Gandhi, Golwalkar and Godse: The Sangh Parivar’s agenda

On 8 December 1947, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar was telling his closest associates that if Mahatma Gandhi did not change his ways and did not stop trying to prevent Muslims from migrating to Pakistan, he knew how to silence him. Recalling this important archival information, Dhirendra Jha, author of Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man and The Man Behind the Machine, says his research conclusively established that Golwalkar’s ideological convictions continue to drive the RSS and the BJP.

In conversation with Seema Chishti, editor of The Wire, Jha says the Sangh Parivar today is delivering exactly what Golwalkar wanted, never mind the BJP’s appropriation of Mahatma Gandhi, his memorials, symbols and even ideas like Swachh Bharat.

While Golwalkar became far more cautious after the ban on the RSS following Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and disowned that he was the author of the book We or our Nationhood Defined (1939), Jha's research proved conclusively that Golwalkar indeed was the author of the book.

In the controversial book, which the RSS has distanced itself from at least publicly, Golwalkar speaks of a Hindu Rashtra, cultural nationalism and denial of equal status to minorities. He favoured a theocratic state and opposed democracy and secularism, and held that individual rights were secondary to the interests of the 'Hindu Nation'.

He also favoured education as a tool to instil Hindu values and Sanskritised Hindi as the national language, and sought unity of Hindus despite his belief that caste is an integral part of Hindu society.

Golwalkar’s prescriptions in this incendiary work were central to the ideological training and radicalisation of youth dedicated to the idea of a Hindu Rashtra. Golwalkar prescribed a solution to India’s ‘minority problem’ based on the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Third Reich. The book eventually formed the core of the Sangh’s credo and, as events in the recent past have borne out, has had a lasting influence on Indian politics.

A major publishing house wanted Jha to remove all references to Golwalkar’s authorship of the book, based on half-baked information available on the internet. Golwalkar had indeed claimed that he was not the author and that Baburao Savarkar, elder brother of V.D. Savarkar, had written it. The claim was amplified by pro-RSS and even some independent historians. Jha, however, points out that he has conclusively established Golwalkar’s authorship of the book based on archival evidence.

While his book is not exclusively on Golwalkar — instead seeking to explain what is happening in the country after 2014 — Jha recalls that Golwalkar had lied about his working as a professor at BHU (Banaras Hindu University). He was, in fact, a lab assistant who had worked at BHU for around 17 months.

Speaking of the links between the RSS and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, Jha recalls that historians often fail to pay much attention to events during the ‘shadow zone’, the intervening five-and-a-half-month period between the Partition of the country and Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948.

It was during this period that Gandhi, who was camping in Bengal on the day India became independent to restore communal harmony, returned to Delhi and helped restore peace in the capital. This was also the time when the rebellious princely states, faced with the loss of their fiefdoms, were actively colluding with the RSS. This was also the time when riots broke out in and around Delhi.

There were enough intelligence reports delivered to the government to join the dots, but then home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel did not believe the RSS could be held to be responsible for the riots and the collusion, says Jha.

In 1940, when 34-year-old Golwalkar unexpectedly assumed charge of the RSS upon Hedgewar’s death, the Hindu militia was still in its nascent stage, with pockets of influence mainly in Maharashtra. Under Golwalkar’s leadership over the next three decades, the RSS and its allied organisations extended its network across the entire country and penetrated almost every aspect of Indian society.