The evolving stance of the Hindu Right
The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling party of India, the Bharatiya Janata Party. It is also the driving force of the Sangh Parivar — Family of Organisations — a wider association, an extended family, whose principal aim is to protect and preserve Hindu sentiments, practices and religious beliefs. This extended family has within its fold, groups ranging from the Vishva Hindu Parishad to Hindu Mahasabha to the Bajrang Dal and not all of them share the same thinking on subjects like the Constitution of India, Muslim rights, Dalit empowerment, the national anthem etc. However despite these differences one common thread that runs through all of them is that ‘the manifest destiny of India resides in a Hindu nation’ and the boundaries of this imaginary nation is that of undivided India.
The RSS is the centre piece — the arch stone — of this Hindu edifice. There are over 6 million members but it has a wider membership, namely people who share their ideas, though they may not be active members. Close to 57,000 Shakhas or branches spread over the entire country engage with this broader citizenry though the RSS headquarters is in Nagpur and the early stalwarts were all Maharashtrians and Brahmins. Gandhi’s assassins came from this hinterland and Veer Savarkar, one of the leading lights of the Hindu movement was implicated in the Gandhi conspiracy case but later left off on a reprieve.
RSS has been lampooned as a Nagpur Brahmin-centric organisation but over the years it has tried to evolve and widen its reach among the other castes, particularly within the OBCs — Other Backward Castes — and its political arm the BJP — earlier called the Jan Sangh — profited in the polls when caste politics surged in 1990s especially after the Mandal Commission was formed to look into the empowerment of the OBCs. The term OBC is in itself a conundrum, one would assume it covers exceptional cases wherein certain castes deprived of opportunities due to inherent social stigmatisation are extended special privileges. Not so, when over 54% of India’s population and covering 3743 castes in addition to Dalits and scheduled tribes [another 25% of India’s population] are advanced distinctive rights then this entire policy of special dispensation is to make a mockery of the very spirit of empowerment. It is nothing but pork barrel politics, a lazy policy to buy votes and hence ‘In India you don’t cast your vote, you vote your caste.’
The BJP has over time cleverly inducted OBCs into its fold. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an OBC and to that extent the charge that the Sangh Parivar is anti-OBC or pro-Brahmin is ill-founded. In fact during the recent Bihar elections, the BJP brazenly declared ‘Mandal and Kamandal are with us’ denoting its core constituency, the Hindu electorate, and the OBCs are with the BJP. Kamandal — a water pitcher used by Hindu ascetics — rhymes with Mandal and this catchy slogan got voter attention. But because Modi is an OBC and therefore to assume that the BJP is a rainbow coalition is naive.
The BJP is nothing without the RSS and at the hustings it is the dedicated cadre of the RSS that works tirelessly for keeping the BJP campaign juggernaut well-oiled and running at all times. RSS provides the legs for the all- important ground game during the elections. To assume that the RSS and the BJP and the rest of the Sangh Parivar work in unison despite their minor differences is to exhibit a facile understanding of the fissures within this extended Hindu family. Even within the RSS there are major fault lines. A case in point is the Kerala branch of the RSS. Here the unique diversity and the egalitarian spirit innate within its civil society brings out starkly the contradictions within the RSS itself, leave alone the complex relationship between the BJP and the RSS.
