• Capt. Praveen Davar

If the RSS had not committed the blunder of having a high profile nationwide celebration of completion of its 100 years, millions of Indians wouldn’t have known its true character and history. With access to several digital platforms, and now AI, the Gen Z knows how to uncover the untruth and discover the reality that cannot remain hidden for long, no matter how deep the propaganda aimed at misleading innocent people.

Many facts about the RSS have come to light in the recent past in relation to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948. The letters exchanged by its then sarsangchalak Guru Golwalkar with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about the active involvement of RSS (and the Hindu Mahasabha in the murder of the Father of the Nation). But, apart from a few historians and research scholars, it may not be known that soon after independence, a little over a month before Gandhiji was felled by Godse’s bullet, Indira Gandhi warned her father, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the danger posed by the growing strength of the RSS. The warning is given in a letter by the then 30 year old ‘Indu’, (as she was affectionately called by her doting father) to India’s first PM on December 5, 1947. This letter is one of the hundreds of letters exchanged between the illustrious father-daughter duo, before and after independence, and is part of a book Two ALONE, Two Together - Letters between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1940 - 1964 - edited by Sonia Gandhi (published by Hodder & Stoughton). As we observe the 41st anniversary of martyrdom of Indira Gandhi on October 31, it may be worth revisiting her views on the RSS which appear as relevant as they were 78 years earlier when they were first expressed by her.

After her marriage to Feroze Gandhi in 1942 (the newly married couple were incarcerated at Allahabad during the Quit India Movement) Indira Gandhi was staying with him in a small rented house in Lucknow. This is from where she wrote the above letter to her father on December 5, 1947. It begins: ‘Life here has nothing to offer the ... middle-class young men. It is not surprising that the superficial trappings of fascism attract them in their tens of thousands. The RSS are gaining strength rapidly. They have been holding very impressive rallies in Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow - except for a very minor details following the German model almost exactly.’ Indira Gandhi then describes details of an RSS rally in Allahabad, as conveyed to her by a Party worker: ‘The rally was held in Alfred Park. There were thousands of uniformed Party volunteers... people were seated in rows - very orderly. After that the Guruji (Golwalkar) and others spoke in pin- drop silence.’ Indira Gandhi wondered how this kind of rally was allowed to be held by the provincial government. She writes in the letter: ‘It is really surprising that this sort of rally is allowed when Section 144 (which prohibits assembly of persons with a view to maintain peace and order) is still operating in the province. Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant was the Prime Minister (as the Chief Ministers were then designated) of the province and, though an efficient administrator, did not however take complaints against communal activities seriously. He was also reported to have a soft corner for Guru Golwalkar, the RSS sarsangchalak. Probably with this in mind, the young Indira Gandhi wrote further: ‘Some of the ministers ignore the whole thing and others say that they have orders from Delhi not to interfere.’ However, it was the dangerous potential of growth of RSS that worried the nationalist in her: ‘But the growth of this organization is so amazingly like the Brown Shirts of Germany that if we are not quick on our toes it will grow beyond our control ...The recent history of Germany is too close for us to be able to forget it for an instant. Are we inviting the same fate to our country?’ Though Indira Gandhi is optimistic and believed that the country would be able to pull through all such dangers, she nevertheless cautions her father: ‘So did the German social- democrats and others persist in believing that somehow at some stage, the Brown Shirts would be suppressed or that the movement would die a natural death. And that was the undoing of the German people. Let us not fall into the same trap.’

On that cold winter morning when the country’s future Prime Minister (who knew, not even the soothsayers) was penning these words to the then present one, both of them couldn’t have imagined that RSS would be banned exactly two months later, but not before they were accused of being part of the plot that led to the assassination of the Father of the Nation. The ban was lifted in July 1949 but not before the RSS sarsangchalak gave it in writing that the Sangh will not participate in political activities. However true to its character, the assurance given to Home Minister Sardar Patel was not kept and the RSS entered politics through the backdoor by founding a new political party, the Bhartiya Jan Sangh, as its frontal organisation with leaders drawn from the Hindu Mahasabha.

The Jan Sangh couldn’t win the confidence of the people throughout the Nehru years. It performed poorly in all the three Lok Sabha elections during the premiership of Pt Jawaharlal Nehru while the Congress won respectively 364, 371 and 361 seats in 1952, 1957 and 1962 general elections. The first general election after which Indira Gandhi became the PM was in 1967 when the Congress won only 283 seats. But this was because of poor economic situation Mrs. Gandhi had inherited due to the after effects of 1965 War and drought across many states in the country, its tally in 1971, after PM Indira Gandhi took radical steps like bank nationalisation and abolition of privy purses, rose to 352 seats. Elections to 16 states were held after the Bangladesh Liberation War, 1971 in which PM Indira Gandhi led India to its greatest-ever military victory. The Congress won with a massive majority in 14 of the sixteen States in which polls were held this and the Jan Sangh everywhere came a cropper. Following the JP Movement in 1974-75, a state of emergency was declared by the government and RSS was banned alongwith two more fundamentalist parties - the Jamaat-e-Islamia-e-Hind and Anand Marg.

Like her father, Indira Gandhi had a deep and abiding faith in secularism. As one of her biographers commented on her decision: ‘Secularism was to her a precious inheritance, central to all democratic functioning; to strengthen its roots she banned the parties she considered fundamentalist, extreme rightist or accepting violence as necessary for transforming society.’ This is one of the ironies of post independence history that RSS was banned and their leaders put in jail by the two steely leaders of India - the ‘iron man’ Sardar Patel in 1948 and the ‘iron lady’ Indira Gandhi 27 years later. Each time the mercy petitions of RSS sarsangchalaks for lifting the ban early and premature release from incarceration fell, initially, on deaf ears. But accepted finally with conditions which were never fulfilled by the saffron outfit. As the BJP is commemorating centenary of the RSS with great fanfare, the nation will do well to remember the warning given by India’s most daring Prime Minister soon after independence.

(The writer is a former Secretary AICC and Editor, The Secular Saviour)