Prime Minister Modi, the RSS and restraints on the media and civil liberties
Ignatius Chithelen is author of Passage from India to America:
Over a quarter of India’s 1.4 billion people are illiterate and many more have very low levels of literacy. Hence the major TV channels are the primary source of news and have an enormous influence on public opinion. Reputed media watchdogs, such as Reporters Without Borders, point out that the major TV channels in India effectively function as the official media since they avoid any criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his government, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS,) the secretive organization that is said to control the BJP.
Pressure on the media
On April 2, a story in The New York Times reported how the Modi government is pressuring “…news outlets — berating editors, cutting off advertising, ordering tax investigations — to ignore the uglier side of his party’s campaign to transform India from a tolerant, religiously diverse country into an assertively Hindu one.”
Modi’s government is also seeking to influence the judiciary by appointing judges who sympathize with it, transferring those who rule against it’s interests and policies and offering lucrative incentives to compliant judges after they retire, according to news reports.
Influencing judges
Within a year of assuming office in 2014, Modi’s government amended the constitution to set up a body, which includes the central law minister, that approves appointments of judges to the top courts, as noted in a story in The Atlantic, April 29, 2019. The action overturned a 1993 rule under which only sitting judges of the Supreme Court could appoint new judges.
In February this year, at an International Judicial Conference attended by Modi, Supreme Court Justice Arun Mishra praised the Prime Minister for being an “internationally acclaimed visionary” and for his “versatile genius to think globally and act locally.” Some lawyers of the court signed a statement expressing a “deep sense of anguish and concern” over Mishra’s remarks. Several former judges, including of the Supreme Court, criticized Mishra for not maintaining an independent political stance, as is expected of a judge in a democracy.
That same month, Justice S Muralidhar was transferred from the Delhi High Court to the Punjab and Haryana High Court. A day prior to his transfer, the judge had reprimanded the Delhi Police for not registering cases against BJP leaders and others for communal hate speeches, which were recorded on tape, The Hindustan Times reported.
Last month, Rajan Gogoi, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, was appointed to the upper house of parliament by Modi’s government. Gogoi’s appointment, an article in The Washington Post on March 24 noted, “just four months after his retirement (and after he was accused of sexual harassment), has raised big questions about justice” in Modi’s era of hyper-nationalism.
RSS founders praised Hitler & his attacks on the Jews
In 1948, a former RSS member shot and killed Mahatma Gandhi, accusing Gandhi of being partial towards Muslims. Gandhi, a Hindu, was the leader of the non-violent struggle for India’s independence from British rule in 1947. A secularist, Gandhi criticized the RSS for being “a communal organization” in the mold of Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists.
Early leaders of the RSS, which was founded in 1925, openly praised Adolf Hitler’s racial policies in Germany as a way of dealing with the Muslims and other religious minorities in India. For instance, one of them V.D. Savarkar, wrote "If we Hindus in India grow stronger, in time these Muslim friends…will have to play the part of German-Jews instead," according to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, published on 12.14.2017.
The RSS tolerates no dissent and criticism
In 2004, when Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, school textbooks published by state education board portrayed Hitler as a hero, and glorified fascism, the Haaretz article continued. The section on the "Ideology of Nazism," in the tenth-grade social studies textbook, stated "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race."
Modi started his political career as a member of the RSS when he was in his youth. In 2007, he wrote a book in Gujarati titled “Beams of Light.” It was about 16 men who inspired him, all members of the RSS. The BJP which governs India, with Modi as Prime Minister, is the political arm of the RSS being “ideologically captured and organizationally controlled by the RSS,” Sudheendra Kulkarni, an adviser to the former BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, wrote in The Indian Express in 2016.
Operating as a secret society, the RSS mostly communicates verbally with its members, has no records of its membership and avoids seeking media coverage, according to several studies. The studies also show that the RSS is hierarchical in its power structure, with a supreme leader at the top, and commands dictated from above and little or no tolerance for independent views and criticism. The Modi government’s efforts to control the media, influence the judiciary, restrict civil liberties and its other attacks on democratic norms could be said to reflect the way the RSS operates.
A holy motherland of Hindus
The core belief of the RSS is that India is a “Hindu Rashtra” (a nation of Hindus.) Schools run by the RSS have distributed booklets containing a map of India encompassing Pakistan and Bangladesh, that were both part of India before its partition in 1947, as well as Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, and parts of Myanmar, all under the heading “Punya Bhoomi Bharat,” the “Indian Holy Land.”
The RSS proclaims an ideology “aimed at ensuring the predominance of Hinduism in Indian society, politics, and culture, which it promotes through tactics that include violence and terror. Its agenda includes subjugating or driving out Muslims and Christians…,” notes Paul Marshall in “Hinduism and Terror,” a paper published in 2004 by the Hudson Institute, a Washington DC based policy group.
Four million volunteers who mobilize voters
The RSS has over four million volunteers, all male, organized hierarchically starting from more than 70,000 local units, according to media reports. Carrying a wooden pole, the volunteers wear uniforms of brown pants, white shirts and black caps and participate in regular “self-defense” military-based training programs. (See photo.) The core members of the RSS work full time and are paid a wage. The RSS is the largest organized political force in India and, around the world is second in size after the Chinese Communist Party.
RSS volunteers are the backbone of the BJP, especially during elections when they seek to ensure maximum turnout of voters for the party. They coordinate this voter mobilization with millions of members from the RSS’ affiliated organizations, according to various studies.
The RSS has penetrated all aspects of life in India. Vidya Bharati, the RSS’ educational wing, reportedly runs over twenty thousand schools, with over 100,000 teachers and more than two million students. The RSS operates over a hundred separate affiliated organizations Including trade unions and groups for students, women, businesses, retired armed forces personnel, teachers, consumers, cooperatives, intellectuals, overseas Indians, doctors, slum dwellers, tribals, as well as an arm that carries out conversions to the Hindu faith.
The RSS is deeply embedded in Modi’s government
Since 2014, after Modi was elected Prime Minister, the RSS has vastly expanded its influence over all aspects of governance in India. Besides Prime Minister Modi and most members of his cabinet, the President, Vice President and the head of the ruling BJP are all reported to be current or former members of the RSS. The organization’s membership has also risen under Modi’s government. Daily gatherings of volunteers, for instance, rose to about 60,000 in 2019, up from around 45,000 in 2014, according to a Bloomberg report.
With Modi in power, on policy process the RSS “…is much more active and outspoken than ever before and…(it’s) affiliates have grown rapidly and…penetrated every aspect of Indian society,” Walter Andersen, a professor of South Asia studies at Johns Hopkins University, told reporters from Bloomberg in 2019. He has studied the RSS for over five decades and written two books about its history, organization and influence.
One recent indication of the official stature granted to the RSS is that, in March the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting blocked Media One, a Malayalam TV channel in Kerala, from broadcasting for 48 hours. This was because, The New York Times reported, the channel had covered February’s biggest news story — the Hindu extremist led mob attacks on Muslims in New Delhi that flared into broader unrest — in a way that seemed “critical toward Delhi Police and R.S.S.,” according to the Ministry’s order.
Will handling the coronavirus relief funds corrupt the RSS leaders?
Currently, several RSS affiliates are actively working with the Modi government ostensibly to tackle the economic and social issues arising from the coronavirus infections. Yet, as in past crises such as droughts and floods, the RSS is said to be using its organized clout - this time vastly enhanced by government backing - to expand its membership and influence.
A big portion of the funds, being spent by the Modi government to tackle the coronavirus crisis, is likely being given to individuals and institutions backed by RSS leaders, according to news reports. Handing out large amounts of cash will tempt some, RSS leaders included, to try to seek bribes and pocket some of the money. In past elections in India, ruling parties were defeated when their officials were exposed as being corrupt, including due to the sudden, sharp rise in the wealth of local party leaders.
It may soon become evident if some RSS leaders were taking bribes to distribute the coronavirus relief funds. And if such evidence emerges, perhaps a majority of Indians will demonstrate maturity by exercising their right to vote Modi out in the next parliamentary election – typically though RSS leaders are known to hold onto their positions of power for life.