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.


Comments

  1. 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. 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. 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. 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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...