Disowning Golwalkar's We

(Written in 2006, published as chapter 6 of the book Return of the Swastika, Voice of India, Delhi 2007, by
Dr. Koenraad Elst)

1. Golwalkar's centenary
The year of our Lord 2006 is Golwalkar year. To celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of "Guruji" Madhav
Sadashiv Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak ("chief guide of the association") of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh ("National Volunteer Association"), his organization and its network of affiliates have arranged for a great
many commemoration events. Or they insert a Golwalkar element into other events.
Thus, on 7-10 February 2006 in Jaipur, RSS activist Yashwant Pathak convened an international conference of
elders of all ancient (non-Abrahamic) traditions. The conference was devoted to the impeccable theme of
"Spirituality beyond Religion", and in itself, this was a perfectly respectable initiative. I have met Mr. Pathak
several times and I can't think of anything bad to say about him. For the priests and medicine men of isolated
pockets of resistance against christianization or islamization somewhere in Africa or America, it must be quite a
boost of faith in the future to see this kind of international gathering under the auspices of the most successful
resister, Hindu Dharma. Precisely because this was such a good initiative, it is a great pity that the conference
brochures prominently featured Golwalkar's photograph.
First of all, Golwalkar had little to do with the non-Abrahamic religions outside India. To my knowledge (but I
haven't read his newly published complete works yet), he never wrote about them, never drew them into his
vision of interreligious relations, never took an initiative to build bridges with them. His focus was purely on
India and Hinduism; nothing wrong with that, but it's not the right rsum for earning a place as the
figurehead of an interreligious conference. In case the idea was to give a face to the role of Hinduism as host to
and champion of the world's religions, it would have been better to draw attention to one of the many sages from
Hindu history, and specifically to one who was actually involved in interreligious relations. Maybe Agastya, who
took the Vedic tradition to an as yet non-Vedic South India? Or Vivekananda, who did something similar in
1893 when he spoke at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago? Or Ram Swarup (1920-1998), who went
out of his way to re-evaluate so-called Pagan religions and break the spell of Christian and Islamic superiority
claims? If the RSS is serious about its boast of being a selfless servant to Hindu society, it was wrong to push
itself and its own leader into focus rather than Hindu Dharma and its representatives.
Secondly, the participants to this conference had not asked to get associated with this historical character they
had never heard of. In particular, they didn't know that Golwalkar, for reasons to be discussed below, nowadays
mostly figures in the media as exhibit number one for the allegation that Hindu nationalism is a "fascist"
movement. So either the Elders' event would fail to draw attention, in which case no harm would be done but not
much progress made either; or it would attract media coverage and condemn the participants to being depicted
henceforth as collaborators of a neo-fascist international. Upon returning home, they would be asked by their
friends: "Hey, what has gotten into you? I just read on the internet that the conference you went to was in fact a
fascist conference." It's a bad host who treats his unsuspecting guests to such an outcome.
Most non-Sangh Hindu activists avoid any reference to Golwalkar because he has become an embarrassment
(and because he is unnecessary in motivating them to serving Hindu society). It could be argued, though, that
this shunning of Golwalkar is unfair to him. As we shall see, he is denounced as a fascist on the basis of two
passages in a single booklet written at the start of his career. By such criteria, most famous people who are
quoted as authorities on moral and political matters could be crucified on a handful of less felicitous lines in their
complete works. However, this unfair treatment happens to be prevalent and is partly the result of the poor
defence Golwalkar's followers have given him in the opinion-making domain. Public figures and social
movements have to live in the real world and take the sheer facts of the power equation in the public sphere into
account. As long as Golwalkar has not been disentangled from this identification with the worst handful of lines
in his repertoire, it is most unwise and self-destructive to be seen glorifying him.
2. An embarrassing booklet
The main reason for Golwalkar's tainted reputation is found in two paragraphs in a booklet he wrote two years
before becoming the RSS leader. He was 32 when he put the finishing touch to We, Our Nationhood Defined, in
the first week of November 1938. If that seems old enough for him to have made up his mind and write out a
matured formulation of his nationalist vision, he had until then worked as a biologist and a renunciate so that the
book was actually his first venture into political thought.
It sounded like good news when the papers announced that the RSS has officially rejected Golwalkar's book We
as "neither representing the views of the grown Guruji nor of the RSS" (thus quoted in "RSS officially disowns
Golwalkar's book", Times of India, 9 March 2006). Yes, immature it certainly was, being obviously derivative
and lapsing into intemperate language here and there, at least in its original 1939 edition. Personally, I too
wouldn't want to be identified forever with what I wrote at that age. The second edition was somewhat cleansed
of these excesses of language and went through three printings, the last one published in 1947.
But Golwalkar's individual immaturity was representative of the immaturity so typical of the colonial condition.
Original thinkers were few and far between in 1930s India, which looked up to the West and copied its models,
often in a half-digested version. Jawaharlal Nehru was a parrot of Cambridge socialism, while Subhash Bose
dreamed of a synthesis of communism and fascism. Even the independent-minded Hindu nationalist Sri
Aurobindo Ghose was more indebted to Western ideas than he would admit, vide e.g. his evolutionistic
reformulation of yogic ideals. So, it is no surprise that in thinking through Hindu nationhood, Golwalkar sought
inspiration from the modern "democratic states" (1939:16, 1947:21) of the West without adding much personal
input nor any input from his native Hindu tradition.
By and large, there is nothing shameful about Golwalkar's first grappling with political thought. It was actually
more sophisticated than what is usually taken to be the RSS party-line. Thus, while the RSS is accused of
following the "leader principle" (drawn more from the ancient Hindu veneration for the guru than from the
contemporaneous fascist model), the young Golwalkar expressed no criticism of the principle of democracy,
though he could easily have gotten away with that. Questioning or plainly rejecting democracy in favour of the
seemingly more successful fascist and Bolshevik models was very voguish in the 1930s. By contrast, Golwalkar
took the democratic model for granted. The choice of political system was simply not his concern as long as the
polity was an expression of the Hindu nation. But how to define and cultivate Hindu nationhood? That was the
topic of the book, and it led the author to consider the experience of established nation-states in the West.
3. Disturbing quotes
For decades and until recently, the single most-quoted Hindutva statement was the following one from
Golwalkar's We: "The non-Hindu peoples in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language (*)
they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness towards this land and its age-long
traditions but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead - in one word, must cease to
be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving
no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen's rights." (1939:47-48, 1947:55-56)
The Marxists who usually do the quoting, pretend (and given their permanent state of hysteria when dealing with
Hindu nationalism, possibly also believe) that this is a warrant for genocide, a "holocaust of the minorities". Yet
the text is quite explicit: far from wanting to kill or expel Muslims and Christians, Golwalkar even agrees to let
them "stay in the country" and live safely in his Hindu Rashtra, only without citizen's rights. I don't find that
acceptable, and I assume the RSS has now sent the message that it rejects this option too, but it is at any rate
totally different from genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Instead, what he proposed for the non-Hindus is exactly the condition of "dhimmitude" that Islamic states in
peacetime have always imposed on the non-Muslims. Even today, Saudi Arabia goes considerably farther in
practising discrimination against the minorities than Golwalkar did in preaching it, e.g. it doesn't allow any form
of non-Muslim worship on its territory whereas Guruji did not propose to forbid Christian and Islamic cultic
practice. Dhimmitude, an imposed third-class status for minorities, is bad enough, but those who denounce it in
Golwalkar's model would have more credibility if they also denounced it in the Islamic states, where it is not
somebody's private little idea on the yellowed pages of a juvenile exercise in political thought, but actual practice.
In the last decade, another quote from We has become the most popular Hindutva reference, being presented as
somehow encapsulating the essence and the genesis history of the Sangh Parivar: "German race pride has now
become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by
her purging the country of the semitic Races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.
Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the
root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."
(1939:35, 1947:43) Though the RSS spokesmen don't specify this, it is obviously this paragraph that prompted
them to dissociate themselves from Golwalkat's We.
4. The meaning of the "race pride" quote
What does the controversial "race pride" quote mean? Let us first of all look at what is not here. These days,
when the word "Nazi" is uttered (in this case not by Golwalkar but by his detractors), reason is switched off and
hysteria takes over, so that people think they have seen or heard things which aren't there in reality.
Conspicuous by its absence in Golwalkar's allegedly pro-Nazi statement, is the term Nazi or the name Adolf
Hitler. Before the outbreak of World War 2 in September 1939, it was perfectly acceptable in India, both among
Hindus and Muslims, to praise Hitler and National-Socialism. Let us not forget that in the preceding years even
the British leaders Lloyd George and Winston Churchill had spoken favourably of Hitler and his magic formula
for reviving Germany after the humiliation of Versailles, something which Golwalkar refrained from doing, if
only narrowly. And that even the later leftist icons Salvador Allende and Fidel Castro were youthful admirers of
the Fhrer and of his Italian colleague Benito Mussolini. As late as Christmas Eve of 1940, Mahatma Gandhi
wrote a letter to Hitler assuring the latter that he (Hitler) certainly wasn't as bad as his enemies painted him.
But Golwalkar did not want to draw attention to the existing regime in Germany as some kind of model to be
emulated. On the contrary, elsewhere in the same book, he contrasts the militaristic barbarity displayed by the
contemporaneous Germans with the Hindu "spiritual giants" who "stalk the world in serene majesty" and serve
as the homegrown role models for modern India (1939:32, 1947:39-40). He concludes the booklet with the un-
Nazi vision of "one glorious splendrous Hindu Nation benignly shedding peace and plenty over the world"
(1939:67, 1947:76). He also supports the Czech position against Germany on the disputed Sudetenland and
deplores the Czechs' failure to assimilate the Sudeten Germans (1939:38, 49; 1947:46, 57), clearly favouring the
typical homogenization policy of nation-states pioneered by the French Revolutionaries in non-French parts of
France. He holds the Czechs' failure to assimilate their minorities up as a warning to the Hindus. What he
focuses on is the incompatibility of two nations forced to co-exist within one state, any two nations, and that is
the "lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by".
Many examples of ethnic conflict within multi-ethnic states could be given, but the example then in the eye of
the world was Germany, where the Nuremberg laws of 1935 had defined the Jews as a separate nation. German-
Jewish intermarriage got prohibited, a move actually welcomed by the orthodox in the Jewish community, who
frowned upon the ongoing cultural and biological assimilation of the Jews into German society. The
participation of Jews in a number of prestigious professions was either ended or reduced to their percentage of
the total population (a leftist move otherwise applauded as "affirmative action" in favour of an
"underrepresented" group, i.c. the Gentile Germans), and Jewish emigration was encouraged and facilitated.
But surely this meant that Golwalkar supported the German hatred for "the Semitic races, the Jews"? Not at all.
In his survey of nations whose experience and nationalism are to "serve as a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to
profit by", the very first one is the Jewish nation (1939:19, 30; 1947:25, 37). This was and is standard fare in
Hindutva writings, starting with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's trail-blazing book Hindutva (1923), which speaks
out in favour of the Zionist project. Hindu nationalists have always looked up to the mettle of the Jews, who
managed to maintain their identity for two thousand years under adverse circumstances, and who even managed
to revive Hebrew as their mother tongue and national first language, where Hindus aren't even able to promote
Sanskrit to the status of national link language or pan-Indian second language. Hindu nationalist parties have
always advocated diplomatic recognition of Israel when Congress (until 1992) and the Communist parties
opposed it.
This, incidentally, explains the sudden popularity of this Golwalkar quote in anti-Hindutva writings. The main
exploiters of this quote, the Indian Marxists, have seen their intellectual power centre expand from India to North
America. In the US media and academe, they have cornered the same power position that they have enjoyed in
India for decades, and they largely control the information flow from India to the American public including the
professional India-watchers in academe and the government. From there, they exercise a lot of influence on
public political discourse back in India. However, to secure their position in the US, they have to deal with the
powerful Jewish influence there.
The Jews are not stupid and they know that in the Indian ideological spectrum, it has always been the Hindu
nationalists who supported the Zionist project while the leftists opposed it. Just as it was always Hindus who let
Jews live in peace in their own country, while Hinduism's Christian, Muslim and Communist enemies have a
rather darker track record in this regard. Indeed, some US Zionist groups co-operate with Hindu nationalists,
teaching them the ways of modern communication and lobbying. So, in order to gain the upper hand over the
Hindus in winning over Jewish opinion, the Marxists have to divert attention from today's Middle East politics to
other issues in order to paint their opponents as somehow even more anti-Jewish than themselves, or at least
tainted by association with an even more anti-Jewish movement, viz. National-Socialism. Hence their
hyperfocus on this seemingly pro-Nazi quote of Golwalkar's.
Very often, the Marxists even add their own explicitation to this quote: "Here, Golwalkar is applauding the
genocide of six million Jews." That, of course, is a lie. Those who put forth this claim are either ignorant of
history or shamelessly speculate on their readers' ignorance. The "purge" to which Golwalkar referred, was the
progressive exclusion of the Jews from public life and the policy of promoting their emigration. The Holocaust
only took place in 1941-44 under specific and largely unforeseen war circumstances. In 1938 and until 1940,
Nazi policy was still one of Jewish emigration. That's not so nice either, but given their history, the Jews know
better than most people that migration is a preferable alternative to persecution and death. In 1938, Hitler's
mortal victims were still counted in hundreds, Stalin's in millions (which didn't prevent Jawaharlal Nehru from
visiting the Soviet Union, guzzling down all the propaganda fed to him on a guided tour, and praising it for the
rest of his days). In that light, if anything is shocking in Golwalkar's book, it is his innocent and highly
uninformed inclusion of the Soviet Union in his list of examples of nation-building.
Conspicuous by its absence is most of all the entire Nazi policy vis--vis the Jews as a possible model for the
Hindu treatment of the Muslims. Not just extermination but even expulsion doesn't figure in Golwalkar's plans.
On the contrary, whereas Hitler first of all wanted to dissimilate the largely assimilated Jewish minority,
Golwalkar favoured the assimilation of the Indian Muslims into the "Hindu nation" from which their ancestors
had been estranged by conversion.
5. Withdrawing the book
As we have shown, the alleged Nazi sympathies revealed by the book's most controversial quote are a matter of
eager over-interpretation. Their true proportions are in fact quite limited. All the same, it remained an unwise
thing to write or say. In that sense, it is good news that the RSS has at last dared to forswear its ingrained
childlike veneration for its Guruji and to state that he had been wrong. Unfortunately, even this move is still
tainted by the RSS culture of not facing difficult ideological questions head-on.
According to the Times of India's Akshaya Mukul (9 March 2006), "We is considered the basic charter of
Sangh". Whether this is yet another Marxist lie or just an instance of the stark ignorance of the present
generations of journalists, I don't know, but the claim is at any rate untrue. For becoming the founding text of the
Sangh, We appeared in print 14 years too late, as the RSS was founded in 1925. (Likewise, contrary to recent
propaganda, B.S. Moonje's study tour of European military organisations and his favourable impression of the
Italian paramilitary youth squads came too late to shape the RSS organization, which had fixed the rules for its
uniforms, training schemes etc. in the preceding years.) And more importantly for us today, the book hasn't
played any such role since at least 1948, when the remaining stock of its fourth print was confiscated during the
crackdown on all Hindutva forces after the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. The book was never reprinted after that,
so that over 99% of all Sangh activists now alive have never even seen a copy.
So, in practice, the RSS has already disowned the book more than fifty years ago. Doing so now is thus not "a
major ideological shift", as the Times of India claims. The only shift is from an implicit disowning to an explicit
disowning, which is a historic event only because it breaks the long-standing RSS taboo on criticizing the
leadership. But the ideological decision of rejecting We has been taken long ago. Indeed, it was Golwalkar
himself who vetoed any further reprints of We. The late K.R. Malkani and other RSS elders told me that Guruji
had mused about the book's "immaturity".
However, none of those veterans ever told me that Golwalkar had "revealed that the book carried not his own
views but was an abridged version of [Hindutva author V.D. Savarkar's brother] G.D. Savarkar's Rashtra
Mimansa", as is now reportedly claimed by pro-RSS Delhi University lecturer Rakesh Sinha, author of Shri
Guruji and Indian Muslims (Suruchi Prakashan, Delhi 2006). It may be true that Golwalkar said this, but what
exactly would it mean? Some general ideas of Hindu nationalism were in the air, especially among
Maharashtrian Brahmins like the Savarkar and Golwalkar families, and you find these in both books. Even so,
whatever Golwalkar took from G.D. Savarkar into his booklet, "this maiden attempt of mine" (1939:3), he had
made his own. He merely thanked Savarkar whose book "has been one of my chief sources of inspiration and
help", and referred the reader to that book for "a more exhaustive study of the subject" (1939:4). Clearly the
contents of the two books were not identical. It is not like as if Golwalkar wasn't responsible for those ideas he
happened to share with or even borrow from Savarkar.
It is painful to note the typical RSS clumsiness in this futile exercise in keeping Golwalkar out of the firing line.
While trying to relieve him from responsibility for his own booklet, they don't hesitate to accuse him of
plagiarism. After all, in the book itself, neither he nor M.S. Aney in his foreword ever acknowledged that "the
book carried not his own views". Of course the book expressed Golwalkar's own convictions. All writers owe a
part of their ideas to the influence of others, but they digest those influences and distil from them the convictions
that become their own. No matter where Golwalkar got his ideas, he took responsibility for them by writing them
down and publishing them under his own name.
The attempt to distance Golwalkar from the contents of We by attributing the latter to another Hindutva writer
are revelatory for the RSS state of mind regarding this embarrassing heritage. They want to salvage Guruji as an
icon without attaching any implications to his writings. Rather than confronting the problem posed, the RSS
leadership has always preferred to ignore it. For over fifty years, they did this by imposing on themselves and
esp. on their younger rank and file an ignorance of the book's very existence. Last year, they oversaw the
publication of Golwalkar's complete works in twelve volumes (including his private letters, transcripts of
conversations etc.), but excluded from this collection the text of We, his single most cited work Now they are
formally disowning the book without taking a second look at its contents.
That is just not the right way to deal with a problematic heritage. The RSS leaders' reaction betrays a helpless
fear in front of the Marxist media campaign hyperfocusing on their icon's embarrassing juvenile statements.
They seem not to trust their own ability to come to terms with the exact significance of those statements nor with
the mundane fact of their hero's fallibility.
Ironically, the RSS leadership's inability to come to a balanced evaluation of Golwalkar's thought is largely the
result of Golwalkar's own impact on his movement. The RSS originated in the context of the communal tension
resulting from Mahatma Gandhi's tragicomical involvement in the pan-Islamist Khilafat movement of 1920-22,
culminating in the anti-Hindu pogrom known as the Moplah rebellion. Its uniform was originally that of the
Indian National Congress volunteers acting as security guards in Congress conferences. Its secretive style of
functioning, with avoidance of written communication and emphasis on personal meetings, was taken from the
armed freedom fighters of Bengal, a movement in which founder Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar had briefly
participated. Those aspects of RSS life were purely pragmatic and provisional, but Golwalkar institutionalized
them more firmly.
In particular, he ideologized the purely circumstantial fact of the RSS's lack of an intellectual dimension. He
distrusted books and taunted his followers if they were caught reading. He would rhetorically ask if anyone ever
needed a book to love his mother,-- or his Motherland. So now, he is reaping what he sowed: his successors are
unable to make sense of his own first book. Intimidated by the secularists' domination of the media and the
intellosphere, they shy away from a debate on his legacy, leaving the moulding of public opinion about him and
his book entirely to their enemies.
To the current RSS leadership, I would suggest that this approach is also flawed for a reason that won't matter to
outsiders but ought to be painful to themselves as heirs to Guruji's legacy. The RSS is actually trying to save or
restore its own reputation at Golwalkar's expense. By organizing a debate on We, it could have effected a change
in public opinion and ultimately cleared Golwalkar's name from the charge of being some kind of Nazi. There is
nothing to hide there or to turn one's eyes away from: while We was immature, it was by far not as incriminating
as the Marxists want us to believe. And to the extent that it was incriminating, it would only be healthy to face
and analyze this faux pas in Guruji's career.
A fresh wind of glasnost (openness) could have worked wonders in restoring a sense of proportion and fairness
in the evaluation of Golwalkar and of Hindutva in general. Instead, the RSS has chosen to leave the current
demonizing beliefs about We intact, to "defend" Golwalkar only by wrongly shifting the booklet's authorship to
G.D. Savarkar, and to wash its own hands off the whole matter by pushing the booklet out of sight even in the
publication of Guruji's "complete" works. That way, only its own rank and file will remain ignorant of it, and
helpless when attacked about it, while its enemies have other channels of information.
6. The Indian approach to World War 2
In coming to terms with its past, the RSS could learn a few things from the former Communist Party of the
German "Democratic" Republic, now functioning as one of the parties within the German Federal Republic's
multi-party democracy. A few years ago, these post-Communists abandoned their self-righteousness and called a
conference to discuss their organization's and their ideology's historical errors. I suggest that the RSS should
likewise organize a public debate of Golwalkar's merits and failings, particularly the latter. Its scholars (but
where are they?) should replace the quotes from We in their book and world context from which the quoters
always carefully detach them.
In this case, it is not even that difficult. First of all, the RSS need not follow its enemies in acting as if the
booklet or indeed its two most popular quotes somehow encapsulate the essence of the RSS. If that had been the
case, many similar statements would have been made by post-1948 Sangh leaders, and the Marxists wouldn't
have needed to dig up a yellowed text from 1938 to "prove" their Nazi-RSS allegation. The quotes are so popular
and by now worn out precisely because they are not representative for RSS thought.
In my interviews and conversations with hundreds of Sangh leaders and activists, including in confidential
settings where they let their guard down, I have never ever heard anyone cite Golwalkar's "race pride" quote nor
make any statement to the same effect. If it were representative, then certainly it shouldn't be difficult to find
more recent statements to the same effect. To be sure, attempts have been made to find or rather to fabricate such
more recent RSS statements, vide the false presentation of a Gujarat textbook issued under Congress rule as a
BJP textbook and then claiming, equally falsely, that it discussed Nazism without mentioning the Holocaust.
Such attempts do show in passing how the Marxists realize that their single piece of evidence for "Hindu
fascism", even if it had been strong in itself, is a bit dated and in need of being supplemented with more recent
expressions of the same ideological tendency.
As the Times of India reports (9 March 2006): "Former RSS spokesperson M.G. Vaidya while approving the
removal of We from the Sangh's pantheon of texts, says the book that is central to 'us is Golwalkar's Bunch of
Thoughts since it consists of his views after he became sarsanghchalak on June 21, 1940'. Speaking from his
village in Wardha, Vaidya told Times of India: 'We is not the RSS Bible as everyone would like to believe. If it
was the Bible then every Sangh worker would have read it and it could have been found in every house. But it is
not the case.'" Well said, but this implies that there is no good reason for the hypersensitive and uptight way the
RSS is dealing with this apparently only minor piece of heritage.
Secondly, India is one place where a level-headed discussion of the history of the 1930s and 1940s is still
possible. In the West, the typical textbook and media treatment of World War 2 history has gradually
degenerated into unhistorical morality tales pitting pure black against pure white. Hitler has been placed outside
human history and turned into a demon incarnating unalloyed evil, eventhough racialist thought and the rejection
of democracy were widespread tendencies in those days. Anyone remotely associated with his camp is likewise
blackened in every aspect of his life activities, even those long before or after the Nazi period; while Stalin is
still whitewashed by virtue merely of being an enemy (as least after 22 June 1941) of that demon. In India, by
contrast, it remains the done thing to distinguish between the numerous different angles from which people got
involved in this worldwide conflict, and to reserve a separate evaluation for colonial underlings trying to define
their own position and pursue their own goals in the middle of forces they couldn't control nor even understand.
Thus, in the West, it is suicidal for any reputation-conscious public figure to celebrate someone who collaborated
with Nazi Germany in what he considered the service of his own nation's best interests. Finland, the Baltic states,
Rumania and other formerly Communist countries are currently under pressure to remove statues and terminate
other forms of official recognition for historic national leaders in that position, who had been squeezed into the
tragic dilemma of a choice between Hitler and Stalin. By contrast, India officially and with good conscience
celebrates the memory of Netaji (i.e. Fhrer) Subhash Chandra Bose, the socialist freedom fighter who opted,
unpressured, for military collaboration with the Axis powers. The Communist Party (Marxist) in West Bengal
has named an airport after Netaji and has a long-standing political alliance with his party, the Forward Bloc.
Along with other leftist parties, they proposed the octogenarian Mrs. Lakshmi Sehgal, the commander of Bose's
women's battalion, as their candidate for India's presidency in 2002. India's entire political spectrum is united in
celebrating Netaji as a sterling freedom fighter.
In the West, this would now simply be unthinkable. Anyone with even the remotest and most indirect connection
with the losing side of WW2 is deemed totally and irrevocably out of bounds. Like hysterics, Western academics
and pressmen see (or force each other to pretend to see) Nazism as a contagious disease that can infect people
via-via and spring full-blown from anyone who ever had even the faintest contact with any carrier of the
contagion. In India, by contrast, it remains the normal thing to exercise the human power of discrimination so as
to distinguish between Netaji's laudable patriotism and the reprehensible conduct of his tactical allies in distant
countries. In those circumstances it shouldn't be too difficult nor too risky to subject Golwalkar's alleged
sympathy for Nazi Germany to public scrutiny. Especially since it can be shown that he was definitely not
presenting Nazi Germany as an example for Hindus to follow.
7. The Indian approach to the minorities
As for the other contentious quote, about allowing the minorities "not even citizen's rights", it too deserves to be
dedramatized and replaced in its context. Those with an obsessive Nazi-centric mind may be told to consider that
context more closely and see for themselves how very respectable the quote thereby becomes: Golwalkar warned
against the persistence of unassimilated and disloyal minorities with reference to Czechoslovakia's betrayal by its
German minority, resulting in the annexation of Sudetenland by Nazi Germany.
More importantly, here too the actual history of the RSS and its affiliated organizations offsets the suspicions
attracted by young Golwalkar's viewpoint. While V.D. Savarkar may have equated "Hinduness" (Hindutva) with
Indian nationality and vice-versa, excluding the non-Hindus, and while Golwalkar initially did advocate the
exclusion of the "foreign" religionists (or at least those among them who refused to acknowledge India's Hindu
character) from full citizenship, the fact is that this understanding of Hindutva was definitely disowned gradually
by the Jana Sangh (1952-77) and rejected by the BJP (1980-) in favour of "genuine secularism". Most Hindu
activists in India and abroad are perfectly satisfied with a secular state, i.e. one in which laws apply equally to all
regardless of religion, e.g. where all abide by a common civil code (a defining trait of all secular states, but not
of Nehruvian India) and where Hindu temples are as inviolate and legally free from government interference as
mosques and churches are.
In these circumstances, it shouldn't be too difficult for the RSS to openly entertain the possibility that
Golwalkar's insistence on homogeneity and the exclusion of the minorities from citizenship was a mistaken and
un-Hindu policy. It should be understood as a loan from European political thought centred around the nation-
state as conceived during the French Revolution. Indeed, in We, Golwalkar himself explicitly cited the modern
"democratic states" of the West as his source of inspiration. Of course there is nothing wrong with Hindus
adopting useful innovations from the West, but notions like the nation-state need to be problematized, not just in
terms of Marxist or globalist anti-nationalism but also from the viewpoint of Hindu tradition. Whatever its flaws,
Hindu society has always managed diversity rather well, and this good habit should be reformulated in modern
terms as an alternative to the uniformistic understanding of the nation-state which young Golwalkar seemed to
have swallowed hook, line and sinker.
To correct his own exaggerated reliance on this Western import, he could have reread his own remark made on
another page of the very book he was writing then, We (1939:60, 1947:69): "Why did not the Hindu think for
himself? Why did he allow himself to be misled by scheming Englishmen into absurdities and political blunders?
The reason is simple and lies in the common human weakness of associating good qualities and wisdom with
wealth and power." See, not all of his juvenile observations were misguided.
8. Conclusion
The image of M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73) has posthumously been narrowed down to just two infelicitous and
embarrassing quotations from his first book, one that he himself had repudiated early in his career as RSS leader.
If read judiciously and within their context, they are by far not as incriminating as various anti-Hindu polemicists
would like to have us believe. In particular, contrary to the common allegation, they do not prove that Golwalkar
was a Nazi sympathizer, nor that he had mass murder in mind as the solution for the problems Hindu society
experienced with its Muslim and Christian minorities.
So, clearly the RSS could defuse the negative-publicity bomb which its enemies claim to have dug up from We,
if only it had the intellectual wherewithal to properly analyze the text and then, if this proves to be the right
course, to clearly disown specifically what must be disowned. But instead it is satisfied to bury the book,
refusing to discuss its contents or even to make it available to readers of Golwalkar's "complete works". Like in
decades past, it still prefers to look the other way, intimidated by the total control of the mediatic and intellectual
domain by India's anti-Hindu coalition of Islamic, Christian and Marxist polemicists. As so often, it is playing by
the rules its enemies have imposed rather than changing the power equation through a sincere intellectual effort.
It is a welcome development that Golwalkar's followers finally acknowledge that their Guruji has committed
mistakes too. But whatever his faults, shouldn't they resolve that he deserved better than to be censored?
Wouldn't they render a better service to his memory as well as to the Hindu cause by subjecting his book to a
close and frank reading rather than to the silent treatment?