By Amulya Ganguli
It hasn’t taken long for the hollowness of the sermons from the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat — on accommodating Muslims in an inclusive society — to be exposed.
First, an interfaith couple was attacked with a Muslim man being beaten up for being with a Hindu girl while the police looked on. It is not surprising that the incident took place in U.P., which is the new Hindutva laboratory (as Gujarat was when Narendra Modi was the chief minister) under chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who faces cases relating to hate speeches.
Then, the relatives of Pehlu Khan, the cattle trader who was lynched by gaurakshaks in Rajasthan, were shot at while they were on their way to depose before a court. Evidently, the saffron warriors had been keeping a watch over the family and were not too keen to let the law follow its own course, whatever the RSS sanghsarchalak may have said.
To them, Muslims remain “internal enemies”, according to M.S. Golwalkar’s classification which the RSS now claims to be disowning. But the ground reality is different. Golwalkar and Godse are likely to remain the saffron brotherhood’s icons for the foreseeable future where the rank and file are concerned even as the Hindutva top brass extolls Vallabhbhai Patel and Deen Dayal Upadhyay.
However, Muslims are not the only victims of the systematic nature of violence which is currently prevailing, resulting in the murder of rationalists, scientists and journalists by the Hindu Right. Along with the encouragement given by Yogi Adityanath’s government to “fake encounters” or cold-blooded killings of suspects by the police, the law-enforcing machinery has apparently become more trigger-happy than ever before as the killing of a multinational executive in Lucknow showed.
It is obvious that Bhagwat’s objective of mainstreaming the RSS, if that is really his intention, is unlikely to be fulfilled in a hurry. Instead, if the targeting of Muslims continues, he will be accused of living in a make-believe world of his own with little idea of the forces which drive the RSS.
It is worth noting that no other front-ranking RSS leader has reiterated Bhagwat’s views. There have only been a few articles by BJP ministers in his support. Among them was a piece by Ram Madhav, who is now on lien to the BJP from the RSS, in which he quoted a significant response by an RSS stalwart to the question as to why the organization does not include Muslims.
The reply – that a boys’ school does not admit girls – shows that the Hindu-Muslim divide is as wide and irrevocable as the gender gap in the opinion of a majority in the RSS. While co-education is now the norm in schools and colleges, the nine-decade-old commitment of the RSS to a polarized society remains the main obstacle to Bhagwat’s efforts to initiate a change.
Considering that there is every possibility of Muslims being targeted on various pretexts – love jehad, gharwapsi, beef consumption, cattle smuggling – the decision of the national opposition parties to stay away from Bhagwat’s three-day exercise in glasnost (openness) was the correct one. Attending it would have conferred a legitimacy on the RSS which it does not deserve if the latest incidents in U.P. and Rajasthan are taken into account.
By the same token, it is now clear that former President Pranab Mukherjee and the corporate czar, Ratan Tata, acted rather hastily in responding to Bhagwat’s invitations to attend the functions of the RSS. Tata did not speak, but Mukherjee delivered a long lecture about the virtues of pluralism to no purpose, as is now evident.
If the opposition leaders had attended the three-day conclave at New Delhi’s prestigious Vigyan Bhavan, it would have been a similar waste of time by them. Far more concrete examples are needed to demonstrate that Bhagwat is being taken seriously by the camp followers of the RSS and the BJP before his invitations can be accepted.
The caution is all the more necessary because there is no certainty that Bhagwat himself has changed in any significant way from being the person who once favoured the gharwapsi of those Hindu “brothers” who were misled into converting to Islam. “Bhule bhatkey jo bhai gaye hai nun ko wapas layengey”, he told a meeting of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in 2014.
He had also advised the gaurakshaks during his annual Dussehra speech last year not to be distracted by critical comments by “highly placed persons in the government” or the judiciary’s remarks, pointing out that those protecting cows have also been attacked by the cattle smugglers.
It is possible that the more moderate tone of Bhagwat’s Vigyan Bhavan speech was intended to reassure the middle class that the lynchings and other acts of violence by the saffron cadres are an aberration lest any disillusionment about the BJP hurts the party’s electoral chances.
The BJP’s army of trolls have also been unenthusiastic about Bhagwat’s speech either because they sense its tactical purpose or because they reject it outright, as a remark by one of the netizens – buddha sathiya giya hai (the old man has become senile) – suggests. In any event, the social and political scene hasn’t changed in any way for the Hindu Right.
(IPA Service)
The post Futility Of RSS Supremo’s ‘Glasnost’ Homilies appeared first on Newspack by India Press Agency.
