Renowned scholar of contemporary Indian politics Walter K Andersen who has written two books on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) has said in a recent interview to an Indian media platform that the West has misinterpreted the RSS as a religious organisation .
Andersen who worked in the US State department as a political analyst is also former head of South Asia studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. ‘In 1987, Andersen came out with his first book on the RSS ‘Brotherhood in Saffron’. It was co-authored by Sridhar D. Damle. In 2018, the duo published another book titled ‘RSS: A view to the inside’
Andersen was recently interviewed by senior journalist Vasudha Venugopal for the NDTV. Here are some key comments by Andersen excerpted from the interview:
How RSS has been misinterpreted by the West
(Andersen was one of the first foreign academics to meet the second Sarsanghchalak(Chief Mentor) of the RSS MS Golwalkar)
“My advisers at the University of Chicago (Professors Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph) were among the first set of American scholars to meet him. I was thinking of a topic for my own dissertation and I wanted to do something on student politics. But they said why don’t you do something on the RSS. No one had done a comprehensive study on the RSS… When I met Mr Golwalkar, there was hardly any foreign scholar who had tried to find out about the RSS and how it functioned. There was nevertheless a lot written about the RSS but it tended to be impressionate and filled with factual inaccuracies. In fact, some of them even wrote that the RSS was the youth branch of the Hindu Mahasabha which was not true at all. ..There were many misconceptions and I confronted them myself. Mr Golwalkar obviously agreed to see me because he wanted to talk about the way the RSS operated. We were almost socratic in our approach to each other. I would ask a question, and he would respond. It was like a graduate seminar. I found him forthcoming, open and willing to talk. I even asked some very direct questions, to which he in a very academic way tried to find out how I got the idea. A lot of people think of the RSS as a military organisation, but I thought a more accurate description was that it was more like a monastic organisation. And that I think is true of the RSS even today although it has expanded”
RSS and Caste Discrimination
“The training system of the RSS in many ways tries to reduce or diminish the importance of caste in one’s life. At RSS camps, for example there is a system of participants engaged in functions that cross traditional caste lines like people feeding someone else or cleaning latrines. As far as I know, they don’t give you caste names or refer to you with caste names in the shakhas (branches).”
Is RSS a male dominated organisation?
“When people say this is an all-male organisation, it is an unfair criticism because there is a female equivalent to the RSS. I am told reliably that.. in India the RSS is going to place a lot of emphasis on involving families in its activities, particularly in urban areas and among professionals. There is a female
equivalent of the RSS, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti that is not nearly as large as the RSS or even as influential but the RSS people see it as a viable adjunct as they are increasingly doing activities together. …Even in the US we have the boys scouts and the girls scouts that occasionally do things together but
generally do activities separately, pretty much for the same reason.”
Rahul Gandhi’s attacks on RSS
(Rahul Gandhi is leader of Indian National Congress, the principal opposition party in India and he has been attacking the RSS for several years now)
“A couple of years ago I read of Rahul Gandhi visiting temples, and that was obviously an attempt to showcase himself as closer to Hindu traditions. Does he consider himself a Hindu? I have no idea, but he obviously sees it as an advantage. I find his attacks on the RSS a little strange and unusual though. How does this really help him, I wonder, particularly when it comes to Hinduism… It is important to understand that the RSS is not a religious organisation. It has never been. Rahul Gandhi is misinterpreting the RSS as many others, including many foreigners and also Indians. They see it an Hindu nationalist organisation, but it depends on how you define Hinduism. Do you define it as the present head of the RSS does as a national group which is why he says Muslims and Christians here are also Hindus? Many people don’t see it that way. Many people see it as a religious organisation, and that religion deals with the eternal. It does not. It really deals with the here and now. The first person to write systematically about Hindutva was Savarkar and he was aggressively an atheist. I have met many others in the RSS who are atheist or at best agnostic. Religion as a metaphysical issue didn’t mean very much to them then or now.”
Key Focus Areas of RSS
“They have a new general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale who wants to expand the network of the RSS in the rural areas, and has ideas to strengthen the family system, which is another key focus area of the RSS. Another area of challenge for the RSS is the intellectual elite that still has some suspicion of them. The so-called “Khan market crowd” and all that, but that is a very small part of the Indian population, and moreover they are not organised as a group. In the forties and fifties many of them were pro-communist but the major communist parties are not nearly as influential as they once were.”
RSS and Indian Constitution
( In response to Vasudha Venugopal’s question: Recently, in the UK, Rahul Gandhi said that the RSS has become an extra-constitutional authority. Do you think that is true, or even possible in the future?”)
Andersen: “I personally don’t think so…. If you look at the leadership, they tend to be well educated, they work with the government through their affiliate organisations.
RSS and India’s Independence Movement
“….one of the arguments we hear is that the RSS did nothing during the independence movement which is not quite true. They were not revolutionaries but that was the argument used against them. On the other hand, the same people opposed to the RSS portray it as revolutionaries. You can’t have it both ways.”
(The full interview is available at https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/rahul-gandhi- misinterpreted-rss-like-many-in-the-west-renowned-scholar-walter-k-andersen-3928826)