Minority report

RSS was always a 'cultural' oddity, though it loves to preach 'cultural nationalism'.

The RSS was always a ‘cultural’ or, if you prefer, a proto-political, oddity — though it loves to preach ‘cultural nationalism’, as its chief K.C. Sudarshan has recently done in Jaipur.

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A look at its dress-code will make the issue clear enough — outsized khaki shorts and the ‘danda’, a caricature of Boy Scout gear clubbed with the symbol of authoritarianism. However hard the outfit may try to confuse 21st century Indians through the overuse of the term ‘nationalism’ in talking about itself, it is well to recall that the Hindutva mother unit reviled Gandhiji — one of its crazed adherents even killed him. It also kept out of the freedom movement which represented the ‘culture’ of the times and was ‘nationalist’ by any definition.

In the election season, the RSS and its affiliates, which include the BJP, appear to have an elaborate plan to woo the minority vote, of Muslims chiefly, as their recent actions suggest. Without this it would be hard to increase Hindutva’s electoral appeal. Thus, as if being solicitous of Muslims, Mr Sudarshan informs us that it is all right to have “different civilisations, people with different lifestyles, eating habits” and so on, if they have one ‘bhav’ (sentiment) and ‘soul’. Why, thank you, Mr Sudarshan!

Lest this be mistaken for spirituality, the RSS has always believed that our Muslims do not display ‘cultural nationalism’, meaning they don’t strike up the ‘Ram dhun’, despite the poet Iqbal describing Ram as ‘Imam-e-Hind’. The RSS’s short answer is that though our Muslims (or Christians) are nearly all local converts and not of foreign descent, their ‘sacred lands’ or ‘punyabhoomi’ lie outside India. The ‘cultural nationalism’ slogan was engendered to highlight the so-called ‘otherness’ of the Indian Muslim on this very count. Political expediency may make the RSS seemingly tolerant of Muslims, but Mr Sudarshan tells us that they are not a ‘minority’. Does this mean not any more enjoying constitutional guarantees that exist for religious minorities, such as their educational institutions or personal law?