Thursday, October 2, 2025

Gandhi vs. RSS: The Battle for India’s Soul

 


-Ramphal Kataria

Appropriating Gandhi: RSS and the Politics of Historical Revision

On Gandhi Jayanti 2025, Prime Minister Modi praised the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a century-long agent of “service to the nation.” This tribute raises critical questions about historical memory and ideological contrast. While Gandhi championed non-violence, pluralism, and constitutional morality, the RSS historically opposed the independence movement, admired fascist regimes, rejected the Indian Constitution, and fostered communal polarization. The assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, an RSS affiliate, underscores this antagonism. This op-ed critically examines the RSS’s ideological trajectory, highlighting its fascist inclinations, majoritarian agenda, and persistent clash with Gandhian principles. It argues that appropriating Gandhi’s legacy to validate the RSS is a deliberate effort to blur historical truths, and emphasizes the urgency of defending Gandhi’s vision of a just, inclusive, and pluralist India.

 

On Gandhi Jayanti this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), calling its hundred years a saga of “service to the nation.” For some, this was ritual homage. For others, it was a chilling political message: the attempt to cloak the RSS — once banned after Gandhi’s assassination — in the halo of Gandhi himself.

This is not just symbolic. It marks a deliberate effort to fuse Gandhi’s moral authority with the RSS’s contested legacy, ahead of its centenary in 2025 and the 2026 elections.

Gandhis India vs. Golwalkars India

For Gandhi, India was to be a federation of faiths. “I want it to be wholly tolerant, with its religions working side by side,” he wrote in Young India (1924). He insisted that Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Sikhs, and Hindus were all part of India’s civilisational fabric.

The RSS disagreed. Inspired by Savarkar’s Hindutva (1923), it defined the nation as a Hindu pitribhumi (fatherland) and punyabhumi (holy land). M. S. Golwalkar, its second chief, rejected the pluralist Constitution, writing in Bunch of Thoughts (1966): “It has absolutely nothing which can be said to have grown from the soil of this land.”

Where Gandhi saw India’s strength in diversity, Golwalkar saw danger in difference.

Fascist Echoes in Hindutva

The RSS’s fascination with European fascism is no secret. In We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), Golwalkar praised Hitler’s “race pride” and the “lesson” of purging Jews. Hedgewar and his circle admired Mussolini’s youth brigades. Discipline, uniformity, cultural nationalism — these were seen as templates for a Hindu rashtra.

That legacy is rarely spoken of today. Yet when the Prime Minister praises the RSS on Gandhi Jayanti, he sanitises not only its role in Gandhi’s assassination aftermath but also its ideological debt to fascist Europe.

Gandhis Assassin and the RSS

The RSS has long struggled with the shadow of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s killer. Godse was once an RSS member and later a leader of its ideological cousin, the Hindu Mahasabha. The Government of India banned the RSS in 1948 after the murder. The Kapur Commission later recorded the “atmosphere of hatred” against Gandhi fostered by Hindutva groups.

Today, BJP MPs and MLAs have openly praised Godse as a “true nationalist.” In 2019, Pragya Thakur, a BJP MP from Bhopal, called Godse a patriot. She later apologised under pressure, but the fact that she sits in Parliament is itself a symbol of Gandhi’s betrayal.

Rewriting Gandhi Out, Writing Savarkar In

The battle over Gandhi’s legacy is visible in classrooms. NCERT textbooks have quietly deleted references to Gandhi’s assassination, the role of Hindu extremists, and Godse’s ideology. Passages critical of the RSS have disappeared. At the same time, Savarkar has been elevated, portrayed as a misunderstood patriot rather than a polarising ideologue who openly rejected Gandhi’s politics.

This is no innocent curricular trimming. It is the deliberate hollowing out of Gandhi to make space for the RSS within the nationalist pantheon.

Gandhi as Statue, Not Spirit

The state still celebrates Gandhi — in statues, slogans, and Swachh Bharat logos. But these are emptied icons. His radical insistence on Hindu–Muslim harmony, his opposition to untouchability, his resistance to centralised industrialism, and above all his rejection of majoritarian nationalism — these core ideals are sidelined.

In their place stands a sanitised Gandhi, safe enough to be invoked by the same forces that once despised him.

Why Modis Tribute Matters

With the RSS’s centenary approaching in 2025, and elections looming, Modi’s message was strategic. By invoking Gandhi and RSS together, he attempts to erase the moral gulf between them. If Gandhi can be appropriated as a vague “patron saint of service,” then the RSS can claim to be the rightful heir to his legacy.

But this is historical falsehood. Gandhi died resisting precisely the ideology that the RSS embodied. He gave his life for Hindu–Muslim unity. Godse killed him for that.

The Stakes Today

This is not about the past. It is about the present. When students no longer read about Gandhi’s assassination, when MPs call his killer a patriot, when the Constitution is dismissed as “foreign,” and when Gandhi is invoked to legitimise those who once opposed him — India risks becoming unmoored from its pluralist foundations.

The battle between Gandhi’s India and Golwalkar’s India is not abstract. It is being waged in classrooms, legislatures, WhatsApp forwards, and public memory.

Conclusion: Choosing Gandhi, Not Hollowing Him Out

To remember Gandhi is not to recite platitudes. It is to defend his vision of non-violence, religious pluralism, and moral democracy against the encroachment of majoritarian authoritarianism.

Modi’s tribute to the RSS on Gandhi Jayanti was not respect. It was appropriation. To merge Gandhi with the RSS is not homage but betrayal. Gandhi’s ideals and the RSS’s ideology were not parallel lines — they were clashing currents. One gave us the Republic; the other distrusted it. One died for harmony; the other fostered its opposite.

On Gandhi Jayanti 2025, India must confront the choice: Will Gandhi remain a statue on a pedestal, emptied of meaning, or will his living spirit resist the slide into uniformity and authoritarianism?

That choice is not historical. It is the battle for India’s soul, unfolding before our eyes.

References

 

1.     Golwalkar, M. S. Bunch of Thoughts. 1966. Nagpur: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

2.     Golwalkar, M. S. We, or Our Nationhood Defined. 1939. Nagpur: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

3.     Kapur Commission Report. Inquiry into the Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, 1970.

4.     Organiser. Editorials: “National Flag” (1947), “Manu Rules Our Hearts” (1950). Nagpur: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

5.     Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics. London: C. Hurst & Co., 1996.

6.     Bhishikar, C. P. Biography of K. B. Hedgewar. Nagpur: Sahitya Akademi, 1980.

7.     India. Ministry of Home Affairs. Government Records on RSS Bans, 1947–1949. National Archives of India, New Delhi.

8.     Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. London: Pan Macmillan, 2007.

9.     Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India 1885–1947. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1983.

10.  Narasimhan, V. Hindu Nationalism and the RSS: History, Ideology, and Controversy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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