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Look what RSS is up to! You want
to wait?
RSS chief
plans to make India Sanghmayi, here’s how he is going about it
Sach Kanwal
Singh
 Journalism
has many constraints, but perhaps the biggest is its frequent
failure to see trends and developments that happen just beneath the
surface and remain outside the pale of headlines and a sharp public
focus till something explodes in full view as an “incident”, a
“statement”, a “controversy”.
Mainstream media
reporting on Sikh, Punjab or India related issues very often
deliberately skirts such issues while keeping the sham of
objectivity. As a community newspaper representing and alive to Sikh
interests, the World Sikh News does not have the luxury to wait till
an “incident”, a “statement”, a “controversy” breaks through to give
us a peg to report on a phenomena which all know is happening but
none is daring to talk about except a few enlightened souls in civil
society.
At a time when
the near centrist Congress party in
India
is making a song and dance about standing like a bulwark against the
forces of communalism, it is maintaining a pregnant silence on the
deep inroads into the Indian psyche being made by the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Mark our words.
The RSS is in an aggressive, proactive mode in India now. Its entire
work culture is changing, it has launched a countrywide movement and
program to embrace the influential and increasingly affluent middle
class, it is hogging in many states and domains the place usually
reserved for regular political parties, and it is preparing to shed
its silent-worker, behind-the-scenes, nose-to-the-grind image.
Leading the
RSS-in-an-aggressive-expansionist-mode drive is none other than its
chief Mohan Bhagwat who publicly repeats at least twice a week that
India is a Hindu Rashtra, something he said within moments after his
anointment as the RSS head and significantly, something that has
gone unchallenged by the Congress as well as the many avatars of the
communist parties.
In
Punjab, the Akali Dal and the SGPC remain blissfully untouched by
repeated statements of Mohan Bhagwat about entire India being a
Hindu Rashtra and all citizens of
India
being Hindus, even as the Akali Dal continues to maintain a
fraternal love-clasp with the political child of the RSS, the BJP.
Akali Dal patron and CM Prakash Singh Badal often describes the
alliance as much more than a political understanding. “We are almost
brothers,” he has repeated ad nauseum now.
As another story
on Page 15 of this edition explains, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat landed
at Delhi’s Dwarka suburb on October 2, the occasion ostensibly meant
to mark the day India dedicates to its near mock exercise of
committing itself to a self-styled apostle of peace. Bhagwat did so
by performing worship of AK 47 and other guns and ammunition, and
then delivered the RSS mumbo jumbo of worshipping power to ensure
non-violence.
But what is even
more important is the other social trend being actively promoted by
the RSS under Bhagwat. Its leaders are out in the open, RSS is
making open political statements, it is explicitly interfering and
intervening in the affairs of the BJP, it is taking overt political
position on all kinds of matters including issues of foreign policy,
it is gathering forces under its own banner inviting former army
officers, sants and sadhs, intellectuals and journalists.
In Punjab, the
number of RSS shakhas has grown astonishingly huge in the last three
years. At a time when elections to Punjab’s colleges are banned by
law and students have remained deprived of meaningful engagement
with politics for almost a quarter century, the RSS has its shakhas
in hundreds of schools and colleges.
Bhagwat chose to
make his traditional shastra puja (weapon worship) address in
Dwarka, a fast growing suburb in Delhi’s south-west, and RSS is
reaching across to the white collar migrants in many towns and
metros.
 Delhi’s
posh areas and highly congested suburbs witness RSS shakhas in the
park being sold to youngsters as health clubs cum spiritual
exercises. Sources in the RSS said they have instructions to expand
in all suburbs and focus on the well to do as well as the
unemployed.
“We must have
new image, a post-corporate image of a young, English and Hindi
speaking, modern yet spiritual, traditional yet wearing branded
jeans, quoting Proust and vedas in the same breath,” a young RSS
pracharak lectured in a Moga shakha last Sunday. This Sunday, he was
back, underlining and bringing about the significance of the fact
that an estimated 15,000 RSS cadres clad in their traditional khaki
short pants, white shirts and black caps had converged to listen to
“Bhagwat ji”.
In the decade
that the suburb has come into being, the 84-year-old Hindu
nationalist organization has set up 200 shakhas (daily assemblies)
in just Dwarka. In Chandigarh alone, more than 20 shakhas of the RSS
are currently in operation.
The middle class
Indian suburbs now represent not just the “new and more flexible
face of the RSS” but also its most pernicious. No more will the RSS
carry its explicit communal card; instead, like the age old practice
of Brahmanism, it is evolving and metamorphosing into an entity that
will make it hard to pin it down as the party of hate and poisonous
minds.
The RSS leaders
are now clear that they to achieve such an objective, they must
recruit new potential cadres from professional ranks. So, the lumpen
youth in search of a purpose will not be asked to get up at
5 am
to join the shakha. Instead, the well educated will be told the
shakha timings are to their advantage, and there is a gym next door
that will be available for free.
In many colonies
in the metros as well as in Punjab’s cities, the RSS has ensured
that timings and the regimen are flexible. While conventionally, the
shakhas have operated in the morning and entailed exercise drills,
now you have night shakhas in areas such as Dwarka. “We need to
accommodate working professionals,” Bhagwat explained helpfully.
And listen to
his nuanced talk: “While our nation has the reputation, it has
utterly failed to secure supremacy in the world arena. Our values of
truth and non-violence cannot be asserted until we wield and worship
power, something which the RSS preaches and practices. The country
must become Sanghmayi.”
Sanghmayi means
drenched in RSS ideology.
Clearly, the
rebuilding efforts are designed to reposition the RSS as an
acceptable ideological faith to a rapidly evolving demography,
moving away from the traditional perception of being dominated by
the upper castes. It is on the time tested Hindutva road of an
assimilation drive and is making special efforts to attract the
dalits and the backward castes to its fold.
The operation is
below the surface, subtle and slow, and RSS will wait till it gets
the results with time. And then the RSS will be a formidable force
for the minorities to engage with. Some, of course, do think that
the fundamentalist, religious and ideological slant militates
against its ability to reach out to a wider cross-section in the
country, but much harm would be done in a matter of a couple of
years itself.
Bhagwat is not
saying, is not even alluding that the RSS has any intention to
change and become an inclusive force. His idea of inclusiveness is
limited to assimilation. The RSS has expanded its presence steadily
since 1990, growing its base of shakhas from 29,000 in 1990 to
40,000 at the end of March. Most of these expansions have come about
in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which have a strong
presence of the socially backward communities.
Officially, the
RSS today has 800,000 cadres attending its daily shakhas across the
country. It operates almost like a secret paramilitary
organizationand efforts to re-invent itself are aimed not at any
soul searching but to win more souls for the devil.
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The IT Milan,
and Shakha on the Web!
Look at the
bold new initiatives of the RSS. In
Bangalore,
Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai and Chandigarh, it is running “IT
Milan” gatherings (information technology meetings) where it
exhorts informal gatherings of its supporters and sympathizers
from the IT sector to imbibe the RSS ideology if they want to
counter the dragon of
China
and overpower and sublimate Pakistan.
The obsolete
rules are gone. No need for sporting the khaki knickers. There
is more acceptability of married members. Pracharaks will soon
not have to be celibate full-time members. It is coming up with
plans like Vishesh Sampark Yojana to reach out to bureaucrats
and NRIs. Members are being encouraged to use social networking
to attract youngsters. They are asked to use Yahoo Groups and
Orkut.
“Many
shakhas are called now ‘software shakhas’ to groom busy IT
professionals in the RSS way of thinking,” said Ram Madhav, RSS
spokesperson. The new age shakhas will be on the web too, and
right into your child’s laptop.
How prepared
are we to counter such shrewdly thought out plans at
penetrating, assimilating, metamorphosing the societal agendas?
Remember, the RSS will leave no stone unturned in trying to
appropriate the Sikh Gurus, the Guru Granth Sahib, our religious
idiom. Why do you think it has set up the other RSS, the
Rashtriya Sikh Sangat? It is time to wake up, unless you want to
wait for an “incident”, a “statement”, a “controversy”.
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7
October 2009
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