The Takeover (2019)

How the RSS is infiltrating India’s intellectual spaces

NB: The Caravan article below indicates why the Modi government refuses to dismiss the Education Minister. He has helped the RSS consolidate it’s grip over higher education, from syllabi to appointments. Ashok Kumar Pandey explains his background and significance. Read more about the systematic demolition of Indian democracy. DS

Hartosh Singh Bal

FOR TWO DAYS IN MARCH 2017, over seven hundred academics and vice chancellors from 51 state and central universities gathered in Delhi University to learn how to bring the “true nationalist narrative” to academia. The closed-door event was called the Gyan Sangam—knowledge summit—and one of its main speakers was Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The topics under discussion, reportedly, were the “cultural onslaught on educational system,” the “colonisation” of intellectuals and the resurgence of nationalism in academia.

According to its website, the Gyan Sangam is an “initiative started in 2016 to create a platform for positive nationalistic academicians.” The site quotes Vivekananda, stating “all sciences originated in Bharat.” These workshops are organised by the RSS-affiliated Prajna Pravah—a typical Sangh project that was floated 25 years ago. The organisation describes its vision as a “rational umbrella that stimulates, trains and synthesizes individuals to recognize the inherent strength of Bharath with academic vigor directed towards decolonizing Indian minds from Eurocentric impact.” Its will to transform, it seems, is not limited to India. “Hindutva being assimilative and self-sustaining has the potential to liberate world from arrogance of power accumulated through dictatorship policies of the west.”

The scale at which the Prajna Pravah was able to hold the event suggests the enormous heft the organisation has acquired under the Modi administration. That year, J Nandakumar, a prominent figure in the Sangh who was the akhil bharatiya sah prachar pramukh—national vice president for publicity—of the RSS, was appointed the national convenor of the Prajna Pravah. Often described as the intellectual wing of the RSS, the organisation is meant to take on the cultural dominance of the Left, whether in universities such as JNU or in states such as West Bengal or Kerala.

A month before the Gyan Sangam event, a conference organised by Ramjas college, called “Cultures of protest: a seminar exploring representations of dissent,” was violently disrupted by members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the RSS’s student wing. The ABVP had objected to the inclusion of Umar Khalid in the line-up of speakers invited to the seminar. Khalid, then pursuing a doctorate at Jawaharlal Nehru University, was one of the students in the centre of a storm that had unfolded at JNU in 2016. Along with Kanhaiya Kumar—the president of the students’ union—and others, Khalid was arrested on sedition charges. These events prompted heated primetime discussions focussed on the crackdown on students, and the idea that JNU was a “den of anti-nationals.”

This propaganda has served the BJP well. It has marked a decisive turn in how the conversation on nationalism is conducted in the mainstream. Any form of dissent, or attempt to question the views of the RSS, the BJP or Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is now framed as a threat to national integrity. In effect, the idea of the nation has come to be conflated with an ideology, a political party or an individual. And the consequences of this are being felt in India’s top universities.

ABOUT FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, the idea of JNU took formal shape amid heated debates in parliament. The education minister at the time, MC Chagla, moved the Jawaharlal Nehru University Bill in the Rajya Sabha, making a strong case for the setting up of an educational institution that would be a testament to Nehru’s legacy. Originally conceived as a second university that would relieve the overburdened University of Delhi, it soon became a much more ambitious project.

Parliamentarians, some of whom were unhappy about naming the university after Nehru, debated what the role of the state should be, what kind of academic ideals it should encourage and how it should cater to the demands of a newly independent developing country. The university, it was decided, would “foster the composite culture of India,” inculcate a “scientific temperament” and promote ideals of “national integration, social justice, secularism.”

JNU was inaugurated in 1969, and G Parthasarathy, a prominent educationist and diplomat, became its first vice chancellor. Over the course of time, the campus has come to be known for a culture of progressive student politics and critical thought. The current vice chancellor, M Jagadesh Kumar, has violated longstanding practices enshrined in the rules of the university. Within the first year of his appointment, it became clear that Kumar was not just uncomfortable with the historical tradition of dissent and public engagement by students on campus, but that his manoeuvring was part of a greater design. He was attempting to change the very nature of the university, including the process of recruiting new professors.

Kumar, a professor of electrical engineering at IIT Delhi, took over in January 2016, a month before the sedition row. At the time of his appointment, the Indian Express reported that Kumar was “a senior office-bearer of Vijnana Bharati, a wing of the RSS involved with the Swadeshi science movement.” Kumar denied any formal association, but said he had attended a function organised by Vijnana Bharati, as it was concerned with science. Everything he has done has only served to foster the worldview of the RSS on the campus and among the new faculty he has been instrumental in recruiting.

It is a good example of how, since the Modi government assumed power, in 2014, a series of measures are being used to dismantle India’s educational institutions to accommodate the RSS’s ideology. Prominent historians such as Romila Thapar have argued that the Sangh is attempting to foreground revisionist histories with a glorified view of a Hindu past. Dinanath Batra, the head of the RSS-affiliated Shikhsha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, sent the National Council for Educational Research and Training extracts from its textbooks that he wanted to see removed. These included, among others, several Urdu and English words, the thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore, positive references to Mughal emperors and a paragraph linking the rise of the BJP and Hindutva with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. In March this year, the NCERT dropped three chapters from its ninth-standard history textbooks. There are visible signs of attempts at an ideological takeover in JNU: a Vivekananda statue is set to be inaugurated, even as students and teachers ask where the funding for it came from.

Meanwhile, the dark underpinning of RSS ideology—its vision of cultural nationalism premised on the exclusion of minorities—has been smoothened for public consumption. In the past few years, its members have made far fewer rabid statements. The Sangh has even made attempts to reach out to the Congress, and other parties with different political orientations. The core idea of Hindutva that animates the organisation, however, remains unchanged. Only the response to it has altered. Recent speeches by the RSS chief from a national platform were a culmination of this makeover. Commentators were soon falling over themselves, claiming to sense a remarkable transformation. It was a successful advertising campaign for an old product in new packaging.

For the RSS, the university is the symbolic centre of dissent and left-liberal thought, facilitating the recruitment of new faculty in social sciences across the country who then serve to advance the reach of ideas antithetical to its worldview. The appointment of people with dubious qualifications who are sympathetic to the Sangh, such as Sudershan Rao to the Indian Council for Historical Research and Gajendra Chauhan to the Film and Television Institute of India, is one tactic to counteract this. In JNU, too, as the appointment of Kumar to the post of vice chancellor indicates, new recruitments are being made with a clear vetting of ideological affiliations.

These newly appointed academics are already at the forefront of a fledgling, but clearly delineated, attempt to create a parallel academic framework in the social sciences. This framework seeks to establish a “nationalistic perspective” across disciplines, from science to history to philosophy. Not only does this project have the clear intent of ensuring that the ideology that defines the RSS is given the gloss of academic respectability, it also seeks to establish a university curriculum based on this ideology that will form the grounding for scholars emerging from institutions such as JNU and Delhi University.

The process to ensure that RSS views begin to increase their hold over institutions that shape Indian intellectual life is underway. The eventual aim—clearly professed, but not yet taken seriously enough—is to establish the hegemony of the Sangh’s ideology in academia. This is not an ideology that has been moderated with power, neither has it changed in any essential way since the inception of the RSS. It has always been exclusionary, without space for many of India’s minorities.

“THIS FUNCTION HAS BEEN ORGANISED to foster understanding of the Sangh, because the Sangh is now present in the country as a force,” Mohan Bhagwat said at the beginning of a speech, in Delhi, on 18 September 2018. The programme was held at Vigyan Bhawan, a venue reserved for conferences organised by the government of India. Private bodies or non-profits may be allowed to use the venue, according to the allotment guidelines, only if the president, the vice president or the prime minister attend the function. Yet, the union minister in charge, Hardeep Singh Puri, used his discretionary powers to provide Bhagwat a national platform, giving no explanation of why this was done, when there was no shortage of other venues in Delhi.

Part of a three-day lecture series, titled “Future of Bharat: An RSS perspective,” the speech was telecast live. The symbolism of this is hard to miss. The only other occasions on which we have seen live feed from this venue is when the most senior leaders of the government, or foreign dignitaries, speak. Bhagwat was occupying the same stage with ease, outlining a vision for Bharat. Four years before, in October 2014, when Bhagwat’s Dussehra speech in Nagpur was broadcast live on Doordarshan, it resulted in a national furore. Every opposition party came out with statements opposing it, and the national broadcaster was forced to defend its decision on the grounds that the speech was a “news event.” Like much with the organisation, this transition has been managed gradually, making what was once unacceptable seem commonplace today.

The hour-long speech was expositional. In the search for headlines, however, the newspapers reported only those parts that they thought would make news. For instance, the Indian Express ran with a story that Bhagwat had chosen to refute the BJP’s position of a Congress-mukt Bharat—a Congress-free India. Such reporting invariably meant that the internal coherence of the speech, and its purpose, was never really communicated by the media.

Bhagwat sketched out four main streams in the country’s life, following the war of 1857. The first was that of armed struggle, which led to men like Subhash Chandra Bose. The second was the attempt to bring political awareness to the people. This stream, led by the Congress, achieved the fundamental aim of Independence, but has since disintegrated into the struggle between various political parties. The third, the aim of reforming society—in the manner of Gandhian movements or civil-society activism—ended up creating small islands that remained marooned in a larger society that continued unchanged. The fourth, for which he cited the example of the Arya Samaj and Vivekananda, sought to return to the fundamentals.

According to Bhagwat, KB Hedgewar’s encounters with these various streams resulted in the concept of the RSS. The RSS, he claimed, is a methodology for building a cadre of people spread across every village of the country who will have imbibed these fundamentals of Hindu values to which the fourth stream sought to return. Having done so, he added that there is no need to reform society, as the third stream desired, since this cadre would become the core around which society itself would become strengthened and cohesive. “Hedgewar said we will organise Hindu community,” Bhagwat claimed. “He did not make this proclamation because he wanted to oppose somebody, but he wanted to unite people.”

The overall effect of the speech was to make the RSS seem like a benign movement with noble intentions, which embraced and supplanted everything that had preceded it, from the freedom movement to religious reform. Bhagwat delivered an approximation of what he had promised he would do at the beginning of the speech. The speech did not provide an understanding of the Sangh, but a vision of how it should be perceived for the moment.

But the purpose behind the creation of the RSS was exactly what Bhagwat tried to claim it was not. Hedgewar’s decision was based in good part on the need to consolidate against the Muslims. According to Dr Hedgewar: The Epoch Maker, a biography by BV Deshpande and SR Ramaswamy—and edited by the leading Sangh ideologue HV Seshadri—that is present on the RSS website, in the run up to the founding of the RSS, Hedgewar fulminated that Indian Muslims had proved themselves “Muslims first and Indians only secondarily” during the freedom movement.

“While the cries of ‘Hindu-Muslim Bhai Bhai’ continued to reverberate in the air,” Deshpande and Ramaswamy write, “its prospect in reality was receding farther and farther. Doctorji became engrossed in finding answers to certain basic questions: Over these years of our fraternization, have the Muslims ever responded positively to any of our gestures? Have they developed any warmth towards the Hindu society? Have they reciprocated the Hindu tradition of tolerance, of ‘live and let live?’ Have they exhibited the slightest willingness to join us in paying homage to Bharat Ma?” Another biography, by the RSS loyalist CP Bhishikar, noted that Hedgewar referred to Muslims as “yavana snakes”—using the Hindi term for Greeks, often applied to foreigners in general—and argued that they were “anti-national.”

Throughout Bhagwat’s speech, such inconvenient facts were set aside, and the truth was either altered or omitted to ensure that the public view of the RSS articulated from Vigyan Bhawan would be far more benign than the facts warranted. A general ignorance about RSS history is forgivable among the general public, but cannot be an excuse for the media that covered the speech. Rather than pointing out the obfuscations Bhagwat was indulging in, they chose to report Bhagwat’s narrative of RSS history. The Indian Express led the day after with the headline, “If Muslims are unwanted, then there is no Hindutva.”

Another thing the media took note of was how the second sarsanghchalak, MS Golwalkar, a figure of vast influence in the RSS and the source of much controversy because of his rhetoric about Muslims, was barely referred to in the speeches. Newspapers glowingly reported Bhagwat’s claim that the RSS had distanced itself from the more incendiary parts of Golwalkar’s views.

Bhagwat, however, had made no claim about discarding Golwalkar’s thoughts. What he did say was that Golwalkar’s book Bunch of Thoughts “is a collection of speeches made in a particular context and cannot be eternally valid.” A news report quoted Bhagwat as saying the “Sangh acknowledges as valid only those parts of ‘Bunch of Thoughts’ which remain relevant to the current circumstances and have been put together in an in-house publication, ‘Guruji: Vision and Mission’.” A simple examination of this book would have easily settled the question of a change in the RSS worldview. However, no contemporary nor subsequent news report has bothered to examine the book in question.

This is especially troubling, since Bhagwat had made it clear that Guruji: Vision and Mission lays down the view about Muslims currently prevalent in the RSS. In fact, he invoked the book precisely when asked about the conflict between his statement that the Sangh does not see Muslims as “unwanted” and Golwalkar’s view, recorded in Bunch of Thoughts, categorising the community, along with Christians and communists, as internal enemies.

A chapter in Guruji, titled “Hindu—the Son of this Motherland,” is instructive:

Actually, ‘Bharti’ is a substitute term for ‘Hindu’, but today there is a lot of confusion in the usage of the ‘Bhartiya.’ This word is now being used now as a substitute of the word ‘Indian’, which results in the inclusion of other groups like Muslims, Christians and Parsis etc in this terminology. Therefore, this word ‘Bhartiya’ tends to confuse us when we want to speak only about this specific society. Only ‘Hindu’ can express this feeling and meaning that we want to convey, truly and in full.

The import of this claim should not be lost on anyone. At the end of the next chapter, titled “Our Identity and Nationality,” Golwalkar writes, “All the elements required to develop as a great nation are present in this Hindu society in their entirety. This is why we say that in this nation of Bharat, living principles of the Hindu society are the living systems of this nation. In short, this is ‘Hindu Nation’.”

Golwalkar’s idea of Bharat, therefore, is a “Hindu Nation,” where Muslim, Christians and Parsis do not belong. This is what Mohan Bhagwat effectively endorsed. The idea of exclusion, of second-class citizenship for, at the very least, a sixth of the population of this country, is inherent to the worldview of the RSS. And this has not changed since its founding, in 1925.

In invoking the book, Bhagwat was indulging in a sleight of hand typical of the Sangh.

Guruji: Vision and Mission is actually a translation of a book first published in Hindi, in 2007, as Guruji: Drishti Aur Darshan. Although the book predates Bhagwat’s ascension to the post of sarsanghchalak, the Hindi text is available as an ebook, and copies of the English translation can still be bought online. It was published when KS Sudarshan was the chief of the RSS. It is unknown within the Sangh. In fact, shortly after Bhagwat’s speech, I was told at the RSS bookstore at its Jhandewalan headquarters that the book is currently out of print, both in Hindi and English. Bhagwat was informed about the book because he had written the introduction to it. But his own introduction makes no reference to Bunch of Thoughts. It states the book is drawn from Golwalkar’s collected works, spread over 12 volumes. “Naturally, they cover many subjects, some of them of contemporary relevance and some others with all time relevance,” Bhagwat writes. “Time never stands still and circumstances do change.” The chapters themselves are not dated, and do not indicate which of Golwalkar’s books, speeches or conversations they are drawn from.

Clearly, Bhagwat’s much-touted claim on Golwalkar was an afterthought, not to be taken seriously.

TWO BOOKS ON THE RSS by major trade publishers had anticipated the airbrushing of the Sangh’s views by Bhagwat. The first, by the Sangh insiders Walter Andersen and Shridhar K Damle, called The RSS: A View to the Inside, published by Penguin, in 2018, is a sequel to their first book, Brotherhood of Saffron. The authors had unfettered access to Bhagwat over the course of their research. They refer to Bunch of Thoughts as one of three RSS-published works considered “the ideological foundation of Hindutva.” The second, RSS 360: Demystifying Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, by the RSS functionary Ratan Sharda, has been published by Bloomsbury, and is an updated edition of a little-noticed earlier book. Today, these are the only popular books available for a general reader looking to read about the RSS, hoping to clarify or confirm Bhagwat’s bowdlerised version of the RSS’s origins and beliefs.

Unsurprisingly, neither book has much claim to objectivity. Sharda, whose book interchangeably uses the term leftist and secular to denote any inconvenient view, translated Guruji: Drishti Aur Darshan into English. He anticipates Bhagwat’s narrative on the foundation of the RSS:

Dr Hedgewar envisioned an organisation that would look beyond immediate gains, which would be non-political and its only job would be to create extraordinary human beings out of ordinary members of the society, who would be selflessly dedicated to the cause of nation building and service to the society … In the dark days of British rule when calling oneself a Hindu was an embarrassment for the educated class, Doctor Hedgewar stood up in 1925 and said, “Yes, I, Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar proclaim that I am Hindu and this is a Hindu nation.”

This is not history; it is hagiography. Ironically, Sharda begins his preface by stating, “For any author it is a sense of great satisfaction when a prestigious publishing house shows readiness to publish a new version of a book already in the market. I must admit that I had to work really hard on this version due to the high critical standards of their editorial team.” These high editorial standards are difficult to locate in the book.

It omits to mention, for instance, that the genesis of the RSS lies in the fact that Hedgewar and BS Moonje, a close associate of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, left the Congress largely because Gandhi had reached out to the Muslims through the Khilafat movement—a campaign by Indian Muslims that expressed support for the deposed caliphate after the First World War. The formation of the RSS was by no means the solitary work of Hedgewar, as Bhagwat and Sharda would have it. In fact, five people attended the inaugural meeting: Hedgewar, Moonje, VD Savarkar’s brother Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, LV Paranjpe and BB Tholkar. Moonje then went on to head the Hindu Mahasabha, in 1927. While differences did arise between the Mahasabha and the RSS, the two organisations continued to work closely in the run up to Partition. It has become subsequently necessary for the RSS to suppress this fact, because of the Mahasabha’s clear link with MK Gandhi’s assassination. Moonje’s role has consequently been written out of RSS history.

Andersen and Damle’s book has higher claims to scholarly credentials. But, as the journalist Dhirendra K Jha pointed out in an article for The Caravan, Damle is the sanghchalak—chief—of the Chicago branch of the RSS’s overseas arm, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh. Jha also notes that the book chooses to selectively propagate right-wing distortions of the events that took place in JNU in February 2016.

“The book then refers to a JNU administrative committee’s finding of March 16, 2016, that the march had been held without permission and indeed involved people shouting anti-national slogans,” Jha writes, in an article for Scroll. However, the book says nothing about the report of the magisterial inquiry instituted by the Delhi government. This report, which came over a week before the JNU administration announced the results of its probe, did not find any evidence of Kanhaiya Kumar shouting anti-India slogans. That these videos were doctored is not mentioned anywhere in the main text of the book. Only in one of the footnotes, on page 331, which many readers may not bother to read, do the authors admit that “the issue is complicated by the apparent doctoring of at least some of the videos of the event.”

This is not the only instance in the book of the authors doctoring facts to present a narrative that favours the RSS view of events. But the very fact that there should be a need to do so over what started as a mere campus protest indicates the importance JNU holds in the RSS’s scheme of things.

DURING THE 142ND MEETING of JNU’s academic council, on 26 December 2016, by having the minutes of the previous meetings of the academic and executive councils confirmed—over the protests of many of the committee’s members, who claimed they had been misrepresented—the vice chancellor arrogated to himself the power to finalise the panel of experts, as part of the faculty-recruitment process. Under the JNU Act, 1966, the VC can only nominate external experts to the selection committee from a panel nominated by the various departments of the university, and approved by the academic and executive councils, a practice that has been followed at JNU since 1978. However, the resolution, and a subsequent amendment to the regulations governing faculty recruitment, allowed the VC to nominate members from outside the approved panel of experts.

Although a writ petition is pending before the Delhi high court, challenging the resolution since it contravenes the JNU Act, the VC has continued to invoke this new provision. According to the JNU teachers’ association, in most of the over-thirty selection committees constituted since the new database of experts was created in 2016, he has named at least two of the three experts from outside the approved panel.

Some of these appointments have been challenged in court, and the available details suggest how subject experts are being bypassed to make faculty appointments. One of these cases deals with the appointment of Birendra Nath Prasad to the post of assistant professor of ancient history in the centre for historical studies.

Of the three experts nominated by Kumar to his selection committee, only one, Adhya Sinha, was from the approved panel, but even she was an expert on medieval, rather than ancient, history. The other two “experts” were Aruna Sinha of Banaras Hindu University, who lists her specialty as modern and contemporary history, and Kapil Kumar, the chairperson of the faculty of history and director of the school of tourism and hospitality service management at the Indira Gandhi National Open University, who lists his speciality as modern Indian history and tourism studies and management.

Kunal Chakrabarti, then the acting dean of the school of social sciences, and Ranabir Chakravarti, a former chairperson of the centre for historical studies, were both part of the interview, held on 28 September 2017, and dissented with the selection. In a letter to the executive council, they described the process followed in the interview:

Two experts have their specialisation in Modern Indian History and the third is in the History of Medieval India. In fact the two undersigned were the only subject experts as they are both Professors of Ancient Indian History … It is only natural that the procedure, processes of the nomination of the ‘experts’ being palpably flawed, the outcome was no different … one particular ‘expert’ was caught napping—as many as four times—during the day-long interview process … Another ‘expert’ asked a candidate about the candidate’s non-utilization of an 18th century text whereas the candidate’s … research was the study of social history on the basis of the Buddhist texts of the first three centuries of the Christian Era! … The third ‘expert’ was no different who asked a candidate with a PhD on the ‘Daily Life in Ancient Bengal’ that how and whether this theme will help understand ‘national integration’! … In fact the two undersigned were told by the Chairperson that they would be permitted to ask only one brief question to each candidate.

Another instance that has gone to court relates to the appointment of an assistant professor for the centre for the study of social systems, in 2017. The criteria for applicants included a master’s degree in sociology or social anthropology. The candidate selected, PC Sahoo, had a bachelor’s and master’s degree in geography. All three experts who sat in on the interview were selected by the VC, and did not figure in the approved panel of experts.

These cases are a good illustration of the free hand Kumar has had in faculty appointments ever since he took charge. Many of the new appointments made in this fashion have questionable academic credentials, with as many as five of them facing serious charges of plagiarism. These charges are the subject of a complaint by the students’ union to the University Grants Commission. In none of the cases are the issues about lifting a sentence or two. In each of them, large chunks of text have been copy-pasted verbatim, either from government reports or from foreign publications.

These appointees include Pranav Kumar and Anuja, both assistant professors in the centre for social exclusion and inclusive policy; Pravesh Kumar, an assistant professor in the centre for comparative politics and political theory; Jaikhlong Basumatary, an assistant professor in the centre for Indo-Pacific studies; and Manoj Kumar Jena, an assistant professor in the centre for the study of social systems. All of them were appointed in 2017. The JNU authorities have tried to claim that these complaints are anti-Dalit as they have been directed largely at appointees who belong to scheduled castes and tribes, but the fact remains that these candidates were picked over other SC/ST candidates who had the necessary qualifications.

Such selections, more than anything, are reflective of the fact that, despite the clear professional advantages that accrue to anyone publicly professing their ideology, the RSS and its affiliates have been unable to create a pool of people who have the intellectual credentials to fill the vacancies that will be created, as attempts are made to sideline or remove those professing any form of liberal, left or progressive ideology.

N Sai Balaji, the president of the students’ union, has argued that faculty members selected in this fashion, even when they do not have a direct RSS affiliation, become vulnerable to pressure from the VC. Anuja has already been appointed a proctor, responsible for disciplinary proceedings. Another of the VC’s closest associates on campus, Buddha Singh, an assistant professor in the school of computer and systems sciences, also faces plagiarism charges. He is the associate dean of students, and a warden. He is closely associated with the RSS.

Even as administrative control is increasingly moving towards those supportive of the RSS’s ideology, the problem of producing intellectual output that can give some academic legitimacy to the Sangh’s beliefs persists. The effort in this direction has taken more time and is far slower, but is now being put in place.

IN 2016, under Shri Prakash Singh, a professor at Delhi University, the Gyan Sangam began a project to prepare a series of books that would be used as course material in universities, and would reflect a “nationalist reference frame.” Two years later, the first of these books was launched at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, in the presence of Satyapal Singh, the minister for human-resource development, Shakti Sinha, the director of the library, and J Nandakumar. The book was titled Politics for a New India: A Nationalistic Perspective.

Reporting on the release, the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, stated, “The book, a collection of essays, offers different dimensions of Indian Politics with the Nationalistic and Dharmic frame of reference. It challenges the orientalist and colonial narratives in social science … A novel initiative to decolonise Indian minds, the book also provides an alternative narrative to hegemonic Eurocentric concepts.”

The majority of the contributors to the book are faculty members at JNU or Delhi University. This includes Vandana Mishra, an assistant professor at the centre for comparative politics and political theory in JNU. She was selected to the post despite the fact that PK Datta, the chairperson of the centre, who was present on her interview panel, had given a dissenting opinion. Along with Pranav Kumar, one of the five new appointees charged with plagiarism, Mishra is one of a select group of scholars being shepherded by Shri Prakash Singh in academic projects. Shri Prakash, too, has enjoyed a huge boost in his academic career under the current regime. “Shri Prakash was a lowly ranked academic who had a meteoric rise under this administration,” a senior academic at JNU, who has worked with him, told me. “He is an important person within the RSS network. He is not serious about ideas. His strength lies in organisational matters.”

When I spoke to Shri Prakash, he told me that the book would be the first in a series, and similar collections of essays on law, philosophy and economics were already under preparation. He told me that the idea was to present academic discourse with the “right perspective.” Most of the time in Indian universities, he told me, academics twist their perspectives according to their beliefs. He had collected a group of young scholars from DU and JNU with a “rightist perspective,” who would use their scholarship to utilise “the same tools and techniques, the same methodology and the same scholarship” as was prevalent in the best academic work to provide alternatives to the twisted perspectives now available in academia. The work, he added, was the first real effort to provide readings for university students that would challenge the one-dimensional approach prevalent today.

“In institutions like DU, JNU, Ambedkar University and Jamia today, if you probe independently and check the kind of readings that are being provided, the kind of chapters from books that are prescribed for the courses, the majority are divisive,” Shri Prakash claimed. “I won’t name names, but there is a big question mark over the kind of milieu they provide. Unlike them, our perspective is to believe that before the British or the Mughals, India had a rich heritage, rich literature, a national culture. Just because there was no English doesn’t mean there was no literature. We do not believe blindly in this richness of ancient India, but come to it through research.”

He said the group he had set up was a voluntary effort. “In solo writing there is too much time that is taken; perspective is missing. We discuss each issue, present papers, put them through peer review, a blind review and finally the article is sent to a faculty not known to the contributor.” In case of this book, he added, since it was the first such effort, he had himself handled the reviewing process.

When I asked him about the “deepest gratitude” he had extended in the acknowledgements to Krishna Gopal, the sah sarkaryavah—joint general secretary—of the RSS, for “showing unfathomable faith and providing constant directions and motivation to the entire team of contributors,” he said that was an acknowledgment of the fact that Gopal “had addressed us and motivated us.” Nandakumar’s contribution is also acknowledged in the book.

The book in question deserves closer scrutiny than it has received so far, given that it is the result of a clearly articulated desire from the top RSS leadership to prepare books that will make their way into academia if the BJP continues to enjoy a hold on power. According to Shri Prakash, the book on law is being prepared under the supervision of Anupama Goel of the National Law University, Delhi; the book on economics under Anand Kumar, of DU’s college of vocational studies; and the book on philosphy under Aditya K Gupta, an assistant professor of philosophy at DU.

Shri Prakash’s repeated attempt to convince me of the rigour of their approach, and the methodology that went into the preparation of the book, is apparent in the attempt to replicate the look and feel of research, from footnotes to annotations to quotations from other texts. He makes this clear in his introduction to the book:

… the work undertaken here is a modest attempt to seek identity for Indian Ways of Study. It may be treated with precaution as indigenization of Indian political studies—with the highest level of objectivity and freedom from ideological and Western domination—relying on the analysis of world views drawn from our own intellectual tradition, as well as the ontological, epistemological, and ethical assumptions underlying political issues.

But at the heart of the book is the very same mindset that has been articulated by the Sangh from its inception, and was very much evident in Bhagwat’s Vigyan Bhawan lecture.

In her essay, “RSS Ideology and Practice: The Context of Social Harmony,” Vandana Mishra writes about the genesis of the RSS. “The widespread communal rioting across India in the early 1920s not only raised questions about the relevance of Gandhian techniques but also convinced the reformists that a new approach and a novel strategy was needed to be put in place to counter the threat of communalism.”

She then invokes Lajpat Rai. “In his address to the 8th Hindu Mahasabha session in 1925, Lala Lajpat Rai proposed that non-violent non-cooperation could seriously weaken Hindu solidarity and thus adversely affect the freedom struggle. ‘We cannot afford to be so weak and imbecile as to encourage others to crush us, nor can we be so obsessed by the false ideas of ahimsa, but at our peril.’”

Her conclusion is clear:

These (1920) riots were also seen as a sign of profound social crisis—disunity among Hindus. This needed to be addressed if India was to be independent and emerge as a cohesive and unified nation after independence. The thought that, there is a need for an inner transformation to reawaken the sense of national consciousness and social cohesion became the starting point for the formation of RSS on 27th September 1925.

In trying to build up a case for the RSS as an entity that sought to work against the disunity within Hindus, she ends up conceding that the very idea of the RSS was designed to consolidate Hindus against Muslims. In a few honest sentences, she destroys the basis for the thesis Bhagwat sought to construct in his lectures.

Pranav Kumar and his co-author, Namita Kumari, in their essay, “Glorification of Terrorism: Challenges, Responses and Pathways,” circle back to the same theme of anti-nationals and the refuge they found in JNU, couched in the guise of institutional responses to terror. “The apologists for terror often project their acts as harmless and, at times, essential and beneficial for democracy. They take refuge in the principle of freedom of expression, academic freedom, university culture and the responsibility of the media. They tend to stretch the argument for the freedom of expression to its furthest limit by claiming that, in a democracy, all voices should be heard.”

The transition from this generic claim to specific accusations against those involved in the protests at JNU is made without evidence: “And the voices, according to them, include the voices supporting violence and exhorting citizens to overthrow democracy itself. When ‘anti-national’ and ‘pro-terrorist’ slogans were raised at JNU, many claimed that a university campus was above and beyond the nation-state. Hence it should be allowed to pursue academic freedom and indulge in such activities and movements.”

Having created a strawman out of one specific instance that does not even fit their case, they conclude, “At this juncture, it is important to understand the impact of the glorification of terrorists and terrorism by apologists for terror. Unfortunately, no specific studies have been carried out by Indian authors.” Meanwhile, the irony of creating a nationalist perspective free of western domination by relying on western studies is lost on the authors.

Such a package could hardly be complete without the endorsement of the patriarchy that is at the centre of the Sangh’s view. In her essay on “Feminist Jurisprudence in 21st Century & Relevance of Vedas in Contemporary World,” Seema Singh, an assistant professor of law at DU, argues, “Just to prove the superiority of the western philosophy the true Vedic standards and spiritual knowledge was not only ignored but also misinterpreted for elimination. In any society where women are not respected, see the loss of its equilibrium and harmony. In the spiritual domain, men and women have an equal position. Men and women are different sexually but they are both the children of the same God. Men should never try to control women by force nor should women try to eliminate the position of men.”

As these academics work to construct a curriculum they want implemented in universities across the country, they remain aware that the key to implementing it lies in the RSS’s access to power, which would require the re-election of Narendra Modi. Early in March, these academics who were central to the Prajna Pravah’s Gyan Sangam project came together to set up a group called Academics4NaMo. A news report on the group stated that “several professors of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), including varsity’s registrar Prof Pramod Kumar, Prof Sudheer Pratap Singh of Centre for Indian Languages and Dr Vandana Mishra of Centre for Comparative Politics & Political Theory; Delhi University professors like Prof Shri Prakash Prof Tarun Kumar Garg, Prof Manan Dwivedi of Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA), Delhi and Dr Shantesh Singh of Kuala Lumpur based United Nations University are part of the campaign.”

Swadesh Singh, an assistant professor of political science at DU who has co-authored three books with Shri Prakash Singh, is one of the key members of the group behind the campaign. Academics4NaMo, he told me, seeks to bring together all those who want to see Narendra Modi re-elected. “The idea is not to support an ideology or a political party but an individual. There may be people who disagree with a few things Modi has done but the question is whether he is better than any other alternative.” The distinction between ideology, party and Modi is specious, as he well knows. But for anyone who accesses the group’s website, or follows its twitter handle, there is nothing to indicate a strong linkage with the RSS. The news report itself only refers to professors from JNU and DU, without referring to the Sangh, and only ends up conferring legitimacy on the project for the average reader.

Swadesh confirmed the presence of the academics named in the news report at the first meeting of Academics4Namo. “Soon after an initial meeting of three hundred delegates in Delhi, we will be expanding across the country,” he told me. When I ask him about Shri Prakash Singh, he told me he was also part of the Gyan Sangam initiative at the 2017 Prajna Pravah conference.

He was careful to qualify his association. Telling me he has been a journalist with NDTV and has studied at JNU, he added, “I do not think the university is home to anti-nationals. It provides space to many different views, to people like me. I had even organised a press conference with Udit Raj, in 2016, to make exactly this point, at a time when the rhetoric on the Kanhaiya incident was at its height.”

In 2017, Swadesh wrote a response, in the Huffington Post, to Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s criticism of the Gyan Sangam. In a piece, titled “Yes, Bring on Bhartiyata,” Mehta had stated, “Any exposure to a classical culture will hopefully cure nationalists of a boorish anti-intellectualism, a resentment against ideas … So bring on ‘Indic thinking.’ Indic thinking will require self-awareness. What we are not sure of is whether the current custodians of nationalism in education can handle its truth.”

His response, Swadesh told me, was part of his view that people like him need to engage with their critics, especially those, such as Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who are “sympathetic to Indic traditions.” His response to Mehta—“Dear Pratap Bhanu Mehta, If The RSS Cannot Lead The Indic Knowledge Tradition, Who Will?”—stands in the same relationship to most badly argued, crudely stated op-eds written on behalf of the RSS as Bhagwat’s carefully crafted speeches stand in relationship to Golwalkar’s provocative words. But, in the end, the difference is superficial; the essence is the same.

Shri Prakash Singh and his associates in academia, such as Swadesh, are already a sign of the growing sophistication of the RSS in dealing with intellectual issues. The discourse is still easy to see through, still vulnerable to obvious criticism about its divisiveness. But already, as the media response to Bhagwat’s speeches made clear, there are more and more takers for the more sanitised views of the Sangh.

Swadesh ends his response to Mehta on a telling note: “One thing is for sure—you cannot ignore the activities of the RSS on the ground even if you trash their intellectual efforts. They are not the alternative discourse but the main discourse of this country today. Deal with them.” It is a note we would ignore only at our peril.

https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/how-rss-infiltrating-india-intellectual-spaces

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