an end.
Things reached absolute zero when Advani visited Mohammad Ali Jinnahs mausoleum i
n Pakistan, in June 2005, and praised the Muslim leaders secularism. Practically
the entire RSS bayed for Advanis head. Sanjay Joshi, then the party general secre
tary, demanded that Advani abdicate the party presidency. Advani was asked to re
port to the RSSs Delhi headquarters and then convey his resignation at a press co
nference. Instead, he announced his decision to quit to waiting journalists as s
oon as he landed at Delhi airport. Later that year, Advani left the BJPs national
executive meeting in Chennai with a parting salvo: Lately an impression has gain
ed ground that no political or organisational decision can be taken without the
consent of RSS functionaries. This perception, we hold, will do no good either t
o the party or to the RSS.
While practically every leader stood arrayed against Advani, according to a form
er editor at an RSS-sponsored publication, Bhagwat took a soft line, arguing tha
t the RSS should maintain good relations with Indias neighbours, and that the BJP
should retain Advani as a sort of mentor. At the same time, he was quietly push
ing for youngsters to take the party reins.
At a high-level strategy meeting of the RSS in Haridwar around that time, MG Vai
dya and others suggested that the RSS should junk the BJP once and for all and f
loat a new political party. According to Sudhir Pathak, Vaidya declared, We are H
indutvawadis and our party should follow that line. I will create a party based
on Hindutva. He found no takers; Devi told me that a decision was taken to end th
e internal debate and stick with the BJP.
The decision may have been eased by the advent of the new BJP president, Rajnath
Singh. Singh joined the RSS in 1964, at age thirteen, and became a district pre
sident of the Jan Sangh at age twenty-four. As soon as he took charge of the par
ty, be began making conciliatory gestures to the RSS and, in 2006, the BJP amend
ed Article 21 of its constitution to allow RSS workers to hold key positions all
the way down to the district level. The Sanghs prodigal party was beginning to r
eturn.
|THREE|
IN MARCH 2009, just two months before general elections in which the BJP was hop
ing to wrest back power from the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, the R
SS effected a generational shift when Sudarshan chose Bhagwat, then the organisa
tions general secretary, as his successor.
On the day the change of guard happened, Pathak was hanging around the main hall
of the RSSs sprawling Reshimbag campus, in Nagpur, whose Zero Mile was considere
d by the British to be the geographical centre of the country. At the time, the
hall had lattice windows through which he could see the proceedings of the Akhil
Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha, the highest decision-making body of the RSS. Normall
y Mohanji wears kurta and pyjama but that day he was wearing a dhoti, Pathak reca
lled. In characteristic RSS style, the anointment was an unfussy affair. Afterwa
rds, Bhagwat came out of the hall. For a few seconds, he seemed lost, Pathak said.
He could not even find his slippers. Then he regained his composure.
Pathak said that when he later asked him about it, Bhagwat admitted he was stunn
ed for a few moments thinking about the enormity of the role he had inherited: I
was just Mohan Bhagwat for those few seconds. I was thinking whether I will be a
ble to do the job I have been given.
The announcement was sudden, but not totally unexpected. The RSS had begun repla
cing its aging leaders with much younger ones beginning in the late 1990s; altho
ugh this may have been a liability in short-term relations with the BJP, the org
anisation recognised the long-term importance of an energetic leadership. When t
he sixty-eight-year-old Sudarshan was appointed sarsanghchalak, the then general
secretary, HV Sheshadri, told him there were two viable options for general sec
retaryMadan Das Devi or Bhagwat.
Sheshadri and Sudarshan were inclined towards Devi, who understood politics and
was the official RSS point man for overseeing the BJP. But MG Vaidya advised Sud
arshan that it would be prudent for him to put his weight behind Bhagwat. Like a
lmost all RSS decision-making, the selection process was informal, highly consul
tative, and private.
None of us had even heard his name until he became chief, a senior editor at a nat
ional English-language magazine told me. Bhagwat was just fifty-nine.
Mohan Madhukarrao Bhagwat was born on 11 September 1950, in Sangli, Maharashtra,
at his maternal grandfather Annajis home, into a family of Brahmins with close t
ies to the RSS. Bhagwats paternal grandfather, a lawyer from Satara named Narayan
Bhagwat, moved to Chandrapur after his parents died. Narayan, or Nanasaheb, was a
member of the provincial Congress and a schoolmate of Hedgewars at Nagpurs Neel C
ity School, which threw the future RSS founder out for defying British rule and
singing Vande Mataram.
Bhagwats father, Madhukarrao, became an RSS pracharak in the 1940s and worked ext
ensively for the organisation in Gujarat. He eventually decided to marry, but co
ntinued his work with the RSS until Bhagwat was born, after which he enrolled in
law school in Nagpur. Bhagwat is the eldest of three sons and a daughter born t
o Madhukarrao and his wife, Malatibai.
The family was steeped in the values of the Sangh. Three generations of Bhagwats
have held positions of authority in the RSS. After heading the RSS in Gujarat,
Madhukarrao became Chandrapur district chief, a position held by his father befo
re him. Malatibai was a member of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the RSSs womens wing,
and in charge of the Jan Sanghs district womens forum.
In January this year, I met Ravindra Bhagwat, Bhagwats youngest brother, at the f
amily home in Chandrapur, a rapidly expanding Maharashtrian town whose skyline i
s dominated by the portly smokestacks of a 2,340-megawatt super-thermal power st
ation, the biggest pithead electricity generator in the state. Hanging in the li
ving room was a painting of a tiled two-storey house that originally stood where
the large modern buildingwhich includes shop fronts and Ravindra Bhagwats officeis
today. A collection of mementos and trophies, many of them won by Bhagwat in si
nging and theatre competitions, were displayed on a shelf. Ravindra said that wh
en Bhagwat returned from university after graduation he carried a gunnysack full
of medals and trophies.
Bhagwats childhood friend Rajabhau Bhojawar, a former Life Insurance Corporation
employee who still lives in Chandrapur, recalled that Bhagwat and he used to be
very fond of Marathi pulp thrillers, especially those by Baburao Arnalkar, who w
rote novels such as Akrava Avatar (Eleventh Avatar), Sinhagarjana (Lions Roar) an
d Vishwamitri Pech (Vishwamitras Dilemma).
Bhagwat enrolled in the veterinary sciences programme at Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh K
rishi Vidyapeeth in Akola, but since many of the courses were taught at Nagpur U
niversity he spent most of his undergraduate years in the city. He graduated wit
h a gold medal in pathology. Students of veterinary courses had to complete two
years of government service after they graduated; Bhagwat joined the animal husb
andry department in Chandrapur for a couple of months and then transferred ninet
y kilometres east, to Chamorshi, as a veterinary officer.
Sudhir Pathak recalled an inter-university youth camp organised by the Maharasht
ra government in 1970, which was celebrated as International Educational Year. A
bout thirty students each from fourteen universities participated in the three-d
ay programme. Bhagwat started a shakha on the second day. Even then, he could ho
ld forth with authority on Bharatiya culture and tradition. There was no flag, bu
t everything else was like a shakha, Pathak said. About a hundred students attende
d it for two days. The gathering became controversial, and questions were raised
in the Maharashtra assembly over how a shakha could be run at a government progr
amme. The government denied the shakhas existence.
Apart from being a dyed-in-the-wool RSS volunteer, Pathak said Bhagwat was like
any other student, fond of fashion and the latest Bollywood songs. Once, on a bu
s, a girl piped up, arre Mohan, lets hear something, and he readily obliged with Mer
e Samne Wali Khidki Mein, the wildly popular romantic song from the hit movie Pad
osan. Bhagwat also pursued an interest in theatre and poetry, and once represent
ed Nagpur University at a festival in Calicut, performing the Marathi folk art B
haarud, which combines devotional singing and storytelling. He also acted in and
directed plays. Pathak said Bhagwat was a totally different person when he perfor
med.
Bhagwat dropped out of a post-graduate course just before the Emergency to becom
e a full-time RSS worker in Akola. During Indira Gandhis autocracy, he remained u
nderground. Both his parents were jailed. When democracy was restored, he quickl
y rose through the Sangh ranks, heading RSS operations in Nagpur, and then for a
ll of Vidarbha. In the 1980s, he was given charge of RSS operations in Bihar. In
1991, he was promoted to all-India chief of physical training, and was then mad
e pracharak pramukh, the person in charge of overseeing all full-time RSS worker
s.
THE YEAR 1992 WAS A TUMULTUOUS ONE for India. The country was experiencing its o
wn perestroika, launched the previous year by a Congress government led by the w
ily PV Narasimha Rao, only the third Congress member outside the Nehru-Gandhi fa
mily to become prime minister. That April, the revelation of a Rs 4,000-crore st
ock market scam triggered a tsunami of criticism against the capitalist turn the
country had taken. As winter approached, the Sangh family prepared for its kar
seva in Ayodhya, a massive mobilisation of volunteers who were supposed to help
build a temple to Ram at his purported birthplace on the banks of the Sarayu riv
er.
Around the same time, the filmmaker Lalit Vachani arrived in Nagpur to shoot a s
hort film on the RSS. In 1990, Vachani had approached Sudarshan, then a joint ge
neral secretary, to make a documentary on the RSS. A pleased Sudarshan convened
a gathering of about ten shakhas. He was very disappointed to learn it was a radi
o documentary and there were no television cameras, Vachani said. When Vachani re
turned two years later to make his movie, Sudarshan was very enthusiastic. His at
titude was like, where were you guys all these years?
During two months of shooting, Vachani and his production team spent a lot of ti
me at Asha Sadan, an RSS office in a mansion that also functioned as a sort of h
ostel for volunteers. One of the leaders whom Vachani met there was Bhagwat, who
, as the RSSs all-India chief of physical training throughout the 1990s, oversaw
an integral part of character building in the Sangh.
The boys at Asha Sadan simply adored him, Vachani told me over Skype from his home
in Germany. He was like god to them. One day the boys asked Bhagwat to play the f
lute, Vachani recalled. He was terribly out of tune. Yet all the boys praised it
like it was a great performance.
Somewhere midway through Vachanis twenty-seven-minute film, The Boy in the Branch
, Bhagwat explains the logic of a game called Kashmir hamara hai, which is played
in RSS shakhas. In the game, some kids stand in the centre of a circle and try t
o push out others trying to occupy it. The shakha is the life of the Rashtriya Sw
ayamsevak Sangh, Bhagwat says in the film. Now they dont have too much information
about the Kashmir problemArticle 370, acts, etcbut at least awareness is built in
them that Kashmir is ours. It belongs to Bharat.
Vachani made a follow-up documentary eight years later in which he revisited man
y of the same places and figures. In that film, The Men in the Tree, Sudarshan e
laborates on the significance of recruiting young swayamsevaks: Children are pron
e to habit formation. In childhood, they are also influenced by their environmen
t. They are moulded in that environment. From infancy stage to childhood stage,
children are very retentive and malleable and prone to learning good habits. Wha
t you teach them has a lasting impact in their minds. That is why we get childre
n into shakhas from infancy.
Reflecting on the early 1990s, the three main characters in The Men in the TreeSa
ndeep Pathey, Purushottam and Sripad Borikarspeak proudly about their roles in th
e destruction of Ayodhyas Babri Masjid, on 6 December 1992.
I was up on the dome, Borikar says. That was a lifetime achievement. We helped make
history.
The RSS, according to them, had planned the kar seva which led to the demolition
, down to the last detail. Pathey says the preparations were so meticulous that
everything was recordedthe age of each boy, which train he would travel in, the g
roup leader to whom he would report. Even those who ventured to Ayodhya independ
ently had to register with RSS workers. It wasnt possible for just anyone to go th
ere as a temple volunteer, Pathey says.
Borikar recounts, Nagpur had chosen ten men who could face anything. I was one of
them. We worked on the dome with whatever we could lay our hands onrods, sticks
sometimes just rocks. We had only one thing on our mindsdemolish the structure. He
adds, The Muslims will come around to our way of thinking. Gradually, an environ
ment will build up in which they will realise that Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura sh
ould be handed over to Hindus. If Muslims want to live in this country, then they
will have to listen to big brother.
Pathey goes on, If they dont hand it over on their own, then whichever way the Hin
du behaves, they will have to face the consequences.
|FOUR|
AFTER HE BECAME SARSANGHCHALAK, Bhagwats first order of business was to continue
to repair damaged relations with the BJP. He began by dismantling certain conven
tions. Sudarshan did not want to go to Advanis home because he thought, according
to protocol, Advani should come to Jhandewalan, Sudhir Pathak told me. Mohanji sai
d, It doesnt bother me. Ill go to his house. After all, he is elder to me. We can s
olve issues only by talking. Bhagwats childhood friend Bhojawar told me that once w
hen Bhagwat came to lunch at his home, he asked him how he handled Advani. I know
his status and I respect his age and behave accordingly, Bhagwat replied. But I d
ont step back from the issue that I have gone to discuss with him.
Bhagwats approach to the BJP patriarch is characteristic of the way the RSS has o
perated during his timeboth internally and with respect to the partyand is in many
ways a throwback to a civility that existed before Sudarshan became chief. Alth
ough serious differences of opinion exist between the organisation and the party
, and among the RSSs top brass, most are settled through the Sanghs informal, deli
berative process. (There are only two official policy meetings of the RSS each y
ear.) As sarsanghchalak, Bhagwat is immensely influential, but he does not unila
terally impose his will on the BJP or on his own organisation. That said, once d
ecisions are taken, and communicated by the sarsanghchalak, they are considered
final for members of the RSS; no post hoc dissent is tolerated. (There is a sayin
g in the Sangh, a swayamsevak and former journalist who worked on the BJPs recent
Delhi election campaigns told me. If some official announces that goats have thre
e legs, we will prove that it is so.)
Many recent RSS decisions, especially with regard to the functioning of the BJP,
clearly bear Bhagwats impress. On 2 January 2009, as general elections loomed, B
hagwat (who was two months away from being appointed sarsanghchalak), Madan Das
Devi and Suresh Soni travelled to Advanis house for talks with the BJP leadership
. We understand that itll be an NDA and not a BJP government, so you decide what y
ou can do, and what you cannot, vis--vis our core Hindu agenda. The entire Pariva
r is firmly behind you, but there should be more such interactions, Bhagwat said
at the meeting, which lasted several hours, according to an Indian Express repor
t. Bhagwat added that the BJP must ensure that Hinduon ka anadar na hothat the Hind
us are not shown disrespect.
After the BJP lost the elections, Bhagwat began tightening the screws. The India
n Express reported that he told Advani in August, We would like to send a conting
ent of five hundred to seven hundred volunteers to strengthen your organisation
at various levels, but its for you to take a call. First of all, you have to deci
de what kind of ties you wish to have with the RSS.
On the eighteenth of that month, Bhagwat appeared on Times Now for his first int
erview as sarsanghchalak. He laid out five demands that the RSS would make of it
s volunteers in the BJP: uphold the Sangh ideology, uphold the RSS work ethic, m
aintain a continuous dialogue with other organisations where swayamsevaks are work
ing and with those who agree with the BJP, ensure that the BJP is a party with a di
fference regarding character, and bring the young generation along.
BJP as a party has to do this, Bhagwat added. BJP as a party is not run by the RSS.
They have to find a way. Either they have to agree to this or disagree to this.
They are free. But our swayamsevaks always belong to us. We are telling them th
is. Bhagwat also hinted that the next BJP president should ideally be a leader wh
o is not active in Delhi.
A few months later, the appointment of a new BJP chief sent out a clear signal t
hat the RSS was trying to strengthen its grip on the party. According to several
people in the Sangh family, including Dilip Deodhar and the swayamsevak who wor
ked on the BJPs Delhi election campaigns, the first choice was Narendra Modi. Mod
i, however, said he did not want a national role until the 2012 Gujarat election
s were over. Manohar Parrikar, who had been the youngest-ever RSS regional chief
and was then in between terms as Goas chief minister, was briefly discussed, but
he was considered too young to lead the party nationally. Finally, Advani sugge
sted the name of Nitin Gadkari, a Brahmin from Nagpur who has been a swayamsevak
since his teens and served as the partys Maharashtra state president.
Despite concerns about Gadkari, the suggestion was readily accepted by the RSS. G
adkari had two problems, Devendra Swaroop, the former editor of Panchajanya, told
me. The media didnt know him and his style of expressionhis Hindi was relatively po
ordid not match with his national status. But Bhagwat thought he could play an all
-India role.
One of the BJPs first major decisions under Gadkaris watch had the stamp of RSS al
l over it. Barely a week after he was appointed, in December 2009, the results o
f the Jharkhand assembly elections came out; it was a fractured mandate, with th
e BJP and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha getting eighteen seats each, and the Congre
ss and its allies managing twenty-five. A day later, the Jharkhand leaders of th
e RSSs tribal wing, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, were called to Delhi to report on
religious proselytisation in the state. The RSS felt that if the Congress cobble
d together a government, it would give a fillip to Christian conversions. To blo
ck the Congress from power, the BJP decided to tie up with the JMM, even though
many BJP leaders were against it because of allegations of corruption against th
e JMM leader Shibu Soren. The BJP had just fought a Lok Sabha election largely o
n the issue of black money. Sudhir Pathak, and a long-time RSS member with direc
t links to the Jharkhand leadership of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, told me that B
hagwat was the alliances prime mover.
During three years as president, Gadkari alienated many people in both the party
and the Sangh. He drew particularly intense flak for mismanaging the Uttar Prad
esh assembly elections in early 2012. His business group, Purti, came under susp
icion for fraud, and RSS members resented the open show of wealth at the wedding
Gadkari threw for his son, that same year. Why didnt you object when ninety plane
s landed in Nagpur for the wedding? an RSS member and former BJP state minister f
rom Madhya Pradesh said of the Sangh leadership when I met him last November. You
have made moral values secondary.
But Bhagwat backed Gadkari throughout his tenure, and when it was coming to an e
nd, in late 2012, he let it be known that he preferred continuity. Several peopl
e, including Dilip Deodhar and Sudhir Pathak, told me that Bhagwat felt Gadkari
should get a second consecutive term, and that Gadkari need not take personal re
sponsibility for the charges against his companies.
The closer Gadkaris presidency came to ending, the fewer backers he had in the pa
rty and the RSS. Among his remaining allies were MG Vaidya and his son Manmohan,
the RSSs head of promotion. The Vaidyas lobbied Bhagwat; he told them he had tri
ed to retain Gadkari, but that the rest of the RSS and BJP leadership was firmly
against it. Still, Bhagwat encouraged the Vaidyas to try again. According to Di
lip Deodhar, the Vaidyas, without Bhagwat and the general secretary, Suresh Bhaiy
yaji Joshi, met with the RSS senior leadership at the house of Bapu Bhagwat, a Na
gpur-based swayamsevak. The RSS members heard them out, but said little. (Manmoh
an Vaidya denied this meeting took place.)
Finally, on 22 January 2013, income tax officials raided eight locations in Mumb
ai that were associated with Purti group companies. The addresses proved to be b
ogus. That day, Bhaiyyaji Joshi and Advani met with Gadkari in Mumbai, and advis
ed him to step down. He resigned that night. With the blessings of Advani and th
e RSS, Gadkari nominated Rajnath Singh, who had led the partys reconciliation eff
orts with the RSS after Advanis resignation in 2005, to a second term. Singh took
over the following day.
IF SINGH WAS AN ACCEPTABLE THIRD CHOICE for the RSS, Bhagwat would soon get the
BJP leadership he most desired. Even before the party, under Vajpayee and Advani
, lost a second consecutive general election, in 2009, Bhagwat had his eye on a
future prime ministerial candidatethe Rajya Sabha member Pramod Mahajan, a Marath
i Brahmin who became a full-time RSS worker in 1974 and later helped organise Ad
vanis rath yatra. According to the businessman and long-time swayamsevak Dilip De
odhar, between 2000 and 2006, Bhagwat used to secretly meet with Mahajan at the
residence of Dr Vilas Dangre, a famous homeopathic doctor in Nagpur, where they
had lengthy discussions late into the night. Mahajan used to land at Nagpur airpo
rt and slip through the backdoor and meet Bhagwat at Dangres house, Deodhar said.
He added that Bhagwat saw in Mahajan the next BJP leader. (A family member of Ma
hajans confirmed that the two men were close.)
Mahajan was suddenly gunned down by his brother, in 2006. From that point on, ac
cording to Deodhar, Bhagwat began to back Narendra Modi, who had had a hand in o
rganising Advanis Ram temple agitation, and was then serving his first elected te
rm as chief minister of Gujarat. Although Modi was a good organiser and had stro
ng ideological credibility, many in the Sangh leadership were opposed to him, an
d he was under criminal investigation in connection with the 2002 Gujarat pogrom
. (The investigation is ongoing.) RSS leaders feared that court cases could go ag
ainst Modi, Bhagwats friend RH Tupkary, a swayamsevak and well-known metallurgist
who headed the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, told me.
Tupkary, who said he is about to start work on a book tentatively titled The RSS
Re-Evaluated, said the leaderships attitude began to change when Modi swept the 20
07 assembly elections in Gujarat; after that, they started seriously considering
him for a national role. With a renewed mandate, Modi began to clip the wings o
f many senior organisation and party members, hardening some sections of RSS opi
nion against him. But Bhagwat was evidently not concerned: the following year, w
ith much of the Sangh leadership fuming at the Gujarat chief minister, Bhagwat t
ravelled to Ahmedabad to release Modis book Jyotipunj, a collection of profiles o
f his mentors, including Bhagwats father, Madhukarrao.
The first time his name was discussed as the potential prime ministerial candidat
e was in 2011, in Baroda, a former member of the RSS central executive council to
ld me. After the scheduled baithak ended, some of us were asked to stay back for
a couple of hours. That meeting was devoted to discussing the political situatio
n in the country. There were more people opposing Narendra Modi at the time than
supporting him, the former central executive member added. Over the next two yea
rs, however, the discussions continued at meetings in Chennai, Amravati and Jaip
ur. Throughout this period, the Sangh leadership was collecting feedback from it
s pracharak network, which unequivocally supported Modi.
According to Sudhir Pathak, There were two viewsto take only a secularist line, or
to have some Hindutva also. The Hindutvawadi group was in favour of Modi. Bhagw
at was not taking sides. Advani had shown that the Hindutva line can only take y
ou up to 180 Lok Sabha seats; if you want to carry everyone along, a sober face
like Vajpayee was necessary. But then the argument was that in 2004 we saw how f
ar a sober face could take us. So the leaders sort of agreed that in 2014 Hindut
va would be the appeal. By June 2013, when Modi was chosen to head the BJPs nation
al campaign committee, virtually every RSS and BJP leader, apart from Advani, ha
d fallen in line.
A large part of Modis attraction for both Bhagwat and the cadre may be that, desp
ite his autocratic operating style, he has never challenged the Sanghs fundamenta
l ideology. Rather, he has shown the RSS leadership that the familys core values
can travel even better in new packagingthat designer clothes and talk of economic
development can fit perfectly well with hard-line Hindutva. He is a model for s
wayamsevaks who have embraced the ethos of a consumerist India.
Many leaders in the Sangh family continue to be wary of Modi, who has successful
ly sidelined many of his political rivals, first in Gujarat and now within the n
ational party; most party and Sangh members who have maintained their influence
have done so by making way for his rise. Perhaps the only person who has publicl
y checked Modi without experiencing any political fallout is Bhagwat. The RSS ch
ief, who is reluctant to give up on anyone who has been a member of the organisa
tion (including Advani and Gadkari), has rehabilitated several of Modis rivals, s
uch as Gordhan Zadaphia and Sanjay Joshi. In Bangalore this March, during the co
ncluding session of the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha, Bhagwat, trying to ref
ocus the cadre on its own agenda, reportedly told volunteers, Our work is not to
chant Namo, Namo. We must work towards our own target.
Still, Bhagwat seems to appreciate that Modi is currently the RSSs best available
means of securing political power. (That said, if Modi does become prime minist
er, he wont necessarily need the Sangh until the next election.) In February, I s
poke by phone with Vasant Limaye, a Pune-based corporate trainer and Marathi nov
elist. Limaye said he met Bhagwat at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur last year ar
ound Dussehra, while he was doing research for a new political thriller. Bhagwat
told him about the BJPs and RSSs preparations for the upcoming elections, and sai
d that the BJP and Modi were the right people to lead the country. Limaye asked
him if he considered Modi to be a Winston Churchill. What I meant was Churchill w
as the wartime British PM and was unceremoniously dumped after the war was over,
Limaye told me. Bhagwat didnt answer that question. He just smiled.
|FIVE|
THE SARSANGHCHALAKS ANNUAL VIJAYADASHAMI SPEECH, in Nagpur, is considered the RSSs
most important public address every year. The one that Bhagwat delivered on 13
October 2013 was different in many ways from any that had come before; it was th
e first time in the history of the organisation that its supreme commander spent
a third of the time talking about the national economy and government policy, w
ith specific references to inflation, deficits and currency controls.
If only we develop an indigenous pattern of growth, based on our own genius and i
n sync with the present times, keeping in mind the positive and negative aspects
of modern technology, current world economic systems and trends, we will be abl
e to achieve a growth that, along with bringing its benefits even to the last ma
n in the row, will make us self-reliant, create jobs, improve quality, and ensur
e equity, justice and freedom from exploitation, Bhagwat told the gathering of hu
ndreds of RSS workers. He spoke about soaring prices, the plunging rupee and dee
pening deficitssubjects untouched by previous chiefs. The speech was webcast live
, and a team of swayamsevaks across the country made sure it trended on Twitter.
It was a bit difficult that day because of cyclone Phailinwhich made landfall the
previous daybut we managed to make it the top trending topic from India, the deputy
RSS leader I spoke with at Keshav Kunj said.
For years, the Sanghs economic platform has been articulated by the Swadeshi Jagr
an Manch, an RSS offshoot that advocates a wholly indigenous, self-reliant econo
my. In particular, the SJM has consistently opposed foreign investment in the co
untry and, for the most part, the RSS has been as wary of it as the SJM. This ha
s often set the RSS at variance with the BJP, which has taken a more ambivalent
line on foreign financing. Bhagwats speech hinted that the RSS has moved away fro
m its obstinate earlier position to a somewhat more liberal stanceone reflected i
n the BJPs election manifesto, drafted by a committee chaired by the RSS stalwart
Murli Manohar Joshi, which calls for foreign investment in many sectors.
One area where the economic platforms of the SJM, the Sangh and the BJP have alw
ays overlapped is corruption. For many years, the RSS has supported the anti-cor
ruption agitation of Anna Hazare. At an informal interaction with journalists in
Kolkata in 2011, Bhagwat said, It was the RSS that highlighted Annas developmenta
l programmes for villages. We even got Anna to help us in our village developmen
t programmes. It was during these interactions that the RSS suggested to him to
go in for a movement against corruption. More recently, Bhagwat has held up the e
lectoral campaign of Hazares former lieutenant, Arvind Kejriwal, as a model for t
he BJP. A few months ago, at a lunch at RH Tupkarys home, Tupkary said to Bhagwat
, Our plank has been stolen by Kejriwal. Tupkary felt that BJP politicians were be
having like Congress members and were concerned only with making money. He said h
e has told the BJP leaders the same thing, Tupkary recalled. He told them that the
y should take proper note of Kejriwal, and not give tickets to anyone with a tai
nted character.
Despite the loftiness of the Sanghs anti-corruption rhetoric, however, even Bhagw
at has a somewhat equivocal record on malfeasance. The Sangh leadership has an e
stablished tradition of throwing the floor open to informal question-and-answer
sessions at the end of most meetings. At one baithak in Alappuzha, Kerala, in la
te 2012, Bhagwat was asked a question on the Koodankulam nuclear power station a
nd why the RSS was not part of the agitation. He replied that the demonstrations
against the plant started when construction was nearly complete, and that Chris
tians were leading the protests. The answer piqued KV Biju, then the SJMs co-conv
enor for south India, who had been part of the agitation since 1989, soon after
the project was announced. (Biju is now the organising secretary of the Swadeshi
Andolan, a rival to the SJM.) He told Bhagwat that he had been misinformed. At
that point, the meeting was called to a close and Bhagwat asked Biju to join him
backstage. Biju said that when he explained in detail the history of protest ag
ainst the nuclear plant, Bhagwat told him that he had been unaware of it.
Bijus exchange with Bhagwat after the Alappuzha meeting took place at about 3 pm.
Around 9.30 that night, Bhagwati Prakash Sharmathe SJMs national co-convenertelephone
d me and asked me to step down from the SJM.
Three days later, the veteran RSS leader Ranga Hari told Biju that he should mee
t the sarsanghchalak again and apprise him of corruption in the SJM. For about a
year, Biju and an SJM organising secretary named Appala Prasad had been campaig
ning against the SJM core committee member and former national convener P Murali
dhar Rao. They had produced documents to prove that Rao had used SJM funds to bu
y property in the name of his wife, Pratibha, and a cooperative society he heade
d. Biju told me that when he asked the RSS national executive member Madan Das D
evi about who approved the purchase, Devi admitted that Rao had not taken any co
nsent. (When I emailed Rao for comment, he wrote back saying he had left the SJM
in December 2008; when I pointed out that the transaction took place in 2010, h
e didnt respond.)
Biju took the issue to the national joint convener of the SJM, S Gurumurthy, who
promised to take action but then ignored the matter. Then, at the RSS national
executive meeting in Chennai, Biju spoke with Bhagwat, who he said assured him t
hey would meet again to discuss the allegations.
Biju sent two reminders to Bhagwat about their appointment. He soon got a call f
rom the then RSS joint general secretary KC Kannan. Biju told me Kannan said to
him, You want to meet the sarsanghchalak to flag the issues in the SJM, right? He
knows about all those issues and has said that he is not going to interfere in
such matters. Rao was finally forced to repay the money, but only after months of
protest.
THE RSS UNDER BHAGWAT may have updated its economic approach while retaining its
ideological soul (the sarsanghchalaks alleged tolerance for corrupt Sangh worker
s notwithstanding), and thereby partially overcome one of the most important cha
llenges it has faced in recent decadeshow to respond to the cultural upheaval wro
ught by economic liberalisation. But the organisation has failed to rid itself o
f a more longstanding existential threatthe bigotry of its members, especially ag
ainst Muslims. Perhaps these trends are interlinked, and the Sangh, as it adopts
a more market-oriented economic position, has found it advantageous to simultan
eously reaffirm its aggressively Hindu-nationalist core.
Despite the RSSs continual public denials that it is bigoted or fosters violence
in its members, large and small examples of extreme intolerance in the Sangh fam
ilyModis Uttar Pradesh campaign manager using the language of revenge and honour in ri
ot-affected Muzaffarnagar; the head of the VHP calling for vigilante action to e
vict Muslims from their homesseem to leak out into the press constantly. Bhagwat
himself frequently accuses Muslim men of carrying out love Jihad by courting Hindu
women. Former RSS members say that these are the attitudes in which the Sangh b
rought them up.
In January, I went to meet Shyam Pandharipande, a former journalist who grew up
in an RSS family, at his sixth-floor apartment in Nagpur. I joined the RSS before
I joined school and I completed my RSS training before I graduated from college
, Pandharipande told me. He recalled a revealing episode from his third year of t
he Sanghs officer-training camp, in 1970, the last step in becoming a full-time R
SS worker. During a question-and-answer session, a volunteer asked Yadavrao Josh
i, then the head of Sangh workers across all of south India, We say RSS is a Hind
u organisation. We say we are a Hindu nation, India belongs to Hindus. We also s
ay in the same breath that Muslims and Christians are welcome to follow their fa
ith and that they are welcome to remain as they are so long as they love this co
untry. Why do we have to give this concession? Why dont we be very clear that the
y have no place if we are a Hindu country?
According to Pandharipande, Joshi replied: As of now, RSS and Hindu society are n
ot strong enough to say clearly to Muslims and Christians that if you want to li
ve in India, convert to Hinduism. Either convert or perish. But when the Hindu s
ociety and RSS will become strong enough we will tell them that if you want to l
ive in India and if you love this country, you accept that some generations earl
ier you were Hindus and come back to the Hindu fold.
The RSS ideology has not always been so extreme. In the decade after Deoras took
over, the Sangh managed to wipe away much of the stigma associated with its com
munalism. But then came the Ram temple movement and the demolition of the Babri
Masjid, which indelibly stamped the Sangh as a fundamentalist organisation. Alth
ough the radicalisation that took place during the movement still defines the RS
S for many people, I was told it created a generational rift within the Sangh fa
mily. A state executive member of the RSS in Kerala, who has been a pracharak si
nce the 1950s, said that Ayodhya was never discussed at Sangh forums in the earl
y days. In the collected works of Guruji, there is no mention of Ayodhya or the R
am temple even once, he pointed out. A senior leader once told me that RSSs partici
pation in the Ayodhya movement was a case of the tail wagging the dog.
He added that that single actthe destruction of the mosquealienated thousands of p
eople who were Sangh supporters. I remember Kerala High Court judges openly parti
cipating in VHP conferences, he said. Similarly, many Muslims and Christians wante
d to join the Jan Sangh. Now they do not want to associate.
Of course, the RSS and its offshoots have never had a monopoly on bigotry and co
mmunal violence in Indian society. This is even true for the Ram temple agitatio
n. Two people in the SanghDevendra Swaroop and one of the organisations dozen nati
onal leaderstold me that the movement grew out of a seed planted by the Congress.
This is supported by Christophe Jaffrelot, who writes in his book The Hindu Nat
ionalist Movement and Indian Politics that Dau Dayal Khanna, an octogenarian Con
gressman and former Uttar Pradesh minister, was the first to lay before the VHP
a plan to build a campaign around Rams purported birthplace, in 1983. This follow
ed a period in which Indira Gandhi began making pilgrimages to sacred rivers, sh
rines and temples across the country, and speaking of a Hindu hegemony in the Hi
ndi heartland. Several years later, when the Ram temple movement was gaining ste
am, Rajiv Gandhi arranged for secret talks between the sarsanghchalak, Deoras, a
nd a Congress emissary, the former cabinet minister Bhanu Prakash Singh. At thei
r conclave, Singh told Deoras that Gandhi was prepared to allow foundation stone
s for a Ram temple to be laid in Ayodhya, provided the RSS backed the Congress P
arty in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections. Deoras agreed. The Congress government per
mitted a foundation-laying ceremony to be performed, but changed course after an
outcry from the Muslim community.
In the Bhagwat era, the Ram temple movement has largely been relegated to the in
creasingly minor domain of the VHP, though it also receives a mention in the BJPs
latest election manifesto. A couple of years ago, at a baithak in Tripunithura
in Kerala, Bhagwat was asked about Ayodhya, How long will it take to build a Ram
temple there? He replied that the dispute wont be solved for at least the next thir
ty years. He then smiled, and added, It will be the VHPs biggest problem, tooto keep
the issue alive for that long.
Other pernicious strains in the Sangh seem to have thrived in the past decade. T
he RSS national executive member Indresh Kumar is named in the chargesheets for
the bombings carried out by Swami Aseemanand and other Hindu terrorists between
2006 and 2008, when Bhagwat was the RSS general secretary. Although the investig
ations are proceeding at a snails pace, there is still some chance that Kumar may
be charged. (Officials at the National Investigation Agency declined to comment
on the cases.) In theory, Bhagwat, too, could come under investigation after As
eemanand told The Caravan in January that the RSS chief sanctioned the attacks.
The swayamsevak who worked on the BJPs Delhi election campaigns told me that one
reason the RSS is taking such an interest in these particular elections is that t
hey fear for their survival. He said another UPA government might try to entangle
Sangh leaders in the terror cases to subjugate the organisation. That possibili
ty may now be remote, but charges and allegations of violence by Sangh members n
evertheless hang like the sword of Damocles over the head of the RSS.
WHEN I MET the former BJP general secretary KN Govindacharya at his office in Ea
st Patel Nagar, Delhi, last October, he told me about an opinion piece that Vajp
ayee, then a forty-seven-year-old swayamsevak and president of the Jan Sangh, wr
ote in the Indian Express in 1972. The article argued that a strongly ideologica
l party would never come to power in pluralist India, and could at best remain a
n influential pressure group. Swayamsevaks have two courses of action, Vajpayee
wrote: give up on achieving power; or compromise on their ideology, come to powe
r, and then discharge their responsibilities as RSS men.
After the article came out, the Sangh called a meeting of its national leadershi
p to discuss Vajpayees views. The sarsanghchalak, Golwalkar, thought that in theo
ry an ideological party could come to power. Vajpayee was not interested in deba
ting possibilities; he wanted clear direction about which path to take. Golwalka
r told him that it was up to Vajpayee and his colleagues in the party to choose.
As Bhagwat suggested to journalists at the Kolkata workshop last August, the San
gh family sees the current elections as an opportunity to solve this dilemma for
the foreseeable future. Bhagwat himself has long been resolute about the direct
ion in which the RSS must head. In an unpublished portion of his interview with
the filmmaker Lalit Vachani, in the early 1990s, he spoke about new challenges f
acing the Sangh. The RSSs worst period is over, Bhagwat said. Earlier it was ignored
. We didnt have money or resources. It was a small organisation. Later, it was be
ing opposed. There was a lot of negative, wrong publicity. People were filled wi
th anti-RSS sentiment. Now that period is also over. From that perspective, the
path ahead is clear. He added, Our thought is not opposed anymore. There is some b
ecause of political reasons, but we are not worried about that. We will handle i
t in our own style.
In January 2009, Bhagwat echoed this line. Less than three months before becomin
g sarsanghchalak, he told a meeting of young professionals from the management a
nd information technology sectors, How to resolve the current problems prevailing
in our country is the next question. In words that could very well apply to what
is playing out today, he said the Sangh will help to organise. The rest will be
done by the swayamsevaks themselves. And from 1925 till 2008 the evolution of th
e Sangh shows that we are indeed marching ahead with our plan and reaching towar
ds our goal consistently. It is all about an individual. He is to be encouraged.
There are difficulties in this. But we are not the people who talk about proble
ms. We will overcome and surmount problems and try to accelerate the pace of our
work effectively. This picture is clear in front of us. Not only the goal, the
clear strategy, all the stages, methodology to reach there are all worked out an
d we have a clear cut plan before us.
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uf