contributed by Malini Bhattacharjee, 9 July 2020

What does it mean for religious and cultural groups to serve the ‘other’ in times of a pandemic? Is it spontaneous altruism that motivates this service or mere rational reckoning? Or is it a deliberate attempt at constructing a ‘secular’ image for itself?

In India, amidst the many religious and cultural groups that have been participating in Covid relief work, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist group, has registered its presence quite significantly. The RSS is considered the parent organization of the larger Hindu nationalist movement and the ideological mentor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has formed the government at the Centre since 2014 and in several states across India. The ‘Sangh’, as it is popularly known, and its affiliate groups, who are collectively referred to as the ‘Sangh Parivar’ (family of Sangh), occupy a controversial status in Indian politics and have often been labelled by Centrist and Leftist forces as being ‘anti-minority’, ‘communal’ and even ‘fascist’ for their alleged role in fomenting communal riots.

As of May 20, 2020, the RSS had provided relief in a little more than 85,000 different locations across India, distributed over 6.2 million masks, donated over 11 million ration kits, distributed over 71 million meal packets, organized 131,443 temporary shelters and assisted over 2 million migrant workers in different ways.

RSS volunteers providing food and water to migrant laborers in a railway station in Maharashtra, June 2020. Source: Sandeep Patil

An interesting aspect of this relief programme has been that in some cases, the RSS was seen to have provided assistance to Christians and Muslims. In one instance, it helped a Christian rag picker with food and other supplies in Mumbai who had been starving for days during the nationwide lockdown. In another instance, an elderly Christian couple in Mumbai who were unable to procure supplies during the lockdown were assisted by RSS volunteers. In Assam, one Muslim swayamsevak (volunteer) had reportedly been serving people across religious lines. Another story reported by the popular press was that of a Muslim woman in Jammu who donated half a million rupees that she had saved for her Hajj pilgrimage to the RSS affiliate Sewa Bharati as she was apparently impressed by the organization’s work during the lockdown.

Given the mainstream perception of the RSS as a communal organization, how does one make sense of this act of reaching out to the ‘other’ in times of crises? A straightforward reading of this exercise may lead to the conclusion that the organization is misunderstood or maligned because of the vested political agendas of its critics and that it is actually not communal. While that may be a legitimate argument, a more careful analysis of possible motivations behind such ‘compassionate’ acts of service is warranted.

Mass Thermal Screening organised by the RSS at Nehru Nagar Slum in Vile Parle area, Mumbai, Maharashtra, June 2020. Source: Sandeep Patil

A cursory review of the RSS’s activities reveals that seva (service) has been a central pillar of the organization’s work since its inception in 1925. While the volunteers of the Sangh have always been involved in providing relief during natural and political calamities, from the 1950s onward, a series of affiliates such as the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (dedicated to tribal welfare), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (religious wing), Sewa Bharati (service wing) and Vidya Bharati (educational wing) were commissioned by the RSS in order to provide institutionalized and targeted seva to Dalits and tribals.

Seva activities perform specific political functions such as offering a counter to Christian proselytizing activities in the tribal areas, assimilating Dalits, indoctrinating children through a parallel form of education and inculcating values of national awareness and ‘character building’ to create a pan-Hindu unity.

The scale of seva projects within the Sangh Parivar today is overwhelming; its service activities - mostly in the realm of health and education - were estimated at a total number of around 165,000 projects in 2015 (Andersen and Damle, 2018; xiv).

Several civil society reports and stories in the popular press from time to time, have alleged that the philanthropy of the Sangh is selective and that it systematically excludes non-Hindus. And yet, one comes across several instances, when seva was offered to non-Hindus. The Charkhi Dadri air crash (1996) was one such case where the RSS stepped in to help the relatives of all the dead passengers who were Muslims. While conducting my own doctoral fieldwork, I came across a village named Atal Nagar in Kutch that had been reconstructed by Sewa Bharati after the Bhuj Earthquake of 2001 where nine Muslim families had been allocated new houses. Residents of Chaulia, a Muslim dominated village in Erasama Block, Jagatsinghpur district in Odisha, that had been ravaged by the 1999 Super Cyclone recounted to me that the RSS volunteers were the first to set up community kitchens in their village.

To return to my earlier question, what prompts organizations like the RSS to offer aid to members who are typically outside its constituency? In order to understand this phenomenon, one has to acknowledge that disasters and pandemics create situations that are very different from normal times. For religious and cultural groups in particular, they provide an opportunity to establish mass contact with the community, including out-group members and demonstrate their secular credentials. For an organization like the RSS that has been banned thrice by the state and is forever trying to revamp its image as a ‘secular’ entity, inclusive aid-giving facilitates the breaking of communal stereotypes that exist about the organization and also embellishes its image as a credible and ‘selfless’ civil society actor. Even in non-disaster situations, as Melanie Cammett (2014) has shown in the case of Lebanon, sectarian parties pursuing a state-centric strategy and those which have achieved dominance within their own group, are likely to distribute welfare goods to out-group members. The welfare activities of the Gullen movement and the Muhammadiya too reflect similar trends where non-Muslim groups are often catered to.

Historically, even though religious and cultural groups have always been at the forefront in providing welfare activities, they have been marginalized quite significantly with the rise of modern states. One consistent strategy adopted by these groups therefore has been to counter this marginalization by adopting ‘secular’ characteristics in order to appear more legitimate. Some of these characteristics which were popularly adopted by religious and cultural bodies in colonial India included book-keeping, documentation and fund-raising through subscription modes that were felt to be ‘transparency’ enhancing rational practices. In post-colonial settings, deliberate service to out-group members has been another important hallmark adopted by these groups.

However, I am not trying to suggest that seva when rendered to non-Hindus by the RSS is merely a political strategy. The space of humanitarianism is messy and political and yet the motivations for service are complex. There is genuine altruism, love for the nation as much as rational reckoning involved. Political motivations aside, the ongoing pandemic has demonstrated yet again the power and relevance of religious and cultural groups in our societies. The ‘sacred’ is constantly and successfully reinventing itself to embrace the ‘secular’, while the secular space of humanitarianism gets re-enchanted with greater participation of religious and cultural groups.

References

Cammett, Melani. Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon. Cornell University Press, 2014.

Andersen, Walter K., and Shridhar Damle. The RSS: A View to the Inside. New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2018

 

Malini Bhattacharjee works as Assistant Professor at the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University in Bangalore. Her research revolves around issues of religious nationalism, the politics of humanitarianism and disaster relief and the intersections emerging between religion, development and public policy in contemporary India. She is particularly interested in the politics of Hindu nationalism and its emergence in diverse regions of India such as in Assam and in Karnataka. Her recent book ‘Disaster Relief and the RSS: Resurrecting ‘Religion’ through Humanitarianism’ (Sage, 2019) examines the political implications of the humanitarian work of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) by discussing the institution of ‘seva’ (service) in disaster situations.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the blog editorial team or the Asia Research Institute.

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