Skip to main content

IS and RSS

Ghulam Nabi Azad did not really compare the terrorist outfit, Islamic State, with RSS.  He says he only mentioned the two in the same breath.  He was opposed to both.

Though the IS and RSS may share a few things in common, putting them on two sides of the same balance is preposterous.  Tavleen Singh, in her column in The Indian Express, elaborates on that preposterousness and then goes on to assert that she grew up despising RSS.  This is what she says:

I found their aggressive nationalism silly and their obsession with Hindu revivalism boring. I still do. I believe that reducing the vast wealth of Indian civilisation to a debate about beef is vandalism. Since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, we have seen far too many of his partymen exhibit their complete ignorance about Hindu civilisation by spreading hatred against those who eat beef and believing that they do this in the cause of reviving Hindu thought from Vedic times. Most of them have learned their ideas from RSS shakhas, so it should be clear that the RSS needs to change a lot more than its knickers

This is all, more or less, what I have been telling in my writings all through.  I’m happy to find someone who agrees with me or, being humble, someone with whom I agree.

I also don’t think that the RSS will stretch its ambition beyond the borders of Bharat Mata and seek to bring the whole world (Vasudaiva Kutumbakam) under the wide umbrella of its ancient culture.  The IS wants to bring the whole world under the Caliphate.  I fail to understand why anyone wants to bring anyone else under anything.  This is one thing I fail to understand about the RSS too.  Why does it want to bring India under the Hindutva umbrella?  Why can’t it let people find their own religious and cultural moorings?  Why does it insist on lending its roots to everybody in the country?  It is in this one regard, on the insistence of making everyone wear the same religio-cultural robes, that the RSS is being compared with IS.  Of course, we know, like Tavleen Singh, that the RSS has only grown up from knickers to trousers and has not post-graduated in the ideology as the IS has.


Labels:

Comments

  1. RakeshMarch 20, 2016 at 8:58 PM

    Totally agree. There's no comparison between RSS and IS at all. RSS is militant, but they do try to help the country during crisis, which is more than what IS does. I'm totally against the policy of RSS and their brand of Hinduism, but given a choice, I'd always choose RSS over IS.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 20, 2016 at 9:58 PM

      When any organization is on a downward slide, no one can predict how low it will go. Still it's quite certain that RSS won't hit the levels reached by IS.

      Delete
  2. Yogi SaraswatMarch 21, 2016 at 12:01 PM

    RSS is an organization founded to serve the nation without differentiate between cast , religion or region but those dont know much about RSS are always think that RSS is against Muslims or others but Yes , RSS is against those are in the dress of India but playing for others.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 21, 2016 at 1:23 PM

      The problem is there are elements both in RSS and its affiliates that have criminal tendencies. If they can be controlled quite a lot of problems will be solved.

      Regarding those who act against the nation, aren't there laws to deal with them? Why should any organization take the law into their hands?

      Moreover, is India such a feeble concept that it will crumble on the face of a few individuals shouting some slogans?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more