The Brotherhood in Saffron

by Walter Anderson

  22. Indian Express (Delhi), 12 April 1977.

  23. Organiser, 5 March 1978. There is some discrepancy in reports on the number of shakhas. Organiser, 2 April 1979, gives a figure of 9500 in 1975.

  24. Organiser, 29 March 1979.

  25. Organiser, 5 April 1981.

  26. Organiser, 31 January 1982.

  27. The RSS general secretary in 1982 reported that there were 5600 shakhas in these four states: Karnataka, 1500; Kerala, 2500; Tamil Nadu, 400; and Andhra Pradesh, 1200. Organiser, 14 February 1982.

  28. India Today, 11 May 1977, p. 34.

  29. Reported in Kuldip Nayar, ‘Mistrust of RSS Could Split the Opposition’, in India Abroad (New York City), 18 June 1982, p. 2.

  30. Organiser, 12 April 1980.

  31. Interview with Professor Om Prakash Kohli, national president of the Vidyarthi Parishad, on 7 May 1983 at Bombay.

  32. This was admitted in an interview with Nana Deshmukh on 16 April 1983 in Pune. Deshmukh, however, was careful to emphasize that no RSS instructions to the Jana Sangh were given during such talks.

  33. Organiser, 29 August 1977. The proposal that the RSS merge with one of the youth groups affiliated to the Janata Party revealed a complete misunderstanding of the traditional RSS perception of its role. The RSS has never defined itself as the political adjunct of any political organization, even though Vinayak Damodar Savarkar tried unsuccessfully to use it as the volunteer front of his Hindu Mahasabha in the 1930s, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in 1949 envisaged a similar role for it vis-à-vis the Congress party. Rather, the RSS has always conceived of itself as a character-building organization training young men who would reform society in their own ‘perfected’ image.

  34. Janata Party Constitution, Article 5, Section a (i).

  35. See report of these manoeuvres in The Hindu (Madras), 12 March 1979.

  36. For a Jana Sangh interpretation of its problems with Charan Singh, see Nana Deshmukh, R.S.S.: Victim of Slander (New Delhi: Vision Books, 1979), pp. 50–63. Deshmukh writes that Singh offered to drop his criticism of the Jana Sangh on the dual-membership issue if it supported his bid to become prime minister.

  37. Prime Minister Desai, who depended on the Jana Sangh group, did not back the demand that Jana Sangh legislators sever their links to the RSS.

  38. Vajpayee, in what the press reported to be a highly emotional speech, made these remarks at a party meeting called in early April 1979 to discuss the RSS question. See The Hindu (Madras), 3 April 1979.

  39. Indian Express (Delhi), 7 July 1979.

  40. Indian Express (Delhi), 13 July 1979.

  41. Indian Express (Delhi), 14 July 1979.

  42. Indian Express (Delhi), 17 July 1979.

  43. Indian Express (Delhi), 25 July 1979.

  44. Ibid. The RSS constitution states that anyone holding an office in a political party could not simultaneously hold any post in the RSS.

  45. Indian Express (Delhi), 30 July 1979.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Indian Express (Delhi), 5 August 1979.

  48. Indian Express (Delhi), 2 August 1979.

  49. For example, D. P. Thengadi, now the chief theoretician of the RSS, noted at the time that Vajpayee resorted to this publicly critical stance towards the RSS to preserve his national political stature. Interview with him on 10 September 1979 at Chicago.

  50. Vajpayee and Advani, according to Nana Deshmukh, were given responsibility ‘to decide anything and everything’ regarding which Jana Sangh members would go into the government or work in the organization. Interview with Nana Deshmukh on 16 April 1983 at Pune.

  51. This is not to say that there was no grumbling from within the Jana Sangh ranks regarding the leadership’s non-assertive role. There was. This was pointed out to us by Nana Deshmukh in an interview with him on 16 April 1983; the same point was made by J. P. Mathur, a Janata Party member of parliament from the Jana Sangh group, in an interview on 26 July 1983 at Delhi.

  52. One indication of this consideration is a reported letter of Madhavrao Mule, acting chief of the RSS during the Emergency, to a Janata alliance spokesman assuring him that the RSS intended to make it a more inclusive organization. See Times of India (Bombay), 14 March 1977.

  53. Organiser, 28 May 1977.

  54. Interview with Balasaheb Deoras on 29 July 1983 at Nagpur.

  55. Narayan’s 13 September 1977 letter on this matter is reported in Organiser, 3 October 1977.

  56. RSS leaders were indeed talking with their counterparts in the Jama’ at-i-Islami. Statement reported in Organiser, 3 October 1977.

  57. Organiser, 12 September 1977.

  58. Organiser, 19 November 1977.

  59. Reported in Organiser, October 1979.

  60. For a discussion of the importance of membership and ritual on community commitment, see Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 93–94.

  61. The Janata Party’s popular percentage of the vote dropped from 43.2 per cent in 1977 to 28.3 per cent in 1980. Because the opposition was divided in India’s winner-take-all system, the Janata Party’s parliamentary percentage did not reflect its popular standing.

  62. It fought the election under the name of Janata Party (Secular).

  63. See India Today, 1 March 1980, for a description of the discontent in the ranks of the Jana Sangh group.

  64. Times of India (Bombay), 8 March 1980.

  65. Times of India (Bombay), 23 March 1980.

  66. Organiser, 2 March 1980.

  67. Organiser, 16 March 1980.

  68. See discussion of Muslim voting in Myron Weiner, India at the Polls: 1980: A Study of the Parliamentary Elections (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1983), pp. 120–24.

  69. Newspaper reports as late as mid-March 1980 note that senior Jana Sangh figures believed that the general assembly of the RSS would adopt a resolution barring its members from active politics. For example, see Times of India (Bombay), 17 March 1980.

  70. The wording of the parliamentary board’s formula would also have prevented Janata Party members from participating in the activities of the labour and student affiliates of the RSS. The advisory proposal stated: ‘No legislator or office bearer of the Janata Party shall participate in the day-to-day activities of the RSS. No members of the Janata party shall work for any front organization which functions in competition with the one sponsored by the Janata party.’ Times of India (Bombay), 20 March 1980.

  71. For the RSS view of developments, see Organiser, 30 March 1980.

  72. General Secretary Rajendra Singh stated in an interview on 25 July 1982 at Bethesda, Maryland, that there was a large number of central assembly delegates opposed to making RSS members ‘second class’ persons in politics.

  73. In the vote, Desai and three other non-Jana Sangh members voted against the hard-line stand.

  74. For a description of the proceedings of the gathering, see Times of India (Bombay), 7 April 1980.

  75. Organiser, 15 May 1980.

  76. Interview with Rajendra Singh on 25 July 1982 at Bethesda, Maryland.

  77. Organiser, 16 April 1980.

  78. Times of India (Bombay), 27 December 1980.

  79. Ibid.

  80. See a summary of his speech in Election Archives (June 1981), pp. 675–87.

  81. Times of India (Bombay), 31 December 1980.

  82. The Congress party, however, formed the government because it was able to lure independents to its side.

  83. Organiser, 28 February 1982.

  84. Ibid.

  85. Times of India (New Delhi), 31 August 1982.

  86. Organiser, 10 October 1982.

  87. Organiser, 21 November 1982.

  88. Organiser, 23 May 1982. The Vidyarthi Parishad was under great pressure from its own ranks to revoke the 1977 decision, which many thought would over the long run undermine the Vidyarthi Parishad’s appeal in the student community.

 
89. The election was unusual in other ways. The Congress did very well in traditionally Jana Sangh, Hindu, Punjabi-speaking neighbourhoods, while the BJP picked up unexpected support among Muslims and among voters in outlying suburban areas, which in the past had supported the Congress. One plausible reason for the loss of support among RSS cadre might be the backing of Punjabi Hindus—and the RSS cadre in Delhi is largely Punjabi Hindu—for Prime Minister Gandhi‘s tough stand towards the growing Sikh demand for an autonomous Punjab.

  90. Organiser, 24 April 1983. Also see Times of India (Bombay), 24 April 1983.

  91. For a discussion on the controversy generated by Vajpayee’s proposal, see Times of India (Bombay), 18 April 1983.

  92. Despite the dismal parliamentary showing, the BJP did secure about 7.7 per cent of the total vote, suggesting sufficient support to rebuild the party’s legislative representation at the state and national levels. Indeed, only the Congress party polled a larger percentage of voters. In fact, the Jana Sangh had only once before performed better—in the 1967 elections when it polled 9.4 per cent of the vote.

  93. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) criticized Rajiv Gandhi and his party for not making the RSS an issue. See India Abroad (New York City), 4 January 1985, p. 14.

  94. India Abroad (New York City), 11 January 1985.

  95. L. K. Advani, BJP general secretary, notes that the BJP from its inception in 1980 has recruited RSS pracharaks for party work. He argues that this recruitment demonstrates that the RSS itself has not turned its back on politics. Interview with him on 15 September 1985 at Potomac, Maryland.

  96. Vajpayee reportedly stated that the shift was only ‘a change in terminology and not in content’. The Telegraph (Calcutta), 23 July 1985. This decision was ratified by the party executive in early October 1985.

  97. See reports of the six-day conference in Times of India (Bombay), 9, 14, 16 October 1985.

  98. For a comprehensive review of proceedings, see Indian Express (Delhi), 13 May 1986.

  99. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former president of the BJP, is an exception, but even he is careful not to distance himself from the pracharak network that exercises a powerful voice in party affairs.

  Conclusion

  1. Movements comparable to the RSS are discussed in Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study of the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966), a study of the puritan movement in England; and James W. White, The Sokagakkai and Mass Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), the study of a Japanese religious organization and its political affiliate, the Komeito. Also see Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s study of American communes in Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective, (7th printing) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

  2. For a discussion of the two ethical standards, see Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ in Hans H. Gerth, C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 77–128.

  3. This is not an uncommon reaction of normative groups to politics. Amitai Etzioni, for example, points out that leaders in normative organizations, in order to build moral commitment to themselves, seek to avoid instrumental activities and positions. Etzioni, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations, pp. 217–18.

  4. A theoretical discussion of ‘significant audiences’ in George H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society, ed. by Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 149–ff.

  5. According to Leon Festinger and J. Merrill Carl-Smith, the more it ‘costs’ a person to do something, the more ‘valuable’ he will consider it, in order to justify the psychic ‘expenses’ required. See their article on the process in ‘Cognitive Consequence of Forced Compliance’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (March 1959), pp. 203–10.

  6. For a discussion regarding the importance of social homogeneity on group cohesiveness, see Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community, pp. 93–94.

  Conclusion

  The founders of the RSS assumed that India would not become a strong and independent country until there had been first a cultural revolution. The training process they constructed emphasized discipline, work and a desire for order. They assumed that those men who had gone through the training would on their own take a leading role in reshaping Indian society.

  The urge towards personal purification as a prerequisite to political action is a motivating factor behind much of contemporary radical politics.1 Such movements are now most widespread in the new states of Asia and Africa, for it is in these states that the most rapid social and moral dislocations have occurred. Independence, the emergence of new social forces, the displacement of traditional elites, and the rationalization of public administration have undermined existing images of responsibility and civic purpose. These dislocations have resulted in a search for new symbolic frameworks to make the new social environment meaningful and to create conditions for people to act purposefully in society.

  The Hindu revivalists of the 1920s believed the divisions in Hindu society rendered the Hindus incapable of overcoming foreign political and cultural domination. Hindus were separated by traditional commitments to specific occupations and religious observances, by rules of endogamy and commensality, and by linguistic and regional loyalties.

  Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, who organized the RSS during a period of widespread Hindu–Muslim rioting in the mid-1920s, saw in the riots a fundamental sociological problem of the Hindu ‘nation’. Even though Hindus were the majority community, the revivalists considered then a suppressed majority, robbed of vigour and purpose. A thousand years of foreign domination were the testimony to that weakness. The revivalists had a deep sense of anguish over the vast tracts (e.g., Afghanistan, Tibet) which were culturally ‘lost’. They feared that Hindu influence would continue to be eroded through conversion to other faiths or through a lower birth rate. They also feared that Hindus, because they lacked a sense of community, lacked the will to resist either the Muslims or the British, both of whom were regarded as foreign. The revivalists held that any attempt to mobilize Hindus against foreign domination was bound to fail unless Hindus overcame their pessimistic fatalism and came to look at themselves as a community. Hedgewar proposed a psychological remedy to the problem of Hindu disunity. He devoted his life to the construction of a programme that would bring about the desired psychological reorientation of those men who would lead the movement for a new and more integrated society.

  Hedgewar incorporated into the RSS a training process which came to be called character building, stressing discipline, work and commitment. The process is based on the Hindu conception that disciplined training under an enlightened teacher results in an introspective recognition of truth. The truth was a secularized version of advaita vedanta; it took the metaphysical position that all men are basically one and applied it to Hindu society. Hedgewar’s search for a nationalist programme of action arose from a deeply felt need to restore among Hindus a sense of self-respect rooted in Indian culture. In the face of orthodox resistance, he found justification in Indian history and culture for modern technology, scientific knowledge and economic development.

  The RSS was conceived of as a school that would teach this new truth. Commitment to it was highly personal and ideological, often requiring the member to abandon his ties to his family. Ideological zeal bound the swayamsevaks together in a brotherhood whose goal was to reshape the country’s social and political institutions.

  Since its formation in 1925 the RSS has attracted support almost exclusively in urban areas, and largely from the salaried lower-middle-class and small-scale shopkeepers. These are groups whose social and economic aspirations are undermined by inflation, by scarcity of job opportunities, and by their relative inability to influence the political process. The RSS has had little success among the peasantry, whose religious beliefs, practices and sense of community have been less affected by the changes brought on by moder
nity. However, as change comes to affect increasingly large numbers of Indians, the revivalist appeals offered by the RSS (and by other groups as well) are likely to become more popular, and there are now signs that the RSS is making some headway in certain rural areas. The 1982 Meenakshipuram conversion incident and the demand for the reopening of Hindu temples now used as mosques, were issues that had a resonance in rural India, and both events helped the RSS to build its credibility there.

  The RSS, which places very stringent requirements on its members, is not likely to become a mass membership organization. The continuous testing of the members’ zeal and self-discipline tends to turn away all but the most ardent supporters. However, the RSS was never meant to mobilize on a mass scale. Hedgewar speculated that it needed to train only 1 to 3 per cent of Hindu men to achieve the cultural revolution. The cadre were to be the leading social group who—endowed with organizing capacity, social respect and strong determination—would eventually assume the leadership role in the revival of the Hindu ‘nation’. The RSS expected each member to be a disciplined Hindu activist whose activity would carry him outside the RSS.

  Hedgewar and his associates in the young RSS believed that character building was, in itself, sufficient to achieve the desired social and political transformation of India. Those who became virtuous through self-discipline would be moved individually to revitalize society. In the pre-independence period the RSS established no newspapers; it organized no student groups, trade unions, or political groups; the cadre engaged in no underground revolutionary activities (at least not in the name of the RSS). Indeed, full-time RSS workers were discouraged from engaging in politics. Many militant Hindu revivalists, such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, ridiculed the apolitical orientation of the RSS. Militant activists, such as Nathuram Godse, left the RSS. Many RSS activists wanted the RSS itself to take a more assertive role in the transformation of Indian society, and some prominent office-bearers resigned when it did not.

  At the end of World War II, many RSS members, particularly in north India, began to lobby for a change in RSS tactics. Their sense of urgency increased as independence drew closer. The RSS defence of Hindus in pre-partition Punjab and its refugee relief operations earned it considerable popularity and established activism in the RSS repertoire of programmes. The urgency to broaden its activities intensified following the ban placed on the RSS at the time of Mahatma Gandhi’ s assassination, which threatened the survival of the RSS. In addition, the decision of the Congress party to exclude RSS members both from the party and from its affiliated organizations, effectively blocked the political ambitions of its members. The decision to form affiliates was a compromise between those activists lobbying for the RSS to transform itself into a political party and the traditionalist element fearful that political and social activism would undermine the character-building programme.