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RSS, Hindu Mahasabha had a tumultuous tie, says Sangh ideologue
NEW DELHI: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha did not see eye to eye on several issues, including their approach to Mahatma Gandhi and his way
NEW DELHI: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha did not see eye to eye on several issues, including their approach to Mahatma Gandhi and his way of thinking, and their relationship went downhill over time, an RSS ideologue has said.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s decision to fight a defamation case for his statement linking RSS to the Mahatma’s assassination has triggered a rush in the saffron organisation to unearth documents that can prove its tumultuous ties with his assassin Nathuram Godse and the Mahasabha.
A letter by Godse to Hindu Mahasabha leader Veer Savarkar, blaming the RSS for “wasting the energy of Hindu youth”, is one of the documentary proofs the Sangh is relying on to distance itself from the charge of being involved in the murder. “Godse and four others (members of Hindu Mahasabha) wrote to Savarkar in October 1932, complaining that the RSS was wasting the energy of the Hindu youth,” Rakesh Sinha, a DU professor, said.
Sinha, who is also an honorary director of RSS think tank India Policy Foundation, said the schism deepened as members such as Godse and Savarkar disapproved of the Sangh’s “socialist, austere way of life, which was drawing them closer to Gandhi” and for not supporting Mahasabha’s political activities. “RSS’ decision to join the Civil Disobedience Movement started by Gandhi in 1930 made HMS furious. Dr KB Hedgewar, the founder of RSS, stepped down from the post of sarsanghchalak and led the Forest Satyagraha in Pusad. He, along with 300 RSS workers, was arrested and incarcerated for a year,” Sinha said.
He quotes from HMS leader Dr BS Moonje’s dairy, where he wrote that RSS workers were “carried away by Gandhian movement”.
With the spotlight back on RSSHMS links, the Sangh cites several reasons — its refusal to back an agitation against the Nizam of Hyderabad or join the battalion raised by the British government ahead of World War 2 — for cleaving its ties.
“Unfortunately, Marxist historians treated pre-Independent Hindutva movement as a monolith and wrongly assumed a hegemonic position of the HMS,” Sinha said.
But historians rebuffed these claims. Mridula Mukherjee, a former professor of modern Indian history at JNU, said the RSS and the HMS were as close as “the RSS and the BJP now or the RSS and the Jan Sangh earlier”.
