The RSS or (National Volunteer Corps) professes to be an independent Hindu revivalists body with no role to play in the functioning of the BJP-led coalition government. Yet it is open secret that the fundamentalist shadow of the Sangh does fall on the ... administration. Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee and his hard-line Home Minister L.K. Advani, apart form several other senior ministers, are RSS members. The Sangh is like a parent body, and BJP is one of the several affiliates that form the so-called saffron brotherhood (saffron is the Hindu holy colour), or, as it is more commonly called, the Sangh Parivar (famnily).
The RSS shuns publicity and keeps a low profile. PM Vajpayee and many of his cabinet colleagues were once fervent RSS activists, looking up to leaders who were ardent Hindu-supremacists and who admired the likes of Adolf Hitler.
"To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, (Hitler's) Germany shocked the world by purging the country of ... the Jews", Madhav Golwalkar, the second supremo of the RSS, wrote in 1938. "Germany has shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures ... to be assimilated into one united while, a good reason for us in Hindustan (India) to learn and profit by ... The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and religion, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion ... or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen's rights".
Today, 60 years after Golwalkar wrote those harsh, intemperate lines, the RSS sounds a trifle less bigoted, but only a trifle. The Sangh (which currently has about four million members and sympathisers) still seeks to create a "Hindu nation" and its governing credo remains Hindutva (Hindudom), a thesis formulated in1923 by the militant Hindu leader ... Savarkar ....
Hindutva in essence is an exclusionist doctrine that deems all non-Hindus who live in India to be basically non-Indians. Only Hindus, Savarkar theorised, truly constituted the Indian nation. India's socio-cultural milieu is rooted in the Hindu ethos, in the Hindu way of life, for the Hindus are the indigenous people of the subcontinent.
No person can be truly Indian if he or she does not share those Hindu traditions, who does not feel "united by blood ties with all those whose ancestry can be traced to Hindu antiquity", and whose "fatherland" and "holy land" are not both India.
The patriotism of Muslims and Christians will always be suspect in RSS eyes, for with their holy lands in Saudi Arabia and Israel/Palestine, they fall short of the last criterion. The Christians and Muslims ... have separated themselves from the "national soul", says the RSS, they "have cut off all ancestral national moorings of this land".
And so too have some educated Indians, the Westernised elite, who espouse foreign concepts and ideologies like socialism, communism and capitalism, even democracy - concepts that are not rooted in traditional Hindu thought. They too, like the communists, the Muslims and the Christians, are perceived by the RSS as a hostile force.
The BJP, whose members include people from the Westernised elite, cannot possibly subscribe to such rabid xenophobia. The party swears by democracy and believes in equal citizenship (but no "appeasement") for the Muslims. PM Vajpayee cultivated the image of a liberal, sensible, honest politician with socialist leanings. The BJP does of course show other, less acceptable faces, speaking often in two voices, one seemingly less fundamentalist, another unmistakably Hindu-centric, puritanical and anti-West. But on the whole, "the party remains the respectable facet, the window dressing if you like, of the Sangh Parivar", said a senior Indian journalist. If the BJP is the Sangh family's respectable facade, the (VHP) - an affiliate set up in 1964 to link the Sangh family with the community of Hindu sages and ecclesiastical bodies -and its youth wing the Bajrang Dal manifest its fascist face ...
Between VHP's Ashok Singhal and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee clearly lies a wide gulf, encompassing in its span the entire spectrum of Hindu activism, from the radical far right to the moderate. The affiliates of RSS are allowed to chart their own course, while the parent body stays clear of direct involvement in their activities. For otherwise, writes Walter K. Anderson and Shridhar D. Damle in their book on the Sangh, The Brotherhood in Saffron, "(The RSS leadership) would have lost the aura of detachment which provides them their legitimacy as teachers, 'cultura' commentators and arbitrators."
The RSS routinely lends pracharaks (missionaries) and volunteers to the affiliates, the though they are essentially independent, Sangh leaders more often than not constitute their top leadership. Says V.D. Varadpande, 80, a veteran RSS activist and retired college principal ... in Nagpur: "Hedgewar (the founder) used to say, "The RSS is a powerhouse. As electricity is generated in a powerhouse and distributed everywhere, so RSS-trained people will spread in all spheres of society and bring about change"".
In Hedgewar's time ... there were no affiliates. Indeed, it was not till 1948 that the RSS began spawning its "stepchildren" ... Revivalists like Hedgewar in early 20th century British India (which included what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) felt Hindus, despite their overwhelming number, were a "suppressed majority" who had lost their self-esteem and vigour. Eight centuries of non-Hindu domination, first by Afghan and Turk Muslims, then by the British, had robbed the community of its sense of pride, leaving it disunited and demoralised. Deeply religious, some revivalists sought inspiration from the Gita, sections of which were interpreted to justify even .