New Delhi: Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has again hit out at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in a series of tweets over the last few days.
मेरा मानना है कि RSS व सम्बंधित संगठन को संघ परिवार कहना सही नहीं- परिवार में महिलाएँ होती हैं, बुजुर्गों के लिए सम्मान होता, करुणा और स्नेह की भावना होती है- जो RSS में नहीं है।
अब RSS को संघ परिवार नहीं कहूँगा!
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 25, 2021
The attack in UP on nuns from Kerala is a result of the vicious propaganda run by the Sangh Parivar to pitch one community against another and trample the minorities.
Time for us as a nation to introspect and take corrective steps to defeat such divisive forces.
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 24, 2021
In his long-running political battle with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ex-Congress chief has often attacked the “Sangh Parivar”.
But it appears that his advisors haven’t told him about the history of the relationship between the RSS and the senior leaders of his own party, including his great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru and grandmother Indira Gandhi.
Over the last six decades, the RSS and senior Congress leaders have come face-to-face on several occasions, where the party’s leaders showed appreciation for the work that the cultural organisation did.
Congress-RSS history
In 1963, Congress stalwart and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had invited an RSS contingent to be part of the Republic Day Parade in Delhi. The invitation was extended as a recognition of the stellar work by RSS volunteers during the 1962 Sino-India war.
Two years later, when Pakistan attacked India, the then PM Lal Bahadur Shastri, a towering Gandhian leader and a Congress stalwart, invited the second RSS Sarsanghchalak (chief mentor) to participate in an all-party meeting to discuss this issue.
Then Sarsanghchalak M.S. Golwalkar attended the meeting. RSS was the only non-political organisation to be invited to the meeting.
In 1970, the then PM Indira Gandhi visited the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanyakumari. The driving force behind this magnificent project was RSS pracharak (worker) and former sarkaryavah (general secretary) Eknath Ranade. This was a publicly known fact.
When Gandhi visited the memorial a few days after its inauguration, she said, “It is a moving experience to come to Kanyakumari and see how the faith of thousands in Swami Vivekananda’s message has made possible this memorial. May it inspire all who visit it and give them the courage to live up to Swami ji’s great and timeless teachings.”
Connection with Ram Janmabhoomi movement too
In the early 1980s, the RSS launched a massive anti-conversion movement, following the conversion of large number of Dalits to Islam at Meenakshipuram in Tamil Nadu.
The organisation that was created at that time to drive the movement was called Virat Hindu Samaj. When it was set up, Karan Singh, a senior Congress leader and a former Union minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet in 1970s was nominated as its president.
The organising secretary of the body was Ashok Singhal, who was a prant pracharak (full time worker) of the Delhi RSS. Singhal later played a key role as a Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader in building up the movement.
Another interesting fact about the Ram Janmabhoomi movement is that the idea for launching it came from Congress stalwart Dau Dayal Khanna, who first floated the idea formally in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, at a public meeting organised by the Hindu Jagran Manch in 1983.
Khanna presented the resolution to rebuild temples not only at Ayodhya but also in Mathura and Kashi (Varanasi) in this meeting.
He was a party veteran from UP and had been a cabinet minister in the Congress government led by Chandrabhanu Gupta in the 1960s. Later in the 1980s, he also became the first general secretary of Shri Ram Janam Bhoomi Mukti Yagya Samiti, which was formed in 1984 to spearhead the movement.
‘Will give support to anyone who asks for it’
The best answer to the critics of RSS came from the current Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat in September 2018, when the RSS organised an outreach programme. Bhagwat addressed an audience comprising eminent people from all spheres of society.
During a Q&A session, he was asked why the organising secretaries in the BJP come from RSS if the body has no ties with politics. He was also asked if the RSS ever supported any other political party or organisation.
In his reply, Bhagwat said, “Whoever asks for the organising secretary, Sangh gives them. So far no one else has asked for it. When they will, we will think about it.”
Speaking about how the RSS thinks on this subject, he said, “If (their) cause is good, we would definitely give. Because in the course of 93 years, we have not supported any party but we have supported a policy. The advantage of our supporting a policy is that as our strength increases, the political parties also get the benefit. Those who can take the benefit, take it, and those who cannot are left behind.”
He noted examples like the Emergency and the construction of Ram temple to make his point.
“During Emergency, our policy was to oppose it but we did not think that (Bharatiya) Jana Sangh should benefit from it. There were people like Babu Jagjivan Ram, S.M. Joshi, N.G. Gore. There was Gopalan ji from CPM. Everyone got the benefit. The swayamsevaks worked for everyone,” he said.
“There was only one election in which we were supporting the policy of Ram temple and only BJP was in favour of that so the BJP reaped the benefit. Even the parties that had an alliance with the BJP got the benefit. So we support the policy. We haven’t worked for a political party and we won’t do it,” he added.
Next time Rahul Gandhi wants to attack the RSS, he should remember this long history between the party he leads and the body he hits at.
The writer is research director with Delhi-based think tank Vichar Vinimay Kendra. He has authored two books on RSS. Views expressed are personal.
(Edited by Amit Upadhyaya)
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