BJP-RSS Declare Holy War Against Kerala

The RSS/BJP rulers of India have finally woken up against violence! You are grossly mistaken if you believe that they are seeking forgiveness for the large-scale killing/raping/maiming/robbing people of the minorities, specially Muslims and Christians, in 1992-93 (nation-wide carnage of Muslims before and after demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya), 1998 (widespread violence against Christians in Gujarat), 2002 (carnage of Muslims in Gujarat) and Kandhamal, Odisha violence of 2007-08 (cleansing of Christians in the area). The RSS/BJP rulers have not expressed their intention of discarding or checking the present spate of violence against minorities in the name of the cow, Love-Jihad, ghar wapsi (forcible conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism) and allegiance to Hindutva.

There has been no respite in violence against Dalits too. In fact, in the last three years incidents of violence against Dalits have galloped by around 300 per cent. The casteist, criminal and patri-archal elements are having a free run in inflicting violence against women. The same is the fate of peasantry, working class, students and intellec-tuals. Never in the history of India’s indepen-dence, these classes were subjected to such brutal denigration and repression in the name of Bharat Mata.

But it is only in Kerala where violence perpetrated by the CPM Government of the State against the RSS/BJP cadres that is running amok; this has been labelled as ‘red terror’. The rulers at the Centre, flying the banner of Hindutva, have declared war against the Kerala Government by launching a strident Jana Raksha Yatra. It is not that only the CPM Government is under attack. The whole of the Kerala society, its ethos and culture are under attack. The national leadership of the RSS/BJP has descended on Kerala to fight the Left, to be specific, the CPM, for perpetrating violence against the anti-national CPM. The UP Chief Minister, Mahant Yogi Adityanath, who has many criminal cases pending against him in UP courts, is leading the Hindutva juggernaut. According to Adityanath, the Left has turned the State into a factory of “jihadi terrorism” which should be a matter of serious concern for India as a whole. To quote him, “In the guise of secularism, the CPM has turned Kerala into a hub of jihadi terror. It must be rejected and for that we have come here to create public consciousness”.

No proof is offered in support of the serious allegations against Kerala and its people. Even the Home Ministry of India, which is under the charge of Adityanath’s Hindutva co-traveller, Rajnath Singh, and other national intelligence agencies like the NIA, CBI and IB under him, have not prepared any such dossier. If this was so the CPM Government would have been dismissed long ago by the Modi Government. But the denigration of Kerala publicly continues. In any other country, the person/s making such wild allegations would have been hauled up by the courts and deposited in the safe custody of jails.

Despite this smoke-screen, the Hindutva leadership is unable to hide its real design. Adityanath, as the newly surcharged Hindutva icon, spilled the beans. He declared that in Kerala “the red will turn saffron soon”. This would be done by converting Kerala into a “Sanatan Hindu Rashtra”. The Left would be cleansed as Adi Shankaracharya did in the 8th century by cleansing the opponents. According to Adityanath, “When the country’s religion and culture was threatened by foreign invaders, Shankaracharya launched the movement for the protection of the Hindu religion. Today, the time has come to replicate the Shankaracharya movement and Hindu culture must be protected and preserved in Kerala.” 

By foreign invaders Adityanath must have meant Buddhism and Jainism (as in that period there were no Muslim or Christian ‘invaders’) and what Shankaracharya’s army did to these religions has been chronicled by the two prominent saints of Hinduism. According to Dayanand Sarswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, “For ten years he (Adi Shankaracharya) toured all over the country, refuted Jainism and advocated the Vedic religion. All the broken images that are now-a-days dug out of the earth were broken in the time of Shankara, whilst those that are found whole here and there under the ground had been buried by the Jainis for fear of their being broken (by those who had renounced Jainism).”1

Swami Vivekananda, while describing the cleansing of Buddhism from India, wrote: “The temple of Jagannath is an old Buddhistic temple. We took this and others over and re-Hinduised them. We shall have to do many things like that yet.”2

It is surprising that the Hindutva bandwagon does not organise anti-beef yatra in Kerala where beef is a secular diet. It does not launch any movement for banning cow-slaughter in the State. This only shows its hypocrisy. The issue of Islamic jehad and the Left having a foreign ideology, are being used as the RSS feels that after Gujarat it is Kerala which could be the laboratory of Hindutva as it has substantial presence of minorities.

It should not surprise anybody that the RSS, basically representing hegemonic Brahamanism of North India, historically hated Keralite Hindus and treated them as belonging to an inferior race. M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS supremo, was invited to address the students of the School of Social Science of Gujarat University on December 17, 1960. In his address, while underlying his firm belief in the Race Theory, he touched upon the issue of cross-breeding of human beings in the Indian Hindu society in history. He said:

“Today experiments in cross-breeding are made only on animals. But the courage to make such experiments on human beings is not shown even by the so-called modern scientists of today. If some human cross-breeding is seen today it is the result not of scientific experiments but of carnal lust. Now let us see the experiments our ancestors made in this sphere. In an effort to better the human species through cross-breeding, the Namboodri Brahamanas of the North were settled in Kerala and a rule was laid down that the eldest son of a Namboodri family could marry only the daughter of Vaishya, Kshatriya or Shudra communities of Kerala. Another still more courageous rule was that the first off-spring of a married woman of any class must be fathered by a Namboodri Brahman and then she could beget children by her husband. Today this experiment will be called adultery but it was not so, as it was limited to the first child.”3

The above statement of Golwalkar is highly worrying in many respects. Firstly, it proves that Golwalkar believed that India had a superior Race or breed and also an inferior Race which needed to be improved through cross-breeding. Secondly, a more worrying aspect was his belief that Brahmanas of the North (India), and specially Namboodri Brahmanas, belonged to a superior Race. Due to this quality, Namboodri Brahamanas were sent from the North to Kerala to improve the breed of inferior Hindus there. Interestingly, this was being argued by a person who claimed to uphold the unity of Hindus the world over. Thirdly, Golwalkar as a male chauvinist believed that only a Namboodri Brahmana male, belonging to a superior Race from the North, could improve the inferior human Race from the South. For him, wombs of Kerala’s Hindu women enjoyed no sanctity and were simply objects of improving the breed through intercourse with the Namboodri Brahamanas who in no way were related to them. Thus, Golwalkar was, in fact, confirming the allegation that in the past the male-dominated high caste society forced newly-wedded women of other castes to pass their first nights by sleeping with superior caste males.

It is surprising that despite holding such ideas, which openly denigrated the Hindu women and society of Kerala, the RSS has been able to create pockets of influence in Kerala. The organisation, which shamelessly denigrated the Hindus of Kerala, is presenting itself as the saviour of the Hindus of Kerala.

There is no doubt that some parts of Kerala are in the grip of horrible political violence. It is a sad scenario for a State which is known for its total literacy, culture, finest gender ratio and all-inclusiveness. The Hindutva leaders present violence as one-sided: only its cadres being targeted. This is not true. According to police records accessed by journalist Sneha Mary Koshy of NDTV, “172 political murders have occurred since 2000. Of these, the RSS and the BJP have together lost 65 party workers, while 85 of the CPI-M’s workers have been killed. 11 activists each of the Congress and the IUML have also been killed in this period.”4 The data on killings clearly shows that since the year 2000, the BJP/RSS’s sole victimhood is not supported by facts. But one unfortunate aspect of these killings is that almost all victims hailed from poor families.

In fact, it was not long ago that Golwalkar, the most prominent ideologue of the RSS who has been described as the ‘guru of hate’ in an essay titled ‘Internal Threats’, identified three sections of Indians as ‘Internal Threats’ who needed to be neutralised. Muslims, Christians and Communists were declared to be ‘Internal Threats’ number ONE, TWO and THREE respectively.5 Muslims and Christians have been perennial targets of the Hindutva storm troopers for being ‘outsiders’ and it is the turn of the Communists now. Thus the Guru wrote: “Socialism is not a product of this soil. It is not in our blood and tradition. It has absolutely nothing to do with the traditions and ideal of thousands of years of our national life.”6

This semi-literate (a status worst then being illiterate) Guru thus denigrated hundreds of great martyrs of India, namely, Bhagat Singh, Chandershekhar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Ashfaqullah Khan who sacrificed their lives raising the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ and dream of building a Socialist India. Golwalkar, while describing Socialism as an alien ideology, insults even Swami Vivekananda who declared: “I am a socialist not because I think it is a perfect system, but half a loaf is better than no bread” and described Socialism “as the vanguard of the social revolution that is to follow”.

The political violence in parts of Kerala is not an aberration but part of the Hindutva strategy of hegemony over those parts of India where ‘other’ kind of Hindus reside. The Left, instead of falling into the Hindutva game-plan of tit for tat, must concentrate on organising all sections of the Kerala population against the anti-national plan of the “Sanatan Hindu Rashtra” where casteism, racism, inequality and the Manu Code will thrive.

Endnotes

1. Swami Dayanand Sarswati, Satyarth Prakash, p. 347.

2. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol 3, Advaita Ashram, Calcutta, p. 264.

3. M. S. Golwalkar, cited in Organiser, January 2, 1961.

4. http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-many-political-murders-have-taken-place-kerala-last-17-years-what-numbers-say-66354

5. M.S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Sahitya Sindhu, Bangalore, 1996, pp. 176-201.

6. Ibid., p. 200.

Shamsul Islam, a well-known theatre personality, is a former Associate Professor (now retired), Department of Political Science, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. For some of the author’s writings in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu and Gujarati use the following link: http/du-in.academia.edu/Shamsullslam