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Reuters, March 06, 2002
India's Hindu groups: three bodies, one soul
By Sugita Katyal
NEW DELHI, March 6 (Reuters) - They are often tossed into the
same bowl in the alphabet soup of Indian politics.
Though three separate groups, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) all spring from the same Hindu revivalist platform whose
goal is to build a Hindu temple on a site sacred to both Hindus
and Muslims.
The temple dispute has led to the nation's worst religious
violence in a decade and confronted the Hindu-majority nation's
ruling BJP-led coalition with its biggest crisis since taking
office in October 1999.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or National Volunteer Corps,
which came into existence in the western Indian city of Nagpur in
1925, is the ideological parent of the other two groups.
A social and cultural organisation, it was established with the
avowed objective to make officially secular India a Hindu rashtra
or Hindu nation but it is not a political party.
The secretive RSS is widely accused of harbouring a deep-seated
bias against the country's minority Muslim and Christian
communities. RSS leaders deny this, but say they are opposed to
special treatment for any religious community.
Leaders of the RSS have in the past also extolled the
achievements of ancient India -- from calculus and nuclear
physics to advanced chemistry and aeronautics -- saying it was a
pity Indians had forgotten their home-grown geniuses.
The life of the RSS shakhas or cells revolves round a daily
martial arts drill where khaki-clad members, including many
teenagers, learn the principles of obedience to RSS superiors.
Volunteers are often the first to arrive for disaster relief at
places hit by cyclones, floods or quakes -- they were prominent
in relief efforts during the killer earthquake in Gujarat last
year.
The group was banned for two years after Mahatma Gandhi's
assassination in 1948 because Nathuram Godse, the man who killed
Gandhi, was a former RSS member.
From the same Hindu fundamentalist background, the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party is a political party that began its life
in 1951 as the Jan Sangh, the political wing of the RSS.
SOUGHT TO REUNIFY INDIA, PAKISTAN
In its early years, the Jan Sangh argued for reuniting India and
Pakistan in pursuit of its central objective of an Akhand Bharat
or Undivided India, a slogan it abandoned later.
The Sangh, which fought for protection of cows, sacred to Hindus,
in its early years, was a regional player in the sixties.
It reorganised itself as the BJP in 1980 after splits emerged in
the country's opposition and rose to national prominence on the
back of a pledge to build a temple dedicated to Hindu god king
Rama on a site where a Muslim mosque was torn down in 1992.
The destruction of the mosque triggered the country's worst
communal riots since the partition of the subcontinent into India
and Pakistan in 1947, killing about 3,000 people.
Though a part of the larger Sangh parivar or family of groups
linked to the RSS, the BJP put the temple and its policy of
Hindutva or Hinduness on the back burner after it took power at
the head of a multiparty coalition in 1999.
Over the past few years, the BJP, which has risen from just two
seats in India's parliament in 1984 to 180 today, has sought to
shrug off its communal label and distance itself from the RSS.
But the influence of the RSS is still evident in recent efforts
by the BJP-led government to "saffronise" education and
rewrite history texts to glorify the country's Hindu past.
Saffron is regarded as a holy Hindu colour.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or the World Hindu Council is the
religious wing of the RSS which was set up in 1966 as a
non-political group "to consolidate and strengthen Hindu
society." It has a huge following worldwide because it was
set up to strengthen the Hindu fraternity globally.
Today the VHP almost has a one-point programme: to build the Ram
temple in the northern town of Ayodhya at the site where the
16th-century mosque once stood. Many Hindus believe the Babri
mosque was built on the birthplace of Rama.
The fiercely Hindu group also opposes religious conversions in
India, saying Christian missionaries bribe poor tribal people
with money and medical care to change faiths.
BBC, Thursday, 7 March, 2002, 16:33 GMT
Profile: The Vishwa Hindu
Parishad
By Rajyasri Rao
BBC correspondent in Delhi
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) was founded in 1964 by a group of
senior leaders from a hard-line Hindu organisation, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to give Hindus what they believed would
be a clearly defined sense of religious identity and political
purpose.
Its founders felt the need to present Hinduism in a rigorous
though simplified form which would be comparable to most other
world religions.
The superiority of other faiths was believed to stem from their
being far less diffuse and more uniform than Hinduism.
But its critics call the VHP a hardline Hindu outfit with
unmistakably close ties to its parent organisation, the extremist
RSS, whose objective to 'Hinduise' the Indian nation, it shares.
Central to the RSS ideology has been the belief that real
national unity and progress will come only when India is 'purged'
of non-Hindus, or, when members of other communities subordinate
themselves 'willingly' to 'Hindu superiority.'
Linked groups
The VHP has tended to tone down the rhetoric of Hindu supremacy
and even make an occasional distinction between fellow (Muslim)
citizens of the present and (Muslim) 'marauders' of the past.
But the ambition of establishing a resurgent Hinduism by
inculcating what some historians call a carefully constructed
common 'Hindu spirit' is very much central to the VHP.
This is also something it shares with the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), which currently leads the Indian Government at the centre.
Earlier known as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the BJP was
established in 1951 as a political wing of the RSS to counter
rising public revulsion after the revered independence figure
Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a former RSS member.
Some commentators say the party came close to obliteration in the
1960s with the Congress led by the charismatic and secular
Jawaharlal Nehru, leaving little room for hardline communal
politics.
But a political emergency announced by Nehru's daughter, Indira
Gandhi, in 1975 enabled the BJS leaders, Atal Behari Vajpayee and
LK Advani among them, to gain near stardom after serving brief
prison sentences.
But it didn't really emerge as a political presence until the
early 1980s.
A series of events in that decade including the mass conversion
of lower-caste Hindus to Islam pushed the BJP's close affiliate,
the VHP, to the forefront.
Historians say the VHP-led Hindu right considered the mass
conversion of "dalits" or lower-caste Hindus to Islam
to be an unforgivable insult.
The dalits, for centuries beholden to the upper castes, outraged
Hindu hardliners by daring to convert at all, and moreover,
convert to Islam.
The VHP saw this as a serious threat to its notion of Hinduism.
It proceeded to whip up Hindu support for a re-defined communal
force, organising a series of religious meetings, cross-country
marches and processions through the 1980s.
This phase coincided with the launch of an electoral strategy by
the BJP to corner and hold on to the "Hindu" vote.
Temple controversy
Following the success of their campaign, senior VHP leaders
announced at a religious meeting in 1984 their programme to
"liberate" a site in Ayodhya from an ancient mosque to
make way for a temple to the Hindu god Ram.
Analysts say this announcement heralded a turning point in the
history of the Hindu nationalist movement.
The VHP has since then claimed that the site belongs rightfully
to Hindu worshippers who believe that the mosque stood on the
birthplace of the god, Lord Ram.
Although the claim does not stand up to substantial
archaeological or historical scrutiny, the VHP and BJP are seen
to have made possible the creation of a shared Hindu symbol that
cuts through most divisions in Hindu society.