View from the Right: Understanding RSS

Vaidya notes: “RSS is not a banned organisation. Even though the government has, without any legal basis, banned the Sangh and has later revoked the ban without any conditions. It is not even a secret organisation. Its activities are conducted in open fields and anyone can participate in them.”

Apart from the German ambassador’s visit, Vaidya mentions the invite to former President Pranab Mukherjee as an example of the orgnisation’s inclusive nature, even though Mukherjee has been a Congressman all his life.

Vaidya says that in his four-decade association with the RSS, he has never heard any senior functionary of the RSS “glorify” either Hitler or Nazism. “The illiberal brigade present in the media and the intellectuals has always cited M S Golwalkar’s book, We or Our Nationhood Defined, which was published for the first time in 1938, when Golwalkar did not hold any post in the RSS,” Vaidya says. He stresses that “this book does not represent the views of the RSS”. Vaidya concludes that the illiberal left in the media and among the intellectuals “never had any interest in meeting and understanding the volunteers of the Sangh”.

Partition stories

Panchjanya has started a series looking into “stories related to the Partition”. The inaugural story in the series is, “The League’s scheme to make India devoid of Hinduism”. The article states: “The Congress has been betraying the Hindus since before Independence. The question is, if it was not a Hindu organisation then how did it continue to make deals with the Muslim League? The partition of India was a result of the secularism of Congress.”

It is often heard, the article claims, that it was the obstinate conduct of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, which was responsible for the Partition. That it is only the “partial” truth and not the “entire truth”. It adds that the foundation of Partition was laid down when Congress reached an agreement with the Muslim League in 1916. Slowly the voice of Jinnah had become the voice of the entire Muslim community. It adds: “Jinnah had decided to make the centuries-old dream of the Muslim community come true”. The dream, the article says, was “to bring India under the Islamic flag”.

Defending NRC

The editorial in Organiser is on the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which it calls the “National Register for Citizenship”. The editorial speaks about the recently published final draft of the NRC, which has left out over 19 lakh people. It states that “some in media and political circles are happy to find loopholes in the NRC and projecting it as a Hindu-Muslim issue” and that the international media too is “playing with the fire and attacking the government for completing the process as per the schedule given by the Supreme Court”. The editorial conceded that “corrective action” is required in “many aspects” which will need “political will to implement”.

It explains that the entire process was “directed and monitored” by the Supreme Court of India and hence “should be seen from the national-legal point of view rather than a secular-communal prism”. It says that “whatever may be the political positioning of the Congress”, the commitment for NRC was made in the Assam Accord signed by Rajiv Gandhi, when he was the prime minister, to “provide certain safeguards for Assamese people to protect, preserve and promote their cultural and linguistic identity”.

It is “vital” to secure the international borders “to avoid all kinds of illegal migration, and to implement development and connectivity related clauses of the Assam Accord”. It adds that the “issue of illegal migration is not limited to Assam”, but has security implications for East and Northeast region.