The RSS has often been portrayed as an anti-democratic organisation by the Western media as well as academia. Nothing can be farther than the truth. To understand how important democracy is for the RSS, one needs to revisit what happened after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had imposed an 18-month long internal Emergency in India. The Opposition leaders were packed to the jails, fundamental rights were hijacked and the Indira government’s dictatorial rule almost strangulated Indian democracy. Had it not been for the valiant fight put on by lakhs of RSS swayamsevaks (volunteers).
Ironically the same Western press which has been trying to paint RSS as an anti-democratic organisation, was all praise for how the Sangh defended Indian democracy.
There are two interesting texts that should be referred to in this context. They are: ‘The Press She Could Not Whip: Emergency in India as reported by the Foreign Press’, edited by Amiya Rao and B.G. Rao, and first published by Popular Prakashan in 1977, and ‘The Smugglers of Truth’, edited by Makarand Desai and published by The Friends of India Society International in July 1978 (it compiled articles published in Satyavani, an underground journal that was published during Emergency period in India).
Let’s take a look at some of the foreign media reports during that era and what they had to say about the RSS.
American journalist J. Anthony Lukas busted the propaganda against the RSS which was banned immediately after the Emergency had kicked in. In an article titled India is as Indira Does (published on April 4, 1976) in The New York Times, Lukas wrote, “The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, commonly known as the RSS, are a tightly disciplined band of volunteers between the ages of 12 and 21, but they can hardly be called ‘troops’. Pictures of material seized from the RSS offices after the Emergency primarily show long wooden staves and wooden swords.”
“I asked Om Mehta, a Minister of State in the Home Ministry, about this and he replied vaguely, ‘There were some metal swords too.’ Even with some metal swords, I asked, how could boys with staves pose much of a threat to a superbly equipped army of about one million men, the Border Security Force of about 85,000, the Central Reserve Police of about 57,000 and some 755,000 state policemen. ‘Well,’ Mehta said, ‘there were undoubtedly some rifles.’ ‘Did you seize any?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They probably kept them at home. Don’t underestimate these people’s capacity for mischief’.”
On 24 January, 1976, around 7 months after the Emergency was imposed (25-26 June midnight, 1975), The Economist wrote in an article titled Yes there is an Underground, “In formal terms, the underground is an alliance of four opposition parties: The Jana Sangh, the socialist party, the breakaway fraction of the Congress party and the Lok Dal… But the shock troops of the movement come largely from the Jana Sangh and ..the RSS, which claim a combined membership of 10m (of whom 80,000, including 6,000 full-time party workers, are in prison).”
This report specifically said that Dattopant Thengadi, a senior RSS Pracharak (full-time worker) was one of the top leaders who were running the underground movement to end the Emergency and restore democracy in India.
In another dispatch, as reproduced in the underground journal Satyavani on 26 June 1977, The Economist wrote: “The underground campaign against Mrs Gandhi claims to be the only non-left wing revolutionary force in the world, disavowing both bloodshed and class struggle. Indeed, it might even be called right-wing since it is dominated by Jana Sangh and its banned cultural affiliate the RSS but its platform at the moment has only one non-ideological plank — to bring back democracy to India.”
It added, “The truth of this operation consists of tens of thousands of cadres who are organised down to the village level into 4-man cells. Most of them are RSS regulars… the other opposition parties which started out as partners in the underground have effectively abandoned the field to the Jana Sangh and the RSS. The function of the RSS cadre network… is mainly to spread the anti-(Indira) Gandhi word. Once the ground is prepared and political consciousness raised, so the leaders are ready, any spark can set off the revolutionary Prairie fire.”
Interestingly, during the Emergency, many RSS workers went underground and crossed over to Nepal to evade arrest in India. The Guardian wrote in an article dated 2 August 1976, titled The Empress Reigns Supreme, “Reports from Kathmandu say that the Nepalese government has rejected appeals from the Indian police to arrest and intern members of the Indian underground.”
“A source close to the Nepalese embassy said that Kathmandu will never hand over to the Indian government members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)… banned by the Gandhi regime shortly after the promulgation of the Emergency…”
Quoting the then Indian Home Minister about his views on the RSS, the same article stated, “‘The RSS continues to be active all over India,’ Brahmanand Reddy, the Indian Home Minister, said recently… ‘It has even extended its tentacles to far-off Kerala in the South’.”
Commenting on the role of communists, the article added, “…Pro-CPI (Communist Party of India) journals in India are being given some latitude by the censors because the party is in favour of even stronger measures to suppress the non-communist opposition.”
The New York Times reported on 28 October 1976, “The only political parties which are supporting Congress Party of the government in the actions that it is taking are the Communist Party of India, the pro-Moscow Communist party and the Moslem League.”
First arrest in Emergency
As soon as Emergency was imposed on the midnight of 25-26 June, 1975, the first man to be arrested was an RSS stalwart. KR Malkani, the editor of an English daily Motherland, was arrested from his residence at 2:30 am from his residence at Pandara Road in New Delhi. Motherland, however, was able to bring out a special supplement by the 26 June afternoon that exposed Indira Gandhi’s move to impose Emergency in detail. This was a historic edition and was in such huge demand that a single copy was sold at Rs 20, a princely sum for a newspaper copy at that time. It was the only newspaper on 26 June that published detailed stories on ‘Emergency’ and made the whole nation and the world aware about it. It was shut down by the Indira Gandhi government as a part of the crackdown on independent Press. Motherland was backed by the RSS too.
More than 1.5 lakh RSS volunteers were jailed during the emergency and a large number of them were brutally tortured also. Most of the top RSS leadership was also in jail. However, a handful of them escaped the clutches of the police and kept on running an underground movement by continuously moving from one place to another and changing their appearances. One of them was an RSS full-timer from Gujarat who later became the Prime Minister of India and is known to the world as Narendra Modi. The latter has given a detailed account of how this underground movement was run in a book that was originally written in Gujarati in 1978 and was titled ‘Sangharsh ma Gujarat’.
It was translated in Hindi also under the title ‘Aapatkaal Mein Gujarat’. Broadly the title can be translated in English as ‘Gujarat’s struggle against Emergency’. The book tells you not only about Gujarat but the whole nationwide movement as Gujarat was one of the hubs of this movement where most of the underground literature was published and was sent to many other states in the country.
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The writer, an author and columnist has written two books on RSS. He tweets @ArunAnandLive. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication
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