In 1946, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s direct action day call catalysed large-scale conflagrations in Bengal, the fires of which would soon be carried across to the other parts of India by the headwinds of communal hatred that had been roiling the country in the run-up to the Partition. As religious hostilities tore India apart, MS Golwalkar, the monkish, bespectacled leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), saw an opportunity to reinvigorate the Hindu revivalist organisation he had been meticulously chiselling into shape as its second sarsanghchalak.

Six years before this episode, the RSS had faced a crucial setback following the British government’s decision to enact the Defence of India Act, the provisions of which restricted the public displays of militarism in India as imperial Britain navigated the travails of the Second World War. This had spelled doom for the organisation which largely drew upon the tenets of European fascist movements, and even adopted their outward trappings: Uniformed cadre, goose-stepping, and arms training.

As the British prepared to depart from India, the rigours of the 1940 law were loosened. Having led a rather circumspect life until that point, the RSS suddenly found its feet and reasserted itself with vengeance. Its cadre fanned out into parts of the United Provinces (modern-day Uttar Pradesh), Punjab and Delhi, organising training programs, military drills, conscriptions and, in the process, becoming the carriers for anti-Muslim feelings surging through the country.

Role in partition violence

Not only was Golwalkar – the moving spirit behind this mobilisation – “pushing the RSS into new areas, he was also shaping the battlefield in the strategically important region of the national capital” ahead of the Partition, writes DK Jha in his new book The Myth Behind The Man, The Man Behind the Machine, a comprehensive new biography of the Golwalkar.

Jha’s work illuminates the life of Golwalkar in a new light, laboriously picking out the facts from the legends built around him. The book shepherds the narrative through Golwalkar’s years as a laboratory assistant at Banaras Hindu University, a temporary job he had landed on account of his liaisons with the theosophical society of Annie Besant.

The author walks the readers through the setbacks Golwalkar faced, failing to win a scholarship to Europe and having an unsuccessful career as a lawyer before he joined the Ramakrishna Mission as a monk at its Sargachi ashram in Bengal. It is from this point that Golwalkar rose to prominence after translating some major anti-Muslim treatises written by influential Hindu nationalist leaders of that time. In 1938, Golwalkar concretised his own ideas in We, or Our Nationhood Defined, a highly controversial tract that theorised the same solution to the “minority problem” of India that Jews had been dealt with in Germany.

Jha adds new perspectives to Golwalkar’s duplicity that defined his rhetoric and actions: He denigrated Gandhi’s non-violent strategies at one point, but later appeared to have endorsed them when he believed this would get him out of jail. He steered away from India’s freedom struggle for the most part and continued to pay homage to saffron flags (as opposed to the tricolour), except when he wanted to desperately gain legitimacy in the aftermath of the 1962 Sino-India war. He wrote his anti-Muslim treatise with verve and conviction. But later, when his works were subjected to critical reexamination, he denied having written them at all.

More importantly, in the case of the Partition-related violence in Delhi, the book unpacks how the carnage was not just fuelled by anger about the persecution of Hindu refugees arriving from the parts of newly-created Pakistan, but also about the systematic conspiracy of right-wing groups, indulging as they were in wide-spread polarisation, provocation, arms-distribution and mobilisation that resulted in the communal bloodletting. In the aftermath of the riots, writes Jha, Golwalkar even congratulated the Hindus in the areas where Muslims were most harmed.

An expanding influence

The book also takes the readers through the role played by Vallabhbhai Patel, who was the Home Minister at the time. “Patel flitted evasively on the issue of the Sangh’s role in the communal trouble in Delhi…he baulked at the issue of the Sangh’s involvement in these disturbances,” writes Jha. “The position that he took was rather strange, particularly because Delhi Police, which worked directly under his supervision, had sufficient information about the role of RSS” in the Delhi riots.

Facing censure from Mahatma Gandhi, however, Golwalkar retreated temporarily from his role as an instigator. But soon he resumed his activities in other regions like western UP, where senior police officer BBL Jaitley went on to unearth a massive conspiracy to “create a communal holocaust” as he dug out trunks “crammed with blueprints of great accuracy and professionalism of every town and village, marking out Muslim localities.” The material was recovered from the RSS office and bore tell-tale signs of Golwalkar’s involvement.

Jha’s magisterial work also reveals how the RSS leveraged support from the Hindu princes of British India, calling them a “bedrock of Hindu power.” It was mostly Hindu ascetics who helped the RSS gain a foothold in the princely states. In the case of Jammu and Kashmir, for example, it was Swami Sant Dev, a spiritual guru close to the Dogra king. Sant Dev encouraged the proliferation of RSS branches across the Jammu plains.

As Jha writes, Golwalkar’s hagiographers in the RSS would go on to forge stories of him trying to convince the maharaja to abandon the demand for an independent Kashmir and merge with India. But Jha throws light on how the RSS members increasingly tried to disrupt the influence of Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah, whom Nehru had banked on to secure Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India.

Letters written by Nehru, and amply cited by Jha, reveal how the RSS was dispatching its members to support the maharaja in his campaign against Muslims in the Jammu region, which caused India’s first Prime Minister to grow enraged as he feared that killings of Jammu Muslims would impact India’s case at the United Nations.

Gandhi upset the Hindutva applecart

The rising influence of Gandhi and his pitch for communal concord, however, caused Golwalkar to grow anxious. An AICC resolution was passed the same year, describing private armies, including the RSS as a “menace” to the spirit of India’s freedom struggle.

This also made the balance of power pivot away from Patel and in favour of Nehru. For Golwalkar, who had sought to capitalise on the feelings of loss, grief and pain among the Sikh and Hindu refugees, Gandhi’s rising profile and his emphasis on religious harmony through his fast-unto-death campaigns constituted a mortal blow on his most cherished ideal of carving out a Hindu Rashtra as enunciated in We, or Our Nationhood Defined.

Growing restless, some members of right-wing groups started to plot assassinations of senior Congress leaders. One such plot led to Gandhi’s assassination. “Rapidly, the tide turned,” Jha writes. “In one stroke, public opinion took a great swing away from the champions of a Hindu Rashtra.”

Golwalkar resorted to the same U-turn here that had characterised his politics for the most part. Spooked by the mounting public anger, he issued a press release terming the killing an “appalling tragedy” and offered a “salutation to the revered departed soul.” However, those protestations failed to absolve Golwalkar and he faced arrest. His organisation was also banned. Although Golwalkar was released within months, he was later rearrested.

Jha also offers an interesting account of how Patel attempted to rehabilitate the image of the RSS by trying to convince Nehru that the group had undergone a “required transformation.” As Jha writes, Patel played a “proactive role” in getting the ban on the RSS lifted. He even responded to Golwalkar’s letter after his second release, expressing “how much happiness I have felt after revoking the ban”.

With the first general election in 1951 establishing Nehru’s sway and secularism being established as the guiding force, Golwalkar sensed his project was running aground. This condition was to prevail for much of the country’s political history, barring a few occasions, and continued to weigh down on the myriad directions in which the Hindu nationalism – as embodied by Golwalkar – tried to diversify through the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Until 2014, when the ideals enshrined in Golwalkar’s We or Our Nationhood got a fresh lease of life.

Shakir Mir is a journalist based in Srinagar.

Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, The Man Behind the Machine, Dhirendra K Jha, Simon and Schuster India.