Rahul, RSS & Indian right

Hasan Suroor

THE grand strategy, clearly, was to give a flailing Congress another kick in the shin by slapping a defamation case against Rahul Gandhi for his remarks over the alleged RSS role in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. But, as often happens with too-clever-by-half strategies, it appears to have backfired. After the initial misstep when he appeared to back down, Rahul has finally got it right by sticking to his original statement, and the spotlight now is firmly on the RSS and its links with Gandhi’s killers. To be confronted with questions about his assassination will be deeply embarrassing to the RSS and Narendra Modi at a time when he is desperately trying to appropriate Mahatma’s legacy.

Some commentators have sought to dismiss it as a “farce”. It might end up as one; but while it lasts it will only cause discomfiture to the RSS as old accounts of how its supporters distributed sweets on hearing the news of Gandhi’s assassination are being recalled. To many young Indians not quite well-up on their history, what Sardar Patel, an RSS sympathiser, said about it at the time has come as a revelation. Absolving the RSS of direct involvement in Gandhi’s assassination, he pointedly noted how “communal poison” spread by it had vitiated the atmosphere in the days leading up to the assassination. It was a withering verdict; and that remains the nature of the beast even today. Is it a mere coincidence that community relations have been poisoned to such a degree under the RSS-driven Modi government?

Of all the bogus claims that populate Indian politics, the most egregious is the description of BJP as a modern everyday right-wing party like, say, the British Conservative Party. The truth is that the BJP is so far removed from mainstream right-wing thinking in the rest of the world that if there was a  “Comintern” of the right, it might struggle even to find a place in it. The modern libertarian right is not only unapologetically secular, but actively engaged with ideas ranging from individual freedoms, free speech, and the nature and role of the state to  reining in market forces, reforming public services, and promoting social mobility, etc. It has moved on from the “hang-’em-flog-’em” era of social, economic and religious fundamentalism. 

The BJP, by contrast, is still stuck in a time warp with its narrow interpretation of nationalism, and a perverse belief in Hindu supremacy with echoes of the 1930s German notion of racial purity. In most Western democracies, the BJP would be classified as the far right with the likes of intellectually feeble United Kingdom Independence Party; Marie Le Pen’s National Front; and the Republican Tea Party — all xenophobic, hostile towards minority groups, and obsessed with cultural nativism.

The RSS-BJP brand has become so toxic that it has started to cause embarrassment even in domestic independent right-wing circles. Admittedly, the independent right in India is so scarce that it is almost like looking for Eskimos in Rajasthan. But the few stray voices that do exist resent being lumped with the Sangh Parivar, and its increasingly mainstreamed lumpen fringe. A case in point is Swarajya, C Rajagopalachari’s defunct 1950s journal revived last year as a platform for the liberal right, “an authoritative voice of reason representing the liberal centre-right point of view”. Despite its protestations, many see it as just another in-house BJP venture with a veneer of  sophistication. Which riles some on Swarajya. Seetha, a senior journalist associated with it, was so upset at the “sweeping generalisation that anyone who is right of centre is a supporter of the RSS and the rabid Hindutva brigade” that she lodged an angry protest with The Hoot after it published an article last year linking it to the Sangh Parivar. 

“There is a deliberate attempt to gloss over nuanced positions and paint everyone not in agreement with the Left as rabid right-wing extremists, which needs to be countered...”, she wrote. Distancing herself from the BJP/Hindutva right, she added she had been dubbed a “sickularist” and “Congressi” by Hindutva trolls “for being even slightly critical of the BJP or conceding that the Congress may have been right on something”.

She has a point; never mind Swarajya’s broad ideological fraternity with Modi and his project (note the timing of its launch and some of its leading figures’ direct or indirect links with the BJP).  I’m sure many in the BJP would have proprietary claims on Swarajya seeing it as “our own” journal, and react with shock (“Et tu, Swarajya”) in the event it decides to play naughty. But the relevant question to ask is: why is this happening? Why everyone on the right tends to get lumped with “the RSS and the rabid Hindutva brigade”? 

Well, it’s not a Left conspiracy. The roots of the trouble lie elsewhere: a history of intellectual vacuum on the right which allowed obscurantist Hindu nationalists a free run to entrench themselves as the mascot of the Indian right; and as its sole authentic voice. India has had no tradition of enlightened right-wing public intellectuals, which means that the only platform available to ambitious right-leaning academics, journalists, wannabe politicians and disillusioned leftists has been the BJP. What is more troubling is that these new entrants  have shown no interest in infusing fresh ideas, but  have instead happily lent their services to providing intellectual respectability to a vision of an illiberal and intolerant India. 

Even the so-called “independents”  are not averse to rushing to the party’s rescue when it calls them. It will be interesting to see how far a venture like Swarajya will be willing to go to challenge the RSS orthodoxy as it seeks to become a platform for the “liberal centre-right point of view”. Meanwhile, whatever the outcome of the Rahul-RSS row, it will not shut down the debate on RSS’s past. It is too dark and murky to be forgotten in a hurry.

I leave readers with this passage from American Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis’s book It Can’t Happen Here. Does it remind them of any top right-wing Indian political leader? 

“...He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare...; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts — figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”

— The writer is a London-based commentator