Much ado about Bhagwat: Did he really say what you’ve read in the mainstream media?

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Not many people read the weekly newspapers Organiser and Panchjanya, official publications of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, published in English and Hindi respectively from Jhandewalan in Delhi. The only time one hears about them is when the mainstream media tells us about a supposedly controversial statement made by some senior member of the Sangh.

The latest controversy has stemmed out of an interview of the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat published in the two papers on a special issue — “Politics Beyond Power” — devoted to the birth centenary of Deendayal Upadhyaya. On September 21 the Hindustan Times reported that in an interview, Bhagwat had “pitched” the government to “review reservation policy” currently given to certain backward castes and tribes. Other mainstream media outlets reported similarly.

Mohan Bhagwat has hardly ever stayed away from controversies. In the wake of the December 2012 Delhi gang-rape, Bhagwat famously blamed westernisation for increasing cases of violence against women in the urban areas. Soon after, he gave a “theory of social contract”, as per which marriage is an institution in which the wife should take care of the household chores and the husband should run the family and provide security, physical and otherwise to the wife. For the year 2015, such ideas can only be called anachronistic and have even embarrassed the culturally conservative Bharatiya Janata Party.

The latest controversy seems to have come out of a far-fetched interpretation though. But before the interview, a background of Deendayal Upadhyaya: Upadhyaya had been an RSS pracharak in his youth, and was one of the founding members of Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the forerunner of BJP, in 1951. After Syama Prasad Mukherjee’s death in custody in Kashmir in 1953, he nurtured the fledgling party and mentored young leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, till his own mysterious death on a Lucknow-Patna train journey in 1968. Apart from being a politician, Upadhyaya founded many Hindu nationalist journals, of which one –- Panchjanya –- is still in print.

Most significant to our present discussion is Upadhyaya’s political philosophy of “integral humanism”, which rejected both capitalism and communism, and is a modern-day version of Sanatan Dharma. BJP continues to call it a “guiding precept”, its open support for free markets notwithstanding.

Prafulla Ketkar and Hitesh Shankar, the editors of Organiser and Panchjanya respectively, together interviewed Bhagwat on the present-day relevance of Upadhyaya’s integral humanism philosophy for the September 25 issue. (Panchjanya has also published the interview in Hindi.) One may very well differ with Upadhyaya’s philosophy or Bhagwat’s interpretation of it; also, the RSS’s erasure of caste as a social menace has earlier been documented by academicians and others.

But anyone who cares to read the Organiser–Panchjanya interview in its entirety would see that Bhagwat was making a broader theoretical point: that the reservation system has been politicised since its inceptionin a way that goes against the collective welfare of the nation. He clearly said, however, that “reservation for socially backward classes is the right example” of a policy initiative in tune with integral humanism. “If we would have implemented this policy as envisaged by the Constitution makers instead of doing politics over it, then present situation would not have arrived.”

The present controversy was also uncalled for because only two weeks ago, Bhagwat had been widely quoted as coming out in support of reservation. At a book launch in Delhi on September 6, he said: “We support reservation. Till the time there is inequality in the society, reservation is needed. To bring up those suffering from this inequality as equals, we need reservation. But there should not be any politics on that.”To interpret, therefore, that Bhagwat was pitching the government to review reservation policy in the Organiser–Panchjanya interview is an exaggeration.

In a politically charged environment ahead of the Bihar assembly elections, the opponents were quick to react. Unsurprisingly, Janata Parivar leaders Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav made use of the situation and attacked the BJP. The Congress said Bhagwat’s statement exposed the BJP’s anti-poor mindset.

In the recent past the BJP has supported reservation, not the least, because it makes lot of electoral sense. Both RSS and BJP, embarrassed, issued clarifications (even though Yadav’s attack hasn’t stopped), but the damage was done.

https://twitter.com/RSS_Org/status/645953688813481984

Politicians perhaps need not care for facts when opinion serves the purpose. But it’s certainly the media’s responsibility to readily fact-check statements before interpreting and publishing them — especially ones that might stoke a controversy.