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.