People's Democracy

DOCUMENTARY ‘THE MEN IN THE TREE’

Organise, Or Perish!

Sudhanva Deshpande

AS Kali, a young ex-swayamsevak (volunteer) from Nagpur is asked, ‘Who was Shivaji?’ we see him straining his memory. We see him trying desperately to dig up information on a name that seems dimly familiar. The film cuts to eight years ago, when Kali, then a young boy, is being told in his RSS shakha about Shivaji. The film cuts to his classroom in school where his teacher drones on in English about how Shivaji fought Muslim rulers on behalf of the oppressed Hindus. In the end, Kali is asked to answer a question by his teacher on what he has just heard. Clueless, Kali gets up and stares into space, pretending to think hard. Cut to the present, as the older Kali struggles hard yet again for that elusive answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he says finally, ‘but I think he had something to do with the Shiv Sena.’

Kali features in The Men in the Tree, a 98-minute documentary on the RSS by Lalit Vachani. If the title is a little confusing, that is because the film is a sequel to Boy in the Branch, made in 1992. This earlier film documented the activities of one RSS shakha in Nagpur, where the organisation has its headquarters. Vachani went to Nagpur expecting to see images of fascist indoctrination reminiscent of Nazi Germany. What he saw instead was so simple in its ingenuity that it was almost brilliant. Young boys came to the shakha and, under the watchful eye of the shakha pramukh, they played games. These games are the first step in an elaborate chain of RSS indoctrination. For instance, one game begins with the children shouting ‘Kashmir belongs to us!’ Another, a name game, is interesting in how certain names from Indian history are included (Sardar Patel, Rani Lakshmi Bai, Rana Pratap, Gandhi, etc.), how some are excluded (Ashfaqullah Khan or Akbar), and how some names are juxtaposed with others (thus Gandhi would be followed by, say, Golwalkar). Through these games, the young boys acquire a sense of belonging to the RSS even as their consciousness is systematically communalised. And it is through these games that the boys also acquire the other RSS traits: a sense of discipline, uncritical obedience and reverence of authority, and hatred of the enemy. The enemy as defined by the RSS, of course --- Muslims, Christians, communists, whatever.

The crucial question obviously is how much of this indoctrination survives in the boys as they grow older. If we were to take Kali as a representative case, very little. Kali thinks that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was wrong and he has a complete disregard for presumed historical wrongs. Sadly, however, Kali is perhaps not the typical case. When Vachani went back to Nagpur in 2000 to track the boys who had formed the central characters of Boy in the Branch, he found that Kali had dropped out of the shakha when it wound up. This was not the case with Sandeep, who sells ayurvedic medicine today, after having worked six years as an RSS pracharak. Sandeep is charming, articulate and passionate in a quiet sort of way. His smile lights up his face. He never looks like someone who will go around murdering and looting. Unlike Shripad, a building contractor, who used to be the physical instructor in Kali’s shakha. Shripad looks like a goon, and talks like one. He tells us, eyes gleaming with pride and hatred, that he was among those who stood atop the dome of the Babri Masjid when it was demolished. On the other hand, Sandeep was one of those, he says with his easy smile, who was manning the ‘base camp.’ Different personalities, different styles; united, however, in a fierce allegiance to a fascist ideology --- Arun Jaitley, Vinay Katiyar.

Vachani also interviewed two ex-RSS members. Des Raj Goyal, author of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, talks in the film about his years in the RSS. The other ‘insider’ testimony is provided by Purushottam Agarwal, who teaches at the Jawarharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and who went to an RSS shakha as a boy. On several questions, their testimony is remarkably similar, though they were RSS members in different times and in different cities.

On the question of Gandhi, for instance, whatever it may claim in public, it is clear that the RSS has a seemingly dual, almost contradictory attitude. On the one hand, they have a tremendous antipathy to the man. Thus, Agarwal tells us that in his shakha, they used to be told that if Gandhi is the Father of the Nation, he is the father of Pakistan, not India. On the other hand, though, there is also an attempt by the RSS to ‘co-opt’ Gandhi. Thus, we see Gandhi saluting the saffron flag in RSS comic books!

Yet, the duality of the RSS attitude to Gandhi is clearly a front. Goyal recalls how, in the late 1940s, as a young RSS activist, it was his duty to report Gandhi’s speeches to his RSS bosses. But the young Goyal, relentlessly fed with abuse and slander for Gandhi, hated him so much that he listened to the speeches on the radio, rather than seeing the man’s face. The only day that he planned to go to Gandhi’s prayer meeting was on January 30, 1948, as there was expectation that something big was going to happen --- just a few days ago, a bomb had exploded at Gandhi’s prayer meeting. When Goyal reached Birla House, he saw people running out --- Gandhi had already been shot. Goyal was destined never to see the man’s face.

This brings up the tricky question of Gandhi’s assassination. The RSS was banned for a while after the event, even though the organisation itself claimed, as it does to date, that it had nothing to do with the act. Nathuram Godse was technically not a member of the RSS when he killed Gandhi. But he was a follower of Savarkar, the ideological guru of the entire Hindutva brigade, including the RSS. In the film, Goyal says while the RSS may not have killed Gandhi, the work of Hindutva organisations created the ideological environment which made a Godse possible.

Even so, Goyal considers the killing of Gandhi as the first step towards the creation of the Hindu Rashtra. The statement is significant. He does not single out the demolition of the Babri Masjid as the first step. What this tells us is that the Hindutva forces work with the truly long run in mind. For instance, the RSS was quite happy to even dissolve the precursor of the BJP, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, when it was given the opportunity by Jai Prakash Narain to enter the national political mainstream as part of the Janata Party.

So the electoral or other fortunes of the BJP do not per se form the main concern of the RSS. The RSS project is about something much larger: the reshaping of the whole of Indian society along authoritarian, majoritarian lines. This would entail the dismantling of the very democratic set-up that has enabled the BJP to come to power in the first place. That is the real meaning of the Hindu Rashtra. This term, Hindu Rashtra, has come into mainstream political consciousness relatively recently. In particular, Gujarat is being described, quite correctly, as the laboratory of the future Hindu Rashtra. Yet, the term itself is of course much older, and the point that Des Raj Goyal is making in the film is that Gandhi’s killing, way back in 1948, was the first concrete step in that direction.

This is precisely what makes the film frightening. The RSS has a very long memory, and it works with the truly long run in view. And that is the reason why it targets, most of all, the young. The current Sarsanghchalak of the RSS, Sudarshan, told Vachani in 1992 that the RSS inducts children into the shakha because it is at that impressionable age that one can make a real difference to the child’s life, and leave him with ideas that he will carry around for the rest of his life. Sandeep is no longer a pracharak, he is a harmless looking seller of ayurvedic medicine; Shripad is no longer a physical instructor in the shakha, he is a not-so-harmless-looking building contractor; both, however, are Hindutva bigots for life. And though the film itself does not say this, it is quite clear that all communalism --- Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, whatever --- targets the minds of the young. The ingenuity of the RSS is that it does so by involving the child in play and recreation --- apart, of course, from running its own schools and educational establishments. And as the film shows, it also produces pop-history through its comic books, which are tremendously fascinating for young minds.

The real lesson the film has, however, is that it underlines the stress the RSS places on organisation and discipline. Both Sandeep and Shirpad candidly share on camera their respective roles in the demolition of the Babri Masjid. What comes out clearly is the sheer level of organisation that went into staging that massive fascist spectacle. It was all neatly orchestrated and carefully calibrated. Everyone knew exactly what to do. The argument that the demolition was the ‘spontaneous’ result of the mob going ‘out of hand’ is rubbished by the testimonies by these two RSS activists in the film. To quote Sandeep, ‘micro-level planning’ went into the operation: karsevaks went to Ayodhya in groups of five, each group had a leader, each group was given precise tasks on the fateful day. There was just no question of spontaneity. In the RSS scheme of things, organisation is as important as ideology. Clearly, the RSS understands that social change is only possible if led by an organised force. There is a lesson here for secular forces: organise, or perish!

It is for this reason that the film ends on a misleading note. After having underlined throughout how the RSS organises, to then claim that the RSS is basically a self-limiting phenomenon, that the essentially tolerant Hinduism of the masses will eventually assert itself is rather simplistic. What will defeat the RSS is not appeals to a tolerant religion, but an engagement with fascism at the ideological level by a solid organisation that can resist and roll back the increasingly ferocious attack of Hindutva on our society, culture, and politics. But this is a minor blemish in an otherwise engrossing, disturbing and challenging film, a must-see for all those fighting Hindutva fascism.

(Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and director with the theatre group Jana Natya Manch.)