Our nation Sanskritised

The most striking thing about militant organisations which rally people in the name of religion, and seek to achieve their ends by singling out the “other” and attacking them, is that, their beliefs are completely lacking in compassion, justice or any notions taken from any humanist tradition.

Naturally, they have no kinship with the ideals of democracy, and no value for the idea of living together and sharing our common pool of resources — which is just what Pope Francis, the “poor man’s pope”, spoke about at the United Nations last week, and which form the core precepts of the UN — the ending of wars, promotion of peace and helping uplift the poor.

Outfits such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria readily come to mind in this context because they revel in their notoriety. In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is not a stereotype of these threatening groups.

But in its ideology — based on seeking to arouse racial and religious consciousness and directing hatred and malevolent force against people they would like to eliminate or diminish — and in its less than transparent organisational structures and functioning, India’s Hindutva hotspot is moved by a similar manic energy and ambition.

The RSS’ bible is We or Our Nationhood Defined, written by M.S. Golwalkar back in 1939, a year before he was nominated head of the organisation. It is replete with Hitlerite ideas. The RSS’ offspring Bharatiya Janata Party dare not publicly endorse them. But it cannot repudiate them either. Indeed the author is treated with reverence not only by the RSS but also other members of the Sangh Parivar and adorned with the honorific of “Pujya Guruji” for laying a firm ideological foundation for the faithful.

An infamous passage from his text reads: “...the foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinate to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less preferential treatment — not even citizens’ rights. There is, at least should be, no other course for them to adopt.”

Such chilling ideas cannot inspire votaries of equality of any stripe, leave alone the young in this country who look for equal opportunities, most urgently in the fields of education and work, in order to live peaceful lives free from want — true change and “achche din”. It is hard to see how any of Golwalkar’s postulates can make for societal harmony and progress.

But surprisingly, some policy outlines of the present regime seem to be rooted in the former RSS chief’s ideas of an ideal society and state in India at the heart of which is not rational and scientific inquiry, but the privileging of so-called Hindu consciousness or outlook.

Education seems to be the most conspicuous victim under human resources development minister Smriti Irani, who has prostrated herself before the saffron outlook in order to advance her career, as can be seen from the appointment of a spurious historian as the head of the Indian Council of Historical Research, the attempt to fill leading educational institutions with those spouting RSS’ “cultural” theology which treats myth as history, and quarters being given to Dinanath Batra, an apparatchik, in setting the schools curriculum.

The current RSS chief has also plunged straight into politics and raised questions relating to positive discrimination and affirmative action for traditionally deprived sections, though he has had to hastily cover his tracks when faced with counter-attacks from BJP’s opponents in Bihar, where preparations are on for the Assembly election.

Golwalkar’s signal contribution to the Hindutva belief system is his idea of “cultural nationalism”, from which every odious notion in the passage cited above springs, as the former Sarsanghchalak or RSS chief himself makes clear in his work. It also becomes plain that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most recent attack on “secularists” in Ireland, where he noted that his secular opponents will question any attention being paid to the Sanskrit language, is aligned to a longer trajectory.

The jibe is, of course, ill-founded. Many leading lights of Sanskrit scholarship have been sturdy secular intellectuals, some of them Marxists, who are objects of RSS’ hate as much as Muslims and Christians. The economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen once publicly offered to engage in a discussion on Hindu scriptures and philosophy in the Sanskrit language with anyone interested. But the Hindutva brigade made themselves scarce, after having earlier taunted him. It is doubtful there is one Sanskritist amongst them. They are, after all, politicos in disguise, not masters of Sanskrit language or literature or Hindu religious divines.

The point, however, is not the alleged aversion of secularists to Sanskrit, but the Prime Minister rooting his barb pertaining to the ancient language in the postulates of “Pujya Guruji” though he is careful to avoid saying so. In the Golwalkar system, five “unities” — geography, race, religion, culture and language — together make the “nation”, and the linguistic gap is filled for the “Hindu nation” by Sanskrit, “the dialect of the Gods”, in the RSS ideologue’s own words.

As much as attacking his secular opponents, Mr Modi was evidently airing the Golwalkar standpoint in Ireland on his way to the UN in New York where he would, with political correctness, speak of the ancient Indian concept of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” — the world being one family. The real point seemed to be that one is less than a Hindu if one does not sing hymns in praise of “the dialect of the Gods”.

With the BJP’s own majority in Lok Sabha, although the win rested on a flimsy 30 per cent vote share, the RSS is trying to spread itself wide. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues rushing to a RSS forum to present a report card of their government is a sign that is specially repugnant to our parliamentary system. Imagine the Prime Minister of Pakistan — although the country is hardly a democracy — loping up to the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba bosses in similar fashion, or the US President working to please the “White nationalist” Ku Klux Klan.

In Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood entered government on a sweeping vote, but botched it due to ideological over-zealousness. The RSS faithful didn’t get into office on a revolutionary upsurge and have little reason for hope.