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 Golwalkar: the brain of RSS
By Kashif Hoda
The
Milli Gazette Online
26 February 2006
RSS is planning to
celebrate birth centenary of the second RSS chief Madhavrao Sadashivrao
Golwalkar. While K. B. Hedgewar is responsible for setting up RSS and the
initial leadership, it was the genius of Golwalkar that firmly established
RSS in the Indian political scene. It was he who developed most of the
strategies that are still in use by RSS. He gave RSS the vision that still
inspires its cadre.
Therefore to understand
RSS it is important to understand Golwalkar and his teachings. Golwalkar
was born in 1906 near Nagpur. He entered Banaras Hindu University in 1924,
got his B.Sc. degree in 1926, M.Sc. in Zoology in 1928. He joined BHU as a
teacher and worked there till 1933. Golwalkar was very apolitical in his
student life; the only political activity before he joined RSS in 1931 was
to meet Hedgewar in 1929. Exactly what led him to get involved in politics
to such a degree in a short span of two years, to resign from his job and
move to Nagpur, is a mystery.
 Hedgewar
worked on his new disciple to train him for a future leadership role.
Meanwhile, Golwalkar got himself enrolled into Nagpur University to study
law, getting his LLB degree in 1935. Probably the militaristic routine of
RSS was unable to satisfy the intellectual and spiritual need of Golwalkar,
in 1937 we find him leaving RSS to move to Bengal and become a disciple of
Swami Akhandana at Sargachi. Just a few months later, Swami dies, and a
confused Golwalkar goes back to Hedgewar. He remained attached to his
Swami's mission all his life though, he never cut his hair and beard as
instructed by the Swami.
Golwalkar accompanied
Hedgewar in all his trips to set up shakhas in different places. Golwalkar
was trained and his personality built up so that he could become an
acceptable leader. In 1938 A book comes out "We or Our Nationhood
Defined." It was supposed to be written by Golwalkar, and was a clear
attempt to raise his profile. Later Golwalkar himself admitted that it was
an abridged translation of another book in Marathi.
During Hedgewar's final
days, when he was too sick to travel, it was Golwalkar who took care of
business associated with RSS, and took complete charge of the
organization. Therefore, it is not surprising that in 1940, bypassing some
senior leaders who were with RSS since the beginning, Golwalkar was made
head of RSS.
Golwalkar is the longest
serving chief of RSS and also may be the most successful in terms of
increasing membership and establishing shakhas. Hedgewar left RSS with
about 50 shakhas and 100,000 members and when Golwalkar died he had
expanded its reach to 10,000 shakhas and membership running above a
million.
RSS under Hedgewar was
resigned to its status of a junior member of the Hindu Right, playing
second fiddle to Hindu Mahasabha. Mahasabha leaders didn't treat them as
much more than a youth organizer with no mass movement or vision for the
future. In fact, V. D. Savarkar commented that "the epitaph for the
RSS volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the RSS and he died
without accomplishing anything."
Hedgewar developed his
organization as a street-fighting machine; cadres were well trained to
fight the "enemy" and enhance passions by the disinformation
campaign. RSS continues to be a master of the rumor industry, but inspite
of their emphasis on physical training, there is little evidence that RSS
members get involved in actual physical fights. Lower caste communities
are utilized to do the dirty work of rioting once they have been
initiated. The credit for this transformation goes to Hedgewar.
Soon after taking over
RSS, Hedgewar tried to make it a separate identity from Hindu Mahsabha.
The RSS as a result became more anti-Socialist than Mahasabha, while
maintaining its anti-Muslim stance. This expanded its social base to
include all the people who lose from any radical social change. That
increased its membership as well as giving it financial security. While
most of India was revolting in a peaceful way against the British
occupation, RSS chose a non-confrontational approach. For them being
patriotic had nothing to do with being anti-British.
In his book "Bunch
of Thoughts," Golwalkar writes that "the theories of territorial
nationalism and of common danger, which formed the basis for our concept
of nation, had deprived us of the positive and inspiring content of our
real Hindu Nationhood and made many of the 'freedom movements' virtually
anti-British movements. Anti-Britishism was equated with patriotism and
nationalism. This reactionary view has had disastrous effects upon the
entire course of the freedom movement, its leaders and the common
people." It is really ironic that this is the same organization that
now treats Subhash Chandra Bose as a patriot who was clearly anti-British
in his approach and did not mind taking the assistance of Germany and
Japan to fight the common enemy.
RSS these days have
turned anti-Christian but they were never anti-British, in fact RSS tried
to channelize the nation's anti-British feelings into anti-Muslim
sentiments. The youthful energy of the members was kept busy by occasional
clashes with the Muslims. The British Government must have been happy that
scores of youth were kept out of the freedom movement.
It is possible that RSS
was hand-in-glove with the British Government in their plan to keep their
cadre outside the freedom movement. We find that RSS accepted all the
restrictions placed on it by the government of the time. The khaki shirt
was replaced by the white shirt because it was similar to the military
uniform; canvas shoes replaced leather boots and the belt was dropped
altogether. RSS preferred Anti-Muslim sentiments in place of Anti-British.
While the Indian
leadership was in prison because of the quit Indian Movement, RSS laid the
foundation stone of Hedgewar Bhawan in 1945. It was completed in less than
a year's time. Its compound is big enough to hold an assembly of 9000 RSS
men. This lavish construction comes on the heel of the Bengal famine, for
which RSS, a voluntary organization, was not involved in helping the
people. In fact RSS did nothing to stop the partition of 'Akhand Bharat',
which puts them in the same group with the Muslim League, as the group who
favored the two-nation theory.
It is difficult to
imagine what was going through the mind of Golwalkar at that tumultuous
time in Indian history; it must have taken a lot of effort not to be
active. Nathuram Godse, who used to accompany Hedgewar in his travels,
killed Mahatma Gandhi. The ban on RSS was a difficult time on its
organizational history, it exposed the weakness of the Organization, and
all this time the emphasis was on physical exercise and creating an army
of clones. RSS found little support in its effort to revoke the ban. It
was able to gather only nine lakh signatures to petition the government.
Failing in its effort to
launch a movement against the ban, Golwalkar started to use lobbying to
get the ban removed. After coming out of the ban, RSS started infiltrating
different sectors by launching their own organizations (eg. student
organizations, trade unions, and farmers unions). About 50
front-organizations were created to cover different sectors of the
society. Clashes with China in 1957-59 gave RSS a platform to come out of
hibernation. RSS started many campaigns against cow-slaughter, the Urdu
language, and formation of the Malappuram District in Kerala etc.
Jawaharlal Nehru was very
much against lifting the ban against RSS, but towards the end of his
career, Nehru initiated the process of making peace with RSS. Lads of
Golwalkar were invited to join Republic day parade in 1963. That was the
first and the last time that they were part of the Republic day parade,
but it was a nice propaganda tool for RSS.
The atmosphere of the
1965 war with Pakistan was fertile for RSS growth. On the eve of the 1967
election, RSS mobilized the various Hindu organizations to stage a massive
anti-cow-slaughter demonstration outside Parliament in November 1966. This
movement coupled with Congress' inaction lead to a major defeat for the
Congress and many RSS men became ministers in many of the north-Indian
states. This brought another chapter for RSS, which enabled them to use
state machinery to promote the cause of RSS.
But apparently they grew
too fast and were unable to cope with their success. Indira Gandhi's
shrewdness and defeat of the Pakistani army in Bangladesh made RSS
ineffective. RSS works better under the environment of fear. The strong
leadership style of Indira Gandhi confused RSS strategists, and thus the
death of Golwalkar in July 1973 left behind a demoralized organization. In
spite of this his legacy lives on, directions and strategies that he gave
to this organisation are still followed by RSS.
In brief, this was the
public life of the second RSS chief Golwalkar. The evil design planted by
him continues to give fruit. In this centenary year there will be many
articles praising Golwalkar, and as is the style of RSS, they will be
re-writing history to show us how great a leader he was. To understand
Golwalkar, we have to cut the hype and simply have to read his words as
follows:
On caste system:
"There is nothing to
prove that it (the caste system) ever hindered our social developments.
Actually caste system has helped to preserve the unity of our
society." (Bunch of Thoughts p.108)
"The history proves
that Mohammadan could win over North West and north east areas easily
where Budhism had shattered the pattern of caste system. Gandhar which is
Kandhar now, was converted to Islam completely. But contrary to this,
Hindu religion was strong in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh despite Muslim rule
because caste system was strictly followed there. (Bunch
of Thoughts]
On Nationhood:
"When we say,
"This is the Hindu nation", there are some who immediately come
up with the question, "What about the Muslims and Christians dwelling
in this land? Are they also not born and bred here? How could they become
aliens just because they have changed their faith? But the crucial point
is whether they remember that they are the children of this soil? .... No.
Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and
devotion for the nation." (Bunch of
Thoughts)
Solution to the Minority
'problem':
"The foreign races
in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn
to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea
but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the
Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu
race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation,
claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential
treatment - not even citizen's rights. There is, at least, should be, no
other course for them to adopt. We are an old nation; let us deal, as old
nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races, who have chosen to
live in our country. (We or Our Nationhood
Defined)
"German race-pride
has now become the topic of the day. To keep up with the purity of the
race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country
of the Semitic races- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been
manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for
Races and Cultures, having differences going to the root, to be
assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for use in Hindusthan to
learn and profit by" (We or Our
Nationhood Defined)
The author is also the
editor of website www.indianmuslims.info
and can be reached by email info@indianmuslims.info
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