Rakesh Sinha
Propaganda against the RSS has penetrated from top to bottom and scholarly narration can remove the ambiguities in history about the organisation, which has the ideological wherewithal to offer a credible alternative to transform India, claims BJP MP Rakesh Sinha.
"Intentionally, historicities of some events are not examined prudently by Indian intellectuals. Therefore, candid and scholarly narration on RSS will remove the ambiguities in the ‘history’ of India," he says.
According to him, fabrications and distortions are pre-woven in the narration of events and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has suffered from this bias.
"Therefore, the commitment to truth in writing the history needs earnest defending for the sake of dispelling myth. It is about time to be geared up for this ‘tryst with truth’ about RSS. The fact is that RSS has the ideological wherewithal to offer a credible alternative to transform India," he argues.
Sinha, an academic at the University of Delhi, has written a book "Understanding RSS" in which he seeks to dispel propaganda "intentionally weaved by pseudo intellectuals about RSS for decades".
The book is a collection of his articles related to the RSS and in Sinha's words "an attempt to succinctly put forth the empirical evidences which punctures the myth interlaced by Congress and Left intellectuals to discredit RSS".
He says in more than nine decades, the RSS has developed and fortified its ground to define the Idea of India.
"Its prolonged and sincere engagement with cultural nationalism is certainly not exclusionary and it has no negative ramification on the nation and her destiny. Therefore, argumentum and absurdum on RSS by intellectuals need to be reappraised," he writes in the introduction of the book, brought out by Har-Anand Publications.
However, he says, for the larger masses and ideologically unattached intelligentsia, the observation by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat that the organisation should be judged dispassionately through personal experiences rather than mere derivative information is very pertinent.
"The post-colonial Marxist and Nehruvian social scientists and intellectuals consciously, calculatingly and tactically overlooked empiricism and construed false narrative on the RSS which led a reactionary and regressive discourse. The academic and intellectual majoritarianism was employed as contrivance to squash legitimacy of the RSS and twisted discourse into monologue rants," Sinha claims.
