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10 - When Hindutva Performs Muslimness: Ethnographic Encounters with the Muslim Rashtriya Manch
- Edited by Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University, California, Srirupa Roy, Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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- Book:
- Saffron Republic
- Published online:
- 31 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2022, pp 219-250
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Summary
If we (Hindus) worship in the temple, he (the Muslim) would desecrate it. If we carry on bhajans and car festivals (rath yatras), that would irritate him. If we worship cow, he would like to eat it. If we glorify woman as a symbol of sacred motherhood, he would like to molest her. He was tooth and nail opposed to our way of life in all aspects – religious, cultural, social, etc. He had imbibed that hostility to the very core. (M. S. Golwalkar, second Supreme Commander of the RSS; 1966: 122)
Islam means security and peace, but today Islam is associated with violence, terror and fundamentalism. Is it not the responsibility of all of us to project the right face of Islam by tearing away this ‘naqab’ (mask) of terror, violence and fundamentalism? (K.S. Sudarshan, fifth Supreme Commander of the RSS; 24 December 2002 – Foundation Day of the Muslim Rashtriya Manch)
In 2002, India's premier Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), formed a new affiliate, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch (MRM, or Muslim National Forum), dedicated to the cause of Muslim outreach. Why would the RSS feel the need to form and control an affiliated organization of Indian Muslims? Who is the ideal Muslim citizen as imagined and configured by the RSS? And why would Indian Muslims want to be associated with the RSS?
This essay focuses on the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of Muslim outreach by the RSS. It draws upon my recent research/film documentation of the MRM, described ‘as an independent Muslim organization that receives guidance from the RSS’, and which was set up in 2002 by the RSS sarsanghchalak (supreme commander) K. S. Sudarshan.
I show that the establishment of the MRM has been influenced by goals of political agenda-setting, reframing, and legitimation where the RSS–BJP foregrounds the MRM to present versions of various anti-Muslim Hindu-majoritarian projects such as the Triple Talaq Bill – Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill – the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir, and the building of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. In recent months, the MRM has also been used to legitimize the anti-constitutional and discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and justify the arrests of young Muslim anti-CAA student activists over flimsy charges in the aftermath of the February 2020 Delhi riots.
3 - The Shakha, the Home and the World: Going beyond the Shakha and the RSS Family
- Edited by Amrita Basu, Amherst College, Massachusetts, Tanika Sarkar, Jawaharlal Nehru University
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- Book:
- Women, Gender and Religious Nationalism
- Published online:
- 12 August 2022
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2022, pp 77-124
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Summary
In this chapter, I draw upon a repository of moving images, recollections, photo fragments, notes, memories and stories from three sets of journeys that I made to Nagpur, Maharashtra, while filming the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (henceforth RSS or Sangh) in 1992 when the Bhartiya Janta Party (henceforth BJP) was in the opposition; in 2000 and 2001 when the RSS–BJP came to power under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee; and finally a third filming trip in 2016 when the RSS–BJP had become the force behind the state under the Narendra Modi regime. These trips have resulted in two films on the RSS – The Boy in the Branch (1993) and The Men in the Tree (2002) – and in contemporary research and ongoing visual documentation about different facets of the Sangh Parivar.
This chapter explores the role of the RSS shakha (branch) in reproducing and consolidating Hindu nationalist ideology. I argue for an extensive approach to the shakha that pays attention to both the daily structured activities that take place within the branch and the social connections that are forged by networks, spaces and milieus outside the shakha environment. I suggest that the key to the shakha's effectiveness lie in these linkages that are able to extend the ideology and the form of the shakha from the playground, the home and the family to the world at large.
The argument is developed in three sections. In the first section of the chapter ‘The Shakha Within’, I explore how the RSS shakha structures and reproduces social relations within Maharashtrian, Brahmin-dominated neighbourhoods in Nagpur. I show how the shakha indoctrinates Hindu boys and young men to the worldview of the RSS through an ingenious system involving play and storytelling, somatic ritual, discipline and bodily comportment and leisure-time socialization that extends beyond the ambit of the daily shakha meetings. I show how the shakha games and stories are adapted according to the age of the volunteer, and how these gradually become more ideological and physical over time with the eventual aim of creating loyal, action-oriented and militant bodies in the service of the RSS.