Let the RSS chief walk the talk

It is not enough to say that Muslims have nothing to fear from Hindus - Bhagwat needs to call out hate speeches against the minority community

In his speech made on the occasion of Vijayadashami last week, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat had sought to allay the fears of Muslims who felt that the Sangh and other Hindutva groups were a danger to their existence in India. He said that this was pure misinformation, that “this is neither the nature of the Sangh nor of Hindus,” and that they stood for “brotherhood, amity and peace.” All that the Sangh wanted to do was to defend the country from “terrorist forces,” said Bhagwat, and yet, people continued to spread canards like “arrey Sanghwale marenge, the Hindu sangathan will kick everyone out.”

Days after those reassuring words, Parvesh Verma, a BJP MP from West Delhi, urged Hindus to do exactly that. Addressing a meet organised by the Vishva Hindu Parishad in Delhi’s Dilshad Garden to protest the killing of a Hindu man, Verma called for the complete social and economic boycott of a particular set of people. “Jahan jahan yeh aaapko dikhaee de, mai kehta hun, agar inka dimaag thik karna hai… toh ek hi ilaaj hai, woh hai sampoorna bahishkar. (Wherever you see them, I tell you, there’s only one way to straighten them out — a complete banishment),” he said.

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In the purported video clip, which has since gone viral, Verma does not name the people who he feels should be thus ostracised and deprived of economic activity. But given the context of the meeting, and the fact that the murdered man was a Hindu and all the accused are Muslims (with whom the victim is said to have had an old enmity), it does not take a genius to figure out the identity of the community he is singling out for banishment from India’s body politic.

This is not the first time that Verma has spewed poison against Muslims. During the mass protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Shaheen Bagh in Delhi in January 2020, he had declared that the people gathered there would force their way into the homes of Hindus and rape and kill their women. Neither is he the only one amongst the BJP's elected representatives and the larger Sangh Parivar to come out with hate speeches against Muslims. Let us not forget the incendiary words of Yati Narashinghanand, a so-called seer, who has called for the extermination of Muslims and urged Hindus to take up arms against them. Interestingly, Narasinghanand has continued to make hate speeches against Muslims even though he is out on bail after being arrested for having made such speeches in Haridwar earlier this year.

But what to make of Parvesh Verma's exhortation for a total boycott of Muslims just a few days after RSS chief Bhagwat stated that Muslims had nothing to fear from Hindus? Is Verma's speech proof that the sarasanghachalak's words do not make any impression on members of the Sangh Parivar? So much so that a BJP parliamentarian has no qualms about ignoring his publicly stated position and saying things that are utterly contrary to it?

And remember, Bhagwat's Vijayadashami speech was preceded by some high-optics gestures of his outreach to Muslims: He met with a group of Muslim notables such as former chief election commissioner, SY Quraishi, former Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Najeeb Jung, and others, and also visited a mosque and a madrasa.

These confidence-building efforts are commendable, no doubt. Especially at a time when India's Muslims find themselves in an unremittingly hostile terrain signposted by lynchings, whippings, protests over azaan and the hijab, the bulldozing of houses and establishments, and mosques being claimed by Hindus as their rightful places of worship.

However, one wonders about the impact of Bhagwat's outreach, and indeed, that of his words, when one listens to Parvesh Verma's toxic rant against the community, which he so kindly refrains from naming.

His rant underlies two possibilities — either Bhagwat's writ does not run over the Sangh Parivar, to which the BJP belongs, and so does Verma; or that Bhagwat's pronouncements about Hindu-Muslim amity should never be confused with what happens on the ground. The first one is statesmanlike grandstanding, the other — the realpolitik of the road to Hindu Rashtra.

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Since the BJP and the entire smorgasbord of Hindutva groups draw their ideological nourishment from the RSS, the second possibility is the more likely one. Indeed, for all his outreach to Muslims and his insistence that the Sangh and its votaries do not want to "conquer" Muslims, Bhagwat can be a deft communicator of mixed messages regarding India's largest minority community. And his followers make no mistakes about which ones to pick and which to ignore.

In his Vijayadashami speech, for example, Bhagwat talked about religion-based "population imbalances" while calling for an effective population policy for the country. The reference was clearly to the so-called higher fertility rate of Muslims (a myth since the birth rate among Muslims is declining at a faster rate than that among Hindus). This feeds into the false and paranoid narrative that Muslims will soon outnumber Hindus in this country, and hence, the Hindu Right's hoary old propaganda — 'Hindu khatre mein hain (Hindus are in danger)'. The call to throw the weight of their brute majority against the Muslims to keep them in line, as it were, is only a short step from there.

Bhagwat did not say any of this, but the rabid amongst the Hindu Right would not have failed to read between the lines.

When Verma was quizzed about his hate speech, he denied that his comments were directed against any particular community. His contention was that he was calling for the boycott of people like those who had committed the murder. Bhagwat, too, had said that the Sangh only wanted to defend the country from "terrorist forces". However, when members of a community are routinely accused of various forms of criminality (from cow slaughter to falling in love with a Hindu girl) or even terrorism, it is easy to whip up mass hatred against the community itself.

There have been many instances of Muslims committing acts of terror. The killing of a tailor in Udaipur and a chemist in Amaravati are recent cases in point. But terrorism and criminality are not the sole prerogatives of one particular community. Are the lynchings of Muslims on suspicion of cow slaughter or cattle smuggling not acts of terror? Was the gang rape of Bilkis Bano during the 2002 Gujarat riots not a horrific act of terror? Does Parvesh Verma's incitement to hate not have the potential to lead to violent conflicts between Hindus and Muslims?

So far, Bhagwat has not condemned Parvesh Verma's hate speech. (Neither has the Prime Minister, of course, even though Verma's comments make a complete mockery of his slogan of "sabka saath, sabka vikas".) If he wants people to take his fine words seriously, if he truly wants to be a uniting force rather than a divisive one, all Bhagwat needs to do is to publicly reprimand Verma and send out a strong message down the rank and file of Hindutva groups that such utterances will not be tolerated.

Else, it will only be business as usual, and Bhagwat's speech, just another high-sounding rite de passage.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)