The Rediff Special

'The RSS could well end up as a vast bureaucracy if it does not meet its end before that'

The RSS is struggling to find an identity that will help it play a more meaningful role in the present political scenario. N V Subramaniam of Sunday magazine examines the Saffron Brotherhood's political options.

Lakshman Shrikrishna Bhide travels widely in the world raising funds for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The last time he was in New York, an Indian family pressed him to take US $25 for his onward journey to other American cities. Four weeks later, on his way out to India, he returned the money unspent. "Humme kis par kharch karna hain?" he asks simply.

Bhide is close on to 80 years old. He is straight-backed and sparsely-built and he wears a khadi waistcoat, a dhoti, a black Nehru cap and those round Gandhi spectacles that give him the appearance of the old textbook photographs of Dadabhai Naoroji. In India, he does all his traveling by train in second class, and if the RSS is flush with foreign funds, it is in some measure because Indians abroad revere him.

At the senior levels of the RSS, there are still persons like Bhide. Rajinder Singh [Right], the theoretical physicist-turned-RSS chief, son of the chief engineer of the United Provinces, and whose motorcycle Bhide would borrow in Allahabad for RSS work in the forties, still prefers to go second class, though the need to take three to four insulin injections a day is forcing him more and more now to travel by second AC.

H V Seshadri, the RSS's general secretary, is severe with himself despite being fitted with a pace-maker. And K S Sudershan, the joint general secretary, still lives out of his one-room quarters at Keshav Kunj, and has made few concessions to the open heart surgery he has undergone.

None of this is unusual, however, because austerity has been a way of life in the RSS since its establishment in the Twenties. It has even been a source of its strength. There can be robust criticism of its Hindutva ideology or of its concept of a Hindu Rashtra but equally there are no stories of scandals in the RSS of fudged accounts, say, or of embezzlement, or of faction-fighting, one-upmanship, and so on.

Nearly everyone who has come into the RSS came not from reading its literature but from being impressed by someone already in it. For instance, M S Golwalkar (called 'Guruji'), the RSS's second chief, was struck by the RSS founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. Bhaurao Deoras, younger brother of the third RSS chief, Balasaheb Deoras, moved many men in the United Provinces, where he was pracharak (or preacher) for many years, and Rajinder Singh remains even now beholden to Madhusudan Waman Moghe, who was sent to work at the Allahabad University in 1942. Several others in the RSS who are now with the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad have written or spoken to their own exemplars. Its capacity to cement was enormous. It was a force. Now, it is less and less so.

Outwardly, little has changed. The daily shakhas are being held as usual and they have grown in numbers (45,000 plus). There are more pracharaks, perhaps, then ever before. And, senior leaders, like in the earlier times, are on pravaas 20 days in a month, meeting swayamsevaks, addressing rallies, fashioning new themes in closed-door conferences, and guiding the fate of the RSS and such affiliates as the BJP, the VHP, the Bharatiya Majdoor Sangh, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, working with tribals or the Sewa Bharati attached to slums through open discussions, like at the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha, now underway in Nagpur, or through gentle nudges in smaller get-togethers.

"And yet, somewhere," says a senior RSS members, who has interacted closely with Rajinder Singh, Dattopant Thengdi, the BMS strongman, Seshadri, Sudershan, and others, "the spirit has gone. Since the Christian era, no such institution has been built. The instrument is there, but the issues have not been addressed. The RSS has no conception of economic matters. Nor is it clear about international or scientific issues. It worked on the Hindu-Muslim question and messed it up. The RSS could well end up as a vast bureaucracy if it does not meet its end before that."

Courtesy: Sunday magazine

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