RSS disowns the extravagance of Modi’s leadership, says former Sangh worker

Partha Banerjee was the Bengal secretary of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the RSS, when he divorced the Sangh.

A file photo of Partha Banerjee | Commons

New Delhi: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as an organisation dislikes extravagance and one-person worship, which is why there are multiple signs of conflict between its current head Mohan Bhagwat and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, says Partha Banerjee, a man who spent close to two decades working as an RSS soldier before getting disenchanted by their ideology.

In the run up to the general elections, BJP president J.P. Nadda had then said that the party had outgrown the need of the RSS. Since then, Bhagwat has taken digs at the Prime Minister. Last week, at the centenary celebration of Shankar Dinkar Kane, Bhagwat said “individuals should not proclaim if they’re gods’. PM Modi has been criticised for calling himself a ‘non-biological’ entity in a TV interview.

“There is a lot of conflict between the Modi-Shah brand of BJP and old-fashioned RSS people. RSS basically disowns the kind of extravagance Modi has shown in his leadership. They don’t like it at all along with the ‘me, me, me’ of Modi’s politics,” Banerjee told ThePrint over the phone, speaking from his New York house.

Banerjee was recently profiled by journalist Rahul Bhatia in his book The New India: The Unmaking of World’s Largest Democracy. The book, set to be launched in New Delhi on 17 September has been called a ‘vivid portrait’ of how a nation turns callous and changes into something unrecognisable’. Banerjee’s insights mentioned in the book are critical to understand the inner workings of the RSS, a male-only Hindu political organisation that provides ideological direction to the ruling BJP.

There is a lot of conflict between the Modi-Shah brand of BJP and old-fashioned RSS people. RSS basically disowns the kind of extravagance Modi has shown in his leadership. They don’t like it at all along with the ‘me, me, me’ of Modi’s politics — Partha Banerjee, former RSS member

Banerjee left Sangh in 1981 and left for the US in 1996 to pursue his academic and activism interest. He published a book in Bengali recently named America Swapnapuri na Hatyapuri, and has one more upcoming book in the same language on how India is standing on the verge of “total implosion”. For these projects, Banerjee stations himself in Kolkata for four months every year. He had published his RSS experience in his 1998 book In the belly of the beast: Hindu Supremacist RSS of the BJP.

“I often compare my experience with the RSS with a bad marriage. It was difficult, but not impossible to come out of it,” he says. “I despise the idea of Hinduism of Savarkar and Golwalkar. My idea of Hinduism is one of harmony and peace.”

The indoctrination

As the son of RSS pracharak Jitendra Nath Banerjee, treading on the Sangh path was only natural for Partha whose formative years were spent in and around the machinery. From a very young age, he had started attending shakhas, and was used to RSS leaders frequenting his house.

Jitendra Nath was chosen to build RSS ground up in Bengal after a ban on the organisation was lifted in the 1950s. Banerjee’s father was close to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, and himself was a highly ranked person. Back in the day, Sangh didn’t have many trustworthy Bengali speaking people in its rank and file, and so Jitendra Nath was dispatched to Kolkata from New Delhi. He was a Bengali but didn’t know much of the state and had to work his way up from scratch.

Banerjee had grown up seeing Sangh leaders frequent his house, and developed a good bond with them. As he grew older, he had RSS friends spread all over the country. There were his shakha buddies, and then there were cricket buddies

“I remember my father as a very rough and tough militant kind of a person. His time in Kolkata gradually mellowed him down. But that doesn’t mean he was disillusioned by the RSS, he was completely brainwashed, an RSS man through and through,” says Banerjee, 68.

An all-consuming ecosystem within the RSS that almost traps a person in a social circle dominated and populated by Sangh men makes it difficult for people to typically exit the organisation, Banerjee says. The indoctrination into the ideology also begins from a young age, so followers usually take the ideology as gospel truth, without being able to challenge any fallacies in the ideas that they form.

Banerjee was the Bengal secretary of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) — the student wing of the RSS — when he divorced the Sangh in early 80s. His decision to leave the organisation didn’t come to him as a spur of the moment idea, he says. His exposure to literature of opposing ideas made an impact. He also heard 2-3 speeches by Leftist ideologues, especially one by Hiren Mukherjee, a Communist Party of India stalwart that played a significant role in changing his worldview.

“Mukherjee talked about the inequality in India and poor people’s suffering in that speech, things that I later learnt from people like Noam Chomsky. Such discussions never happened in the RSS,” he said.

Banerjee had grown up seeing Sangh leaders frequent his house, and developed a good bond with them. As he grew older, he had RSS friends spread all over the country. There were his shakha buddies, and then there were cricket buddies. He would go to pooja with them, and they were the people he would gossip with. There was saffron all around, and usually this is what the life of an average Sangh man can look like, Banerjee says.

When he was 20 something, Banerjee did an experiment of sorts at the national RSS conference taking in Kolkata—the idea was to test the ideology. He wrote a letter with various questions and addressed it to senior RSS leaders, made hundreds of copies of the questionnaire and left it at the conference

A slow but sure transition

Living in Kolkata, and having a mother who came from a family of Congress workers who identified as Gandhian meant Banerjee was in a special position – he wasn’t trapped in a Right-wing echo chamber.

“Just like I was a rising star in the RSS for a while, my uncle was a rising youth leader in the Congress, and had a deep influence on me,” says Banerjee.

Growing up in Kolkata also exposed Banerjee to different ideas, outside the world of Sangh. A sociable man, Banerjee says, he would play kabaddi at the shakha, and his cricket buddies were from his neighbourhood.

On the field, he would often be ridiculed for his politics. “The society kids were predominantly Left leaning and would ridicule my politics. As I grew up with them, I came across the work of Rabindranath Tagore, I would recite Rabindra sangeet, and also discovered films by Satyajit Ray and became a big admirer,” Banerjee recalls.

I have very closely seen that the divide between the Left and the Right
is artificial. Moderate Left and Right ideologies have more in common than they realise — Partha Banerjee

This socialisation and coming face-to-face with liberal ideas birthed a deep conflict inside him by the time he was 20. “RSS’ politics of hate, violence, misogyny, and Islamophobia. This advocacy for a backward and prehistoric culture that doesn’t care for modern India or its values, has no scientific reasoning… These things were working inside me slowly but surely. I couldn’t deal with them anymore… and then the untimely death of my mother was the final tipping point,” Banerjee says.

RSS maintaining an arm’s length from the Bangladesh Liberation movement in 1971 also didn’t sit well with a young Banerjee. “I had attended an ABVP camp in 1971 in Burdman, and not a single word was uttered there for the liberation of the Bangladeshi people. So now when the Prime Minister claims that he was involved in the struggle, I find it absolutely hilarious. I know how RSS didn’t get involved in that movement at all.”

When he was 20 something, Banerjee did an experiment of sorts at the national RSS conference taking in Kolkata—the idea was to test the ideology. He wrote a letter with various questions and addressed it to senior RSS leaders, made hundreds of copies of the questionnaire and left it at the conference.

“I asked them certain questions on the doubts and dilemmas I was having about socialism and communism and capitalism… I didn’t understand what the RSS stood for. I asked them why we were so hateful, and why we don’t talk about Bengal’s revolutionaries at shakhas and instead choose to talk about shivaji… I didn’t know RSS doesn’t like to associate with freedom movement leaders…I had many questions like these and left it to hundreds of delegates to answer. I never got a reply, and I never looked back after it,” says Banerjee.

At Bidyasagar college and Baliganj college where Banerjee pursued his Bachelors and Masters in Science, he was surrounded with kurta-wearing, Marx-reading Leftists. They were his best friends, and their friendship too turned out to be an exchange of ideas, radical and moderate, shaping Banerjee’s future politics.

Banerjee never associated formally with a Left party. “The Left party leadership never trusted me because of my RSS background. And back then you couldn’t land a job as a college professor without the endorsement of the Left,” he says.

With RSS in the rearview mirror, and no takers in the Left, Banerjee was left in the lurch. There were no jobs in sight.

RSS’ politics of hate, violence, misogyny, and Islamophobia. This advocacy for a backward and prehistoric culture that doesn’t care for modern India or its values, has no scientific reasoning — Partha Banerjee

He would finally land a gig in 1981 in the remote rural Sundarbans in where he built the college’s library and botany department from scratch. Away from his wife who stayed in Kolkata, Banerjee would spend four years in the Sunderbans teaching biology at the Haji Disharath college, deep in the jungles in South 24 parganas.

Around the village there were no hospitals, no electricity, no cellphone connection. It was a time that gave him a sharp learning curve, but he didn’t wish to spend his entire life in a jungle.

After a four-year vanvaas, Banerjee applied to colleges in the United States of America. He secretly took the GRE and applied for PhD programmes. He finally got through the University of Illinois almost a decade later where he studied and taught till 1999 before quitting his science career to come to New York and enroll in the graduate programme for journalism at Columbia University.

Even as a man of science, Banerjee’s opium remained politics. It was an addiction he would go back to and explore, as a student of journalism at Columbia University when he was in his early 40s. This was his third master’s degree.

From 2000-2001, he worked as a science and health reporter in New York, before quitting to work for immigrants in various roles and organisations. In 2007, he would return to academia at the Empire State University in New York, this time teaching global economics and new media. He taught there till 2011. Since 2011, he has been working as educational program developer for Joint Industry Board of the Electrical Industry in New York.

In 1998, he published his insider’s tale on the RSS. A project that saddened his father.

He also developed a political theory model called the Second Circle, which is a coalition model bringing together the idea of the Left and the Right.

“I have very closely seen that the divide between the Left and the Right is artificial. Moderate Left and Right ideologies have more in common than they realise. Empirical data suggests from American elections that there’s an overlap, and if the working-class people come together, they can destroy the elites who have taken up spaces in both the ideological poles,” he says.

Now as his three-decade-old book is rediscovered, Banerjee says he hopes people will see the seeds of hate ideological organisations can plant in the society.

(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)