Guha: 19th-century politics for a 21st-century society

Some years ago, I edited an anthology of Indian political thought, profiling 19 individual thinkers. The usual suspects — Gokhale, Tilak, Phule, Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Lohia, JP, Periyar — featured, but also some less conventional choices. One of these was Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh between 1940 and 1973.

My inclusion of Golwalkar in a book on Indian thinkers angered among some intellectuals on the Left. I had omitted to include an Indian Marxist. I had compounded my error by giving ‘intellectual legitimacy’ to Golwalkar’s hateful credo by placing him alongside the likes of Phule and Ambedkar.

My judgment was not ideological, but scholarly. To include Golwalkar was not to endorse his views, but to recognise that he had a profound influence on the course of Indian politics. Indeed, as the decades go by, we see that his influence may become as significant as that of Gandhi, Nehru, or Ambedkar. For it was Golwalkar who formulated the ideological credo of the RSS, touring the country tirelessly to build up its organisation, while all the time consolidating links with the political party close to it, the Jana Sangh (forerunner of the BJP).

Among Golwalkar’s disciples were Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani. They venerated him, as did many Jana Sangh and BJP chief ministers he had trained. When Narendra Modi joined the RSS, the halo around Golwalkar still hung around the organisation. In 2007 Modi wrote a long, adulatory, profile of Golwalkar.

Scholars are acquainted with Golwalkar’s books We, or our Nationhood Defined, and Bunch of Thoughts, which see India as essentially a Hindu country, with Christians and Muslims being at best second-class citizens, at worst traitors to the nation. Here I wish to highlight a forgotten newspaper article by Golwalkar, which has acquired a strange (not to say disturbing) topicality.

Through the 20th century, the issue of cow-protection receded into the margins. Leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar focused on national unity, social equality, economic development, linguistic pluralism, and religious harmony. In this political climate, Golwalkar’s campaign for the cow found few takers.

After the deaths of Nehru and Shastri, it had one brief eruption — in November 1966, when hordes of angry sadhus demanding a nation-wide ban on cow slaughter unsuccessfully stormed the Indian Parliament — then went back into oblivion.

Until the past few weeks, that is. The horrific lynching of Mohammad Ikhlaq in Dadri was followed by a spate of comments by BJP leaders excusing, explaining or even justifying the incident. The Haryana chief minister has suggested that Muslims who eat beef should not live in India. The question of cow-slaughter has become an election issue in Bihar, and may become one in Uttar Pradesh.

This narrow-minded and divisive agenda is central to the DNA of the RSS. There have been calls for Narendra Modi to distance himself from the bigots in his party. But is he also prepared to distance himself from a man he has referred to as his ‘Pujniya Shri Guruji’?

Merlot Daruwala wrote:No. It is Cow politics for the Masses, Development for the Classes.

So in all his interactions with foreign leaders, international media, business leaders and of course, classy NRI patriots, it is the latter. While the foot soldiers, those brave sons of cows go about implementing the former.