Hindu Nationalists

"Those who criticised me didn't know Modi is such a magician who also made them speak on important agendas. But all these discussions also told the country that only development can save the country. Even if they spoke about Gujarat negatively, they still spoke about development. There is only one medicine to all problems—development."

"Salutations to the martyrs who sacrificed their lives during the 2001 Parliament attack. Their bravery will never be forgotten."

"They can call me 'Neech'- Yes, I am from the poor section of society and will spend every moment of my life to work for the poor, Dalits, Tribals and OBC communities. They can keep their language, we will do our work."

"In 2014, one of the key agendas of the BJP’s election campaign was highlighting the dismal management of the Indian economy, ironically under an ‘economist’ prime minister and a ‘know-it-all’ finance minister. We all knew that the economy was in the doldrums but since we were not in government, we naturally did not have the complete details of the state of the economy. But, what we saw when we formed the government left us shocked! The state of the economy was much worse than expected. Things were terrible. Even the budget figures were suspicious. When all of this came to light, we had two options – to be driven by rājnīti (political considerations) or be guided by raṣṭranīti (putting the interests of India First)... rājnīti, or playing politics on the state of the economy in 2014, would have been extremely simple as well as politically advantageous for us. We had just won a historic election, so obviously the frenzy was at a different level. The Congress Party and their allies were in big trouble. Even for the media, it would have made news for months on end. On the other hand, there was raṣṭranīti, where more than politics and one-upmanship, reform was needed. Needless to say, we preferred to think of ‘India First’ instead of putting politics first. We did not want to push the issues under the carpet, but we were more interested in addressing the issue. We focused on reforming, strengthening and transforming the Indian economy. The details about the decay in the Indian economy were unbelievable. It had the potential to cause a crisis all over. In 2014, industry was leaving India. India was in the Fragile Five. Experts believed that the ‘I’ in BRICS would collapse. Public sentiment was that of disappointment and pessimism."

"If there is a loss to the country due to my mistake, please criticize me which you must… punish me… but just to oppose me or any other political rival, one shouldn’t forget national interest. This much intolerance is not good."

"How Galileo was nearly killed for opposing a belief but in India, when Charvak, an atheist, challenged the Vedas with logic and rejected the idea of reincarnation, he was given the title of ‘rishi’. Indian thought isn’t about tolerance, it’s about acceptance."

"Hindus accept no divisions between the believer and unbeliever. Every path leads to Him (God or Reality); there can be as many paths to Him as the number of human. Indeed, the prophetic tradition is alien to Hinduism. Narrowness of the spirit, peculiar to Semitic faiths, has been alien to India."

"The now fashionable expression "clash of civilizations" was already in use in India well before Samuel Huntington gave it currency in the West. Girilal Jain, for one, already used it in his analysis of the Ayodhya crisis in 1988-92."

"Journalists can reach the level of bureau chief or assistant editor but can never become chief editors. Editors who developed sympathies for Hindu cause, like Girilal Jain, were squeezed out his job as editor of Times Of India. This is just a very-very small glimpse of the vice-like grip these groups have over these two institutions of democracy."

"He dared you with Olympian majesty and ... tossed out his formulations with a merciless disregard for sentiment..."

"Western thinkers had merged liberalism and Marxism to produce the theory of democratic socialism and in the process emasculated both."

"Unlike Islamic fundamentalists, the BJP does not claim to possess a blueprint. It shall have to struggle to evolve an Indian approach to modern problems."

"The BJP is not a communal party; it cannot be, for the simple reason that Hindus have never been, and are not, a community in the accepted sense of the term. They represent an ancient civilization not known either to draw a boundary between the faithful and the faithless, the blessed and the damned, or to engage in heresy hunting and its counterpart, persecution of other faiths. Hindus are, in western terms, pagans."

""Such is the grip of the misrepresentation of Hindutva in anti-Muslim terms that (even) its proponents, including some leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party, themselves, speak of it defensively"."

"It is sheer dishonesty or naivete to suggest, as is being widely suggested these days, that Hinduism can admit of theocracy. That is a Muslim privilege which no one else can appropriate."

"In reality, however, Buddhisms and Jainism have been no more than movements within the larger body of Hinduism, not significantly different from Lingayats, Saktas or Bhaktas of more recent times.""

""In view of deliberate attempts in recent decades to project Buddhism and Jainism as separate religions, distinct from Hinduism, it would be in order to deal with them in passing. the attempts have clearly been motivated by the design to separate their followers from the parent body called Hinduism just as Sikhs have been to an extent. Though not to the same extent as in the case of Sikhs, the attempts have succeeded in as much as neo-Buddhists and at least some Jains have come to regard themselves as non-Hindus."

"Many Hindu intellectuals are just not able to comprehend the fact that there is no human aspiration or experience which lies outside the range of Hinduism; it provides for even demon-Gods. In contrast, all religions are in the nature of sects, though they cannot be so defined because of their insistence on their separateness and, indeed, hostility to Hinduism"

"It speaks for the spirit animating the rulers of independent India that even the roads named after Curzon and Hastings in New Delhi have been renamed."

"Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the greatest benefactor of hindus in modern times, if he was not a hindu in disguise."

"But, he was a bhakt not of Ram in his totality, that is of Ram the warrior also, but of Ram as Purushottam Purusha, that is, of Ram who set the ideal for ethical life."

"I could find no explanation worthy of the Mahatma for his decision to accept leadership of the khilafat movement. The decision, it seemed to me, revealed the great man's proverbial Achilles' heel."

"As to Jains being Hindu dissenters, and, therefore governable by Hindu law, we are not told this date of secession [...] Jainism certainly has a longer history than is consistent with its being a creed of dissenters from Hinduism."

"Over time, apparent misunderstandings have arisen over the origins of Jainism and relationship with its sister religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. There has been an ongoing debate between Jainism and Vedic Hinduism as to which revelation preceded the other. What is historically known is that there was a tradition along with Vedic Hinduism known as Sramana Dharma. Essentially, the sramana tradition included in its fold, the Jain and Buddhist traditions, which disagreed with the eternality of the Vedas, the needs for ritual sacrifices and the supremacy of the Brahmins."

"While a proper discussion of this question must wait, I would wish to add in conclusion that V.P. Singh and Mulayam Singh have rendered a yeoman's service to the cause of Hindu Rashtra, the former by splitting the secularist forces in the political realm, and the latter by showing Hindus how contemptuous and brutal the Indian state can be in its treatment of them."

"As a group, the secularists, especially the Leftists, have not summoned the courage to insist that in order to ensure the survival of the secular India state, Muslims should accept one common civil code, and that Article 370 of the Constitution, which concedes special rights to Jammu and Kashmir mainly because it is a Muslim-majority state, should be scrapped... Even so I find it extraordinary that those who call themselves modernizers and secularists-the two terms are interchangeable-should shirk the logic of their philosophy of life."

"As far as I know, Nehru never defined secularism in its proper European and historical context."

"A number of Indians have tried to define secularism as sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions). I cannot say whether they have been naive or clever in doing so. But the fact remains that secularism cannot admit of such an interpretation. In fact, orthodox Muslims are quite justified in regarding it as irreligious. Moreover, dharma cannot be defined as religion which is a Semitic concept and applies only to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Hinduism is not a religion in that sense; nor are Jainism and Buddhism, or for that matter, Taoism and Confucianism."

"Hindu tolerance, it seems, is another name for Hindu cowardice."

"The Semitic spirit is intolerant and insistent on the pursuit of a particular course, whereas the Indian spirits is a broadminded and tolerant one. To say therefore that Ram and Rahim are the same is, in my opinion, a form of escapism or make-believe.... There is no concept, for example, in Hinduism of kafir. You cannot be a kafir in Hinduism. You do not cease to be a Hindu whatever you do, unless you choose to get converted to another religion. You can be a Buddhist and a Hindu at the same time, not only in a social sense but also in religious terms."

"'These protagonists of separatism argue that these 'tribals' worship things like trees, stones and serpents. Therefore they are 'animists' and cannot be called 'Hindus'. Now this is something which only an ignoramus who does not know the ABC of Hinduism will say. (..) Do not the Hindus all over the country worship the tree? Tulasi, bilva, ashwattha are all sacred to the Hindu. (...) The worship of Nâg, the cobra, is prevalent throughout our country. (...) Then, should we term all these devotees and worshippers as 'animists' and declare them as non-Hindus?'"

"Guruji Golwalkar was the second head of the RSS after Hedgewar, who founded the organization in 1925. He was a mild mannered schoolteacher with a philosophical bent of mind. His main work is a Bunch of Thoughts, which is a collection put together from his many talks and articles. In it I found a clear analysis of the social problems of Hinduism and of modern India with both practical and spiritual solutions to the problems. Golwalkar gave a clear critique of culture showing the dangers of materialism, communism and missionary religions and suggested a dharmic alternative based upon Hindu and yogic teachings. The book was like an application of the thought of Vivekananda and Aurobindo to the social sphere. I was also surprised to know that such a deep and flexible approach was branded as fundamentalist by leftists in India."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"Without dynamic conquering spirit, even devotion to a divine cause will be of little avail In this hard world which is an arena for trial of strength with brute forces, mere goodness or noble virtues will not hold the field for a single moment. That is why we find that in spite of all the piety, goodness and devotion to God all through the past thousand years, we were trampled under the feet by foreign aggressors who, though total strangers to goodness and virtue, had a passion for heroic action and organised effort."

"Conversion of Hindus into other religions is dangerous to the security of the nation and the country. It is therefore necessary to put a stop to it. It is by exploitation of poverty, illiteracy and ignorance, offering of inducement and by deceptive tactics that people are converted. It is but right that this unjust activity is prohibited. It is a duty we have to discharge towards protecting our brethren in ignorance and poverty."

"It has been the tragic lesson of the history of many a country in the world that the hostile elements within the country pose a far greater menace to national security than aggressors from outside. Is it true that all pro-Pakistani elements have gone away to Pakistan? It was the Muslims in Hindu majority provinces led by U.P. who provided the spearhead for the movement for Pakistan right from the beginning. And they have remained solidly here even after Partition. In those elections Muslim League had contested making the creation of Pakistan its election plank. The Congress also had set up some Muslim candidates all over the country. But at almost every such place, Muslims voted for the Muslim League candidates and the Muslim candidates of Congress were utterly routed. NWFP was an exception. It only means that all the crores of Muslims who are here even now, had en bloc voted for Pakistan. Have those who remained here changed at least after that? Has their old hostility and murderous mood, which resulted in widespread riots, looting, arson, raping and all sorts of orgies on an unprecedented scale in 1946-47, come to a halt at least now? It would be suicidal to delude ourselves into believing that they have turned patriots overnight after the creation of Pakistan. On the contrary, the Muslim menace has increased a hundred fold by the creation of Pakistan which has become a springboard for all their future aggressive designs on our country."

"[Given the Hindu-tribal continuity, Guru Golwalkar proposed that for the integration of tribals and untouchables, one and the same formula applies:] 'They can be given yajñopavîta (...) They should be given equal rights and footings in the matter of religious rights, in temple worship, in the study of Vedas, and in general, in all our social and religious affairs. This is the only right solution for all the problems of casteism found nowadays in our Hindu society.'"

"Many workers appear to take a delight in blaming others for all ills. Some may put the blame on the political perversities, others on the aggressive activities of the Christians or Muslims and such other faiths. Let our workers keep their minds free from such tendencies and work for our people and our Dharma in the right spirit, lend a helping hand to all our brethren who need help and strive to relieve distress wherever we see it. In this service no distinction should be made between man and man. We have to serve all, be he a Christian or a Muslim or a human being of any other persuasion; for, calamities, distress and misfortunes make no such distinction but afflict all alike. And in serving to relieve the sufferings of man let it not be in a spirit of condescension or mere compassion but as devoted worship of the Lord abiding in the heart of all beings, in the true spirit of our dharma of surrendering our all in the humble service of Him who is Father, Mother, Brother, Friend and Everything to us all. And may our actions succeed in bringing out the Glory and Effulgence of our Sanatana-Eternal - Dharma."

"The Christians committed all sorts of atrocities on the Jews by giving them the label “Killers of Christ”. Hitler is not an exception but a culmination of the 2000-year long oppression of the Jews by the Christians."

"By showing that the Hindus are mere upstarts and squatters on the land (as they themselves are in America, Australia and other places!), they can set up their own claim. For then neither the Hindus nor the Europeans are indigenous and as to who should possess this land becomes merely a matter of superior might. ... No, the European... will never cease duping us into believing that we have no more right to this land than he has."

"(...) in order to confer their lost Nationality upon exiled Jews, the British with the help of the League of Nations began to rehabilitate the old Hebrew country, Palestine, with its long lost children. The Jews had maintained their race, religion, culture and language; and all they wanted was their natural territory to complete their Nationality. The reconstruction of the Hebrew Nation on Palestine is just an affirmation of the fact that Country, Race, Religion, Culture and Language must exist unequivocally together to form the Nation idea."

"The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture [...] or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment - not even citizen's rights."

"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic Races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

"Most secularists pretend not to know [the] unambiguous position of Savarkar’s (in many cases, they really don’t know, for Hindu-baiting is usually done without reference to primary sources). Likewise, Savarkar’s plea for caste intermarriage to promote the oneness of Hindu society is usually ignored in order to keep up the pretence that he was a reactionary on caste, an “upper-caste racist” (as Gyan Pandey puts it), and what not. There are no limits to secularist dishonesty... [It] is just another case of secularist justice: Hindu are damned if they do, damned if they don’t."

"Right from his early days in the Andamans, Vinayak encouraged people to speak in Hindi....Till then, government records were maintained in Urdu, and even Hindi was written in the Persian script. Vinayak strongly advocated the implementation of the Devanagari script as it was the one in which the oldest language of the subcontinent, Sanskrit, was written. During his interactions with local merchants in his capacity as the foreman of oil collections, Vinayak passed this zeal on to them too. Through his influence, a girls’ school that was started in the Andamans began a compulsory teaching of Hindi in the Devanagari script."