Those who dislike the saffron crowd often lampoon their silliest political habit, which is that they hold the Congress accountable for what Jawaharlal Nehru did to India’s economy. But the anti-saffrons have a similar problem—they hold the entire history of the Hindu movement against the present of its mother ship, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Every time it asserts the right of Muslims to exist as equal Indians, anti-saffrons caution us not to believe them, that this is all an act. As it happened a few days ago when the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat told thousands of people in New York that a Hindu who believes Muslims should be driven out of India “cannot remain a Hindu.”
He also said that diversity is in India’s “DNA.” He portrayed Hindu deities not as celestial figures, but as archetypes of ideal humans, and demons as the evil within us all. He also reminded us that electoral politics is flawed, and authoritarians can’t stitch together a nation.
This is the sort of thing all activists with inner beauty say. But anti-saffrons say it is naive to take the RSS chief at his word. (I am struggling to avoid nonsensical terms like ‘left’ and ‘right,’ which is complicated by avocado-eaters no longer being a political constituency.)
They say he is posturing for the West. But he has been saying the same things here to provincial audiences who are not accustomed to hearing things like “The day it’s said Muslims aren’t wanted, Hindutva won’t remain.” A tired argument of some is that he wants Muslims to remain in India so that Hindus can fight them instead of their own.
What is more persuasive is that some intellectuals want the RSS to be frozen in the past so that they have someone to condemn and thus be reassured of their own virtues.
If all living things and what they form can evolve, the RSS can too. In fact, it has excellent reasons to do so. It has, after all, achieved its end. Hindu upper castes who felt oppressed by Westernized Anglophile gentry went to war using wounded Hindu pride to unite middle castes and other social rungs to create a society where Hindus are more equal than others.
What the RSS is trying to say is that it’s traditional but evolving. And whether people say it explicitly or not, evolution involves something dying. Maybe like scientific progress, the RSS too has advanced, one funeral at a time.
Also, maybe the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that it mentors or used to mentor for politics has grown too big, and the mothership is not enjoying all aspects of this tremendous success, and wants to present an alternate Hindu intellectual view that career politicians are not saying.
There is a reason why, without hailing the RSS as a vast humanitarian organization, we should trust the spirit of Bhagwat’s words.
Morally clear statements about Muslims from powerful Hindu leaders, even if they are just words, contribute immensely to how ordinary people perceive their world. Good things are so rare and faint that when they do come, we must not muddle them. For a Hindu public figure to say the things he does could potentially carry a cost. So, to think that the RSS would pretend love for Muslims to improve its image is plain ridiculous.
I accept there are some good reasons to be dismissive of speeches. What matters is what’s on the ground. The social security of Muslims in India has broken down. There are several thugs on social media with apparent allegiance to some Hindu organizations who overtly threaten Muslims, Dalits, fashionable women and whoever they deem as foes, and there is rarely any police action against them. One man has just claimed he broke someone’s head during the cockroach protest and that some leaders have ensured he is not in jail. The violence of cow vigilantes continues.
RSS statements may be influential, but not always. There is a fact that the powerful never articulate—that they are not as powerful as people think, that they have limited control over people. Men who believe in the ideal human may not know how to deal with ‘demons.’ An RSS that wants a good global reputation might find it needs to work harder at it.
Even so, there are good reasons why we must trust the words of the RSS’s top leader, apart from the fact that there is circumstantial evidence that he means all that he has been saying. His speeches represent hope in a difficult and dangerous world.
Like Western ‘right-wing’ formations, India’s Hindu movement grew popular by making a large part of a majority behave like a persecuted minority. Now, the world’s most consequential Hindu organization is shedding old grouses and showing the magnanimity of being self-assured.
Also, there is a reason why it is Bhagwat who has been saying socially modern things, rather than leaders of the political face of the Hindu movement, the BJP. Since the party has to contest elections, and much is at stake, its leaders seem to overrate the risk of saying decent things.
Modern India offers throbbing evidence that electoral democracy is flawed, and that what India needs is a counterforce through public pressure groups. The triumph of this year’s student protests was proof that some movements can compensate for the failings of institutions and keep elected governments in check.
In its own way, the RSS has been performing this role behind the scenes, and lately it has started doing it more openly. We need that. It would be interesting, though, if we can guess what the maximum size of India’s Muslim population is that would sustain these sounds of harmony.
The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’