How engaging with the RSS brought double benefit – for the schoolboy me, if not Pranab-da

The author (encircled) is seated in front. Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, wearing Gandhi cap and holding garland, can be seen in the background | Shekhar Gupta/ThePrint

Pranab Mukherjee’s calculated ‘misdemeanour’ gives me the perfect excuse, or news peg, to disclose a double favour granted to me by the RSS that my parents gratefully accepted.

Pranab Mukherjee made headlines as no former President has ever done simply by accepting an invitation from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to speak at their headquarters.

He, at least, had the choice of saying yes or no to supping with the RSS, or, in more committed secular-speak, touching the “untouchable”. What would one have done if he had no such choice?

As I didn’t, at the age of five? Ok, it was some time back. In 1962.

Pranab da’s calculated “misdemeanour” gives me the perfect excuse, or news peg, to make a bel­ated admission, flaunt a fact from 50 years ago (you can choose the one you prefer depending on your leanings) and disclose a double favour granted to me by the RSS that my parents gratefully accepted. I have a faded group photo from my Class V, at school in 1965-66. The school was a Saraswati Shishu Mandir, part of a chain of junior schools run across the country by the RSS alongside the Vidya Mandirs for seniors.

Let me list the two favours conferred on me by the RSS: The first was in a tiny town called Palwal in Haryana (it’s about 60 km on the way to Agra from Delhi on the Grand Trunk Road), which, in 1962-63, was just a large village with one distant cinema hall (we saw Dosti, Haqeeqat and Sangam there).

A place so small, a large peepul tree could be the landmark for visitors coming to our home. My father, who worked in the Punjab government’s cooperatives department, and a usual suspect for punishment postings, was sent there, a place that had no school of any kind, except may be a madrassa on the outskirts, and no MBBS doctor, except some foreign ones at a mission hospital next to the “camp”, as the temporary settlements for refugees from the erstwhile West Pakistan were called.

Because there was no school, my mother and I had to live in Delhi, with her father, so I could at least attend kindergarten. So, by setting up a school in Palwal, the RSS brought a family together — our family of three then.

One Saturday, my father came to Delhi on his weekend commute for family time and brought the news: A school had opened in Palwal, so it was time we moved there too. This was the Saraswati Shishu Mandir, till Class V. It remained Palwal’s only school for some time. So this was the first favour the RSS did to me. It united our family of three then. The first MBBS doctor, by the way, took a further two years.

The author (second row, extreme left), when he was in Class V in Saraswati Shishu Mandir

The second favour: They were never resentful that I, though just five yet, came with an English-medium sheen, having started out at a proper kindergarten. In fact, they appreciated that and rewarded me with two double promotions — Class I to III, and then on to V.

The RSS, therefore, was not merely my teacher those three crucial years, it also added two years to my academic life, enabling me to graduate from college when I wasn’t even 18.

That it gave me two double promotions is a lesser fact, though. Of much greater significance was this surprising welcome — given their famed pro-Hindi-Sanskrit and anti-English bias — towards my “convented” (as Delhi’s matrimonial columns prefer to say) beginnings.

This was the most fascinating thing. There was resentment and suspicion for English, and yet admiration for it. Schools in Punjab (Palwal was in Punjab then, and became part of Haryana only when the state split in 1966) did not begin to teach the English alphabet until Class V. And yet there was a reward for even basic knowledge of angrezi.

There was plenty of Hindi and Sanskrit, though. The school prayer was chaste Saraswati Vandana, even if it was brutalised in Punjabi pronunciation. Try getting a true Punjabi or Haryanvi to say, “Ya Brahmachyuta Shankara Prabhritibihi Devaih Sada Pujita….”

But we tried, and sniggered on the side because none of us quite knew the meaning, not that it would have persuaded us to take it any more seriously. The headmaster’s pravachan (discourse) that followed was more testing, though even at that tender, innocent age, there was something salacious about being told that it was evil to eat egg as it was a mix of rajj (Sanskrit for ovum) and veerya (semen).

I am not sure anybody was particularly impressed by that. We even continued to rear a dozen hens and a couple of roosters in our tiny, semi-pucca home, though for just eggs, not meat.

Attendance at the shakha was not compulsory, but achieved through encouragement. It was held right opposite where we lived, near the peepul tree, so many of us just sat to watch and listen, not old enough to be bought our khaki shorts, belts and sticks yet.

Nobody complained either, for, generally, the swayamsevaks were laughed at as caricatures, and there were dozens of jokes about them that I haven’t forgotten, but which aren’t polite enough to print even in ThePrint.

Shakhas involved mock battles between sher (lions) and bakri (goats), with a handful of fearless lions always decimating the more numerous, deceitful goats. You can guess which animal symbolised the Hindus and which the Muslims. There were no sports except kho-kho (tag), which we boys sneered at as a girls’ sport.

Then followed the most interesting part, story-telling, and we waited for it. I recall many, but the most repeated one was about Haqiqat Rai, a young boy who preferred to sacrifice his head rather than accept a Muslim tyrant’s demand that he shave his tuft of hair or take off his sacred thread. There were stories also of Guru Gobind Singh and his sons’ sacrifice, of Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhagat Singh and Savarkar and their role in the freedom movement.

Gandhi-Nehru and other people were excluded, except to say that they allowed India to be partitioned despite Patel. Nehru was reviled as Macaulay’s favourite son. But his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was quickly co-opted, particularly with the war of 1965. He was also projected as a humble vegetarian, which Shastri was by preference, despite being a Kayastha.

“Mung ki daal khane waale Shastriji ney sharabi-­kababi Ayub ko maat di (The lentil-eating Shastriji defeated the kabab-eating, hard-drinking Ayub),” we were told. The music teacher composed a hilarious syapa (that loud Punjabi ritual where women mourners beat their breasts, sing praises of the one departed and lament the loss). The lines remain imprinted on my mind: ‘Kithe gaye Seato-Cento, mar gaye Cheeni yaar, haye main ki karan, mere tank hoye beemar, haye main ki karaan.’

This was mock wailing for Seato and Cento, the US-led defence alliances Pakistan had joined, for the Chinese, who failed to help Pakistan, and for the Patton tanks, which didn’t perform.

The school, run by the RSS, even bussed us all to Delhi one day in the early winter of 1965 to meet the Prime Minister, and, with the national mood still war-like, my mother gave me a half dozen pyjamas she had stitched for “wounded jawans” and a bag of homegrown spinach for Shastriji —remember, these were famine years and the Prime Minister was asking us to miss a meal a week and grow kitchen gardens. Shastriji accepted both with a smile and a pat on the cheek.

Much is known about the RSS and its thinking, but I will highlight three things from experience. One, our teaching involved a heavy emphasis on the freedom movement without mentioning any of its heroes except the revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh, Azad, Savarkar and Netaji.

It was evident that the RSS did not have many of its own, but was systematically co-opting the revolutionaries. Music classes were filled with the notes of ‘patriotic’ songs based on what was popular then.

Manna Dey’s immortal ‘Nirbal se ladayi balwan ki, ye kahani hai diye ki aur toofan ki (This is a ballad of the struggle of the feeble against the sturdy, the lamp against the tempest)’ was transformed into ‘England se ladayi Hindustan ki, yeh kahani hai amar balidan ki (This is a ballad of India’s struggle against England, of immortal sacrifice)’ , and the rest of the stanzas spoke of Indian sacrifice and British perf­idy — ‘Aisa chakkar chalaya, kiya dhan ka safaya, England ka khazana bharne laga, tabhi Bharat abhaga apni neend se jaaga, aayi yaad use bhi nij shaan ki’. Briefly translated, it goes: ‘Britain looted Indian wealth to fill its treasury, but finally unfortunate India woke up to fight back’. No, the Congress had nothing to do with this awakening.

Two, while there was condemnation of the English and the videshi, the only ones feared and disliked were the Muslims. There were stories of awful atrocities during the Partition, threats in Kashmir on the ‘Yudh Viram Rekha’, or Ceasefire Line, as the LoC was called pre-1971, and of the excesses of Muslim rulers over Hindus and Sikhs.

Aurangzeb was on the top of this demonology, one of the points made repeatedly being that he beheaded the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur. I was surprised by the absent reference to Aurangzeb’s grandfather Jahangir, who wasn’t such a nice guy either, like all the medieval rulers the world over, and who had had the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan Dev, killed through slow torture, scalding him on hot sheets and pouring hot sand over his body.

Why Aurangzeb was demonised for the same crime and Jahangir not quite so, I’ve been thinking. And the penny dropped as the arrival of the RSS for one of its “coordination” meetings with the government and the 50th anniversary of the 1965 war took my memory back to my Shishu Mandir. Aurangzeb killed the ninth guru because he had come to him pleading that he stop the forced conversion of Kashmir’s Hindus.

The fifth guru, on the other hand, had refused to take out from the Guru Granth Sahib verses he had incorporated from the Holy Quran. You know the difference between one’s sacrifice for a Hindu cause and the other’s for his insistence on incorporating wisdom from Islam into his own spiritual worldview.

And the third flowed almost naturally from it, the fear and loathing of Pakistan and, more importantly, the terminal linkage of the Indian Muslim with that nation. The classical RSS view of Indian Muslims was as a permanent fifth column. By now, there is an acceptance of the inevitability of India having a large Muslim population, but the thinking still is that it has to be ‘persuaded’ to live by ‘our’ rules.

And yet, just as a strange blend of deep suspicion and great admiration attaches to convent education, there is even greater admiration for the Muslim who passes the test of ‘patriotism’ and ‘Indianness’. That’s why Kalam — not just for the missiles he made, but also for his love of shloka and veena — becomes such a great hero, and the perfect antidote to Aurangzeb. Or Havildar Abdul Hamid, the greatest 1965 war hero. Lawyer-politician Mohammed Currimji Chagla was another then.

Vajpayee and Advani are rare RSS leaders to have outgrown this organisational mindset, to varying degrees, while remaining loyal to the RSS. That is why, under them, the BJP attracted and embraced so much non-RSS talent: Jaswant Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam and more. Advani also has the intellect to understand that this ideology won’t change. His formulation, that the key to improving Hindu-Muslim relations in India is to normalise India-Pakistan ties, is sound, but it got him into trouble. The RSS attacked him as a Jinnahite-come-lately. Secularists didn’t understand or appreciate this complexity either.

The current lot of BJP leaders are still swayamsevaks, and pupils of Shishu Mandir-Vidya Bharati at heart. That is why the clergy of Nagpur can establish itself in Delhi like the ‘Supreme Teacher’, extra-constitutional influence on the BJP just like the National Advisory Council was to the Congress.

See how it is now consulted on Air India sale and intervenes on the Flipkart-Walmart deal. Initially, I had believed that Narendra Modi, being a loyal swayamsevak but also a strong leader in his own right, will not allow his authority to be suborned to the ‘sangathan’, and that, if he is true to his political character, he will assert himself.

It is tough to predict guru-shishya fighting, but if they do, it will be a hell of a fight, I had said. It seems now that I did not get it right. Four years on, the Modi government is as much an RSS government as Vajpayee’s wasn’t. That’s why the talk of the RSS desperately courting Pranab Mukherjee for “legitimacy” is pompous nonsense. The country’s ruling establishment doesn’t need legitimacy from individuals. That will be put to test in 2019.

— A version of this article was published in Outlook magazine in September, 2015