Has
Congress Always Been Averse To RSS?
Saeed Naqvi
By triggering a debate on its Op-ed page last week, The Hindu, possibly unintentionally, lifted the scab from an old wound for many of us.
The
debate, initiated by Vidya Subramaniam’s column on October 8, 2013, had its
locus elsewhere: the RSS’ growing stranglehold on the BJP. Her point was that
the RSS’s relationship with the BJP violates a commitment the RSS made to
India’s first Home Minister, Sardar Patel, before it was unbanned on July 11,
1949. Remember, the RSS had been banned four days after Mahatma Gandhi’s
assassination on January 30, 1948. But S. Gurumurthy of the RSS, in the
course of establishing his rebuttal, wanders into the attitudes of senior
Congress leaders towards the RSS. The Congress Working Committee, as is well
known, was divided on this issue as it was on the country’s partition. Congress
has historically fudged these issues.
Gurumurthy
clinches the fact that the RSS violated no agreement, by quoting then Home
Minister of Bombay, Morarji Desai, a Patel acolyte. In a written statement to
the Bombay Legislative Assembly on September 14, 1949, Desai admitted that the
ban on the RSS was lifted “unconditionally”.
When,
returning from Muzaffarnagar after last month’s orchestrated, piecemeal ethnic
cleansing, I heard exactly the anti Muslim slogans I had heard during the
Gujarat riots in 1969, it did hurt. On that occasion Badshah Khan, the Frontier
Gandhi, put down anchor in that city for nearly a month because he could not
believe what he saw – 512 killed in what Justice Jaganmohan Reddy called
“largely one sided riots”. Handbills calling for a “religious war” were
distributed “to the rioters by the RSS and the Jana Sangh”. Congressmen joined
the chorus that “Muslims were anti national”. Yes, in 1969.
I
had a ringside seat with Badshah Khan that year. The Statesman had loaned my
services to function as the Frontier Gandhi’s press adviser. This was at
Jayaprakash Narayan’s behest. Since Indira Gandhi had split the Congress,
Badshah Khan’s utterances were being carefully weighed by both sides. Was he
favouring Indira Congress or the Syndicate Congress?
The
issue of which way Badshah Khan would tilt was settled by the horrible communal
situation in Ahmedabad. He was pained at Chief Minister Hitendra Desai’s
alleged communal bias during the riots. And he saw the Chief Minister a
political descendent of the Patel line. At this stage Badshah Khan had more or
less accepted Ram Manohar Lohia’s list of the Guilty Men of India’s Partition.
These “Guilty Men” were, in his book, not terribly averse to association with
the RSS as Gurumurthy makes quite clear.
Gurumurthy
quotes Patel’s speech in Lucknow in which he chastises his “powerful”
colleagues in the Congress who wished to “crush” the “patriotic RSS”. The
“powerful” Congressmen being referred to must be those led by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Did this galaxy include Maulana Azad, President of the Congress from 1939 to
46? I doubt it. His prestige has since taken such a beating by sheer neglect
that historian Ram Chandra Guha does not even mention him among Makers of
Modern India. He considers Hamid Dalwai more worthy of mention.
The
Maulana was “powerful” so long the real wielders of power in the Congress
allowed him to. Nehru, for instance. But once they had made up their minds that
they were full square behind the AICC resolution of June 14, 1947 endorsing
India’s partition, Maulana Azad was an obstacle. There could have been no more
weak and isolated leaders as Maulana Azad and Badshah Khan.
When
Patel suggested to Golwalkar that the RSS should join the Congress, the RSS supremo
was quick with his response. The two should work separately and “converge”.
When, pray, would they “converge”? When Hindu Rashtra has been achieved?
The
first Home Secretary of UP, Rajeshwar Dayal, has in his autobiography, A Life
of Our Times, this story about Golwalkar and Congress stalwart, Govind Ballabh
Pant, UP’s longest serving Chief Minister and Union Home Minister from 1955 to
61.
When
communal tension in UP was high, Dayal carried incontrovertible evidence to
Pant about Golwalkar’s plans to create a “communal holocaust in western UP”.
Pant was convinced of the plot but he would not permit them to arrest the RSS
chief. In fact Golwalkar was allowed to escape, having been duly tipped off.
“Came
January 30, 1948 when Gandhi, the Supreme Apostle of Peace, fell to a bullet
fired by an RSS fanatic.” Dayal concludes: “the tragic episode left me sick at
heart”.
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