Eminent Academician Achin Vanaik
The Prime Minister himself has pronounced and affirmed a shameful deceit. The RSS is "only" a cultural and social organisation! This idea of Vajpayee as an amiable moderate, a secular and liberal democrat at heart has been nothing but a media creation. There are no moderates in the Sangh because all who are unshakably committed to its ideology are by definition adherents of an extremist and authoritarian political project. The 'moderate' versus 'extremist' divide in the Sangh pertains only to differences regarding tactics - the manner and pace at which its overall project of basic transformation of Indian society is to be carried out. The Vajpayee who said "the RSS is my soul" has spoken loud and clear.
Hindutva and indeed all anti-democratic, authoritarian projects operate with a very different understanding of what the relationship between State apparatuses and their own political project should be ... The Sangh must try and legitimise its various calculated steps in the direction of undermining the restraints imposed by the existing institutions, rules, norms and mores of Indian democracy.
Gujarat is today the principal laboratory for testing the waters, as it were. There are two points to note here. First, it is an assault that is being carried out on various fronts to see how far it can go in establishing new norms which then became the "accepted base" for further forward movement ... Second, as the Sangh's strongest trump card, the authority of the Prime Minister is used to justify such advances. That is to say, his deliberately manufactured and promoted aura of "moderation" is used to counter criticism, and where possible, settle the issue once and for all ... Vajpayee has fulfilled his expected role.
... The big lie about the purely social-cultural character of the RSS must be maintained. to deflect criticism of what the Sangh is up to in Gujarat. The RSS must be the only "purely social-cultural organisation" in the world that regularly in its journals pronounces opinions and positions on all kinds of political issues. The RSS was deeply involved in the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign mobilising its mass cadre base for that purpose.
Is it its contention that this campaign was a purely social-cultural movement and not in any way or only incidentally a political campaign? ... Within an hour of (Pokhran test) the RSS' Organiser came out with a special issue commemorating Pokhran-I on a day not its usual day of issue. It is open knowledge that the RSS vets Cabinet appointments and was privy to the draft of the National Agenda for Governance even before it was shown to other coalition partners ... The RSS is the only purely social-cultural organisation in the world that tells a political party, the BJP, that its national organising secretaries must be RSS members, and indeed gets its way. The list is endless accountable to the electorate, the RSS is not! Moreover, it is not even democratically accountable to its own membership since its key officials are all selected from the top not elected from below. The RSS is not even accountable to the ordinary member of the BJP in any way! Never in the political history of India as an independent country has there ever existed such a state of affairs as has been inaugurated by the BJP in power. It is already a measure of how far the Sangh has got in transforming the public and media understanding of democratic practice ... that such a situation no longer comes in much comment let alone condemnation, opposition or institutional rectification! It is not just the ideology of the Sangh that should have made it an untouchable in the democratic arena, it is the very institutional character of the Sangh as a collective entity.
This has not been altered to adjust to democratic realities. Instead democratic realities and perceptions have been adjusted to render this unexceptionable! The great difference between the authoritarian projects of classical fascism and that of the Sangh is that the former had one chief instrumentality to carry it out - the state ... The Sangh ... has two instrumentalities – the state and the RSS. Indeed, not the former but the latter is the "skeleton" on which the new transformed India is to be rebuilt. The ... transformative project. therefore is more flexible and longer term. It is ... a question of ... suborning state structures to the RSS whose dominance in civil society must also be pursued independently, and with the help of the state apparatuses ...
(Source: The Hindu, 15 Feb., 2000)
Vidya Subrahmaniam On RSS and Hinduism
The two-nation theory was first propounded by V.D. Savarkar in 1922 in a handwritten manuscript titled "Hindutva" ... Hindutva so influenced RSS founder K.B.Hedgewar that in time it became the philosophy of the Jan Sangh and the BJP as well.
But what was the central point of Hindutva? Savarkar believed that Hindus were a nation, that they formed a single national group by virtue of accepting India as their fatherland (pitrubhu) and holy land (punyabhu). Savarkar was certain that Muslims and Christians, who worshipped holy places outside India ... did not fit into his definition of a nation.
M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded Hedgewar, left no doubts on this score in his "Bunch of Thoughts" ..
The RSS mindset is, then, not the Hindu mindset ...
What the RSS preaches is not Hinduism. Not if Hinduism is seen as a tolerant platform that allows anyone and everyone to clamber aboard ...
