Bhagwat offers balm to the soul
AS the year turns, it may not be a far cry to say that 2024, in many ways, has belonged to RSS chief Mohan Madhukar Rao Bhagwat.
The RSS chief’s latest comments on Thursday in Pune, during a lecture on “India — the Vishwaguru” at the Sahjeevan Vyakhyanmala lecture series, seem startling enough to provide balm to the soul.
To say that “mandir-masjid disputes are unacceptable”; that “after the construction of the Ram Mandir, some people think they can become leaders of Hindus by raking up similar issues in new places and that this is not acceptable”; to ask, “who is a minority and who is a majority” and answer that question himself, “everyone is equal.”
Perhaps Bhagwat realised that the competitive politics over who is a better Hindu leader had to be properly nipped
in the bud.
Bhagwat’s comments, 75 years after the Constitution guaranteed a secular republic, should have been par for the course. Instead, they are the stuff of relief — and headlines. It has taken the RSS chief to remind his own government that the nation consists of folks with bewilderingly diverse views, traditions, customs, religions, language. And that if this ‘khichri’ has to retain its distinctive flavour, then maybe there’s no point trying to stuff it into the One Nation One People straitjacket.
Predictably, those on the political left are looking for a chink in the armour of his Pune speech — maybe something is lost in translation, since Bhagwat spoke in his native Marathi. Not so predictably, those on the political right are perhaps also wondering why Bhagwat is unhooking the saffron flag from its stump, especially since Hindutva’s victory over Muslims is hovering around the horizon.
It's not clear when the penny dropped and what caused Bhagwat to make the comments he did in Pune. After all, for him to say that “we need to stay together” — Hindus, Muslims, Christians, all — mere weeks after the RSS began the year-long celebration of its 100th anniversary and on the eve of Christmas (which the Modi government marks as “good governance day”, a working day to boot) — is both singular and interesting.
Perhaps Bhagwat realised, after five people were unnecessarily killed in police firing after the communities clashed over the architectural antecedents of the Sambhal mosque a few weeks ago, that the competitive politics over who is a better Hindu leader had to be properly nipped in the bud.
Perhaps he saw that India’s 200 million Muslims, as much as 14 per cent of the population, had to live peaceably and equably with the rest, and that even contemplating another partition of the country was beyond the realm of contemplation. Perhaps he recognised the dangers lurking closer than anyone else. Perhaps he looked around himself and saw how — and why — Islamic nations like Syria and Afghanistan and Palestine had fallen, like ninepins, in the past couple of years. Where would India’s Muslims go if they were not allowed to live like equal citizens in their own country by bulldozer hotheads determined to raze their self-respect to the ground?
After all, back in 2018, Bhagwat had told reporters in Delhi that “without Muslims, Hindutva is incomplete.” And last year, when the single Bench of the Allahabad High Court allowed a survey of the Gyanvapi masjid to see whether it had once been a temple and TV journalists began to palpitate over the implications of the decision, Bhagwat calmly said, “Why look for a shivling beneath every mosque?”
Certainly, it is nobody’s case that the RSS chief and PM Modi are not peas in the same pod or that the RSS has not benefited enormously from the BJP being in power over the last decade. Of course, it has. The RSS knows that if not for Modi, there would be no Ram temple in Ayodhya or its expansion in 39 countries worldwide. The RSS chief is clear that all Indians of all religions are “Hindus”, because once upon a time they were that.
In his Vijaya Dashami address earlier in October, Bhagwat made it clear that he had no time for “wokeism and cultural Marxism”. He pointed out that Bangladeshi Hindus needed help from India. “Even the Gods do not care for the weak... What happened in Bangladesh should be a lesson for Hindu society. Weakness is a crime,” he added.
But Bhagwat’s RSS is interesting in many more ways. It is credibly said that Sangh cadres, who often tip the scales between winning and losing, did not enthusiastically campaign for BJP candidates in the 2024 General Election like they had done previously — one key reason for the party’s lack of majority in Parliament. And that the RSS later decided to reverse course and pull out all the stops in the Haryana and Maharashtra polls. Certainly, the BJP is far more strengthened having Bhagwat as the wind in its sails.
Significantly, the RSS chief’s comments come within days of Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna ordering courts not to accept any fresh suits or pass orders on existing petitions seeking the survey of mosques and whether any temple structures lie beneath. Khanna pointed out that the Supreme Court was separately hearing petitions on reopening the 1991 Places of Worship Act, which had sealed the character of the place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947.
For the time being, Khanna has shut down all legal conversation on whether mosques-were-once-temples. At least for the moment, Bhagwat is also trying to calm down his aroused flock — be satisfied with the Ram Mandir, he’s saying, no need to take over Kashi or Mathura or dig under the Sambhal shahi masjid or the Ajmer Sharif dargah.
It’s more than likely that Bhagwat knows the inside story of the mediation that took place between Hindu and Muslim groups which resulted in the 2019 Supreme Court verdict that gave the 2.77 acres constituting the Ram Janmabhoomi sanctum sanctorum to the “Hindu side”. Bhagwat probably knows the give-and-take that took place over months, why the Muslims gave up what they did and what they were promised in exchange.
The question is, does all this make Mohan Bhagwat the man of the year? A straw poll beckons.
