Scholar, lawyer and author Abdul Ghafoor Noorani’s latest book The RSS: A Menace to India, published by Leftword Books, was released in New Delhi on April 2, 2019. It’s a well written, comprehensive, research-intensive deep-dive book about one of India’s biggest and most secretive organisations.

Speaking on the occasion, journalist and commentator Siddharth Varadarajan said, “RSS is ruling India. Let’s make no bones about it. It is an organisation which calls itself a cultural entity but no one has any idea about its membership, structure and finances. They have exploited every loophole to keep its finances opaque.”

Varadarajan reminded everyone that the RSS’ might have removed the controversial parts from its second Sarsanghchalak M.S. Golwalkar’s book Bunch of Thoughts, but their central theme was there for everyone to hear when Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at Wardha. He questioned why PM Modi gets away by saying Hindus are first class citizens ?

“Are Muslims and minorities not legitimate citizens? It was a blatant violation of Section 126 of the Representation of People’s Act. Opposition is not raising it. This allows Modi to get away by saying that Hindus are first class citizens,” Varadarajan emphasised. He added that in addition to being communal, RSS has penetrated and infiltrated every arm of the system—politics, defence forces, judiciary.

Here is the text of the speech given by Shri M. Hamid Ansari, former Vice-President of India, on the occasion:

Mr. Noorani is nothing if not prolific. Here we have another tome of over 500 pages with its contents diligently distilled. It is also timely.

The topicality of the RSS as a subject of study is evident. This is the second volume on it in English to be published in eight months. The first was an updated version of an earlier work by Walter Anderson and Shridhar Damle. It sought to test a set of prepositions by using a case-study approach of the organisation and its network of affiliates emanating from what it called a homogenising of society.

The present work by Mr. A.G. Noorani goes beyond the superstructure into the origins of the organisation and its progress through certain critical landmarks in the history of modern India, pre-and-post Independence. It brings on record the views of Dr. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru about the RSS and its objectives. It is a comprehensive in its coverage. Particularly useful are the appendices and the documents therein.

The Constitution of the RSS is given in Appendix 2. The Preamble spells out its objectives, the first of these being ‘to eradicate the fissiparous tendencies arising from the diversities of sect, faith, caste and creed and from the political, economic and provincial differences among Hindus’ and ‘to bring about a regeneration of the Hindu Samaj.’

Similarly, the RSS Prayer and Oath which is administered to every entrant enjoins him to work for ‘the all-round greatness of Bharatvarsh by fostering the growth of my ‘Hindu religion, Hindu society and Hindu culture.’

The focus thus is on those who profess to be Hindus who constitute 80 percent of our population. In other words, every fifth Indian—20 percent of the population—is beyond the stated ambit of the RSS and therefore supposedly beyond its prescriptive ideology.

Three questions logically arise here: (a) Do 80 percent Hindus become synonymous with 100 percent Indians? (b) Do the 20 percent non-Hindus get conflated with the 80 percent Hindu population? And (c) What happens to the Constitution of India, its democratic structure, its principle of equality and charter of rights, including the right to profess, practice and propagate their religion, and the duty of every citizen to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture?

The answer to the first two questions is an emphatic NO, unless a hitherto unstated process of conversion in contravention of the Constitution is sought to be initiated. The answer to the third is evident: the Constitution remains the basic law of the land, is binding on all citizens and supersedes other affiliations.

The RSS has developed over the years public policy orientations and influence through the large number of its affiliates and by grafting and promoting Hindutva as a concept of cultural revitalisation and political mobilisation which ‘seeks to subjugate and homogenise the ethnic pluralities by establishing the hegemony of an imagined cultural mainstream.’ This has also generated social violence by some of its adherents.

These principles, depicting Indian nationalism in terms of the faith of the religious majority, have serious negative social and political implications for sections of the citizen-body and are in violation of the Constitution. In this sense, it is detrimental to India as we know it, a denial of all that the freedom struggle stood for, a negation of the existential reality of a plural society, a camouflage for assimilation and homogenisation, a device for erasing the richness and diversity of our land, of converting civic nationalism into cultural nationalism and our liberal democracy into an ethnic one.

Jai Hind.

(Qurban Ali is a senior broadcast journalist.)