The Brotherhood in Saffron Read online

  The RSS, seeking to integrate the tribal population into the Hindu community, has allocated considerable resources to tribal work since the late 1960s. The early work was carried out largely by the VHP. In 1977 the VHP handed over its work among the tribals to the Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (BVKA), a national organization set up that year to coordinate work among the tribals. The BVKA traces its origins to work begun in Madhya Pradesh in 1952 and expand to other states in 1966.The RSS demonstrated its approval of the BVKA’s efforts by giving it the primary role for coordinating work among tribals. One of the most capable RSS pracharaks, Rambhau Godbole, who had previously served as an organizing secretary in the Jana Sangh, was placed in charge of the new national organization. By 1983, the BVKA operated 89 student hostels, 136 primary schools, 137 health centres, 19 agricultural development centers, 26 vocational traning centres, and 83 orphanages.121 At its national council meeting in September 1984, the Ashram decided on a major expansion of its activities during 1985–1986. Balasaheb Deoras, in his address to the council, gave his blessing to the effort, a sign that council, gave his blessing to the effort, a sign that RSS is likely to provide significant support, both in workers and money, to this effort.122

  Regarding the Scheduled Castes, Balasaheb Deoras inaugurated the Seva Bharati in 1979 to coordinate work, largely educational, on a national level.123 This emphasis on education underscores the importance the RSS gives to education as a tool for national integration. Almost all the affiliates of the RSS are engaged in some form of teaching.

  Besides this specific educational programme among the Scheduled Castes, RSS members have operated private schools since the late 1940s. In 1978, many of these schools were brought together into a national organization. The Vidya Bharati was established in that year to serve as the coordinating body for over 1000 elementary and secondary schools.124

  One of the most ambitious initiatives of the post-1977 period is a Hindu missionary programme launched by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1983 to work among tribals, Scheduled Castes and the poor. The project grew out of the national furore that developed after the conversion to Islam of several hundred Scheduled Caste people in a small village in Tamil Nadu. That event touched off a nationwide debate among Hindus regarding ways to enhance Hindu solidarity, and thus diminish the chances for more such conversions. The VHP decided to train 100 pracharaks, as the missionaries are called; and they were assigned to various parts of the country in July 1982. These missionaries were instructed to train a cadre of workers in their own areas of responsibility.125 By December 1982, the first group of 600 were given their assignments. They were joined by an additional 1400 in December 1983, thus completing the first phase of the training.126

  With the rapid expansion of the RSS and its affiliates, the RSS itself became increasingly hard-placed to satisfy the demands for full-time workers. In 1983 the general secretary of the RSS reported that in the previous year the RSS had trained 200 new pracharaks and vistaraks (probationers), a number ‘not in keeping with the demands of the time’.127 In the face of such personnel shortages in a rapidly expanding network of organizations, the RSS moved to improve the lines of communication both vertically and horizontally among the pracharak network, so that it would be in a better position to identify priorities and problems, and to provide the brotherhood a more accurate basis for determining the assignment of workers and the allocation of money among the ‘family’ of organizations. In late 1977 in some places the RSS established forums, called samanvaya samitis (coordination committees), designed to bring together full-time workers from the RSS and from the affiliates at the district and state levels.128 This step bore the mark of Balasaheb Deoras’ activist orientation.

  The Jana Sangh group in the Janata Party was not invited to attend the meetings of the samanvaya samitis.129 Prior to the Emergency, senior Jana Sangh leaders, in their capacity as pracharaks, had attended the annual meeting of the national RSS pratinidhi sabha in Nagpur, the only formal occasion for bringing together the ‘family’ prior to the establishment of the samanvayasamitis.130

  Why this effort to distance the RSS from the Jana Sangh group? From the Jana Sangh side, tactical considerations were surely an important reason. This Jana Sangh group within the Janata Party was then under attack because many of its seniormost figures were RSS members. These senior Jana Sangh figures were charged with dual loyalties. Attending samanvaya samitis would have provided ammunition to the critics of the Jana Sangh group. The RSS for its part also had good reasons to keep the Jana Sangh group out of the samanvaya samitis. The RSS leadership, then orchestrating an ambitious expansion programme, wanted to insulate the RSS itself from political criticism that could lead to restrictions on its activities.

  But even after the Jana Sangh group pulled out of the Janata party in April 1980, no representative of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) attended the samanvaya samiti conclaves. Was the leadership of the new BJP steering the organization away from the ‘family’? The answer seems to be both yes and no. Two legacies—that of Jaya Prakash Narayan, the moral guide of the Janata Party, and that of the Jana Sangh—were contesting for the soul of the new party. The former legacy involved a weakening of links with the RSS. Between 1980 and 1984, aspiring to be the national alternative to Mrs Gandhi’s Congress party, the BJP emphasized its secular credentials to achieve this objective. Advocating a democratic front until late 1984, the BJP wanted to end the political isolation brought about by the RSS controversy. On the other hand, the BJP clearly wanted to continue recruiting RSS workers into the organization. As long as there was some prospect of the BJP developing into a national alternative, the swayamsevaks grudgingly went along with the leadership’s efforts to stress the Jaya Prakash Narayan legacy.

  However, following the electoral debacle of the BJP in 1984 the party seems to have been veering back to its Jana Sangh roots. But it is still an open question whether the leadership will be satisfied with a ‘little’ or with an ideologically oriented party in the Jana Sangh mould. Attending the samanvaya samiti meetings would send a strong signal that the party leaders had opted conclusively for the Jana Sangh legacy and had fully rejoined the ‘family’. In mid-1985 the press began to report such BJP participation in a few places.131 The election to party president in 1986 of Lal Krishna Advani, an advocate of closer RSS–BJP relations, will probably hasten this process.

  SYMBIOSIS: A TWO-WAY FLOW OF INFLUENCE

  The Vidyarthi Parishad, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the BJP, and other affiliates operate as the moral stepchildren of the RSS. Legitimacy flows to the RSS leadership, largely because they are involved in the ‘higher calling’ of character building. Of all the affiliates, it is only the Vivekananda Lay Order and the VHP which could challenge the RSS monopoly on moral superiority, since they too are engaged primarily in character-building activities. However, full-time RSS workers have certain advantages vis-à-vis those of the Kendra and the VHP. They have a general training which enables the RSS-trained worker to step in as manager in all the affiliates, whereas the Kendra and the VHP give specialized training for specific tasks within their own organizations. The RSS-trained worker also has the advantage of a much longer training period which involves practical experience in managing the activities of others. Finally, the RSS is the parent organization, and its trainees are accorded respect throughout the ‘family’. Balasaheb Deoras, the present sarsanghchalak, is him self more of an activist than his two predecessors. He has made it clear that the RSS would pursue a more open and aggressive style under his leadership. He has pledged to involve the RSS more directly in the nation’s development and, by implication, to take a greater interest in the affiliates.

  Golwalkar worked hard to preserve the moral legitimacy of the RSS, and this required a certain separation from the activities of the affiliates. Should the RSS abandon this detachment, the leadership may discover that it is even less able to influence the affiliates than in the past. As long as the RSS leaders give the impression of re
maining outside the struggle for power, prestige and money, they inherit a charisma deriving from their detachment. This factor will undoubtedly continue to preserve a certain amount of autonomy for all the affiliates. The professional skills required to work in the affiliates also serves to insulate them from the generalist RSS leadership who have neither the training nor the experience to qualify than to comment on the wide range of technical issues which the affiliates must confront. The affiliates are tasked to translate the belief system of the RSS into policies specific to their areas of activity. However, the RSS belief system is on too high a level of generality to inform many of the issues which face the affiliates. As a result, the affiliates have influenced the RSS itself (as well as other affiliates) on issues which fall within their own field of responsibility, creating complex flows of influence between the RSS and its affiliates.

  The affiliates are left, within certain limits, to their own devices to mobilize support, and they have adopted a range of different strategies. Nevertheless, the network of affiliates operates within broad parameters set by the common socialization of their leaders within the RSS, by their reliance on common symbols, and by the close consultation among their leaders. The RSS would perhaps temper its support for them if these organizations of mass mobilization were to permit any real challenge to the elites trained in character building.

  5

  The RSS in Politics

  Many senior RSS figures had an ambivalent attitude regarding party politics in independent India. The struggle for power among contending interests or persons was alien to the concept of decision making considered legitimate in the RSS. Soliciting votes seemed corrupting, both for the candidates and the voters. Many believed that the use of propaganda and caste considerations would reduce the chances of the voters electing the ‘best’ candidates. Some were apprehensive that the democratic process would exacerbate the cleavages between already hostile social groups and thus undermine national integration.

  Nevertheless, activist pracharaks were demanding some RSS involvement in politics, and the objective situation seemed to demand political protection. The RSS leadership responded by offering support to the new Jana Sangh of Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. While Golwalkar and most other RSS leaders wanted to keep the RSS outside the political process, they did expect to exercise a moral influence over the new party. They sought some voice without institutionalizing any formal linkage between the RSS and the Jana Sangh. The RSS constitution prohibited political activity, and the government might again restrict RSS activities if it were to engage in overt political activity. The problem was resolved by the decision to loan a number of pracharaks, who were thoroughly socialized in the RSS discipline, to the Jana Sangh. As the party organization expanded, a large number of swayamsevaks were attracted to the party and in time dominated the grass-roots structure of the party organization in most places.

  In the Jana Sangh’s formative stages, neither Mookerjee nor the RSS leadership looked at the Jana Sangh as the political affiliate of the RSS. At its higher levels, Mookerjee had given responsible positions to prominent Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj activists and to some dissident Congressmen. He placed Mauli Chandra Sharma, a non-RSS Delhi lawyer and son of Hindu Mahasabha orthodox leader Din Dayal Sharma, in charge of the party organization. Associated with him was Bhai Mahavir,1 a young pracharak with little experience in politics. Generally, the swayamsevaks who joined the Jana Sangh were novices at politics and were willing to follow the leadership of experienced politicians like Mookerjee.

  At the first national meeting of the Jana Sangh, on 21 October 1951 in Delhi, a committee was selected to draft a campaign manifesto. That manifesto, published on 29 October, focused on national integration:2 India’s unity would be furthered by an educational system reflecting ‘bharatiya culture’, by one indigenous link language (i.e., Hindi in the Devanagari script), by the full integration of Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian Union, and by a policy denying special rights to any minority.3 It proposed that the actual tiller of the soil own his farm; it called for the development of the country through private enterprise, except in such ‘vital’ industries as defence production. The manifesto paid its homage to tradition by asking for the protection of the cow4 and for the promotion of traditional Ayurvedic medicine. It advocated generous aid to the refugees from Pakistan and a policy of reciprocity towards that country. It also proposed that India withdraw from the British Commonwealth. In short, the first manifesto was an economically conservative document which displayed a greater concern for cultural and political integration than for social and economic problems.

  FIRST GENERAL ELECTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT OF PARTY INFRASTRUCTURE

  The young Jana Sangh, with assistance from RSS workers loaned to it, established a complex campaign machinery within three months of its founding. Party leaders, anticipating success, selected candidates for 93 of the 489 parliamentary constituencies and for 725 of the 3,383 state assembly constituencies. They discovered how weak their popular support was when the votes of the first general elections were counted. The Congress, which had organizationally penetrated all regions of the country and which possessed the requisite political legitimacy to attract support, won almost 75 per cent of both the parliamentary and assembly seats. The Jana Sangh won only three seats in parliament and 35 assembly seats. There was some gratification that it qualified itself as an all-India party by polling more than 3 per cent of the total votes for parliamentary candidates.5

  Mookerjee was able to mobilize considerable support in Bengal which gave the party two of its three parliamentary seats and nine of its thirty-five assembly seats.6 Besides Bengal, the party also did comparatively well in the Hindi-speaking states, where it won its third parliamentary seat and the remaining twenty-six assembly seats. The restrained political enthusiasm of the RSS cadre in Maharashtra and much of south India, coupled with the brahmin orientation of the RSS in those areas, undoubtedly had its effect on the party’s poor showing in those few constituencies where it ran candidates. While the results were as much a disappointment to the RSS leadership as they were to Mookerjee, the RSS leadership did not abandon Mookerjee’s party because it had performed so far below their expectations. In a post-election pep talk to swayamsevaks at an RSS camp in Punjab, Golwalkar praised the party’s ability to organize ‘so well within three months. It has given a good fight and gained valuable experience.’7

  To unify the opposition within parliament, Mookerjee initiated negotiations with members from several opposition parties and with independents. When the Jana Sangh delegates assembled for the party’s first annual session at Kanpur in December 1952, Mookerjee had succeeded in recruiting 32 members of parliament into his opposition bloc, the National Democratic Front,8 and invited them to attend the party’s annual session. At that session, Mauli Chandra Sharma was asked to continue as general secretary. The other general secretary selected was Deendayal Upadhyaya,9 a young RSS pracharak who was loaned to the Jana Sangh to help organize the party in Uttar Pradesh. By selecting both Sharma and an RSS pracharak, Mookerjee attempted to balance the two sets of forces within the party organization.

  Mookerjee directed the delegates’ attention to two issues: the special relationship of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with the Indian Union, and the condition of the Hindu minority in East Bengal. On the Kashmir question the delegates decided to involve the Jana Sangh directly in an agitation whose objective was the total integration of the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir into India. This agitation, launched by the Praja Parishad, a Hindu political party in Jammu and Kashmir supported by the RSS, also had the enthusiastic backing of the RSS.

  Mookerjee organized a committee to mobilize national support for the Kashmir agitation. As part of his effort to focus national attention on Kashmir, he entered J&K on 11 May 1953. He was promptly arrested and detained. His death from a heart attack on 23 June, while a prisoner, was interpreted by many in the Jana Sangh as murder. RSS members then active in the Jana Sangh recollect
that they felt that they had lost their political guru (teacher). Since they did not have the political self-confidence to consider one of their own to head the party, their response was to seek another political figure of national stature. This course of action might also have been adopted to ameliorate the growing strains between the RSS cadre and the other party workers.10

  The party leaders considered N. C. Chatterjee (a close friend of Mookerjee’s, a Lok Sabha representative from West Bengal, a leading member of the National Democratic Front, and the president of the Hindu Mahasabha) a possible successor to Mookerjee.11 Chatterjee recalls that Mauli Chandra Sharma, Balraj Madhok, and Prem Nath Dogra, leader of the Praja Parishad, visited him in Delhi soon after Mookerjee’s death and offered the Jana Sangh presidency to him.12 Chatterjee maintains that Golwalkar was also consulted on the selection and had agreed to accept him as the party’s president. That Golwalkar would be consulted, as a matter of course, is understandable. The party had a major RSS commitment in the many full-time workers loaned to it. The swayamsevaks would expect his approval before they made a final decision on the party presidency.

  Chatterjee for his part informed the Jana Sangh leaders that he would have to consult the Hindu Mahasabha leadership before making a final decision.13 If he were to take over the Jana Sangh, some kind of understanding would have to be worked out between the Jana Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha. But Savarkar, still the most influential figure in the Mahasabha, opposed any type of cooperation with the Jana Sangh. Chatterjee recalls that Savarkar’s negative response to the proposal was due in large part to his dislike of Golwalkar and to his lingering distrust of the RSS for not supporting the Hindu Mahasabha either in the 1946 general elections or in 1949 when it resumed operations as a political party. Moreover, Savarkar assumed that the RSS cadre would take control of the Jana Sangh, and in fact probably already had control of the party organization.14