It is a matter of some surprise that a government with most of its members being proud members of the RSS took 10 years to lift the ban on government servants joining the organisation. There is no doubt that this decision will make only a nominal difference because civil servants sympathising with the RSS have been aplenty. Now they will adorn the membership openly while in office. With this decision, formalisation of the idea of the Hindu state has been taken one step further. One only hopes that the DoPT does not next ordain all civil servants to attend RSS shakhas on Guru Purnima or participate in the Dussehra rally and upload a selfie.
When an organisation has spread across different walks of life, when judges openly admit their affinity with it, when the ideas of an organisation have penetrated both the self-conscious supporters and gullible onlookers, the formal instrument of not allowing civil servants to join it does not serve any purpose. So, while we are witnessing a caricature of the Weberian model of bureaucracy, the lifting of the ban on civil servants joining RSS might not make much substantive difference. Those who subscribed to its worldview would already have been operating through that prism while in service and their identity too would not be totally unknown to their superiors and to citizens approaching them. By formally revoking restrictions, the government has only underscored the emergence of a de jure Hindu administration. But even if the government did not do that, over time, and increasingly during the last decade, India’s state apparatus had de facto donned a Hindu identity. In that sense, the lifting of the ban is less of a legal-juridical issue and more a question of the character of India’s public political universe.
Therefore, the real question that the recent decision raises is, once again, of the relationship between the ideology of the RSS and the ideology on which we currently (at least formally) expect institutions in the country to run, viz the Constitution. The juxtaposition between the two is stark and hence, whether formal or de facto, association with the RSS by civil servants jeopardises their commitment to function in accordance with the Constitution.
At a formal level, an organisation that believes in organising one community cannot be worthy of support from the civil servants who are supposed to serve the entire society. More substantively, the RSS does not approve of the way India was restructured after 1947. It believes that “It would have been logical for our post-1947 rulers to re-structure the national life in keeping with our culture. Sadly, that golden opportunity was lost” (https://www.rss.org//Encyc/2015/3/13/Vision-and-Mission.html). One can only imagine the tension between this sentiment and the duty to uphold the Constitution that arguably was the most systematic and earnest document seeking to restructure India after Independence.
The conflicting visions of a state completely de-linked from religion and a state based on dharma, defined as the cultural and spiritual legacy of the land, become even more sharply opposed to each other when we take into account the conflict between ideas of the nation. The Constitution is the outcome of an idea that India is a nation comprising different sects, religions and traditions as opposed to the idea that presupposes the foundational role of one religious community as the pillar of the nation. All nationalist rhetoric following the criticality of one religion leads to an exclusionary nationalism that the Constitution consciously rejected.
This conflict needs to be understood beyond formal declarations because in the public sphere the RSS has evolved through a somewhat complex set of ideas and has produced the politics of suspicion, anxiety and animosity through the available democratic space. The formal adherence to democracy by either the parent organisation or many of its “cultural” off-shoots, as also by the political instrument of the organisation, unnecessarily obfuscates the issue of what role Hindutva has played in India’s recent past.
For almost a century now, India has witnessed a parallel evolution of politics of two varieties — through two contesting paradigms. Hindutva politics has mostly developed intellectually through the Golwalkar-Savarkar paradigm and democratic politics has been shaped through the Gandhi-Nehru paradigm. While Golwalkar initiated a tendency to uncritically imagine a millennium in the past, Savarkar, while appearing to distance himself from traditionalism, nevertheless employed history as proof of, and justification for, Hindu-ness as the bulwark of nationalism. While formally being away from the RSS, he theorised the quest for force as a morally admissible path for achieving higher goals, something that is the hallmark of contemporary Hindutva. Today’s Hindutva is therefore a combination of these apparently distinct approaches. It has promoted ideas of majoritarianism, uncritical traditionalism and orthodoxy combined with crass modernism that upholds force and exclusion as instruments of a distorted nationalist imagination.
In contrast, the Gandhi-Nehru paradigm sought to evolve a nuanced understanding of the past, interpretation of tradition that draws its logical strength from modernity, a self-critical modernity that gave way to the agency of the people and at the same time ensured that the idea of “public” includes all, irrespective of caste and creed.
Fortuitously for this paradigm, the interventions of BR Ambedkar ensured that it was saved from Gandhi’s romanticism about tradition and Nehru’s romanticism that democracy will address all ills automatically. This intervention ensured that the Constitution shunned “restructuring of society on the basis of past values” blindly and also ensured that the Constitution will push in the direction of democratic transformation of the social realm. This may be understood as the framework of constitutional morality.
Democracy lives with a perpetual challenge that it must accept the existence of non-democratic, sub-democratic and exclusionary ideas and politics. Indian democracy has struggled with this challenge all through its formal existence for the past seven decades. Organisations and parties that contradict constitutional morality can compete for power and acquire formal governmental power. Politics at variance with constitutional morality can mobilise citizens and gain popular and intellectual traction. Persons having intellectual sympathies with sub-democratic ideas and politics come to hold public offices, such as in the armed forces, bureaucracy and judiciary. The dilemma is whether to ban or abandon such elements. While democracies occasionally need to employ the long arm of the law to protect themselves, legal protection is often weak in the wake of political challenges to constitutional morality.
When democracy is corroded from within and through democratic coups, the first thing that supporters of democracy need to do is to recognise the elephant in the room. India’s record in this respect is not strong. For long, many collaborators happily did business with the elephant. That has weakened the system’s ability to isolate and tame the challenge. It is necessary to recognise that in the battle between the two paradigms discussed above, the democratic paradigm has received a setback. Whether or not civil servants are banned from joining the RSS, Hindutva is out there and unless the idea of constitutional democracy is reinvigorated, unless it is jealously pursued, propagated and popularised, the proverbial elephant will not go away.
The writer, based at Pune, taught political science
