Rss New Tricks

[harmandeal]

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.