Patriots and Puppets: RSS and the Communists at India’s Dawn

Part 2: From the moment of its birth, the British saw the RSS as seditious while the Communists, born under Moscow’s shadow, paradoxically found comfort in the Empire’s embrace, particularly the Communist Party of Great Britain.

As a young medical student in Kolkata, K.B. Hedgewar joined the revolutionary Anushilan Samiti which was inspired by Bengal’s Swadeshi movement and later channelled that nationalist zeal into founding the RSS.

Dr. Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, was a follower and associate of Lokmanya Tilak, and had close links with many armed revolutionaries and with the Anushilan Samiti. For this reason, from the very day of the RSS’s founding, the British government kept a close watch on him. Even when the RSS’s work had not yet spread across the whole of Maharashtra, British intelligence gathered detailed information about the organization, leaving no stone unturned. Some of these intelligence reports were even presented in the legislature. From the very beginning, the British government regarded the RSS as an organization harbouring seditious intentions. Consequently, the question of the RSS receiving any kind of assistance from the British government simply never arose.

True to its stated principle of “remaining away from political work,” the RSS as an organization never participated in political activity. However, many of its office-bearers and workers took part in the freedom movement under the Congress flag. Dr. Hedgewar himself participated in the 1927 Forest Satyagraha and served a prison sentence for it — though at that time he had stepped down from his position as Sarsanghchalak.

Moreover, many RSS workers regularly aided armed revolutionaries in their activities, quietly and without seeking publicity. Leaders ranging from Aruna Asaf Ali to Jayaprakash Narayan have testified to this fact.

The British authorities received reports of such activities of RSS workers from their own intelligence network from time to time. For this very reason, the British government did not accept the RSS’s stance that it stayed away from politics. In their eyes, the RSS was — and remained — an organization with seditious intentions.

Complex relationship

The relationship between the British government and the communists was complex. From the very inception of the Communist Party, the British maintained contact with them in various ways. Official records exist showing that M. N. Roy was financially supported by the British government for many years. Early history makes it clear that communist loyalties often wavered between the two imperial powers — Russia and Britain.

Although Russia was openly acknowledged as the ‘motherland’ of Indian communists, most of the prominent communist leaders in India had close ties to England. For many among them, their true masters were the British. Within the global structure of the Comintern, the responsibility for ‘guiding’ the Communist Party of India rested squarely with the Communist Party of Great Britain.

When relations between Russia and Britain were strained, Indian communists opposed British rule. During that period, they participated in Congress-led satyagrahas and even plotted armed revolutions. But as soon as Russia and Britain became allies, the Indian communists switched sides and became supporters of British authority. Acting on this new line, they betrayed the 1942 movement without hesitation. Not only that — they went a step further and bargained with the British government to secure the release of their imprisoned leaders, extracting several financial and political concessions in the process.

Unholy alliance

Perhaps even more significant was the fact that the communists had accepted, from the very beginning, the British political plan to partition India. They worked with extraordinary zeal to spread propaganda in favour of this plan and, remarkably, they continue to do so even today. In 1940, P. C. Joshi, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, boasted in a letter to the British Governor-General of India that “we are creating an atmosphere for the creation of Pakistan far more effectively than the Muslim League.”

What makes this even more striking is that Stalin himself had issued explicit instructions to the Communist Party of India not to campaign for or take any initiative toward such a partition. Ignoring those instructions completely, the Indian communists actively aided the Muslim League in every possible way, acting in effect as collaborators for the British.

The relationship between the RSS and the Congress was never cordial. In fact, from the time of Dr. Hedgewar onward, many RSS workers were active within the Congress. Yet the work initiated by the RSS — the task of organizing Hindu society, its insistence on nationalist thought, and its effort at national rejuvenation — were all unacceptable to the Congress.

Most notably, the idea of organizing Hindu society was something both Gandhi and Nehru opposed. Likewise, themes such as nationalism, national regeneration, and the vision of a strong nation were ideas that Pandit Nehru could not tolerate. Moreover, since the British already regarded the RSS as an organization with seditious intentions, the Congress took a strongly adversarial stance toward the RSS right from the beginning.

An unwritten rule was established within the Congress that RSS volunteers would not be made office-bearers at any level. The Congress expected the RSS to “wrap up its saffron flag and work as a volunteer corps of the Congress.” Several attempts were made to pressure the RSS into this role, but the organization never yielded to that pressure.

As a result, once independence was won and power came into Congress hands, Nehru seized the first available opportunity to ban the RSS.

On 30 January 1948, following Gandhiji’s assassination, the Nehru government imposed a ban on the RSS. However, this ban was declared “in the interest of maintaining law and order in the country.” The order did not mention Gandhi’s assassination at all. The First Information Report (FIR) registered for Gandhi’s murder did not name the RSS, nor was the RSS included in the charge sheet filed in court. No accusations were brought by the government against the Sarsanghchalak or any office-bearer of the RSS in connection with Gandhi’s murder.

Nevertheless, through the spread of falsehoods and relentless propaganda, the Congress and the government carried out a sustained campaign to malign the RSS for years.

In the eight decades since independence, the Congress government has imposed a ban on the RSS three separate times on various pretexts, and each time was ultimately forced to withdraw it unconditionally. During none of these bans did the government present to Parliament any statement detailing the allegedly ‘anti-national activities’ of the RSS.

Principled stance

True to its principle, the RSS has never acted against the government. Only on two occasions did it organize movements that could be construed as opposition: the agitation for a ban on cow slaughter, and the struggle against the Emergency.

During the fight against the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975, the RSS stood at the forefront of the nation’s democratic forces. On the very day the Emergency was declared, Indira’s government banned the RSS, jailing Sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras along with hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

But the RSS took the lead in organizing an underground resistance, bringing together all pro-democracy political parties and organizations under the leadership of the late Jayaprakash Narayan. Thousands upon thousands of volunteers participated in the satyagraha that followed. Jayaprakash himself publicly stated: “Had it not been for the RSS, the fight against the Emergency would never have succeeded, and we would not have come out of jail.”

During the three wars forced upon India by Pakistan (1947–48, 1965, 1971) and the 1962 war with China, the RSS fully cooperated with the government. The prime ministers of the time publicly acknowledged this support.

[Tomorrow, we examine the relations between the Communists and the Congress and how they have managed to entrench themselves owing to the patronage of the latter party] 

(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.)