Dr Hedgewar And The Mission Of The Hindu Rashtra

Ugadi is the New Year for Hindus in many regions across India, especially in the Deccan. In the year 1889, in the family of Hedgewars, who were ethnic Telugus settled in Maharashtra, was born Keshav Baliram, who would change the destiny of India and Hindus forever. It indeed was the aadi – the beginning, of a new era.

Dr Hedgewar's vision for the Rashtriya Syamasevak Sangh (RSS) was reflected in the very first statement of the Preamble of the RSS Constitution, a document prepared post-Hedgewar:

Even as the organisation was in its infancy, Hedgewar took steps to infuse the cadre with his values and vision.

RSS was founded on the Vijayadashami of 1925. Since then, the day has been of great significance to the Sangh.

The Vijayadashami of 1928 fell on 23 October. The chief guest to deliver a lecture to the cadre of the budding organisation was selected by Dr Hedgewar himself.

It was Vithalbhai Patel, the brother of Vallabhbhai. This was an important choice.

Just a decade ago Vithalbhai Patel had moved a bill to legalise all intercaste marriages in Hindu society. It had created quite a furore. The entire Hindu orthodoxy, including ‘Dharmacharyas’, were against Patel’s Bill. Even Mahatma Gandhi and Lokmanya Tilak were against the it.

In contrast, the Hindu Mahasabha leader Lala Lajpat Rai and spiritual patriot Sri Aurobindo had supported the legislation. That Dr Hedgewar invited Vithalbhai Patel to address the Sangh cadre on its foundation shows how deeply Dr Hedgewar had contemplated on the removal of ‘the fissiparous tendencies’ in Hindu society.

In 1925, the same year the RSS was born, Rajguru of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association escaped the police and came to Maharashtra. It were Swayamsevaks who provided him safe sanctuary. Dr. Hedgewar met and conversed with him. This was a great risk for an organisation in its infancy. The government of the day could have crushed the Sangh. But Dr Hedgewar, always cautious to keep the Sangh above political conflicts, even those featuring the Hindu Mahasabha and Congress, did not hesitate to take the risk.

In 1930 when Congress decided to celebrate 26 January, 1930, as Independence Day, Dr Hedgewar sent a special circular to all the shakhas to celebrate 'Poorna Swaraj':

It is easy to imprint values into an individual. But to inseminate an organisation with such non-partisan values is almost an impossible task. Yet, the Dr accomplished that.

Dr Hedgewar was a great devotee of Hanuman and would carry a murti of Hanuman with him. There also used to be a murti of Hanuman in the shakha grounds. However, when he found that this caused discomfort with the Arya Samajists, he held back on his own personal bhakti and had the murti removed. Only the civilisational flag of Bharat, which is the Bhagwa Dhwaj, has been honoured since then in the shakha grounds.

It was in 1935 that Baba Saheb Ambedkar made the proclamation that he was born a Hindu but he would not die as one. Dr Hedgewar invited Dr Ambedkar to the Makar Sankranti celebrations of the Pune shakha. Dr Ambedkar was quite impressed with the complete absence of caste divisions among the RSS cadre who were all living in the same camp for days on together.

In 1938, Dr Hedgewar was invited to preside over the Hindu Yuvak Parishad which was held in Pune. It was attended by His Holiness Kshatra Jagadguru Sadashivrao Benadikar. This Jagadguru Peetham was created as an alternative to the caste-based Shankaracharya Jagat Guru system by Shahu Maharaj after a section of Brahmins insulted the king, a descendant of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, as a Shudra.

Unfortunately Tilak had sided with those Brahmins. But Tilak-ites did not. Dr Hedgewar himself was a staunch Tilakite. However, when it came to social emancipation, he would not stand with the orthodoxy of his political guru.

And it was not that Shahu Maharaj created a new Peeth altogether. Rather, he had transformed the renowned Patgaon Math of Mauni Buwa into a Jagadguru Peeth. This Peeth was supposed to be based on spiritual knowledge and moral calibre rather than birth, caste, or race.

At the Hindu Yuvak Parishad of 1938, the Kshatra Jagadguru appreciated Dr. Hedgewar's work, highlighting his strong drive for social upliftment.

For an infant organisation, the RSS under Dr Hedgewar did indeed take radical steps with respect to social reforms. At the same time, he ensured that there was no compromise with the Hindu nature of the RSS.

Dr. Hedgewar was ailing with a deadly and painful disease when the Officers Training Camp (OTC) was being conducted in 1940. Against the advice of the doctors, he decided to attend the camp and that was his last statement to the Swayamsevaks assembled there :

In 2025, the RSS would have completed 100 years.

An organisation started as a bunch of kabaddi playing youths in open grounds, is today perhaps, the most influential organisation in the country, determining the course India should take.

In these hundred years the RSS has much to be proud of and justifiably so. It has one of India’s largest networks of educational institutions which serve the most marginalised sections of society with high standards of education. In disaster-hit areas, it is the RSS which reaches first with help. The political entity powered by the RSS, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is today the ruling party in the Centre.

And all of this started from a bunch of kabaddi players in open grounds.

The RSS has performed impressively in its 100-years journey. During the better part of these hundred years the ideological adversaries of the RSS had better support than the RSS itself – financially, institutionally, and in popular narrative. Marxists had the support of the Soviet Union. Nehruvianism had state power. Islamists had the backing of Islamic countries and Evangelicals, the West. The RSS on the other hand had to entirely depend on Indians, both inside and outside India.

Despite these odds against them, they have succeeded considerably. Not completely but considerably.

However, there are significant challenges in the future.

The most important challenge is also the most ancient one. From its inception till date, except one, all the Sarsanghachalaks of the organisation belong to one caste. There is nothing in the Constitution or in the explicitly stated ideology of the RSS that forbids any non-Brahmin from becoming the Sarsanghachalak. In fact, Madhukar Dattatreya Deoras, who was the third Sarsanghachalak, made a non-Brahmin, Dr. Rajendra Singh, the Sarsanghachalak perhaps to show the cadre and the Sangh insiders (rather than the outside world) that the highest leadership in Sangh is not reserved to a particular community.

In 2023, Dr. Mohan Bhagwat, the present Sanghachalak of the RSS, spoke about the need to have common wells, common crematoria and all Hindu temples open to all Hindu communities. What is depressing about this statement is that this was the clarion call of Swami Shraddhanand and other Hindu Sangathanist leaders almost a century ago. That even today the Sangh had to give the same call is an indicator that with respect to ‘the fissiparous tendencies’ either the Sangh has not moved much forward or social stagnation has entered the organisation dangerously.

Already in Tamil Nadu there are efforts to legitimise caste as ‘social capital’ within the Sangh. With respect to blatant anti-SC violence like what happened in Vengalvayal (where faecal matter was mixed in the water tanks reserved for SC community) and Nanguneri (where an SC student was attacked by caste-Dravidianist students), the Sangh response has been muted. Worse, a senior Sangh official spoke in a derogatory manner about Dr Ambedkar and the moral strength to reject those derogatory words was conspicuous by its absence.

During the days of Deoras such a behaviour would have been an impossibility. He was in fact the first to point out in the national discourse that Dr Ambedkar had considered the Mahavakyas of the Upanishads as the spiritual basis of democracy. It was because of his visionary efforts that Sangh provided the platform for the descendants of Kalaram temple priests to apologise for disallowing Scheduled Community Hindus during the Kalaram Satyagraha.

In the coming years the civilisational battle faultlines are clear.

On the one hand the external enemies of Hindu civilisation are trying to make use of every caste fissure in Hindu society to weaken it. Within, there is a rise in trad-wokes who justify every manifestation of social stagnation in the name of traditions.

The RSS is by far the hope and means for the survival of a healthy and strong Hindu society. On this birth anniversary of Dr Hedgewar, one should remember the parting words of him, said when RSS meant tapas and tyaga:

The words are more important today as the RSS is close to the seat of power and the lure of obscurantism. The tapasvi in Dr. Hedgewar shall prevail in the spirit of the RSS.