(Pragyata, October 2016)
Ramachandra Guha’s column “A question of sources – The unholy holy book of the RSS” (The Telegraph, 17 Sep. 2016) draws attention to the fiftieth anniversary of a major ideological manifesto of Hindu Nationalism: “Guru” Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar’s book Bunch of Thoughts. After the death of Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940), who in 1925 had founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or “National Volunteer Association”, the BHU-trained biologist Golwalkar (1906-73) was the second Sarsanghchalak, “Chief Guide of the Association”, until his own death. He is credited with greatly expanding the RSS’s presence in Indian society by creating a Parivar (“family”) of specialized organizations, including a pan-Hindu religious platform, a trade-union, a student organization, a network for tribal welfare, and a political party.
This party, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS, “Indian People’s Association”), founded in 1951, was a venture into explicit politics which Golwalkar agreed to against his wishes, after the Hindu Mahasabha (“Hindu Great-Council”, °1922) had irredeemably fallen from grace with the murder of Mahatma Gandhi by one of its members. Reportedly, Golwalkar gave his consent to the party’s creation with the words: “Alright then, a house also needs a lavatory.” The party existed until 1977, when it fused with others to form the Janata Party (“People’s Party”), and was reconstituted in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ruling party at the time of this writing.
The book’s title was inspired by Jawaharlal Nehru’s collection Bunch of Old Letters, effectively a “bunch” or random collection of disparate writings. This was not the best choice for what was intended to be an ideological guidebook.
Books in Hindu Nationalism
Guha misrepresents (probably because he misunderstands) the role of books in the Sangh. His inference that the book somehow determines today's BJP government's policies is a typical secularist fantasy, if only because the BJP has emancipated itself from the RSS. Most BJP men today are not from the RSS, and even the RSS men inside or outside the BJP have rarely read this Hindutva manifesto. The short attention span of many Hindus (as an outsider, I would not dare to say this, but Hindu intellectuals themselves keep on bewailing this tendency) militates against reliance on hefty volumes like Bunch of Thoughts. Ploughing through demanding books is only given to few, among ethnicities mainly the Chinese, Northern Europeans and Jews, and even there not exactly the majority. Whenever you present a book to an RSS leader, he is bound to say: "Can't you summarize this volume to a small pamphlet?" (On the bright side, Hindu consciousness-raising is currently getting a tremendous boost by the developments in communication technology: through less demanding means like Twitter messages, and through the return to oral culture, as in webinars.)
This aversion to reading is especially true in the RSS. This has a historical cause as well as a conscious decision behind it. The historical cause is the circumstances of the RSS’s founding: Dr. KB Hedgewar came from the Bengal revolutionary faction of the Freedom Movement, and brought its secretive methods along. Like the revolutionaries, wary of feeding written evidence of their designs to police informers, RSS men never communicated in writing but travelled around to pass information orally. Hence the enormous physical locomotion performed by RSS officers. As the wife of an RSS veteran confided to me: “It is a status symbol for them.”
The (indeed real) influence of Bunch of Thoughts in RSS discourse is mainly through oral sermons by bauddhik officers selecting a few nice passages. Most RSS men won't recognize the more difficult passages that Guha draws grim conclusions from. It is like the Bible in Roman Catholicism, where the raw passages are kept out of hearing distance: the flock is only fed the elevating passages through selected Sunday readings.
There is a big difference between BJP texts of thirty years ago and today, having become more sophisticated but also more secularist and less Hindu. In BJP discourse, pace Guha, the term Hindu Rashtra (“Hindu State”), dear to Golwalkar, is now unthinkable. While Congress has evolved from secular nationalism to making common cause with the Breaking India forces, the BJP has evolved from Hindu nationalism to secular nationalism. (Which, on the bright side, makes it the natural party of government.) This is to a lesser extent true of the RSS, but it is still closer to Golwalkar. However, the person-cult of Golwalkar, still as strong as ever, is unrelated to the influence of Bunch of Thoughts. The RSS position regarding Golwalkar's ideas might well evolve, all while the devotion to Golwalkar remains the same. Secularist intellectuals like Guha may find this absurd, but it is the reality.
We
Guha’s critique is certainly not the lowliest kind of anti-Golwalkar polemic. In articles of that category, used unquestioningly as source in the majority of introductions to Hindu Nationalism, the targeted Golwalkar book would not be Bunch of Thoughts (1966) but his slim maiden volume, We, Our Nationhood Defined (1939). That attempt at ideological contemplation of the political challenges before Hindu society has earned notoriety because of two overquoted passages. In one, Golwalkar is selectively cited as seemingly supporting Nazi Germany. I have analysed this passage in the context of the book and of its time (one chapter each in The Saffron Swastika, 2001, and Return of the Swastika, 2006, or online at https://www.academia.edu/14793753/Disowning_Golwalkars_We), and found this common allegation, present in every introductory text on Hindutva, totally wanting. Thus, anti-Semitism was the core doctrine of National-Socialism, yet the Jewish people was the foremost role model upheld by Golwalkar for the “Hindu nation”. As for the Nazis’ militarism, he contrasts Germany’s champions of martial virtues with the sages who form the Hindu role models “in serene majesty”. This oft-quoted passage is irrelevant for the contemporary debates, except to show to what mendaciousness secularists and foreign India-watchers can stoop.
The other passage could have more to do with contemporary politics. It clearly distinguishes Christians and Muslims from the Hindus, as mere guests vis-à-vis the host society, entitled to protection and an honourable life, but to nothing more. Golwalkar proposes that they (“re”)-assimilate, or else accept a protected status as foreign residents “claiming nothing, not even citizens’ rights”. Yet, as the book disappeared from circulation in 1948 and Golwalkar vetoed its reprint for being “immature”, most Sangh members have never even seen that line. It doesn’t reflect the current party-line of the RSS let alone the BJP.
The only incriminating fact that still attaches to We is its disowning by the RSS. It officially disowned the book in 2006, only confirming half a century of the book’s factual non-existence, and with that decision, we have no quarrel. But it also claimed, quite mendaciously, that the book had not been written by Golwalkar and did not reflect his ideas. Nobody got fooled except the most obedient among the RSS’s own volunteers.
Bunch
By contrast, the contents of Bunch of Thoughts remains a central part of most Sanghis’ ideological formation. The only book to rival it, is Deendayal Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism (1965), adopted as official ideology by the BJS and (after some confusion with “Gandhian socialism”, finally agreed to be but another name for the same ideology) its successor body, the BJP. If you would want to honestly criticize the BJP through a book, it would be Upadhyaya’s Integral Humanism, but even the sheer mention of that book is absent from the immense majority of “expert” publications about the BJP. Bunch of Thoughts only plays a role for the party’s old guard that was groomed in the RSS. The party has moved away from its parent body and most members today don’t have an RSS past.
While Bunch of Thoughts is of limited consequence to our evaluation of the presently governing BJP’s policies, it has a historical link to the party and may of course form the object of research. Without being fooled by the secularists into thinking that any fault found in it can be applied to the party, we will nonetheless take note of the Hindutva gems that Guha has discovered in it.
Golwalkar does indeed remain “the chief ideologue of the organization”, meaning the RSS, and till today, his “bearded visage is prominently displayed” at RSS functions. It may also be true that as an RSS veteran, Prime Minister Narendra Modi “hugely admires Golwalkar”. Yet, in general, it is a big stretch of Guha’s to claim that Bunch of Thoughts is “of enormous contemporary relevance” and is for the ruling party what the Koran is for Muslims. Firstly, the RSS impact on the BJP is limited and waning. Secondly, Islam is a “religion of the book” and is heavily determined by the contents of the Koran, to which it explicitly pays obeisance; but Hinduism is not that book-oriented, even when it pays plenty of lip-service to the Scriptures.
This counts even more for its Hindutva variety. Indeed, Golwalkar himself was emphatically anti-bookish and berated his volunteers when they were caught “idling” by reading a book. More than anyone else, he is responsible for the RSS’s anti-intellectual orientation, which has been very consequential: (1) a complete absence from the public debate; (2) a propensity to make fools of themselves with fantastic claims, e.g. that “ancient Indians had airplanes”, as if India’s real contributions to science and technology weren’t good enough; (3) a complete passivity when Nehruvians and Marxists moved in to to monopolize the cultural and educational sphere; and (4) to really drive the negative implications home, an utter inability to give a credible defence of Golwalkar’s own books.
Nationalism
Golwalkar was a nationalist, and the movement he led, is known worldwide as “Hindu Nationalism” till today. Contrary to what the secularists allege these days, the RSS was very much rooted in the Freedom Movement, in anti-colonial nationalism. It started as a security force to protect a Congress meeting in 1925, and its founder, KB Hedgewar, had been trained by the Bengali revolutionary wing of the Freedom Movement. (This explains a working principle of the RSS, viz. its secretiveness and reliance on direct communication.) Its slightly older sister, the Hindu Mahasabha (1922), was originally a Hindu lobby within Congress.
This nationalism was a logical choice, at least in the 1920s. The immediate pressures from the anti-colonial struggle, and the international after-effect of the national passions of the Great War, made nationalism honourable and obligatory. Even associations for sports or music took the habit of marching in uniform as if they were armies marching to the battlefield. The RSS followed this pattern.
Emotionally, this nationalist appeal undoubtedly works. Election campaigns fought on a national issues tend to unite the ciizens around them, transcending and trumping the usual contests between collective self-interests (commual, casteist or regional), which are divisive.
It is another question whether it still is such a wise choice after 1945, when nationalism got a bad name through its identification with the losing side in WW2; after 1947 and the decades of independence, when India has other concerns than its relatively assured national freedom; after 1947 again, as the year when many Hindus became citizens of the suddenly separate countries of Pakistan and (what was to become) Bangladesh; after the resettlement of millions of Hindus abroad and their acquisition of a foreign nationality (apart from those already in Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Afghanistan); and after quite a few non-Indians have become Hindu. As I have argued elsewhere, “nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns”.
Thus, the reason why Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu temples, was not that they were “foreign invaders”, as claimed in most RSS pamphlets, for then they would have imposed “foreign temples” on the Hindu sites. No, it was because they were Muslim, a word avoided nowadays in RSS parlance, and they imposed mosques. In the discussions about Ghar Wapasi (“return home”), the reconversion of Christian converts to Hinduism, promoted by the RSS, I often hear the justification: “Christianization also entails Westernization” – as if Christianization without Westernization were alright. But that is not the problem: Hindus themselves are fast Westernizing (without the RSS-BJP doing anything against it), but this doesn’t make them non- or anti-Hindu. And at least the Catholic missionaries are responding to this complaint by “inculturation”, i.e. Christianization without Westernization. So that is alright for the RSS: Indian Christians smashing Hindu “idols”, as long as they duly wear dhoti? For “nationalists”, blind to the religious dimension, it is.
Hindu Rashtra
Why was the nation conceived as “Hindu” rather than “Indian”? In Hedgewar’s analysis, Hindu society constituted the Indian nation, while the minorities were mere guests. In older documents of the RSS and the Jan Sangh, you still find this idea of a “Hindu nation”, as evidenced by the oft-quoted Golwalkar sentence about minority inhabitants having “not even citizens’ rights”. However, even then the RSS and the BJS adopted terms like Bharatiya (Indian) and Rashtriya (national), and thus prepared the ground for a more recent shift away from Hindu identity politics and towards “secular” or “inclusive” nationalism. This shift, very outspoken in the BJP but also affecting the RSS, leads to inventive constructions such as that of the Indian Muslims as “Mohammedi Hindus”, a term repeatedly insisted on by LK Advani during the Ayodhya campaign of ca. 1990. Not that Indian Muslims will ever accept this contradictory label, but their honest opinion is not asked. The rationale for this term is the post-Golwalkar doctrine that “Hindu” is syonym with “Indian”.
Earlier, “Indian” was reduced to “Hindu” (subtracting any non-Hindu Indians from the “Indian” category, as in Golwalkar’s quotes above), but in the RSS discourse of the last decades, “Hindu” is being reduced to “Indian”. This purely geographical and thus “secular” notion was the meaning of the Persian word “Hindu” fifteen hundred years ago. But when the Muslim invaders imported it into India, it immediately had a religious meaning: all Indian Pagans in the broadest sense, i.e. all those who were not Jews, Christians or Muslims. This, then, is the original Indian meaning of Hindu: any Indian Pagan, whether Brahmin, Shudra, Buddhist, Tribal or any other grouping or denomination; but emphatically excluding Muslims and Christians. Since it is the historically foundational meaning, those who insist on giving it a different meaning, have the burden of justification on them. In this case, it is the RSS that owes us, already for a few decades, a justification for its absurd redefining of “Hindu” as simply “Indian”, including Christians and Muslims.
Haven’t the “experts” on whom Guha relies, noticed this shift in meaning of the all-important term “Hindu”? It explains, to name a current and important example, the grim and determined passivity of the Modi government regarding specificaly Hindu demands, such as the abolition of the blatantly anti-Hindu (so, communally partisan and hence anti-secular) Right to Education Act, which has forced hundreds of Hindu schools to close down. A Hindu party would be up in arms against anti-Hindu discriminations (and the BJS was, but did ot have the power), but in their present state of mind, the Hindu movement simply cannot conceive of “anti-Hindu” discriminations anymore, as this would mean “anti-Indian”.
A government advisor confided to me that the BJP now, having learned its lesson from the AB Vajpayee government’s passivity on Hindu issues, wants to “keep the pot boiling”. It wants to throw some crumbs to its Hindu constituency, such as a punitive strike against Pakistani terrorist camps, to buy sufficient loyalty from its Hindu support base; but without doing anything substantive on important Hindu demands. The most important of these is not risky projects pregnant with communal violence, such as the Common Civil Code dear to the erstwhile BJS, but the perfectly reasonable and secular abolition of all legal and constitutional discriminations against Hinduism. (I invite the BJP to prove me wrong, not with denunciations but with legislative action.)
This shift also means that both organizations, the BJP formally and the RSS effectively, have renounced one of Golwalkar’s core ideas: Hindu Rashtra, the “Hindu state” (though the RSS used to fussily insist that it means an ill-defined “Hindu nation” instead). It was an un-Hindu idea to start with: the Gupta or Chola empire or any other premodern Hindu political entity was coronated with Hindu rites and facilitated Vedic and Puranic traditions, but never called itself Hindu Rashtra. Further, Hindu states have always been pluralistic, regardless of the ruler’s personal orientation.
In India this is now termed ”secular”, an infelicitous term deviant from its original meaning of “non-religious” or “not acknowledging as consequential any religious identities”; but one that has been accepted by the RSS itself in its 1990’s slogan: “Hindu India, secular India”. By the RSS’s own post-Golwalkar logic, Hindu Rashtra, when analysed, would only mean: “a (genuinely) secular state”. Why then uphold a Hindu Rashtra as a distant goal in contradistinction to the present principle (admittedly very imperfect in its realization) of a secular republic? Golwalkar’s and the present RSS leadership’s positions on this question, and the probable difference between the two, would make an excellent topic for a thorough intra-RSS debate, followed by an authoritative publication explaining the whole question in detail and finally offering clarity. Are they capable of doing this?
India’s unity
Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, Golwalkar didn’t see this nationhood as a project, a “nation in the making”, but as an ancient heritage: "Long before the West had learnt to eat roast meat instead of raw, we were one nation, with one motherland." Indeed, in many RSS writings, it is claimed that the Vedic expression matrbhumi, “motherland”, meant “India”, in the sense of “the Subcontinent”.
That is not true, but the belief has a long tradition. A close reading of the Vedas shows a geographical horizon stretching from roughly Prayag to the Afghan frontier. The only Vedic seer credited with crossing the Vindhya mountains was Agastya, and that was noticed precisely because it was an exceptional adventure, not a visit to a province of his familiar motherland. In the Mahabharata, an epic based on a historical war of succession in the Vedic Bharata dynasty ca. 1400 BC, the geographical ambit of the events and persons involved is similarly limited. Yet, by the time of the final editing, around the time of Christ, dynasties from the farthest ends of India had had themselves written into the narrative. They wanted to belong to the expanding Vedic civilization, which is also why they invited Brahmin families and donated land to them, in order to have them confer Vedic legitimacy on their dynasties.
Not since a God-given eternity, but at least for more than 2000 years, all of the Subcontinent has had a sense of unity. This is far more than most countries can say, and it is enough to justify its political unity today. The pilgrimage cycles, the narration of the same epics in village squares all over the country, and the visible presence of the otherwise self-contained Brahmin caste and the monastic orders, created a degree of self-conscious cultural unity. This sometimes approached but never fully reached political unity, which at any rate only concerned the elites: changing borders made little difference to ordinary life. Clearly, poliical unity existed at least as an ideal.
Fact is that here, Golwalkar gave utterance to a feeling common among Indians. Whatever the details about the past, Indians believe in national unity. And this is not a nationalism “in the making”, on the contrary: the Nehruvian elites dish out all kinds of reasons why not Indianness but the separate communal identities are “real”, yet when push comes to shove, Indians stand united. Before the Chinese attacked in 1962, Tamil Nadu was in the grip of separatist fervour; but when the invasion came, the Tamils, all while remaining wedded to the Dravidianist cultural demands, abandoned the separatist camp and threw their lot in with India. Also, history shows that the surest way to win an election lies in having just won an Indo-Pak war. The local and communal identities are real, but so is the “national” identity.
Hence Guha’s Golwalkar quotation: "Hindu Society developed in an all-comprehensive manner, with a bewildering variety of phases and forms, but with one thread of unification running inherently through the multitude of expressions and manifestations." Here Golwalkar’s observation is impeccable, though I would call this unity “civilizational” rather than “national”. Guha comments: “What precisely this unifying thread was is never defined.” Well, it is Hinduism. This is a vague and capacious notion, but adequate enough to explain India’s self-conscious unity.
Guha’s Golwalkar – 2
(Pragyata, October 2016)
In part 1, we saw Ramachandra Guha drawing grim conclusions from the supposed influence of MS Golwalkar’s 50-year-old book Bunch of Thoughts on the ruling party. Here we discuss some more aspects of Golwalkar’s vision that, in Guha’s understanding, should be cause for worry.
World Teacher
According to Ramachandra Guha, another “assumption that Golwalkar works with is that despite their fallen state today, Hindus are destined to lead and guide the world”. He cites Guruji as asserting that it "is the grand world-unifying thought of Hindus alone that can supply the abiding basis for human brotherhood", so that world leadership, no less, "is a divine trust, we may say, given to the charge of the Hindus by Destiny".
It is not as if other nations are waiting for India’s contribution. Then again, what they did take or accept from India was the most precious contribution. China had no mean philosophy sprung out of its own soil, but nonetheless accepted and integrated Buddhism. Among the Greek philosophers, Pythagoras and later the neo-Platonists were but the most explicit in copying Indian concepts and even practices, and they influenced the whole of European philosophy a well as a bit of Christian theology. A much later revolution in European thought was wrought by Immanuel Kant, who admitted the decisive influence (“awakened from my dogmatic slumber”) from David Hume’s sudden development of a quasi-Buddhist view. Hume doesn’t mention Buddhism, and would perhaps have been laughed out of court if he had, but recently we have discovered that his philosophical awakening had been triggered by his reading two detailed accounts of Buddhist thought by Catholic missionaries posted in Tibet c.q. Thailand. Modern thinkers like AN Whitehead, CG Jung and Ken Wilber tapped directly into Indian thoughts and practices, even if not always acknowledging it (an attitude discussed by Rajiv Malhotra in his innovative thesis of the “U-turn”).
On the other hand, translating this natural attractiveness of Indian traditions for outsiders into a missionary spirit is not very Hindu either. When real Evangelists meet someone from a different religion, immediately their missionary mechanic sets to work: what buttons are there in him that I can click to make him open to my message? Hindus don’t have this at all. When they meet someone from a strange religion, they become naturally curious. They feel no need to destroy that foreign religion and replace it with Hinduism, but assume that there must be a core of wisdom in it, something essentially the same as what makes Hindus tick.
Moreover, this international appeal as a “world teacher” sits uncomfortably with Golwalkar’s nationalism. It is now the need of the hour to stress that Indian contributions are really from India (against e.g. American attempts to obscure the Sanskrit terms and Indian references in yoga), and that in some respects India has indeed been a "world teacher". But apart from that, the further propagation of Indian contributions abroad, as of foreign contributions inside India, will go on for some time. In a footnote of their schoolbooks, the brighter among Chinese or European or Latin-American pupils will still learn that yoga originates in India, or that the zero originates in India, but otherwise it will simply be part of their own life, c.q. their own mathematics. Just like rocket science came from Germany, the train from England, gun powder from China, and mankind from Africa. So many world teachers!
The Buddha’s cosmopolitanism
Like most Hindus, Golwalkar praised the Buddha. The Buddhists, by contrast, he accuses of beginning to “uproot the age-old national traditions of this land. The great cultural virtues fostered in our society were sought to be demolished." It could have made sense to accuse the Buddhists of neglecting certain virtues because they emphasized other virtues more. A slightly earlier Hindu Nationalist, VD Savarkar, had already considered the Buddhist (but not Buddhist alone) value of non-violence harmful for India’s defence. But the destructive design of “seeking to demolish” anything of value is not normally associated with Buddhism. While there is no doubt that foreigners were important in the history of Buddhism, especially the Indo-Greeks (Menander/Milinda) and the Kushanas (Kanishka), Golwalkar surprises us with the information that "devotion to the nation and its heritage had reached such a low pitch that the Buddhist fanatics invited and helped the foreign aggressors who wore the mask of Buddhism. The Buddhist sect had turned a traitor to the mother society and the mother religion."
This is bad history, and rather nasty towards the Buddhist fellow-Indians. But we can agree that Buddhism never set great store by defending India’s borders, which were not threatened in the north or east, where the Buddha lived and worked. The northwestern frontier was known to the Buddha, and indeed culturally familiar, not felt to be a foreign land at all, for his friends Prasenajit and Bandhula had studied there, at Takshashila University. (Yes, it existed before Buddhism: contrary to the Nehruvian received wisdom, the university as an institution was not a Buddhist but a Vedic invention.) But he was not in the business of defending it: at that very time it was not threatened either, and he indeed had other priorities anyway. But neither he nor his followers ever shot anyone in the back who felt called upon to fight aggressors.
Something similar counts for other Indian sects. The Vedas and Epics report a number of wars, but never a defence against foreign aggression. Once there was real aggression, by Mohammed Ghori, defender Prithviraj Chauhan was betrayed by Jayachandra, the latter as much a Hindu as the former. They were aware of some cultural unity stretching from Attock to Cuttack, but politically they were attached to their own part of the Subcontinent, and to hell with the neighbours. The RSS notion of a Deshbhakt (“patriot”, “devotee of the country”, meaning a devotee of the whole Subcontinent) did not exist in premodern Hinduism.
Sects with any kind of spiritual goal had another purpose than nationalism: Liberation, Self-Realization, Knowledge, Isolation (of Consciousness from Nature), Awakening, or anything the different sects chose to call the ultimate state of consciosness. None of the classical manuals for the seekers of the ultimate mention India. If in recent centuries it does come up by way of geographical detail, it is still not invest with value pertaining to their goal. The Motherland is where you come from, a natural given; not where you go to, not the norm you aspire to reach. It is just there.
Then again, you do get the notion of India as a Punyabhumi, a territory fit for earning merit, which you have to purify yourself to re-enter after a stay abroad. Here you get the bridge between Hindu spirituality and Hindu nationalism. In my opinion, like in that of cosmopolitan secularists, this was a degenerative trend, but as an outsider I don’t want to tell Hindus what to do or to believe. So here we do have to admit that Golwalkar had a traditional basis for his assertion of India’s uniqueness.
Caste
Buddhism had come into the limelight in 1956, shortly before the book was written: with Dr. BR Ambedkar’s adoption of, or (in Guha’s borrowed-Christian construction of the event) “conversion” to Buddhism. Ambedkar had wanted to show a fist to caste Hinduism, yet that did not make him into a "traitor to the mother society and the mother religion", on the contrary: he explicitated that conversion to a foreign religion would harm the nation, which he did not want, hence his embracing a sect born in India. As Savarkar had commented: Ambedkar’s “refuge” in Bauddha Dharma was “a sure jump into the Hindu fold”. That is why the RSS, thanks to advancing insight, has gradually included Ambedkar in its pantheon. But that development was not on the horizon yet under Guruji. Guha correctly notes that Golwalkar “does not so much as mention the great emancipator of the Dalits”.
For people involved in a crusade against Hinduism, like the Nehruvian secularists, it was a foregone conclusion that whatever a Hindu leader ever wrote, he would most of all be judged for his position on caste. That this will always be a negative judgment, is an equally foregone conclusion. Hinduism, for them, is “caste, wholly caste, and nothing but caste”. This implies that a nominal Hindu is deemed to have turned against his religion if he takes an approvedly egalitarian position; only then is he the good guy. If he spits on his Mother, bravo! But if he chooses to defend Hinduism, as Golwalkar does, every possible position he takes will always be deemed an intolerable discrimination on caste lines. Even if he pronounces himself in favour of full equality, he is still lambasted for being patronizing and exercising his “Brahmin privilege”.
According to Guha, “Golwalkar vigorously defends the caste system, saying that it kept Hindus united and organized down the centuries.” Yet, what follows is something else than a “vigorous defence”, it is a nuanced historical understanding that a social system at variance with modern homogenizing nationalism may yet have had its historical advantages: "On the one hand, the so-called 'caste-ridden' Hindu Society has remained undying and unconquerable... after facing for over two thousand years the depredations of Greeks, Shakas, Hunas, Muslims and even Europeans, by one shock of which, on the other hand, the so-called casteless societies crumbled to dust never to rise again." Whether a causal relation can be established between caste and the survival of Hinduism, should be investigated, but it is a reasonable hypothesis that deserves better than Guha’s blanket condemnation.
“Bunch of Thoughts altogether ignores the suppression of Dalits and women in Hindu society.” Look at these double standards. Pray, Mr. Guha, show me a book written in defence of Islam that expounds on the mistreatment of women in Islam. After you have done that, you may ask this very similar question about Hinduism. As a prolific writer, have you published anything about the oppression of women in Christianity, a critique developed by the very originators of feminism in the world? Why do you single out Hinduism here? We have never seen you ask feminist authors why they haven’t contributed anything to the struggle for Hinduism’s self-respect against its many enemies, so why the reverse? Further, we may speculate that the women’s viewpoint just didn’t occur to Golwalkar as a confirmed bachelor leading an all-male organization; and that in the India of the 1960s, women’s issues were not as high-profile as today.
By contrast, caste inequality has continuously been on the agenda in the Indian republic. Golwalkar was not silent about it, but gave much less prominence to caste than anti-Hindu authors do, who assume that “Hinduism is caste, wholly caste, and nothing but caste”. RSS veterans who still knew Golwalkar in person told me he took a nationalist and non-conflictual view of the issue: as a nationalist, he believed in the minimization of all divisive factors and in a large measure of equality for all members of the Hindu nation, but not in social engineering, much less in quota or reparative discrimination (“affirmative action”). Thus, when a Brahmin neophyte at first refused to eat together with the other castes, he allowed him to eat separately, until he was familiar enough with the RSS attitude that he himself came around to eating with the others. That way, his acceptance of inter-caste commensality was much better anchored then if imposed on him. The RSS boasts of being the only caste-free civil organization in India. By contrast, the political parties that for historical reasons call themselves “anti-caste”, practise naked caste advocacy. They typically are informal or even self-designated interest groups of a particular group of castes.
Communalism
Guha accuses Golwalkar of paranoia vis-à-vis Indian Muslims and Indian Christians, and quotes him: "What is the attitude of those people who have been converted to Islam and Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt. (…) Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion to the nation."
The memory of the Partition was still fresh, and of the fact that a vast majority of the Muslim electorate had voted for it. The missionaries too had considered it likely that with Independence, India would lapse into chaos, so that some Christian-dominated areas in Kerala and the Northeast could declare their independence. It had also been noticed in the Northeast that non-Christianized tribals gave “Indian” as nationality to census officers, while Christians gave their tribal identity. So, Golwalkar’s suspicion of the minority, while not to be accepted like that, still had a core of truth in it.
Then, Guha goes in for the kill: “There is a striking affinity between the questions Golwalkar asks here and those asked by European anti-Semites in the 19th and early 20th centuries. French, German and British nationalists all suspected the Jews in their country of not being loyal enough to the motherland.” Aha! So Golwalkar was a Nazi after all!
Well, not exactly. First of all, before the Jews became the object of World Conspiracy suspicions, the allegation of a foreign or international loyalty originally concerned not the Jews but the Catholics, with the Jesuit Order as their main weapon of aggression. The Protestants, somewhat like the Orthodox Christians, were organized nationally and accepted docrinal differences, at least within the confines laid down by the Bible; by contrast, the Catholic Church was a global monolith with aspirations for world domination. My own country, Belgium, was a Catholic frontline state, with institutions for Irish, English and Dutch Catholics to support them and eventually allow them to topple the Protestant domination of their countries. There were also real-life incidents that nurtured the suspicion of a Popish Plot, most famously the “gunpowder plot” by Jesuit agent Guy Fawkes to blow up the British Parliament. So, there was a core of truth to those suspicions. Even in demography, these suspicions were not baseless. As late as the 1950s, Dutch Protestants used to warn: “Be careful with those Catholics, with their large families they may overtake our country.” And indeed, today the percentage of Catholics is larger than that of Protestants,-- only, between them, they are not even the majority anymore, and the Protestant-Catholic dichotomy has become irrelevant. Also, the Cathoic birthrate has plummeted to the national average.
The suspicion of a Jewish World Conspiracy was mainly based on a forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, originally fabricated by the Czarist secret police, though dispproved of by the Czar himself. When Islam critics in the West point out that Islam has ambitions for world domination, the Guhas in our midst try to be funny and allege that we fantasize, after the same model, a “Protocols of Mecca”. No: the Zion Protocols were a forgery, the so-called Mecca Protocols for world domination are real. The Quran itself, authoritative for every single Muslim (though ignored by many, fortunately but un-Islamically), says: “War will reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone.” The Jewish Bible has a doctrine of domination too, but only of the Promised Land; while the Quran speaks of world domination.
So, the difference between the anti-Jewish and the anti-Islamic suspicion is one between a falsity and reality. I am aware that for propagandists, reality doesn’t count, only perception does. With the studied superficiality typical of Nehruvian secularism, the seemingly similar perception of the anti-Jewish versus the anti-Islamic suspicion is enough. They can throw that around as a grave allegation, as here in Guha’s article, and be confident that no one will step in to correct them. The endless mendaciousness of the secularists would have been remedied to a large extent if there had been a counterparty capable of responding to them and diagnosing their errors. But the only counterparty to be reckoned with was the Hindu Nationalists, and they had been fixed in argumentative impotence by Golwalkar himself.
Christians have a similar doctrine of world conquest, though less confrontational. In its formative first centuries, Chrristianity lived as a minority in the vast Roman Empire, and unlike Islam, it had to accomodate national laws not of its own making. This fitted Saint Paul’s repudiation of the Biblical Law: it is the spirit (viz. of charity) that counts, not the letter of the law. This means that Christianity became naturally secular: it separated the religious sphere, thoroughly Christian, from the worldly and political sphere, dominated by non-Christian forces. During the heyday of Christian power, Christianity impinged ever more on the political sphere, but in the modern era, it did not have too much difficulty returning to its original “secularist” position of accepting the separate identity of the political sphere. A telling criterion: comparatively few people were killed in the struggle to wrest worldly power from the Churches, compared e.g. to the struggle between secular ideologies in the 20th century. And in this struggle, the secular forces were more violent than the Christian forces, witness the French Revolutionary genocide in the Vendée or the persecution of Christianity in the Soviet Union.
However, in a more moderate and sophisticated way, Christianity does have an ambition of world domination too. Like in Islam, all non-believers are deemed to go to hell, though few Christians now take this seriously anymore. Jesus’ injunction to “go and teach all nations” means that India too is on Christianity’s conversion programme. When the Pope came to India in 1999, he said openly and in so many words that his Church wanted to “reap a great harvest of faith” in Asia, which implies destroying Hinduism the way the native religions of Europe and the Americas were destroyed. He thereby badly let his secularist allies down, for they had always ridiculed the Hindu Nationalist suspicion that Christianity only meant destruction for Hinduism. Yet, after being put in the wrong so bluntly, here is the secularist Guha again shamelessly ridiculing Golwalkar’s suspicion against Christianity.
On one point, though, Golwalkar is blatantly wrong: it is not India that the Christians want to destroy, but Hinduism. Here again, nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns. Not the nation is their target, but the religion. Christians were loyal to the Roman empire, of which the 5th-centuriy Germanic enemies were already Christian too, but when the Empire fell apart, they adapted: after all, their main loyalty was not a political structure but a religion. And then they became loyal citizens of Wisigothic Spain, of Ostrogothic Italy, of Frankish France, a political loyalty that was inevitably secondary. They were not Deshbhakt, they were Yesubhakt. And similarly, they sing the Indian anthem with as much conviction as their Indian compatriots. And they will do so even more when they come to live in a “post-Hindu India” (of which Christian convert Kancha Ilaiah dreams). But if a different political structure comes to replace the Indian Republic, they will effortlessly adapt to that too. Defending the nation against the Christian onslaught leaves their real target undefended: the Hindu religion.
Gandhi
Guha quotes Golwalkar as asserting that "the foremost duty laid upon every Hindu is to build up such a holy, benevolent and unconquerable might of our Hindu People in support of the age-old truth of our Hindu Nationhood". This was never said in the Upanishads, it is not part of the fabled Hindu spirituality. But then, Hinduism has survived because of other factors than spirituality. At times it is simply right to emphasize the martial virtues. Proof a contrario: Buddhism was purely about spirituality and didn’t practise self-defence, so when it was really attacked, during the Muslim invasions, it was wiped away from Central Asia and India in one go. In spite of Golwalkar’s unhistorical view of “Hindu Nationhood”, he was right to extol the project of “unconquerable might”.
Guha compares this “supremacist point o