RSS a ‘traitor’ entity: Congress dismisses Modi’s freedom struggle claim

The Congress on Wednesday dismissed PM Narendra Modi’s assertion that RSS leaders had gone to jail during the Independence movement. The party further alleged that the organisation had instead collaborated with the British to suppress the Quit India Movement of 1942.In a post on X, the party said: “The RSS is an organisation that divides the country. At the time of Independence, its leaders neither went to jail nor were ever banned by the British. During the Quit India Movement, when the entire nation was filling the jails, the RSS was helping the British crush the uprising.”

The party alleged that not a single RSS leader was imprisoned during the freedom struggle, while revolutionaries such as Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad were branded as anarchists by the Sangh and its sympathisers. “Those who were patriots went to fight, those who were traitors joined the Sangh -- this slogan sums up the RSS’s betrayal,” the Congress said.

Accusing the RSS of sowing seeds of communal division between Hindus and Muslims, the party charged that the organisation played a key role in weakening national unity, which ultimately led to the Partition and bloodshed of 1947. “The organisation’s hands are stained with the blood of Mahatma Gandhi, whose assassination was carried out by Nathuram Godse, an RSS man,” it added.

The Congress further alleged that unlike other organisations such as the Congress, socialists and communists, who faced repeated bans and mass arrests under the British rule, the RSS was never banned, never jailed and was instead allowed to spread communal poison.

“After 1925, the RSS did not participate in any major British-opposed movements, whether it was the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 or the Quit India Movement of 1942,” it said.

The post also accused the RSS of rejecting the Constitution in favour of the Manusmriti, and claimed that it had tried to impose sectarian ideology in Independent India. “Even today, the RSS’s only agenda is to ignite Hindu-Muslim hatred and seize power by capturing state institutions. If the root cause of most of India’s problems has to be named, it is the RSS,” the party said.

In yet another post on X, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said, "The PM has spoken much of the RSS this morning. Is he even aware of what Sardar Patel wrote to Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee on July 18, 1948?”

Sharing extracts from a letter written by then Home Minister Patel to Mookerjee, in which he had said, “As regards the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, the case relating to Gandhiji’s murder is sub-judice and I should not like to say anything about the participation of the two organisations, but our reports do confirm that, as a result of the activities of these two bodies, particularly the former, an atmosphere was created in the country, in which such a ghastly tragedy became possible,” he wrote.

Ramesh further said the activities of the RSS constituted a clear threat to the existence of the government and the state. “Our reports show that those activities, despite the ban, have not died down. Indeed, as time has marched on, the RSS circles are becoming more defiant and are indulging in their subversive activities in an increasing measure,” he added.