Century of Treachery, Century of Triumph: As Red Flags Fade, the Saffron Legacy Endures

Part 3: A century since their founding, the RSS has built a vast national network while the Communists, once courted by Congress, have slid into political irrelevance by crumbling under the weight of their own dogma.

Third RSS sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras addresses a rally.

The relationship between the Communists and the Congress always swung between “love and hate.” Until 1942, the communists worked from within the Congress. Many communist leaders held office at various levels of the Congress organization.

But during the 1942 Quit India Movement, the communists betrayed the movement and helped the British government. In return, they received significant financial and political benefits from the British. This arrangement did not remain hidden for long — when it came to light, it caused a major uproar.

Mahatma Gandhi himself publicly accused the communists and demanded answers from them. The Congress even appointed a three-member committee to investigate the matter. That committee — chaired by Pandit Nehru, with Sardar Patel and Maulana Azad as the other members — concluded that the allegations against the communists were true. Once this became clear, the Congress expelled the communists from the party and shut its doors to them.

History of betrayal

The communists supported Pakistan’s invasion of 1947–48. Declaring that the freedom achieved on 15 August 1947 was “fake independence” (झूठी आझादी), they launched armed uprisings aimed at overthrowing the national government led by Nehru.

In 1949, Pandit Nehru presented a detailed statement in Parliament, placing on record the full account of these anti-national activities. That statement is still available in the parliamentary proceedings. Yet even then, Nehru did not ban the Communist Party.

When Communist China attacked India in 1962 and forced a war upon us, the Communist Party of India supported China and engaged in numerous treasonous activities intended to assist the Chinese. This time, however, Pandit Nehru banned the Communist Party and imprisoned its entire central leadership. Then Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda placed before Parliament a comprehensive statement detailing these acts of treachery — and that record too remains part of the official parliamentary proceedings.

From the betrayal of the 1942 struggle up to the present day, the communists have consistently engaged in anti-national activities. The government has had all the evidence of this for decades, and Congress leaders have known about it since the British era.

Even so, from Nehru to Manmohan Singh, every single Congress prime minister has chosen to shield the communists. Nehru, misusing his power, rehabilitated many communists — from M. N. Roy and P. C. Joshi to Sajjad Zaheer — and arranged for them to receive handsome monthly stipends. This practice was continued by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Manmohan Singh.

Why Congress leaders have shown such deep affection for the communists, despite knowing fully well their anti-national character, remains a difficult question to answer.

Communists also played a major role in the Emergency that Indira Gandhi imposed in 1975 and in the repression that followed. It was the communists who advised her to declare the Emergency. The authoritarian constitutional amendments that she tried to push through at the time also bore the stamp of communist counsel. Through Indira Gandhi, they attempted to bring a Russian or Chinese-style dictatorship to India, though they ultimately did not succeed.

National rejuvenation

In the early years after India attained independence, the RSS devoted itself to the task of protecting and assisting Hindu refugees arriving from Pakistan. Following Gandhi’s assassination, the RSS had to wage a satyagraha against the unjust and illegal ban imposed by the Nehru government. Once that struggle ended, the RSS once again focused its energies on its core mission of organizing Hindu society and working for national rejuvenation.

Although the RSS as an organization kept away from politics, it recognized that its ideology needed to be represented on the political stage. Acting on this insight, it took the initiative in founding the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. In the first general elections held in 1952, the Jana Sangh contested and secured 3.76 percent of the vote and three seats in the Lok Sabha.

Over the past eight decades, through many ups and downs and organizational transformations, the erstwhile Jana Sangh has become today’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which now governs at the Centre and in several states with full majorities. Today, the BJP is recorded as the largest political party in the world in terms of membership.

Ajoy Kumar Ghosh and Ho Chi Minh smoke as Jawaharlal Nehru looks on. Ghosh was a prominent Communist leader and general secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1954 to 1962.

The inspiration of the RSS has also led to the creation of numerous other organizations and institutions across many fields. Today, the RSS’s work has reached nearly every taluka in India, and its presence has spread to many countries around the world. If one takes into account the RSS and the numerous organizations in its wider ideological family, the Sangh is widely acknowledged to be the largest and most influential voluntary organization in the world today.

A remarkable fact about the RSS is that in this entire span of a hundred years, it has never experienced a single split.

In the first general elections of 1952, the communists won 26 seats — the second-highest tally after the Congress — and secured 23.37 percent of the votes. Like the RSS, they too have experienced many ups and downs over the past eight decades. Between 2004 and 2009, they participated in the central government in alliance with the Congress. But since 2014, their decline has accelerated.

Today, their presence in the Lok Sabha is negligible. The states of West Bengal and Tripura, which they had held for decades, have slipped out of their hands, leaving them with a foothold only in Kerala. The various organizations they had built up in other sectors have also fallen into disrepair. As an organization, the Communist Party now has very little real existence.

A key characteristic of their history is that the Communist Party has repeatedly fractured over time. Numerous splinter groups — calling themselves Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists — continue to operate in various parts of the country, but they no longer enjoy popular support.

However, thanks to Congress patronage, they have deeply entrenched themselves in the education system, the administration, the judiciary, and the media. Through these avenues, they continue their efforts to create instability in the country.

The communists have neither abandoned their declared program of breaking India into pieces nor apologized to the nation for it. Even today, they continue to engage in violent conspiracies in pursuit of that goal.

A hundred years ago, in the same year — 1925 — two mutually opposed ideologies took root in India. This is a very broad comparative overview of their journeys over that century. In truth, the scope and importance of this subject are such that countless volumes ought to be written about it. I am confident that researchers and scholars will certainly take up this task in the future.

(The writer is Vice-President, BJP Maharashtra, former Chief State Spokeperson of the BJP, Maharashtra and Director, Vilasrao Salunke Adhysan (Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini. He is also the author of several books including a noted work on Ayodhya. Views personal.)