How Hedgewar spurned Bose and his own protégé’s call to join the freedom struggle
ON 7 JULY 1939, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar was convalescing in the mansion of a rich colleague at Deolali, on the outskirts of Nasik, when an old associate visited him. This was Gopal Mukund Huddar, also known as Balaji. When Huddar arrived, he was greeted warmly by MN Ghatate, the rich colleague, and ushered into a room. There, Doctorsaheb – as Huddar called Hedgewar – was joking and laughing with some youngsters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. On Huddar’s request, the volunteers left the room.
Huddar had come as an emissary of Subhas Chandra Bose. A few days earlier, having resigned as the Congress president due to differences with MK Gandhi in April 1939 and exploring options to launch his own struggle for India’s independence, Bose had called Huddar to his Bombay home. In the presence of one Mr Shah, he asked Huddar to fix a meeting with Hedgewar. Huddar was not a confidant of Bose but he appeared to be the right man for the job.
While recounting the incident in a 1979 article for the Illustrated Weekly of India, Huddar wrote that Bose knew two contrasting details about him. One was that he had a “very personal and long-standing relationship with Dr Hedgewar.” In the 1920s, when Hedgewar, the Sangh’s co-founder, became its first sarsanghchalak – supreme leader – Huddar was appointed as the first sarkaryavah—general secretary. The second detail was that Huddar had served as a soldier in the leftist International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Although formerly an RSS man and still a well-wisher of Hedgewar, Huddar was now fiercely anti-British and wished to see the Sangh join the freedom struggle.
“Netaji is very anxious to have talks with you,” Huddar recalled telling Hedgewar. But, he wrote in the Illustrated Weekly, “Doctorsaheb protested that he had been in Nasik as he was ill and was suffering from some unknown malady.” Huddar “entreated him not to give up this chance of an interview with a great leader of the Congress and the nationalist force in India, but he would not pay heed to me. He protested all through that he was too ill to have a talk.”
Huddar then said that it would only be fair for Hedgewar to inform Mr Shah, who had accompanied him and was waiting outside the room, about “his genuine difficulty which, after all, was only physical illness of a kind.” Otherwise, he feared, Bose might suspect that Huddar had sabotaged the mission. “Shrewd as he was,” Huddar wrote, Hedgewar “took the hint and stretched himself on the bed, saying: ‘Balaji, I am really very ill and cannot stand even the strain of a short interview. Please don’t.’”
Huddar understood that there was no point in trying to persuade him. Hedgewar would not fight the British for India’s freedom. “As I left the room,” he recounted, “the RSS volunteers entered and laughter broke out again.”
HUDDAR’S ACCOUNT punctures a flimsy tale that the RSS has been trying to peddle aggressively: that it played an important role in the struggle for India’s freedom. This idea helps disguise the Sangh’s work towards establishing a Hindu Rashtra as patriotism and nationalism. A claim to these virtues also helps its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party, retain electoral power.
The Sangh bolsters this narrative with several misleading and false claims about the doyens of Hindutva. It claims that by the time Nathuram Godse assassinated Gandhi, in January 1948, he had left the RSS. This is false, as I proved, using archival evidence, three years ago. The propping up of the demagogue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Godse’s mentor and the father of the Sangh’s Hindutva ideology, as a foremost freedom fighter is another example. Savarkar was jailed in 1910 for ordering the assassination of a British bureaucrat. He was released, fourteen years later, after making many appeals for mercy to the colonial regime. In one such plea, Savarkar declared his “loyalty to the English government” and his will to “serve the Government in any capacity they like.” As promised, after his release, he stayed away from any anticolonial activity. Instead, he chose to collaborate with the British.
Yet, since it came to power in 2014, the BJP has helped the RSS legitimise its concocted narratives and officially rewrite Indian history….
Gandhi’s Assassin. By Dhirendra K Jha
How Savarkar Escaped Conviction for Gandhi’s Assassination
Terrifying implications of the SC’s Staines Judgement
What the Veneration of Gandhi’s Killer Says About India. By Yasmeen Serhan
After the truth-shower 