... Post-Independence, the RSS hoped to be invited to participate in government ... The hope died with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi ... So intense was the public outrage against it that open political activity was just out of the question ..

... It, therefore, took recourse to launching a political party which could defend the RSS in the political sphere and, simultaneously, build public sympathy for its ideology. S.P. Mookerjee's exit from Nehru's Cabinet provided the opportunity. The RSS needed a publicly- known personality; and Mookerjee was looking for an organisation. So was set up the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which was kept under control through the network of organising secretaries who, according to its leader Balraj Madhok, were all RSS pracharaks, paid by the RSS and answerable only to it.

Over time, the RSS cadres attached to Mookerjee learnt the ways of politics and emerged as public figures. And yet they never developed the confidence to snap the umbilical cord that tied them to the RSS ...

At the founding conference in Bombay, the BJP adopted a public posture that made its ideology look different from the RSS. The camouflage did not bring the expected political dividends in the 1984 elections and the party veered back to the old Jana Sangh ideology. It was not openly flaunted because the party did not want to lose the respectability it had found in the anti-Congress conglomerations.

The objective of the political formation has been to build and consolidate a separate Hindu political entity. Towards that end it had been adopting agendas calculated to widen the communal gulf. If it was the demand for a uniform civil code and abolition of Article 370 at one time (1951), it later became ban on cow-slaughter (1967) and revengeful demand for return of temples supposedly destroyed by Muslim rulers.

For creating popular hysteria, other RSS fronts like the Hindu Dharam Raksha Samiti (Ahmedabad, 1969), the Rashtriya Utsav Mandal and Shree Ram Tarun Mandal (Maharashtra, 1970), and Bajrang Dal (Moradabad, 1980) were floated ... The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal have been quite prominent during the last two decades.

To deny that the RSS is a political organisation is to fly in the face of facts. The only difference from what we generally recognise as political parties is that it is neither democratic nor secular. American researcher Donald E.

Smith had come to the conclusion:'"Nehru once remarked that Hindu communalism was the Indian version of fascism, and, in the case of the RSS, it is not difficult to perceive certain similarities. The leader principle, the stress on militarism, the doctrine of racial-cultural superiority, ultra-nationalism infused with religious idealism, the use of symbols of past greatness, the emphasis on national solidarity, the exclusion of religious. or ethnic minorities from the nation-concept - all of those features of the RSS are highly reminiscent of fascist movements in Europe." (Source: The Hindustan Times, 13 February, 2000)