While the RSS was for all practical purposes the volunteer offshoot of the Hindu Mahasabha, the founders wanted the two to be seen as separate entities. Unlike the Mahasabha, which became by the 1930s a full-fledged political party claiming to speak on behalf of Hindus, the former had a longer-term aim. The RSS calculated that ‘only when a large number of Hindu youths in the country’ – three percent at the lower count – ‘were sufficiently trained in military tactics to bring about a revolution in India could it afford to challenge the government’. A sensational inside account from 1940 claimed that the purpose of training young men for three years – by making them attend Officer’s Training Camps (OTCs) – was to introduce the smartest among them ‘into various departments of Government, such as the army, navy, postal, telegraph, railway and administrative services in order that there may be no difficulty in capturing control over the administrative departments in India when the time comes’
From Vajpayee: Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924
Tag Archives: RSS
The BJP’s Kerala problem
The RSS and the BJP have launched a joint outreach program aimed at minorities — Muslims and Christians — in Kerala.
It is not clear to me what the end game is — if the last few elections in Kerala, both Assembly and national, made one thing very clear, it is that the BJP has a Hindu problem, not merely a minorities problem.
A typical case study is Pathanamthitta, a predominantly agrarian region in Central Travancore famous for being the home district of the Sabarimala temple. The population is largely rural; Hindus comprise about 60% of the roughly 12-plus lakh population while Christians come second with about 36-37%, following by a sprinkling of Muslims at under 5%.
A local notable is one K Surendran, the BJP’s state party president. He led the saffron brigade’s protests in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment permitting women to enter Sabarimala; during the protests he clashed violently with the police and, for his trouble, spent 21 days in jail before returning as a ‘martyr’ to the Hindu cause.
The BJP gave him the Pathanamthitta ticket for the 2019 national elections, hoping to ride his activism to its first ever Parliament seat from Kerala. Long story short, he came third — behind Anto Antony of the INC and Veena George of the CPM, both Christians who attracted more Hindu votes than the BJP’s state party president did.
In the same year, he fought a by-election from Konni, one of the assembly constituencies within Pathanamthitta. Again he came third, behind Jinesh Kumar of the CPM and P Mohanraj of the Congress.
In the 2021 Assembly elections, Surendran played safe and contested two seats — the above-mentioned Konni and, for some obscure reason, the Muslim-majority Manjeshwar seat in Kasargod. He lost both.
Point being, demographics don’t really matter — the RSS/BJP for all its efforts (a bit more on those efforts later on) still runs a distant third, almost entirely because the saffron brigade hasn’t managed to convince enough Hindus to vote for BJP candidates.
The BJP probably needs a Hindu outreach first, therefore — but anyway. This push to woo the minorities is in large part due to the realisation that its share of the Hindu vote bank and its hold on the community is ebbing, gradually but surely. (That this is almost entirely due to Amit Shah and company setting the agenda and importing the sort of nonsense that works in the Hindi heartland, while totally ignoring local leaders who understand the pulse of Kerala better, is another story.)
Anyway, so now we have a minorities outreach program. Which began with the ‘carrot’ in the case of Cardinal George Alencherry, who is for various reasons the member of the Catholic hierarchy in Kerala most vulnerable to pressure.
As far back as 2018, Alencherry gained notoriety for his efforts to hush up a rape complaint made by a nun against Jalandhar Bishop Franco Mulakkal, despite being aware of the nun’s plight.
More recently, Alencherry made the headlines when he was implicated in seven discrete cases of selling land belonging to the Church. He first approached the Kerala High Court seeking exemption from making a personal appearance, but the court shot his plea down. He then went to the Supreme Court, asking that the plea be quashed. The apex court refused and ordered him to stand trial in person.
So he did what anyone right-thinking man caught in a legal vise would do — he tried to build bridges with the BJP. In a public interaction, he praised Narendra Modi’s leadership and averred that Christians do not feel insecure in India.
The pushback was immediate: Members of the Catholic community stormed the church demanding that Alencherry apologize for his remarks and quit his post and vacate his official accommodation. Satyapeedam, the official organ of the Catholic Church, condemned Alencherry in an editorial. AC Michael, president of the Federation of Catholic Associations of Archdiocese of Delhi, repudiated Alencherry’s statement and said the persecution of Christians had spiked under the BJP regime.
Clearly, the Catholic community is in no mood to buy Alencherry’s attempt to get into the BJP’s good books. (Meanwhile, the Vatican has attempted to bail Alencherry out by saying that it has found nothing improper in the land dealings — a temporary relief for the embattled cardinal, but it does not get him off the hook as far as court proceedings are concerned.)
Getting Alencherry to praise Modi in public backfired, but the BJP hasn’t given up on the state’s Christian community just yet. Around Easter, the Hindu groups organized a sneh yatra where party workers visited Christian homes with sweets and good wishes; they then marked Vishu by hosting a breakfast for Christian priests. (This, incidentally, provoked much amusement in the family circle, which includes BJP-affiliated local office-bearers — what does Vishu have to do with Christian priests, was the bemused talk on the family WhatsApp group.)
It is worth noting that in the same week that the Hindutva brigade was brimming over with love for Kerala’s Christian community, three churches were demolished in BJP-ruled Manipur; in Haryana Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal members protested against the planned construction of two churches; and Hindutva leaders presided over an event in Chattisgarh where people took an oath to boycott both Muslims and Christians.
This is what the BJP doesn’t get — the average Keralite reads at least two newspapers, many read even more. Politics and society dominate conversations in vayanashalas (local reading rooms) and tea-shops. Thus, the Christian community is well aware of how their brethren in other parts of the country are treated by the BJP, and thus least likely to be taken in by sneh yatras and suchlike public displays of opportunistic affection. But then, no one accused the BJP leadership of being savvy, so…
Elsewhere, the RSS/BJP outreach embraced the Muslim community by organizing an iftar party on a public highway, in the same week that Uttar Pradesh CM Adityanath decreed that “no religious festival” — clearly meaning Eid — would be permitted to block roads or otherwise occupy public spaces. Muslims read newspapers, too.
Now the state leadership says it is looking forward to Narendra Modi’s impending visit to further boost the outreach program. Good luck with that — Modi’s blanket blitz during the previous elections resulted only in the BJP losing the one assembly seat it had held.
Meanwhile, afsos, RSS worker Vishnu was unable to participate in the outreach program — he was hospitalized for treatment of injuries sustained while making a bomb.
Nothing new to see here — in a post from as far back as September 2017, I had detailed instances of RSS/BJP-sponsored violence in the state, including several instances involving bombs. (A post from a month later details what happened when the BJP attempted to make headway in the state.)
Even that September 2017 post was incomplete — chronicling the RSS-BJP’s attempts to manufacture bombs and create mayhem, heartland-style, is a full-time job. For instance, just two months after I wrote that post, an RSS worker blew the roof of his own home off while trying to make a bomb.
Ask yourself this: Why is a “social service organisation” busy making bombs? The average Keralite voter has a fairly good idea.
All of the above — and more — is why the BJP’s new-found love for Kerala’s minorities is bound to fail. But it is always great fun watching them twist themselves into knots, trying.
PostScript: Deadline pressures kept me from commenting on several other important developments of the week just ending. I’ll try and catch up over the coming days.
Meanwhile, with Twitter gradually imploding, and thanks to the repeated prodding of a good friend, I’ve decided to start a Substack newsletter, and a Discord channel for conversations.
It will have everything — current affairs, longish posts, short notes, some cricket, plenty on books and writing, and it will evolve as it goes along.
Not immediately though — I have some travel coming up in May; the plan is to get everything lined up and kick it off in the last week of next month, after I return.
I’d appreciate thoughts, if you have any, on the paid versus supported versus free models.
Eid Mubarak, to all who celebrate.
STFU about Savarkar already
On the 4th and 5th of February, I was at the Vidharbha Literary Festival, held at the Chitnavis Centre in Nagpur — on the metaphorical doorstep of the RSS headquarters.
There was, I learned after reaching the city the night before, considerable right-wing angst about some of the invited speakers — people like Aakar Patel, Josy Joseph etc. Indirect pressure was applied on the organizers. Four speakers who were on the RSS shit list dropped out at the request of the organizers (which meant that I had to do a couple of impromptu sessions to fill gaps in the schedule, but that is a different story for another time).
More recently, I learned that the RSS had planted people at the event to monitor the sessions and report on the content. A contact sent me a smuggled copy of the report. It is an interesting document if only because it shows that the right wing does not want any discussion at all about almost anything at all — the report criticizes every single session from a right wing/Hindutva lens.
One line in the report jumped out at me:
Offensive and derogatory statements for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh by Prem Panickar (my surname is spelt with an ‘e’, but never mind that) as he stated the term ‘Sanghi Chaddiwale’ for Swayamsewaks.
From a report submitted to RSS HQ on the Vidharba Lit Fest
As an example of how the right-wing ecosystem will twist anything to its own advantage, I’ve never seen a better. (Actually, I have, but I haven’t experienced it personally). Here’s what actually happened: There was a panel discussion on why the left and right have drifted so far apart, and whether we would ever be able to bridge the gap.
At one point, I said that we had to stop talking past each other and start talking to each other. And that becomes impossible if we stick labels on each other, call each other names.
I asked the audience for a show of hands: How many like jam on their toast? A few hands went up. I picked one and asked him whether he makes jam at home or buys it off the shelf. When he said he usually bought jam from the store and named his favorite flavor, I asked him if he could list all the ingredients. He couldn’t.
That, I argued, was the crux of the problem. Labels obviate the need for you to think for yourself. Thus, if you stick labels like ‘liberandu’ or ‘pseudo-intellectual’ or ‘commie’, whatever, on the left, or ‘sanghi’, ‘chaddiwala’ and such on the right, you don’t see an individual as a human being, but as a type; you put him or her in a box that suits you. And you can’t have a conversation with a ‘type’. So, I argued, the first step towards bridging the gap is to see each human being as an individual in his or her own right. (The audience — in Nagpur — applauded, to my considerable surprise and delight.)
That was what actually happened. In light of that, see how the report — written, my source tells me, by a ‘journalist’ — frames it.
In passing, think for a moment of the RSS plants in the audience, and the journalist who compiled that report. You know what the organization you work for wants and what its mindset is (In this case, lit fest equals right-bashing). So you provide what your org needs — reasons to take offense. And you pocket your two pieces of silver…
And all of that brings me to Savarkar, and to Rahul Gandhi’s recent press conference. “My name is not Savarkar, it is Gandhi — and a Gandhi does not apologize” might get him plaudits from the peanut gallery, but it is just bad strategy.
Firstly, to say you will never apologize smacks of arrogance — we are all human, prone to mistakes. When you make one, you apologize and, if possible, try to put it right.
More importantly from a realpolitik angle, you don’t go out of your way to give your opponent a chance to take back the conversation.
Throughout the 40-odd minutes that interaction lasted, RG kept turning every question back to his main point: Who gave Adani the Rs 20,000 crore. Perfect — that is what you do, stay on message. But he lapsed twice, and lost most of what he had gained.
The first was when he needled a reporter about being a BJP shill. He was right, as far as that goes — “insulted OBCs”, the BJP talking point, kept getting thrown at him. But what his irritated response did was give the media an excuse to take the high ground, such as it is. ‘Reporters will ask questions, you cannot insult them’ became the talking point — not merely for the captive sections of the media, but also for the likes of Rajdeep Sardesai, whose striving for “balance” only ends up with him doing awkward splits while straddling a barbed wire fence topped with broken glass.
The second was the Savarkar reference. What did he accomplish? The BJP latched on to it; sundry trolls with Cabinet posts hammered away at him over it; Eknath Shinde says the party will launch a state-wide yatra to celebrate ‘Maharashtra’s hero’; Savarkar’s grandson threatens to file an FIR… (Um, while on that, someone tell him it is the police that files FIRs.)
The net result is that in the days following the press conference, not a single media report or social media ‘influencer’ needed to mention the Adani question — they had two handy distractions handed to them, gift-wrapped. Pity.
The Opposition needs to keep the conversation in the here and now, stay focussed on the questions of today. Stay on message. And they need to decide what that message is that they all agree on, first.
PS: This Twitter thread is… everything.
Hindtuva’s Trojan Horse
Rahul Gandhi recently went to Cambridge — and the right-wing ecosystem went apeshit.
Come to think about it, he doesn’t have to do much to produce that result. Grow a beard, hug his mother, kiss his sister, eat a meal in a dhaba — it is all grist for the likes of ‘Minister for Rahul Gandhi’ Smriti Irani and other luminaries to go nuts-r-us. (And nuts is the operative word — sample this, and this). But even by the standards of this ecosystem, the recent blow-up was pure bananas.
The case against him is, apparently, that in course of a talk in Cambridge he referred to India as a union of states. It’s not the first time he has said this — it is one of the talking points he regularly employs to push back against the BJP’s tendency to flip a middle finger at the concept of federalism and to push its One Nation One Bullshit (okay I made that last part up) agenda.
According to the right wing, though, Rahul Gandhi’s statement is yet another example of his ignorance, exacerbated by the fact that he was badmouthing the country while on foreign soil. I generally weed out these threads when they begin to sprout, but my eye was caught by an exchange on Twitter between journalist Ravi Nair and a retired Major General of the Indian army.
It’s not that a senior army official, who passed out of the NDA on the back of an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, seems blissfully unaware that literally the first line of that document reads: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. (In the Major General’s defence, he only promised to protect the Constitution, he did not promise to read it.)
It is not that the ex-army official did not know that the Constitution defines India as a Union of States — it is that an officer of that seniority, from an outfit that is, or used to be, completely apolitical, was playing the part of a two-rupee troll on Twitter.
In other recent news, an avowed BJP supporter known for communally-charged comments was shoe-horned into the post of Additional Judge of the Madras High Court.
The Shinde-Fadnavis government in Maharashtra appointed Rashmi Shukla to the post of DG, SSB. Here is why it is an issue.
Elsewhere a judge of the Allahabad High Court, in an actual judgment, quoted extensively from various Hindu myths and legends and deemed that anyone who kills a cow or allows others to kill them “is deemed to rot in hell”. He even specified the duration of that incarceration — “as many years as there are hairs upon his body” (an incentive, if you needed one, to go in for the sort of full-body wax so popular among our Bollywood stars).
WAY back in 1998 I was on the road, covering various aspects of the election campaign of that year. I ended up in Baramati the day before campaigning was to end and sought an interview. It was early morning; Pawar was about to set out on a round of the surrounding villages before ending his campaign with a rally in Baramati town. He was in one of his expansive moods that day — instead of the half-hour sit-down interview I’d angled for, he asked me to join him in his Pajero and do the rounds with him.
It was one of those rare occasions when you find an articulate, informed politician in a mood to discuss anything and everything, with no restrictions (Here is part 1 of that interview, and part 2).
During that campaign, he had repeatedly called out the RSS, not Pakistan, as India’s biggest enemy. The subject came up during our chat; that segment is reproduced here in full:
Talking of mistakes, a very senior BJP leader said that the Congress made a big one when it didn’t allow the Vajpayee government to survive the vote of confidence… Why?
Pawar: The argument I heard was that if the Congress had abstained, the Vajpayee government would have survived the vote of confidence. But being in a minority, it would not have been able to achieve anything at all, and in time it would have fallen. And with its fall, the stability plank would have been lost to the party for ever….
The BJP should never be allowed to rule, it is too dangerous. For instance, Advani was a minister during the Janata government — and in his short tenure, he managed to fill his ministry with RSS people, and that gave us a headache when we came back to power.
The BJP and the RSS practise the politics of infiltration. I’ll give you an example. Before the fall of the Babri Masjid, Bhairon Singh Shekawat and I were negotiating with the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Ram Janambhoomi people, for three days we had intense negotiations. We reached a stage where, in one more day or maybe two, we could have come to an agreement. But at that time, the senior RSS person involved in the discussions said he had to leave for three days.
I asked him why, I argued with him, told him nothing could be more important, but he was adamant. So finally I asked him where he was going, and he said Hyderabad, to attend the seminar of the Indian History Congress. I was quite shocked that he thought a seminar was more important that this.
That is when he explained. The IHC controls the way Indian history is written and studied, it approves syllabus and textbooks, it has total control. And the key weapon of the RSS is education, its goal is to rewrite Indian history to suit its agenda. In fact, the RSS is already doing it — the portrayal of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as anti-Muslim is only one example, they talk of how Afzal Khan tried to trick him and how Shivaji killed Afzal Khan, that is the story the kids read about, but conveniently, no one menions that Shivaji’s chief army commander was a Muslim, that he personally constructed three mosques for Muslims… one of my candidates in the state is a direct descendant of Shivaji Maharaj, and his family still pays money for the upkeep of these mosques, but this is never mentioned. Shivaji maintained that all communities and religions should live in harmony, but look how that is being distorted today!
Sorry, but how does all this tie up with the IHC?
Pawar: To be a member, you have to do post-graduation, and Masters, in Indian history. So over the years, the RSS has been systematically selecting students, instructing them to study history, and getting them into the IHC. At last count the RSS-oriented students are 46 per cent of the society. Another five per cent, and the RSS will control it, and then it will write Indian history to suit its own ends. That body is like that, it plans ahead, and works systematically to achieve its goals. In fact, I must say that though the RSS and the BJP are my political enemies, I admire this quality in them, they plan for the future and they work steadily towards a goal.
THAT interview took place 25 years ago. Look around you today, at the systematic efforts to erase parts of Indian history that the right wing finds inconvenient; at the ongoing attempts to rehabilitate Savarkar’s image; at the serial renaming of roads and buildings (a week ago, the BJP renewed its demand that Lucknow be renamed; one of its poll promises for the upcoming assembly elections in Telangana is to rename entire districts); late last year the Union Education Minister, no less, said that from 26 January 2023, students will learn the “corrected” version of history…)
(Update: Found this, just now. An MLA of the Shinde Sena in Maharashtra says he is writing to the PM asking for the removal of Aurangzeb’s grave from Aurangabad. How do I insert a face-palm emoji in this thing?)
Over the last few years and particularly since 2019, I’ve thought back to that interview, and Pawar’s take on the RSS policy of infiltration, on many occasions in light of unfolding events.
My family, dating back to the time of my grandfather and his father, used to be politically active. Time, and death, have accounted for most of my father’s generation and of the one before it, but several of those political links still remain active.
Relatively recently, I met one such family contact while on a personal visit to Kasargode, and the subject of the RSS came up during an extensive chat. I asked about the RSS infiltrating and controlling Indian history, and my contact laughed.
“History?”, he said. “That is the tip of a very large iceberg; it is just the part you can see. For decades now, the RSS has funded and shepherded bright, ideologically committed young men and women through school and college and pushed them into the ranks of the police, the judicial system, the IAS, the IFS, even the army. Their goal is simple and effective — control the institutions, and then it no longer matters what party is in power.”
(Incidentally, Rahul Gandhi said something on similar lines during a recent press interaction on the sidelines of his Cambridge lecture: “The opposition in India is no longer fighting a political party. We’re now fighting the institutional structure of India. We have to compete against the BJP-RSS which has captured all our independent institutions.”)
Think now of that hyperventilating army official, of Victoria Gowri’s ascent to the Madras High Court, the Allahabad High Court judge whose ruling is based not on law and the Constitution but on myth and legend, of the not-so-subtle rehabilitation of IPS officer Rashmi Shukla, of the many false cases being filed by the police across the country, and of the myriad similar instances that briefly make headlines and are as quickly forgotten, and you realise how prescient Pawar was when he said the RSS is the single biggest threat to the unity and integrity of this country.
PostScript: Going forward, I’ll also use this space to link to interesting articles and books I come across. For now, this beautiful essay by the prolific author and columnist Amitava Kumar: Many Words For Heat, Many Words For Hate.
Incidentally Amitava’s opening, about the many words used in our regional languages to describe heat, reminded me of a piece my friend Arati Kumar-Rao had once done, about the desert dwellers of Rajasthan and the many names they have for cloud formations.
Cry me a river
In a previous post I wrote of Hitler, of fascism, of the means to the murderous end that was euphemized as “the final solution”. I expected there would be pushback, and I got what I expected. The politest feedback – I had to sift through a lot to find It – suggested that I was using words I had read somewhere without any understanding of their true meaning; that I was egregiously misapplying those pejorative terms to the India of today; that my “screed” was driven by blind hatred of Modi.
The thing is, I am by no stretch the first to use those words for the RSS/BJP machinery – others, with far better knowledge and qualifications, have used these words before. And these terms were used well before Modi even became Chief Minister of Gujarat, let alone Prime Minister of the country.
One such leading light – a Harvard scholar, an educator, a politician, a former Union Law Minister no less, named Subramanian Swamy – wrote this way back in 2000 to warn us of what was coming, and he was prescient. He was also meticulous in outlining the various steps in the RSS process:
(1) Discredit your opponents and protect your friends: (2) “Shake public confidence in every institution that can circumscribe or act as a speed-breaker for the RSS juggernaut; (3) Script new history; ready the blueprint for the coming agenda; (4) Bridle the electoral system.
The RSS game-plan is ready, Swamy wrote then, only the date for the final blitzkrieg remains to be picked.
Think back to those four steps Swamy outlined. I could have linked a few dozen current examples to illustrate each of them, but I’m going to leave it up to you: As you think back over the past six months, as you read the headlines today, how many of those boxes do you think you can tick?
“Of course,” concluded Swamy, “the good news is that the game plan can fail. I live on the hope that in India, no well-laid plan ever works. India, after all, is a functioning anarchy. That has been the undoing of every attempt to straitjacket its society. That is why we are still the longest continuing unbroken civilization of over 10,000 years. The RSS is, luckily, our counter-culture. The vibrations of Mother India will, I hope, be its undoing.”
I share in that pious hope. I cling to it when, after a day spent shuddering at the incessant stream of bad news, I go to bed at night and try to get some sleep. But then I wake up next morning, and this is the world I wake up to:
In Bidar, northern Karnataka, a 11-year-old breaks down in tears over the plight of her mother, who is in police custody, along with the principal of her school, Shaheen Primary and High School, on charges of sedition. For the crime of staging a play that sought to educate the students on the inequities of the CAA. A court decided to defer hearing their bail application by a week.
Meanwhile, also in Karnataka, a court ordered the police to serve notice on Nityananda, who on securing bail in a case of rape had fled the country. The police told the court that Nityananda is on a “spiritual tour”, and hence there was no need to serve notice on him.
In Allahabad, a court has granted bail to rape accused BJP leader Chinmayanand; the court order is, put mildly, problematic. Remember that bit about protecting your friends and discrediting your opponents? While on that, the Income Tax department withdrew tax evasion cases against Tamil superstar Rajnikanth – who, yesterday, came out with a statement supporting the CAA.
But to revert to Bidar, yesterday was the 5th successive day police entered the school and subjected the students – of classes 4, 5 and 6 — to intense interrogation over the play. The police action is based on a complaint lodged by one Nilesh Rakshala, an “activist” of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the RSS.
The “activist” alleged that there was a line in the play about whacking the Prime Minister with a chappal. The police, which has copies of the play, and video, have found no such line. But a mother and a school principal are in custody, the police enter the school every day for extensive interrogations, a chappal is among the “evidence” they have collected, and a 11-year-old wends her way to a neighbor’s home, weeping quietly over the fate of her mother.
In Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital city, BJP workers attempted to put up a pro-CAA banner outside a school, and hassled students who tried to stop them. A BJP MLA led a mob into another school objecting to anti-Modi graffiti on a wall. Also in Bangalore, where a junior BBMP official acting on an unverified complaint by a BJP leader had demolished 200-plus homes and rendered 5000 or more homeless, another shantytown is now being threatened with demolition because, “Bangladeshis”. “Do you decide nationality by looking at a person’s face?”, the court asked the police while hearing petitions relating to that earlier demolition — well, apparently they do, and will continue to do so.
Meanwhile in Punjab, school children were made to sign a pro-CAA banner. A similar attempt to force students to write postcards congratulating the PM was made in Gujarat – it failed only because outraged parents protested. In Ahmedabad, BJP workers are going around collecting postcards in praise of the PM. Praise, even by force, is good; a poster calling for national unity, though, not so much:
In Bombay, 50 people have been charged with sedition over a slogan at a Pride rally, on the basis of a complaint by a BJP leader. Also in Bombay, a cab driver overheard an innocent conversation, drew the wrong conclusions, and all hell broke loose. (Here is an unrolled thread on the incident)
In Delhi, where the campaign is into its final day, the Election Commission has found DCP Rajesh Deo in gross violation of rules by attempting to “adversely affecting the elections” through his press conference where he alleged that Kapil Gujjar, the gunman who fired at Shaheen Bagh the other day, was a member of the Aam Aadmi Party. The allegation is, according to the man’s own father, untrue:
No surprise here, either in the false allegation or in the EC taking note of it (In my post yesterday, I’d made this exact same point); what is surprising though is the punishment handed out, which amounts to a day’s paid leave.
Also in Delhi, also during the campaign, BJP national spokesperson Sambit Patra put out a tweet suggesting that an AAP leader had called for the establishment of the Shariya nationwide. It is, of course, a lie – the word used was “zariya”, not “shariya”. It is also, of course, extremely inflammatory. And it will, of course, go unpunished. (That Patra lied is not surprising – this is your periodic reminder that it was Patra, aided by Arnab Goswami, who first aired the faked “tukde tukde” video.)
In Bihar, where student leader turned politician Kanhaiyya Kumar has been leading a ‘Jan Gan Man’ rally across the state, his car was attacked and damaged; the driver and Kumar have reportedly been injured, the former badly.
Kumar launched his month-long rally on January 30 at Champaran; it moved to Gopalganj and Siwan on day two; to Chapra and Muzzafarpur on day 3; to Sitamandi on day four; to Madhubani on day 5; and to Dharbanga yesterday, day six. The crowds have been phenomenal, and they have been growing; the pressure is correspondingly greater on the BJP which shares the government in Bihar.
In the dead of night in Azamgarh, UP, police threw stones, fired teargas shells, and flooded a site where women have been holding a Shaheen Bagh-style sit-in protest. Several women are reportedly injured, some seriously.
Also in UP, police uprooted a wedding pandal because they thought it was erected for an anti-CAA protest. Elsewhere, India Today pointed to a series of discrepancies in data in the Budget presented by Nirmala Sitharaman (who apparently had time to decipher the Harappan script but not to run the numbers); the ministry without acknowledging the error quietly corrects it. In Goa, an NCP MLA demanded on the floor of the assembly that tigers who eat cows should be punished, just like humans. Air India cancelled the ticket of a man who was flying to the US because his name happened to be Kunal Kamra. Not THE Kunal Kamra, just A Kunal Kamra. Do you laugh? Do you weep? Do you “laugh, that you may not weep”? Do you, even as you weep, cling on to the few remaining shards of hope, if you can find them?
I wrote about that hope in a recent piece for The Wire. As the headlines pile one on the other in an endless cascade of misery, the combined weight pushing me into a dark, dank, dismal place, I think of Vaclav Havel’s question:
“Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope…”
Perhaps.
I hope the “vibrations of Mother India” – vibrations you can feel as you approach any protest site, anywhere in the country, and there are plenty for you to choose from – will save us. But I also hope she’d buck up about it, because time is running out. And time is running out not because Modi and Shah are rushing to implement the CAA/NPR-NRC, but because the RSS has been prepping the soil for a very long time now, and they are nearly done.
It is not what you see – the shakas, the drills, the flag marches, the occasional shows of strength. It is what you don’t see: that for decades now, the RSS has been quietly insinuating itself into the institutions that prop up India’s democracy.
It has pushed its brightest minds into academics, had them write the prescribed exams and enter the civil services – the IFS, the IAS, the IPS; it has pushed some of its best and brightest into the armed forces and into the media. And over the years, over the decades, these seeds planted have taken root, and grown; these recruits have steadily climbed the promotion ladders and are now increasingly in places of influence.
Swamy’s piece dates back to 2000; the process was in place well before that. With apologies for the length, here is an extended quote from an interview I did with NCP chief Sharad Pawar back in 1998:
Talking of mistakes, a very senior BJP leader said that the Congress made a big one when it didn’t allow the Vajpayee government to survive the vote of confidence… Why?
The argument I heard was that if the Congress had abstained, the Vajpayee government would have survived the vote of confidence. But being in a minority, it would not have been able to achieve anything at all, and in time it would have fallen. And with its fall, the stability plank would have been lost to the party for ever…. The BJP should never be allowed to rule, it is too dangerous. For instance, Advani was a minister during the Janata government — and in his short tenure, he managed to fill his ministry with RSS people, and that gave us a headache when we came back to power.
The BJP and the RSS practise the politics of infiltration. I’ll give you an example. Before the fall of the Babri Masjid, Bhairon Singh Shekawat and I were negotiating with the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Ram Janambhoomi people, for three days we had intense negotiations. We reached a stage where, in one more day or maybe two, we could have come to an agreement. But at that time, the senior RSS person involved in the discussions said he had to leave for three days.
I asked him why, I argued with him, told him nothing could be more important, but he was adamant. So finally I asked him where he was going, and he said Hyderabad, to attend the seminar of the Indian History Congress. I was quite shocked that he thought a seminar was more important that this.
That is when he explained. The IHC controls the way Indian history is written and studied, it approves syllabus and textbooks, it has total control. And the key weapon of the RSS is education, its goal is to rewrite Indian history to suit its agenda. In fact, the RSS is already doing it — the portrayal of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as anti-Muslim is only one example, they talk of how Afzal Khan tried to trick him and how Shivaji killed Afzal Khan, that is the story the kids read about, but conveniently, no one menions that Shivaji’s chief army commander was a Muslim, that he personally constructed three mosques for Muslims… one of my candidates in the state is a direct descendant of Shivaji Maharaj, and his family still pays money for the upkeep of these mosques, but this is never mentioned. Shivaji maintained that all communities and religions should live in harmony, but look how that is being distorted today!
Sorry, but how does all this tie up with the IHC?
To be a member, you have to do post graduation, and masters, in Indian history. So over the years, the RSS has been systematically selecting students, instructing them to study history, and getting them into the IHC, at last count the RSS-oriented students are 46 per cent of the society. Another five per cent, and the RSS will control it, and then it will write Indian history to suit its own ends. That body is like that, it plans ahead, and works systematically to achieve its goals. In fact, I must say that though the RSS and the BJP are my political enemies, I admire this quality in them, they plan for the future and they work steadily towards a goal.
Think of all that as you go through the stories linked above; think of it when you next read of an inexplicably wrong court judgment or hear of an unjustifiable police action. It is not that they are following the orders from Modi and Shah – their mission predates those two, and will continue after those two.
I’m not sure what the solution is, or even if there is a solution at all. Maybe these nationwide protests are the first faint signs of those vibrations Swamy talked about. You can only hope — so I’ll leave you with an image gallery of what hope looks like:
Bad news
Everyone: There’s so much anger and helplessness flooding my thoughts, I worry that soon there won’t be any room for other emotions, like dread.
The New Yorker’s Colin Nissan is savagely sarcastic about the zeitgeist. Read — it will feel like you or I could have written this, about the world we find ourselves in. A world where, says the Economist on its latest cover, Narendra Modi’s sectarianism is eroding India’s secular democracy.
The Economist’s India cover stories down the years is a stark illustration of how the country we know has changed under Modi. Churumuri rounds them up:
Still, this latest cover sounds exaggeratedly alarmist, until you consider Kailash Vijayvargiya, national general secretary of the BJP. Who says he suspected that some workers engaged in constructing a new room at his home were Bangladeshis, because of their “strange eating habits” — to wit, they ate poha. From the story:
I have not filed any police complaint yet. I only mentioned this incident to warn people.”
Speaking at the seminar, Vijayvargiya also claimed that a Bangladeshi terrorist was keeping a watch on him for the last one-and-a-half years.
“Whenever I go out, six armed security personnel follow me. What is happening in this country? Will outside people enter and spread so much terror?” he asked.
Just another of the BJP’s motormouth brigade sounding off, right? And making accusations that, on the face of it, are so absurd they are downright laughable? (I mean, a national BJP leader has a Bangladeshi terrorist following him around for a year and a half — he knows it, but neither his security, nor the police, nor the GoI’s extended intelligence machinery, can do anything about it?)
In passing, if poha now ranks with beef on the BJP’s list of suspect foods, wonder what Vijayvarghiya makes of Narendra Modi, who is on record as saying poha is one of the things he likes to cook?
We dismiss such idiots at our own peril, though. For this is classic gaslighting — he is speaking not to those who can think for themselves, but to that other constituency, of hardcore bigots, who merely want a peg to hang their internal prejudices on. This gaslighting, and the consequent normalisation of prejudice, has dangerous real world consequences. Thus:
A day after shanties belonging to hundreds of labourers were illegally razed by a BBMP official, fear has gripped migrant workers in east Bengaluru, with as many as 600 leaving the city even as authorities justified the action citing lack of time and money for verifying documents.
The administration — in Yedyurappa-run Bangalore — has no time or money to check whether there is any truth to an allegation, so they just demolish a few hundred homes and put a thousand or so people on the street. People, mind, with all proper documentation, including some who are native Kannadigas. Remember, this began with a BJP MLA posting a video of a shantytown and alleging that the residents were illegal Bangladeshi migrants. Elsewhere:
Thousands of migrant workers, mostly employed in coffee estates across Kodagu, were taken to three centres in the district on Thursday as police carried out an identity verification exercise. The centres in Madikeri, Virajpet and Kushalnagar towns were teeming with crowds as police conducted both offline and online identity verification.
The action, say the police, was because of “the security threats these people pose”. What threats? Based on which investigation? Where is due process?
An Amit Shah talks of the “termites” from Bangladesh. A Vijayvarghiya talks of his suspicion that some people eating poha are illegal Bangladeshis. Stupid comments on the face of it, but it accomplishes the purpose: “Bangladeshi” is the cover that confers legitimacy on their actions; Muslim is the enemy they are going after.
The law, which is meant to be a bulwark against such acts, is of no use. In BJP-ruled states where the leaders have passed on their prejudices to the hand-picked senior police officers and given them a loose rein, it is a case of act first, think up reasons later. As for instance in Uttar Pradesh, where…
As more and more cases against protesters charged with attempt to murder and rioting during anti-CAA protests in December began failing legal scrutiny and courts started granting bail, police in Muzaffarnagar invoked a stringent provision of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 — almost a month after it booked 107 people — and claimed that protesters used children “for illegal activity”.
Which is to say, when the initial charges — of “rioting” — fail to hold up, the police come up with something else. And when that fails to hold up (as it will), they will come up with something else again… No sooner than lawyers successfully fight one charge, than another pops up.
This zeal is selective. For instance, in the daily rush of events we seem to have forgotten that today, January 24, is the 19th day since masked thugs armed with iron rods, hammers, bottles of acid, entered the JNU campus, with the connivance of the VC and with the benign tolerance of the police, and caused mayhem. Several of the perpetrators have been identified, via video and cellphone messages — and yet, there has not been one single arrest, no FIR against any of them. On the other hand JNUSU president Aishe Ghosh and several of her colleagues face charges of criminal vandalism for an attack on the university’s server rooms on January 1 — an attack, as an RTI inquiry revealed, never happened.
This is the playbook in its entirety. Use public platforms and captive media to demonise, to other. Then act — no matter how untenable the action is, because the objective is not to apprehend and punish actual wrongdoing, but to make life unliveable for those the government deems its enemy. And when words are not enough, try more direct methods. As, for instance:
According to the Kathirur police Prabesh allegedly hurled steel bombs towards the police picket in front of Kathirur Manoj Smrithi Kendram, an RSS office.
“He threw bombs during the wee hours of January 16 morning. Following the arrest he has confessed that his aim was RSS office. Kannur, being politically sensitive region, any attack on political party offices will be regarded as an act by the opponent,” Kathirur SI Nijeesh said.
Unpack that slowly. An RSS “worker” threw a bomb at his own party office, regardless of the fact that he might have ended up killing his own people, so that blame could be put on the enemy — the political opposition, the “radicals”, whoever. This happened in Kannur, ground zero for RSS-sponsored terrorism. Where, among many incidents, there was this: Lethal bombs recovered from an RSS-controlled temple where they had been hidden. Remember this?:
“They are putting their life in danger to make these things (bombs) for self-defence. That’s how little faith they have in the law and order system in place,” he said.
The man saying RSS workers are making bombs for self defence, risking their lives in the process, is RSS leader (RSS, not one of those convenient “fringe groups”) Valsan Thillankeri — who was at the forefront of the 2019 violence at Sabarimala, where, again, bombs were hurled at the homes of political leaders.
It’s getting to where Colin Nissan’s sarcasm in the New Yorker piece doesn’t feel like sarcasm any more; it is actually a thing.
Everybody: You know those moments between crying about one thing and crying about the next thing, when you finally have time to catch your breath and just cry about nothing?
- Shruti Rajagopalan, one of my favourite columnists on all things to do with economics, turns her attention to the Constitution and, with a tick-tock narrative, shows us how we got here. Read — it is the background you need to understand the present.
- CNN has a detailed report sourcing Amnesty International on the troll armies and related propaganda tools that have made Twitter hell for women politicians and activists. Related, the Independent (London) has a similar story.
- Since Kerala came up earlier in this post (and since I linked to my posts yesterday), here is a Caravan backgrounder that tells you how, and why, Kerala became ground zero for the RSS.
- You read about Davinder Singh. You read about Samarpal, the BSF jawan caught carrying a lethal bomb into a CRPF camp. Now read this story, of how army personnel in Kashmir are commandeering the cars of citizens at night. Why would the army, which has vehicles to spare, need to surreptitiously commandeer private cars at night? What are they doing, that they cannot do in their own official vehicles? The questions just keep mounting, and each unanswered question adds to the dread that the situation in the Valley is much less than even the more pessimistic of us feared.
I’ll be back here later today in case this post needs updating. In the meantime, I will leave you with this comprehensive — and highly evocative — collation of the protest music that is emerging out of the ongoing revolution. I’ve been listening to some of these on loop. And also with this image, that got fixed in my mind when I saw it while surfing Twitter last evening:
Smoke Signals 