MARX TWAIN
A Layman’s Guide to Modi’s Finishing School
Like any far-right outfit, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) of India is like an empty shop with imaginary and invisible merchandise that only the shopkeeper can see. The merchandise in here was always virtual and intangible even when there was no internet. For the merchandise on sale here is either a particular set of Gods (Hindu in this case) who are invisible and complex—and to fathom them, you’ll have to swallow a few fat high-fantasy books which are honestly quite boring—or it is Big Money in the elusive and chancy future, which is either God-given or plundered unless you are willing to earn reasonable and respectable amounts the hardworking way. This shop, however, doesn’t sell the latter. But the third thing it sells is a slippery treadmill of illusory nationalism from which you can fall on your silly butt if you hurtle like a crazed hyper-nationalist to chase a shape-shifting mirage called a country. Ask the marine who last boarded the very last helicopter from the rooftop of the American embassy in Kabul. In a panic, the hyper-patriot may have well left his pants there, the same pants that had seemed starched with patriotic zeal when he first landed in Kabul not realizing that the only beneficiaries of all this, besides political beneficiaries, will be a bunch of crony Moneybags who will sign commercial contracts in that torn geography. The point is that the stuff sold in the RSS shop is so vaporous that no one can be blamed for not grasping the merchandise in practical terms.
Because baby, it really isn’t real.
So whenever you feel you are largely ignorant about the right-wing, don’t feel guilty. Why be guilty about being ignorant about the ignorant? Or about vaporware? However—yes, however—the consequences, as we’ve discovered, can be heavy to bear. In hindsight, it is blinding commonsense that people who fancy themselves to be citizens of modern democracies, must not vote for a nationalist autocrat. Consider this. You wouldn’t have got fooled when that peckerhead you voted for touched his forehead to the steps of the Indian parliament if you had known that his political ancestor, Godse, had touched Gandhi’s feet before killing him. But it is so bloody easy for a layman to get fooled by the counterfeit wares of that shit-shop. Yet, sadly, it is both a rule of life and of the English language that a layman will soon get laid. Ask the voters who kicked themselves for voting Trump, Boris, Modi, or that military lemon Bolsonaro. Some still won’t admit they got screwed in their sleep while dreaming of the tri-utopia of money, god, and nationalism. And drunken dreaming is the only way to somehow conjure that inaccessible merchandise. It is when you finally wake up that you realize someone had spiked your divine cow milk in that RSS shop, and that’s how you’d ended up voting for your own rape. It hits you hard. You curse yourself. The signs were always there but you were like Alice in Wonderland at the time. In fact, the signs were there even before you set eyes on that schlocky shop. The signs were splayed all over this thing called history which records the deeds of all shit-shops and their keepers.
So, here is the history of this shit, my dear, and the players in it, the shits of history.
Among the most vulnerable of the lot who are easily ensnared by right-wing charlatans, are faujis, soldiers. They are a relatively tangible representation of one category in that shop—Nationalism. For Religion you have idols, for Nationalism you have soldiers, but for Money you have empty promises from bumpkins who are goose eggs in Economics, and so they use the other two pieces of substitute merchandise fully: idols and temples, soldiers, and army. Now they cannot make asses of nonliving idols and temples so they turn their attention to soldiers. The trouble with soldiers is that they follow their top commanders dutifully as they must but then their commanders are sometimes like General VK Singh, a former Chief of Army Staff of the Indian Army, who disputed his own date of birth in the Supreme Court on the eve of retirement when he smelled the possibility of an extension in office, despite having written three prior letters accepting the original date of birth in his service records. The Court bluntly pointed this out and was also forthright in ticking him off, “The government gave you an opportunity. It is not fair to criticize the Defence ministry. The matter was treated as closed. They (government) made you the Chief of the Army. They could have said, ‘we don’t need such a person.’” The government of the day was the secular Congress. And “such a person” was the Chief of Army Staff. The same person who was soon damn clear about the date, time, and place of birth of Lord Ram, and that qualified him to become a minister in Modi’s cabinet after retiring. It must have been comforting for Modi to see a former Chief of Army Staff cozily supporting the likes of BJP sympathizer and yoga-Godman Ramdev, and then when he was shamefully booked for inciting crowds, he endeared himself to the RSS bandwagon. On February 26, 2018, VK Singh took the office of the Chief of Army Staff into the underpants of history when he wore the RSS uniform in one of their meets, and sent a chill of realization down every secular Indian spine. That this man had been a closet Hindu fanatic for forty-two years of his military career and even rose to become the Chief of Army Staff. What may have struck much fewer people, though, was how carefully—and diabolically—he had concealed his reality, and how, for the sake of position, this worm had routinely saluted the Tricolor he never believed in for over forty years.
Yet with this, very quickly, some top commanders of the Indian Army realized that the quickest route to Modi’s heart was tongue-first through his ass via Nagpur. And lo and behold, India’s last remaining secular institution was openly polarized and the army lost sight of its real enemy. Its hidden enemy was not across the border anymore, not even in insurgency-ridden Kashmir or the Northeast. It was the BJP, the ruling political party, the political wing of the far-right RSS, Modi’s alma mater, his finishing school, the virus of Indian politics, with several like-minded variants across the world, like the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and so on. Each has a history as boring as death—but a history nevertheless, one which is therefore largely unknown. Because who in his right mind would ever want to know the history of a water buffalo that has simply been aging in a filthy pond since 1925 and wakes up once in a decade or so to make a nuisance of itself and then goes back to sleep?
But because the recently “fabled” RSS is India’s foremost and tattiest far-right organization and also the only one to have successfully planted the first wastrel and goon as head of state, people must know its history. Else you would be like the Indian National Congress, which in turn, is like a whole lot of liberal parties across the world who overlooked the filthy shoots of right-wing terror. In India’s case, that’s quite a shocker because the RSS inaugurated its obnoxious presence in post-independence India by killing the very man without whom Indian independence was inconceivable.
Mahatma Gandhi.
Does the Congress, after seven decades of independence, finally have a plan to return right-wing terror to the ancient lavatory of its birth, that hole in the ground called Nagpur? Or does it merely see the RSS or the BJP (for now they are brazenly one and the same) as just a political rival in the next elections? The Congress can only do the former if the people approve, and for that, the people would need to know the history of shit enough to want to flush it. A history that is quite short—although it started way back in 1925 because it mostly yawned through the period of its existence. And so the story of the RSS is best told through satire if it has to be worth a listen. On the other hand, come to think of it, it is a bloody funny story. The problem in the first place always was that people took these harlequins too seriously.
Just because a fart aspires to be gunfire, should you accord it that status?
Hold your nose, here we go:
Surprisingly there is actually something true about one of RSS’s claims.
And just one look at any RSS shakha unit will confirm it. RSS is actually as old as it fucking looks. It almost seems that they still wear the same knickers as hand-me-downs from 1925 when a man who went by the short name of Keshav Baliram Hedgewar founded it. Otherwise, he was a doctor, as good as doctors were in the India of 1925. One online refresher course of a week today may well surpass those exalted heights. Now don’t let Hedgewar’s doctor bit make you picture a peace-loving healer and saint. Remember, Sambit Patra is a doctor too, and when he speaks on Republic TV he shoots more missiles of spittle across the studio in a single day as the Jokesperson of the BJP than a cow peeing in Varanasi after a urinary tract infection. I hear even Arnab Goswami, the caterwaul of Indian television news, a spit-fire on steroids himself, avoids sitting right in front of Dr. Patra because the last time he did, the latter was felled by Arnab’s return fire and the BJP point of view went momentarily missing with an empty, sunken chair sullenly facing the studio cameras. The BJP point of view must never go missing on television in Modi’s India even if it sounds empty like it always does in Modi’s India. And Dr. Patra does a great job of representing emptiness while more than fully occupying the chair in Goswami’s newsroom. And he makes one reflect on the doctors who are supposed to be healers. Remember Maya Kodnani, Modi’s minister in Gujarat? The fairy godmother who was jailed for her humanitarian role in the Gujarat riots of 2002 when she sent more Muslims to their grave than the number of Hindus she had ever brought into the world as a gynecologist? The similarities between some doctors of 1925 and those of today confirm that medical education and benighted bigotry can be soulmates.
Back to 1925.
Well, Dr. Hedgewar traveled all the way to Kolkata not because like a football-crazed Bengali he wanted to watch Mohun Bagan playing East Bengal, or to attend a book fair of Russian literature, or to learn about Rabindranath Tagore or Rabindra Sangeet all over again, or to master the art of making rasgullas so slurpy and sickening-shweet that thereafter you pronounce every s as sh for the rest of your life. But how “shit” gets called “saffron,” is still not explained. Actually, Hedgewar went to Kolkata to learn terrorist techniques from Bengali secret societies. One still doesn’t know about their secrets though. He seems to have learned something so secret that it continues to remain a secret. And the fruits of his labor can be seen in his legacy when he returned to Nagpur, the place where General Bhagwat’s band now dry the knickers that cover their sun-dried tomatoes, those two tiny tots that must take the blame every time a frustrated India screams: “Why don’t they admit to it! Don’t they have balls!” Dear India, please calm down. They have balls, they do. It’s just that they are a pocket edition.
Now back in Nagpur, Hedgewar suddenly realized that revolution won’t get results. Another matter his definition of “results” also kept changing. You see, just watching a neighbor’s ass getting whipped has made many aspiring revolutionaries reconsider their methods. So Hedgewar put away his weapon of mass destruction—a two and a half feet long lathi made from a drought-affected orange tree in Nagpur—and picked up a book instead. No no no no no! Not like Nehru! He had absolutely no intention of becoming that horrible breed called “intellectuals.” No right-winger wants the shame that comes with it. Plus he was aware that all his strengths were waist-down only. Which is not to say he made no attempt to be sensitive to his environment. In fact, he even tried to check out freedom fighter Tilak’s Home Rule but then you know what happens when you see the neighbor’s . . . . So back to the book he picked up. It had a title so intriguing that to this day we don’t know what the fuck it means. HINDUTVA it was called. He read it and then went and met its author, a guy called Sarvarkar who was in jail in Ratnagiri, mafia don Dawood’s sunny place of birth. And Hedgewar fell in love. The result of that “encounter” was the RSS. Its objective, in his mind, was to strengthen Hindu society. Raises the question of why they are still at it. The obvious answer: they’ve still not been able to strengthen it. Remember that part of the invisible merchandise? All “revolutionary” organizations use it to disguise their minacious goals.
It seems, somewhere down the line, Hero Hedgewar concluded that the British were able to rule India only because the Hindus were taking each other’s brown asses instead of the imported pink ones. Why he excluded the Muslims from this color segregation of asses, I haven’t the foggiest idea. I suspect that this is why the Muslims continue to show their booty to Hedgewar’s disciples. See! It’s brown! they seem to be saying, now for over ninety years. Or maybe Hedgewar felt that, unlike the Hindus, the Muslims weren’t taking each other’s ass. Well, whatever the asinine logic, Hedgewar’s definition of “enemy” suddenly changed rather conveniently to exclude the fully armed might of the British. This is what the Indian Army should learn. They should simply start pretending that the enemy is most certainly not China or even Pakistan. They should tell themselves that their enemies are Muslim women and children and time permitting, the men also. Oh. Strikes me that this is exactly where they already seem to be headed. Ah, trust my army-kid upbringing to briefly overlook that.
It is because the army hasn’t allowed the RSS to fight Pakistan (but when did they stop them?) that it has been now forced to widen its list of enemies to include: Kashmiri women and children, other Muslim women and children, Christian priests, Dalits and backward castes, intellectuals, Hindus marrying Muslims, the Congress, beef eaters, and girls drinking beer. All because of the damn army. Shame! Go to Pakistan! Oh sorry, I went off-track. These slogans are getting to me too.
Back to Uncle Hedgewar.
His main contribution—I swear I’m not joking—was the RSS uniform, the much coveted and envied battle fatigues, the mere thought of which can potentially make a Pakistani commando giggle bang in the middle of a bayonet charge. He is indeed the brain behind the size WWW (extra wide) underwear, the black cap, the color of which is meant to camouflage the area of darkness it covers, a khaki shirt, which later became white because even Hedgewar would sometimes find it difficult to locate his “men,” camouflaged as they were in the potty grounds of Nagpur. And then he taught them—don’t ask me where the fuck he learned it himself—para-military techniques with an extremely lethal weapon. Yes, the lathi. But don’t mock the fellow because to that he added a sword and dagger, which his cadres put to good use now in every Ganpati festival to split open terrified coconuts and to slice samosas to insert in the samosa pav snack before eating it since it’s a denture friendly dish. Plus he added Hindu rituals to the whole jamboree because whether it is a religion or a brand, it can’t become a draw without rituals, symbols, and role models. Now rituals, which are usually used by soldiers before battle, were used on a daily basis in the case of RSS. You know why? Because the battle has still not happened. Meanwhile, the prayers for battle continue. In weekly sessions, Hedgewar would share tales about Shivaji, the Maratha king who was famous for playing peekaboo with the mighty Mughals in the name of guerilla warfare. Now naturally, after four weeks anyone would run out of tales about Shivaji, and so one must find something more to do before the audience of blighted bums falls asleep. So Hedgewar started sketching one lazy Nagpuri afternoon under an orange tree—the RSS’s idea of a Bodhi tree. Pausing only to slap Nagpuri mosquitoes that dared to suck out all his revolutionary blood even before the revolution had begun, the armchair warrior beamed and gave finishing touches to his handiwork. Presto! He had created a martial flag for the RSS, their saffron flag. That it took him so long to simply cut off a triangle from the rectangular single-color fabric to create a pentagonal, double pennant shape, should tell you what a deep thinker he was. If you are in the mood to blink at the most elaborately designed flag in the world, do Google “BHAGWA DHWAJ,” the name of this flag. It was called “Bhagwa” not because, like the RSS, it was bhaagoing or running in fright from the British unlike the Tricolor which was confronting them and which it desperately wanted to substitute (hope is sometimes like weed, my dear) but for its saffron color. Now, out of the blue, it turned into a symbol for confronting Muslims! I have no fucking clue how that happened. Please ask some Muslim who was alive in 1925. No historian had even a drunken interest in the RSS then. Otherwise, you can ask Uncle Modi who will be happy to spin a yarn for you on this. This is the closest he has come to Gandhi. Gandhi used to spin thread on the Charkha. Modi spins yarns in the air even without a Charkha. But be warned, in his perpetual state of jetlag, Modi is capable of relocating the whole episode to Patna in the state of Bihar much to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s consternation.
So satisfied was Hedgewar with his work of art that he rewarded himself by sunning in the Nagpuri sun for two years. After that, he had a brainwave. He organized a training camp for "officers” and created this new breed called “pracharaks,” and I’ll be damned if you don’t know what the shit that means! Modi was a pracharak, remember? It is the official title for doing nothing. But these moving objects, these things called Pracharaks, are not to be confused with your happily married officers, whose performance has been as severely impeded by marital bliss as is widely alleged for the cricketer Virat Kohli. As the old right-wing saying goes: Behind every failed man, is a damn woman. But these buggers, these Pracharak thingies were told to become sadhus first, renounce family and even professional life, as though there was a threat of having any, and dedicate themselves to the cause, which I swear is still WIP. Thereafter he developed a network of shakhas (YouTube can show you this dirt track) because where else can you park so many unemployed blokes? But now he had to keep his Pracharaks busy. So guess what he asked them to do? He asked them to make more shakhas. That’s what they are still doing.
Guess which was the most keenly developed and closely monitored shakha?
A guy called PB (not to be confused with the lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan) Dani was asked to establish this shakha in Banaras Hindu University in the state of Uttar Pradesh. You see, they couldn’t have taken over the university with an indigenous RSS muppet as Vice Chancellor back then in those British days, like they now have, under Pracharak Modi. And this my dear fellows, is serious. Because universities were their prime targets. Jawaharlal Nehru University was out of reach then because it came only in 1969. And even if it was around then and miraculously under the same name, then you know how the very sound of the name “Nehru” sends them comatose into ICU. But by now, Hedgewar became clear who his real enemies were. The first was Gandhi (dare you ask me why! I’m not the father of that derangement called Hedgewar). It seems Hedgewar parted ways with Gandhi, although Gandhi was as unaware of him going as he was of his coming. Hedgewar’s second enemy was the Congress. Not that the Congress noticed, focused as it was on the main plot of seeking independence and not Hedgewar’s commercial break. Hedgewar was greatly disappointed with the Congress’s misplaced focus on independence and poverty alleviation. No cow protection on the agenda can you believe it! Again I will say the Indian army too can learn from Hedgewar before General Bhagwat once again gives them a piece of his mind (he has given so many pieces away, that he must be left with none) which is to change their focus from Pakistan and China to protecting cows (from other cows?). Although the Chinese should be enemy No. 1 since they eat calves also. If lunchtime arrives before the calf grows up that is. Hedgewar however, was clear about his enemies. He was really pissed with the Congress’s approach of nonviolence. Not that he was about to pick up arms himself.
One day, heady Hedgewar marched with a huge and terrifying army of one-hundred bumpkins in a Ganesha procession with loud music intentionally in front of the mosque in the Mahal area of Nagpur. Riots ensued and presto, RSS found a long lease of life. A formula had been figured out at long last. And a good way to stay away from confronting the heavily armed British was now discovered. In fact, the British were quite tickled that things will be even more divided than before. To reinforce their loyalty to the British, the RSS shunned the Tricolor, the same Tricolor the Indian army covers its martyrs with, the same Tricolor they hoist in the killing cold breeze after capturing a high altitude picket, and after losing comrades.
As a matter of fact, Hedgewar told his dumplings not to participate in Gandhi’s satyagraha in 1930. It was then that the Congress noticed the mole. And the Congress passed a resolution forbidding its members from joining RSS purely as a matter of abundant precaution for the threat of people seeking demotions is usually rare. After contributing the uniform, the symbol, and the modus operandi of rioting, at peace with himself, Hedgewar died and his great war remained pending.
A new guy called MS (not to be confused with Microsoft) Gowalikar took over.
Not as a result of internal elections mind you. For them, democracy, whether external or internal, is a nuisance. This Gowalikar character was no relative of Goswami Arnab or Gaurav Sawant, the military-minded TV journalist who takes an occasional much-needed break from screaming “Jai Hind!” all week, to go and play with UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s cows. Before Gowalikar became RSS chief, he worked closely with fellow-RSS galoot Nathuram Godse (who later killed Gandhi) and together they translated G.D. Sarvarkar’s book (not to be confused with their more revered nutjob Veer Sarvarkar) Rashtra Mimansa into English. However, smarty-underpants Gowalikar took sole credit for the shitty translation and so they had a fall-out. Although, funnily, it wasn’t an exact translation and Gowalikar added some pro-Nazi bullcrap of his own and published it in his own name as “We, or Our Nationhood Defined.” Just the title should tell you how fucking convoluted it must be. Denied co-authorship, a bitter Godse went and formed a new Hindu far-right shit-shop by the name of “Hindu Rashtra Dal” while continuing to remain a member of both the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha! Actually, this is quite manageable since none of the three involve any work outside chomping doodh-jalebi.
But it became clear that plagiarist Gowalikar had all the qualities to be an RSS chief and “authoring” that book was a shot in the arm. You see the right-wing animosity to intellectuals has its roots in bitter admiration. The “author” status gave Gowalikar a huge fillip, and while taking the top job (although it is a job with no work), he superseded several seniors because his boss Hedgewar felt he would make the RSS come out from under the dominating fat rump of the Hindu Mahasabha and turn into an independent entity that could potentially put India under its haggard rump. But that was as far as Gowalikar’s independence went.
When Gowalikar became chief, he lived up to the RSS legacy of giving the Indian independence movement the royal ignore. Instead, he felt that defending religion and culture was the path to independence. And for heaven's sake don’t fucking ask me how, else I will dance all day in front of you in RSS chaddis. As a matter of fact, Gowalikar even criticized the independence movement. While the Indian Army criticizes the independence movement of Kashmiris because it is schooled and paid to do so, Gowalikar was doing his anti-Indian-independence and Hindu-supremacy tirade (somehow without independence!) for just one-hundred grams of doodh-jalebis per day. This guy, with a beard so long that it sometimes got caught in his belt (at the back), was the first visionary in the RSS to get shit scared about getting banned and consequently, the doodh-jalebis getting stopped. So he actually disbanded the RSS “military department,” which must have merely meant that they now used their lethal lathis only to affectionately tickle lactating cows.
Ever an optimist, Gowalikar always saw the glass as half-full.
In the ballooning unemployment in India, he found it easy to recruit rapidly from a rich pool of talent that lay in the gutter after guzzling country liquor. RSS membership reached a drunken million thanks to Indian gutters which serve the dual purpose of carrying sewage and hosting potential RSS talent. The RSS grew and in fact, sadly, also set up a shit-shop each in Jammu and Kashmir where a cowardly Hindu Dogra king, Maharaja Hari Singh, struck a few quick deals with them, on which I have had much to say in one of my open letters to a best-selling right-wing clunk who writes the fiction equivalent of Gowalikar’s masterpiece, in English for vernacular readers.
Meanwhile, Gowalikar complied with all the strictures of the British and said that the RSS does not support the civil disobedience movement. In doing so, he pioneered the battle strategy of “strategic withdrawal” except that, in this case, the withdrawal was permanent. He taught his ilk valuable double-speak that helps one stay out of jail. Years later, the Hindu far-right Karni Sena suddenly began to love the movie it had demanded the banning of just days ago. Back then, the Bombay government officially appreciated the RSS and told Gowalikar that he was something equivalent to being sex on toast. Still, Gowalikar’s open admission that RSS had fuck-all to do with Indian independence is noteworthy. He went a step further. He supported (verbally of course) Hitler in World War II and also the Jewish state of Israel.
So when the partition happened, RSS turned into Mona Lisa.
Their lips were smiling from all the communal rioting and bloodshed, but their eyes were weeping when they realized that land was lost. Till then why they had thought that Pakistanis will orbit landless in outer space, don’t bloody ask me. I am not an effing psychiatrist, am I?
After independence, both the British and the Muslims were gone.
Suddenly RSS was friend-less, enemy-less, and rudder-less. Hitler too was now both a joke and a dead body. Fuck the friends; an enemy was desperately needed. So guess who? Yes! Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel, exactly in this order, in the exact order of stature. RSS blamed the trio for the partition while forgetting to credit them for the independence. Why did they do so, when all they ever seem to want is another partition—don’t ask me for God's sake.
Am I their effing Vet?
But by now they were such a nuisance that they were banned. Even the Muslim national guard was banned. Four days later the ban was lifted. And I’ll be damned if I know why. Am I the bloody therapist of the Government of India which keeps banning and un-banning these thugs like a pole dancer jiggling up and down a pole?
Despite that, the hatred of the RSS for the Tricolor endured.
As for Gauputra Gowalikar, he wrote nasty letters about the Tricolor (do google the shit he wrote, don’t take my word for it) which I have no interest in broadcasting given that broadcasting RSS shit is the constitutional responsibility of Republic TV.
It didn’t stop there.
RSS did not even recognize the constitution. Not that the Constitution gives a flying fuck but it beats me why the RSS is here then. Maybe they should live in England with the cows in the countryside. Or in Germany to weep for Hitler at the risk of confusing even the Germans.
Now listen.
In the winter of 1948, the RSS did the unthinkable. It finished its enemy. It was deceptive and cowardly. On January 30, 1948, in Birla House, New Delhi, where Gandhi would hold his multi-faith prayer meetings every evening, Nathuram Godse, the RSS, and Hindu Mahasabha man, stepped out of the crowds and came right in front of Gandhi. Then he bent and touched Gandhi’s feet and stood up, stepped back, and fired three bullets. It was 5:17pm. Gandhi was gone. People were still reeling with disbelief when one American by the name of Tom Reiner caught Godse the killer, and the guards of the Indian Air Force nabbed him. Colonel Bhargava, an army doctor, wept as he pronounced Gandhi dead. The Indian Air Force, the army doctor, the presence of the armed forces yet again.
The army was on the right side then… But now?
Sad, that an RSS man is the President of India and therefore the Supreme Commander of the armed forces, appointed of course, by an RSS PM. What’s worse is that General Bhagwat is the boss of all. So why on earth should the Congress be faulted for drawing similarities with Godse touching Gandhi’s feet before killing him, and Modi touching his forehead to the steps of the parliament after being elected PM and then murdering parliamentary democracy? It’s eerie how well this acronym fits the RSS pracharak:
MODI: Murderer Of Democracy in India
Well, the crowd beat the shits (plural) out of Godse, the same Godse who Modi goes and pays tributes to and on whose name, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh from his party wanted to rename Meerut city.
On February 4, 1948, once again the RSS was banned by Patel, and under a set of stringent conditions, yet again the mistake of unbanning them was done. Even though there had been no hard evidence of RSS’s involvement as an organization, Patel believed they killed Gandhi. They were the only ones celebrating. Some conditions for lifting the ban on them included accepting the Tricolor and the constitution and staying away from politics, holding internal elections, and renouncing violence and secrecy, none of which they do. Years later they again showed their cowardice when Deoras, their Chief, wrote letters to Indira Gandhi supporting the emergency in exchange for lifting the new ban. Writing in support of something to secure clemency comes naturally to them and their biggest role model is Vinayak Damodar Sarvarkar who had honed this into a fine art.
Sarvarkar assumed the nickname “Veer,” when at age twelve, when normal children learn brotherhood, he led his friends to attack a village mosque to which he proudly admitted. In adulthood, one of his first contributions was to try and reconvert the converted Hindus back as Hindus. He abandoned the task upon learning that ultimately we are all apes. He’s the guy who coined the word “Hindutva” for that nano-brain thinking. Oddly, Sarvarkar was initially and temporarily a rationalist and atheist and so finally that makes him somewhat like a shepherd’s pie stuffed with doodh-jalebi. Sarvarkar’s book The Indian War of Independence, painted the 1857 mutiny against beef tallow as a national and unified cause on which again, he couldn’t resist a communal take. He wrote, “The Mahomedan and the Hindu forgot their old religious antipathies to join against the Christian.” Idiotic at many levels, including the inference that in 1857, the Indian Muslim worshiped cows! Throughout the book, he referred to the British as “Christians.” Then he wrote a polarizing book called Essentials of Hindutva which struggled uphill in its attempt to paint “Hindutva” as something that was all-inclusive till it sputtered to its inevitable halt when he wrote that the word (Hindutva) would strain too much, to the point of breaking “if we call a Mohammedan a Hindu because of his being a resident of India.”
Sarvarkar got associated with the ultra-secret India House in London and was arrested in 1910. Although he was sentenced to fifty years imprisonment, he was released in 1921. And that doesn’t happen without reason, my dear. While in jail, to appease the British, he opposed the Quit India movement. Then he signed a clemency and was released on the condition of no revolutionary activities. Like the RSS, he too abandoned the idea of Indian independence and dropped to safety in the parachute of Hindutva. He was a prime suspect in the conspiracy to kill Gandhi, but it’s always difficult to prove these things and so he was spared. Those were not days when you locked up a person for a Facebook post. Not because there was no goddamn Facebook but because there weren’t these fuckers. When it came to writing mercy petitions, Sarvarkar was faster than a QRT, a Quick Response Team. Barely a month after being arrested, he submitted his first mercy petition. It was rejected and he submitted another immediately. He openly asked the British for “forgiveness.” That is why he is considered one of the boldest fellows produced by the RSS. He pleaded and pleaded and pleaded till he exhausted the budget for paper. So much so that the British ran short of toilet paper for themselves and so they started using his mercy petitions for the purpose. When it became unbearable, they released the poor fella.
Incidentally, a biography on Sarvarkar titled Life of Barrister Sarvarkar was published in 1926. The book painted him as the biggest revolutionary ever. The world was curious about Chitragupta, the author of the book, till it was revealed that Chitragupta was Sarvarkar himself! While a red-faced RSS hotly denied this but the publisher was the source of this expose and the so-called “Chitragupta” never showed up. Imagine the kind of man who will sell his autobiography as a biography. But more than that, imagine the state of mind of a man who writes stuff like this about himself: “Sarvarkar is a born hero . . . seemed to possess no few distinctive marks of character . . . an amazing presence of mind, indomitable courage, unconquerable confidence in his capability to achieve great things.”
This guy is the biggest role model of the Sangh Parivar, the two-word nomenclature for the full wagyu family for whom planting any “big lie” is child’s play.
Today the RSS and BJP claim an Indian-ness without having played any role in Indian independence. They lecture all and sundry when the whole idea of the nation is the exact opposite of theirs. The role models they bandy about, people like Patel, are often those who shunned them and their thinking, and had little to do with them; they even banned them. Their indigenous role models were nondescript. They were mere roll numbers in Indian Independence. One such was Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who even joined Nehru’s cabinet. He was the kind who wanted to throw open the membership of Hindu Mahasabha to all communities and not just Hindus and therefore had to part ways and start the Bhartiya Jansangh, the original avatar of the BJP which joined the miserable bunch called Janata Party post-emergency. Years later it took the Ayodhya riots, the old RSS formula, for the BJP to come into power. But in PM Vajpayee’s time, the BJP kept an arm’s length from the RSS which continued to live on doodh-jalebis in Nagpur. The RSS badly needed to come center stage and there was one ace rioting talent available in neighboring Gujarat, a Pracharak. And the rest as they say is history, however smelly it may be.
So that was the history of the RSS in a (nut)shell with its rituals, its symbols, its guise, its pretensions, and of course its role models, where the original stud, may I needlessly emphasize, was Hitler.
Now don’t ask me how Lord Ram feels about being in Hitler’s camp.
Am I a fucking theologist?
All I know is that it is this crazy cocktail of role models who played no role in anything that qualifies as "India” and yet who managed to sell shit as saffron.
After trying his hand at writing the political party manifesto of an imaginary, conservative political party, MARX TWAIN discovered his flair for writing international political satire. His satire, short stories, essays, flash fiction, and flash nonfiction have shamelessly appeared or are brazenly forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, The Satirist, Bella Caledonia, Indiana Review, Terrain, Litro, X-R-A-Y, Reflex Fiction, Consequence, The Ocotillo Review, and other such magazines where the editor wants the voting finger to be put to better use, and where the readers feel that sex jokes can significantly boost the productivity of parliaments and senates. MARX TWAIN is at work on a collection of international political satire essays of the kind you just read. He can be contacted at TheMarxTwain[at]gmail.com because, while he has just joining Twitter as @MarxTwainSays, he hasn’t said anything there so far.