A Disillusioned Hindu

 

Book Review

Title: I could not be Hindu: The story of a Dalit in the RSS

Author: Bhanwar Meghwanshi

Translator from Hindi: Nivedita Menon

Publisher: Navayana, Delhi, 2020

Pages: 236 [hardbound]

“Was it for this Hindu Rashtra I was working so hard, so ready to kill and be killed?” Bhanwar Meghwanshi asks in this autobiographical book of his. The book is about the author’s bitter disillusionment with the religion he was born into as well as the most powerful organisation of that religion, the RSS.

Meghwanshi was born into a caste considered untouchable by his religion. But he loved his religion which taught him as a little boy that Muslims and Christians were enemies of both the nation and the nation’s religion. He joined the RSS as a little boy and at the age of 13, in 1987, he was on a mission to redeem the Ayodhya temple from its Muslim clutches. He joined the militant group that went from his village in Rajasthan to Ramjanmabhumi in Ayodhya and shouted passionate slogans in the train. “Raised fists, inflamed faces, roars of Jai jai Shri Ram, vande mataram, jaykaare Bajrangi, har har Mahadev… We swear upon Ram, we will build the temple there.” He wanted to kill the Muslims who were present in his train compartment.

The RSS had built up all that passion and hatred in the mind of that little boy who grew up imbibing lessons in hatred that the fanatic organisation taught in regular meetings. Meghwanshi became one of the prominent members of the RSS in his village. But the organisation would never make him a leader officially. Because of his caste.

The most painful disillusionment struck Meghwanshi when the food he had prepared very lovingly in his house for the RSS members one day was taken away as parcels instead of being eaten in his house as was planned originally. All that food was found a little later thrown on the wayside. The RSS men wouldn’t eat food prepared in the house of a low caste member. “For the first time in my life that day,” says the author, “I stepped aside from my Hindu identity and started seeing the world like a person from a lower caste.” He saw clearly the mendacity and hypocrisy of the world’s largest religious organisation, the RSS.

He began to hate the RSS. He hated Hinduism which discriminated against its own people in the name of caste. Eventually the hatred mellowed into a sort of enlightenment especially because of the new lessons he learnt from Ambedkar, Phule, and other Dalit thinkers and reformers.

Meghwanshi understood that the RSS is an organisation of “Brahmins and Banias” who merely make use of the low caste people for pursuing their own selfish objectives. The RSS strategy is very simple, according to Meghwanshi. The organisation rouses the base passions of the low caste people and make them fight the Muslims and the Christians.

The upper caste people will let their “pet dogs and cats eat with them, sleep on the same beds as they, travel in their air-conditioned cars with them,” but “will not permit even the shadow of a Dalit to fall on them.” Meghwanshi cites a lot Dalit experiences of shame at the hands of the RSS “Brahmins and Banias”.  “What kind of religion is this,” he asks, “in which … unproductive people who merely chant from almanacs and old tomes, who sit in their shops and cheat their customers and lie and lie” are considered superior to people who do all the work? “A religion based on lies and deception, which exploits women, the poor, Dalits, Adivasis.” That is what Hinduism is for Meghwanshi.

The RSS will never eradicate the caste system, says Meghwanshi. It will put the whole blame for all the problems of the Hindus on Muslims and Christians. Then make the Dalits attack these “enemies”. It will also keep the Dalits under a magic spell by offering some high position or the other to one or two of them. It will never give a high position within the organisation to any Dalit but it will make them MLAs or MPs or even the President of the country.

The Sangh has many strategies to hoodwink people. One of them is to appropriate antithetical thinkers like Ambedkar and then corrupt their teachings. The RSS meetings misquote Ambedkar and present him as “anti-Muslim and a supporter of the Hindu Rashtra”. The most fundamental strategy is to ensure that “Muslims, Christians, Dalits and Adivasis don’t come together.” Any organisation that brings these people together or works for their uplift is “officially hounded, investigated, and their funds restricted by manipulating the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act [FCRA].”

This book is a very serious indictment of the RSS which controls the country today for all practical purposes. It is written by a man who loved the organisation for many years and was a loyal member. He knows what he is writing about. He has faced many threats from the RSS for his later writings and activities. This book deserves to be read by anyone who wants to see the true colours of the RSS.

 

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