RSS is retrogressive but not a terrorist outfit

Even as it is inaccurate and untrue, if not unfair, to call Binayak Sen a Maoist rebel who wants to overthrow the Indian state through violence, it is also inaccurate and untrue to call the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) a terrorist organisation.

For the people who defend Sen against the calumny heaped on him by the state and the right-wingers, it becomes morally obligatory to defend the RSS as a right-wing, retrogressive but not a terrorist organisation. Similarly, those who defend the RSS also have to speak by the same token of principled stand to defend Sen as a leftist who is not a terrorist. But the ideological divisions we see all round with regard to Sen and RSS are stark, and facts be damned.

The fact that the RSS is a right-wing extremist but not a terrorist organisation does not mean that there are no Hindu terrorists, as there are Muslim terrorists. Muslims organisations like Jamaat-e-Hind or Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind can be dubbed right-wing but not extremist. In the case of the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the investigation agencies failed to establish beyond doubt the linkages between individuals who committed acts of terror and those who expressed belief in terror acts even though they may not have been personally involved.

It is true that some people should have doubts about the RSS’ pacifist credentials because its members are known to be involved in acts of violence, especially communal riots and arson. These acts cannot be legally proved, not just against the cadres of the RSS, but also political parties and minority organisations. This may be called terrorism but that would be blurring the differences between acts of violence, and causing confusion.

For example, the killing of a person or a group of persons cannot be called genocide however heinous the killing was. There is, of course, the issue of the RSS ‘shakha’, which is seen in sinister light by all those who hate, and they have a right to hate too (a democratic right), the RSS. But the ‘shakha’ is not actually a terrorist camp. It is just a juvenile attempt at being militarily prepared; to instil discipline and to supposedly make non-martial people, martial. So the ‘shakha’ in the eyes of the objective observer is a subject of mirth rather than terror.

Does it prove there are no Hindu terrorists? It does not. And it is more likely than not that Hindu terrorists must be admirers of the RSS or even derive inspiration from it. But there is need to be legally scrupulous in these matters. The secular credentials of the anti-RSS people will be strengthened if they observe this rule. The problem with the RSS is that it believes in the secular creed of nationalism but it has no understanding or respect for religion proper as such. The RSS’ religion is that of blinkered nationalism.

The RSS is inferior in many ways to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which has a steadfast ideology rooted in Islam — however wrong it may be in its interpretation of Islam — and it has a clear political programme as well. The RSS dare not enter politics and operates surreptitiously through the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Even its claim to be a mere cultural organisation — and it has no understanding or appreciation for anything to do with the rich Indian culture — is false. There is delectable irony in the fact that the people who seem to lend substance and respectability of some kind to the RSS, which it does not deserve, are the ardent secularists, especially those from the Congress.