Elst on M. S. Golwalkar

“When Hindu revivalist sources are quoted at all, preference is given to sources or statements which put the movement in a bad light. The most frequently quoted Hindu nationalist publication in the secondary literature is RSS leader Guru Golwalkar's We, our Nationhood Defined, a rambling pamphlet written in 1938, a juvenile mistake which Golwalkar himself withdrew from circulation in 1948, and which the vast majority of living Hindu nationalists has never read. Hindutva-watchers just can't get enough of it: the majority of Golwalkar quotations in scholarly literature is taken from that pamphlet, though he was not the RSS supremo at the time (while his numerous later statements made when he was, are given much less attention) and though he himself later repudiated it.”

“He is denounced as a fascist on the basis of two passages in a single booklet written at the start of his career. By such criteria, most famous people who are quoted as authorities on moral and political matters could be crucified on a handful of less felicitous lines in their complete works. However, this unfair treatment happens to be prevalent and is partly the result of the poor defence Golwalkar's followers have given him in the opinion-making domain. Public figures and social movements have to live in the real world and take the sheer facts of the power equation in the public sphere into account. As long as Golwalkar has not been disentangled from this identification with the worst handful of lines in his repertoire, it is most unwise and self-destructive to be seen glorifying him. ... According to the Times of India's Akshaya Mukul (9 March 2006), "We is considered the basic charter of Sangh". Whether this is yet another Marxist lie or just an instance of the stark ignorance of the present generations of journalists, I don't know, but the claim is at any rate untrue. .... And more importantly for us today, the book hasn't played any such role since at least 1948, when the remaining stock of its fourth print was confiscated during the crackdown on all Hindutva forces after the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. The book was never reprinted after that, so that over 99% of all Sangh activists now alive have never even seen a copy. ... Indeed, it was Golwalkar himself who vetoed any further reprints of We. The late K.R. Malkani and other RSS elders told me that Guruji had mused about the book's "immaturity". ... The quotes are so popular and by now worn out precisely because they are not representative for RSS thought. In my interviews and conversations with hundreds of Sangh leaders and activists, including in confidential settings where they let their guard down, I have never ever heard anyone cite Golwalkar's "race pride" quote nor make any statement to the same effect. If it were representative, then certainly it shouldn't be difficult to find more recent statements to the same effect. To be sure, attempts have been made to find or rather to fabricate such more recent RSS statements, vide the false presentation of a Gujarat textbook issued under Congress rule as a BJP textbook and then claiming, equally falsely, that it discussed Nazism without mentioning the Holocaust. Such attempts do show in passing how the Marxists realize that their single piece of evidence for "Hindu fascism", even if it had been strong in itself, is a bit dated and in need of being supplemented with more recent expressions of the same ideological tendency.”

“The image of M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73) has posthumously been narrowed down to just two infelicitous and embarrassing quotations from his first book, one that he himself had repudiated early in his career as RSS leader. If read judiciously and within their context, they are by far not as incriminating as various anti-Hindu polemicists would like to have us believe. In particular, contrary to the common allegation, they do not prove that Golwalkar was a Nazi sympathizer, nor that he had mass murder in mind as the solution for the problems Hindu society experienced with its Muslim and Christian minorities. So, clearly the RSS could defuse the negative-publicity bomb which its enemies claim to have dug up from We, if only it had the intellectual wherewithal to properly analyze the text and then, if this proves to be the right course, to clearly disown specifically what must be disowned. But instead it is satisfied to bury the book, refusing to discuss its contents or even to make it available to readers of Golwalkar's "complete works". Like in decades past, it still prefers to look the other way, intimidated by the total control of the mediatic and intellectual domain by India's anti-Hindu coalition of Islamic, Christian and Marxist polemicists. As so often, it is playing by the rules its enemies have imposed rather than changing the power equation through a sincere intellectual effort. It is a welcome development that Golwalkar's followers finally acknowledge that their Guruji has committed mistakes too. But whatever his faults, shouldn't they resolve that he deserved better than to be censored? Wouldn't they render a better service to his memory as well as to the Hindu cause by subjecting his book to a close and frank reading rather than to the silent treatment?”

“The single oftest-quoted Hindutva statement in the whole Hindutva-watching literature is definitely the [the one] from Golwalkar's We... Till today, and even in academic publications, it is very common to see the anti-BJP rhetoric built entirely on these few sentences in Golwalkar's pamphlet of more than sixty years ago.... That alleged Golwalkar quotations turn out to be excerpted from the invective of his critics, is symptomatic of Hindutva-watching in general: first-hand information is routinely spurned in favour of hostile second-hand claims made by unscrupled commentators. In most journalistic and academic publications on Hindutva, the number of direct quotations is tiny in comparison with quotations from secondary, hostile sources.”

“Trying to corner an opponent with an unfortunate but peripheral quotation from his own past works is considered as intellectually dishonest and just not sportsmanlike. How radically different is the treatment which the Hindutva leader Guru Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar gets. In his case, his mature writings are quoted only rarely as compared with his first booklet, We... By contrast, the doctrine of Integral Humanism, formulated by BJS ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya in 1965, which is the official ideology of the BJP, and to which every BJP member has to swear allegiance, is not even mentioned in the vast majority of publications on Hindutva... Due to academic and mediatic power equations, so many dirty tricks with which you would never get away in a normal debate, are standard practice in writings and TV documentaries on Hindutva... The impression of his Nazi connection was created by intentionally dishonest methods, essentially by misinforming the readership through selective quoting, and by falsely presenting secondary comment as primary information.”

“In articles of that category, used unquestioningly as source in the majority of introductions to Hindu Nationalism, the targeted Golwalkar book would ... [be] his slim maiden volume, We, Our Nationhood Defined (1939). That attempt at ideological contemplation of the political challenges before Hindu society has earned notoriety because of two overquoted passages... [I] found this common allegation, present in every introductory text on Hindutva, totally wanting.... This oft-quoted passage is irrelevant for the contemporary debates, except to show to what mendaciousness secularists and foreign India-watchers can stoop...”