Skip to main content

Pranab Mukherjee’s Great Son of India

Image Courtesy here


Though Pranab Mukherjee not-so-subtly denounced the basic tenets of RSS in his speech at the RSS training camp today, his description of the RSS founder Hedgewar as a “great son of Mother India” betrays the ambivalence of the former President’s attitude to the fundamentalist organisation. Is he suffering from senility? Probably yes. Or he may be playing a wily political game at which he was always an expert.

   Is Hedgewar great in any way? He founded an organisation on the principle of hatred. Hatred cannot make anyone a “great son of Mother India” unless you subscribe to the right wing policies that have come to dominate Indian politics from 2014.

   Hedgewar hated Muslims. That hatred was and still is the raison d'être of RSS. Hedgewar hated Indian National Congress simply because it stood for secular inclusiveness. His hatred of the Congress and what it stood for made him and his organisation a tacit supporter of the British Raj.

   When the Congress passed the Purna Swaraj resolution in 1929 and asked Indians to celebrate 26 Jan 1930 as Independence Day, Hedgewar issued a circular asking all the RSS shakhas to hoist the saffron flag instead of the Tricolour. From 1931 even that flag was not hoisted. RSS didn’t want anything to do with the independence struggle.

   Hedgewar prohibited RSS from joining Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi Yatra (though he personally participated). He didn’t want RSS to be associated with the freedom movement. By 1934, Hedgewar’s RSS had become so ‘antinational’ that the Congress had to prohibit any of its members from becoming members of the RSS.

   It is argued by many historians that the RSS was founded in 1925 with the blessings of the British government which wished to keep the Hindus and Muslims as mutual enemies. It fitted well with the British “divide and rule” policy. The way Hedgewar kept his Sangh away from the freedom struggle corroborates this view.

   Yet our former President, a Congressman, wrote that Hedgewar was a “great son of India.” Dear Pranab Da, have you lost your senses? Or are you playing a wily political game at this ripe old age?


Comments

  1. I think, it was a political move. He has nothing to lose. He wanted to make a statement. He has succeeded in getting headlines.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I too smell something fishy. [When I brought in the 'fish' metaphor, a friend joked: "That's natural, he's a Bengali. :) ]

      Delete
  2. Pranab da is a seasoned and articulate politician who has understood that a President rises above party politics and uses every fora to engage people of all traits while leveraging his eminence to make them see his point. A bouquet was offered to Ayub Khan and Bhutto so a bouquet to Hedgewar to make someone listen to him appears to be statesmanship

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I can accept that view though I can't accept Hedgewar's image as a great son of India.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

Good Friday and Some Arithmetic

Two and two is not always equal to four, my young friend Tony says. 2 + 2 ≠ 4, he reasserts. Tony doesn’t think linearly though his thinking has the precision of mathematical logic. See these two, Tony offers an illustration, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Then add another 2 to them, Ambani and Adani. What do you get? I smile in answer. It’s dangerous to answer Tony verbally. Now, Tony continues, let’s take two beggars from the street. And then add you and me, another two, to them. What do you get? Tony goes on with more arithmetic because he thinks I didn’t get it. (Modi + Shah) + (Ambani + Adani) = 4 persons (Beggar 1 + Beggar 2) + (You + I) = 4 persons Is the first 4 equal to the second 4? T oday is Good Friday. Good Fridays are sad because they are about the victory of vicious political power over simple goodness. Just a few days back, on what’s known as Palm Sunday among Christians, Jesus was led like a hero to Jerusalem, a political fulcrum in those days, by a hu