DR. KESHAV BALIRAM HEDGEWAR, founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was from his early boyhood intensely devoted to the cause of nation and was in the thick of the various movements going on at that time for the liberation of our motherland. He was engrossed for several years in the revolutionary movement. He later on plunged into the agitations and organisational work of the Indian National Congress.

But soon he discovered that the underlying idea in all those movements was merely one of ousting the British. And that idea was equated with nationalism. For most of the leading men of those times, 'anti-Britishism' and 'nationalism' were interconvertible terms. Our founder felt dissatisfied with that superficial kind of thinking. He knew from a deep understanding of the history of our nation and also of other nations that the concept of 'nation' was a positive one and was not based on antagonism to anyone else. And he also knew that the slightest distortion in the initial concept of the national goal would, in spite of the best of intentions, ultimately lead us to irretrievable catastrophic results. Our fate would be like that of the person who started to make the idol of Vinayaka but ended by making a monkey:

विनायकं प्रकुर्वाणो रचयामास वानरम् ।

 

It was after profound cogitation along these lines that Dr. Hedgewar decided to start the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on the basis of the correct and positive and abiding concept of our nationhood.

What, then, is that true concept of our nationality?

Let us start with stating and analysing its concept as understood and practised in the modern would, as that would help us appreciate the subject in the present context.

 

 

How did the concept of a 'nation' first manifest itself in the West? To begin with, various groups of people delimited themselves within some sort of natural territorial boundaries. The people residing in a particular territory developed a feeling that they were the sons of that soil, that they had their own way of life which they had to preserve and protect, and that, in short, they were a single, separate and distinct entity. They thus formed themselves into cohesive, indivisible groups. At various times and from various countries, leading men of thought gave expression to the idea of a 'nation' to define those groups. It we collect the various expressions and definitions put forth by them and bring out their essence, we arrive at certain simple conclusions.

The first requisite for a nation is a contiguous piece of land delimited as far as possible by natural boundaries to serve as the substratum on which the nation has to live, grow and prosper. Then the second requisite is, the people living in that particular territory should have developed love and adoration for it as their motherland, as the place of their sustenance, security and prosperity. In short, they should feel that they are the children of that soil.

Then, that people should not be just a mass of men, just a juxtaposition of heterogeneous individuals. They should have evolved a definite way of life moulded by community of life-ideals, of culture, of feelings, sentiments, faith and traditions. If people thus become united in a coherent and well-ordered society having common traditions and aspirations, a common memory of the happy and unhappy experience of their past life, common feelings of friendship and hostility, and their interests intertwined in one identical whole-then such people living as children of that particular territory may be termed a 'nation'.

 

 

If we apply this definition acknowledged by all the learned men in the world, to our own country, we find that this great country of our, extending in the north form the Himalayas-with all its branches spreading north, south, east and west, and with the territories included in those great branches-right up to the Southern ocean inclusive of all the islands, is one great natural unit. As the Child of this soil, our well-evolved society has been living here for thousands of years. This society has been living here for thousands of years. This society has been known, especially in modern times, as the Hindu Society. For, it is the forefathers of the Hindu People that have set up standards and traditions of love and devotion for the motherland. They also prescribed various duties and rites with a view to keeping aglow in our mind a living and complete picture of our motherland and devotion to it as a Divine Entity. And again it is they who shed their blood in defence of its sanctity and in integrity. That all this has been done by the Hindu People alone is a fact to which our history of thousands of years bears testimony. It means that only the Hindu has been living here as the child of this soil. All our great personalities right form hoary ages down to modern times have, by their life and example, confirmed the continuity of this sacred bond.

The common adoration for the motherland had made our people, in a way, related by blood to one another-form the man in Kashi to the man in Kanyakumari and form a forest-dweller to a city-dweller. The various castes, the various ways of worshipping God, the various languages are all expressions of the one great homogeneous solid Hindu People-the children of this motherland.

 

 

Then we , the Hindu People, have had an ideal viz., to realise the Ultimate Truth. In keeping with that ideal we have a dharma which is incomparable for its breadth of vision and encompasses all grades and aspects of human life. We have a current of life, our samskriti (culture) which instills sublime qualities of purity, character, fortitude and self-sacrifice in the individual, enabling him to attain that highest goal of human existence. That stamp of culture is manifest in our day-to-day, sublimating the mundane into the transcendent. For example, it is common custom with us to call every woman, even a little girl, by the word ma, i.e., mother. The same meaning is conveyed whatever other words we may use in our various dialects. That is, every woman, whatever her age or status in life, except a man's wife, is a manifestation of the mother to him. This is a special feature of our culture.

The famous instance of Shivaji who sent back honourably and laden with presents the beautiful daughter-in-law of the Muslim Subhedar of Kalyan captured in war (though it appears exceptional in the eyes of the foreign, especially Muslim, historians) is a very ordinary instance symbolic of the sublime culture of this land. And this is shared even by the commoners here.

There was a revealing instance during the holocaust after the assassination of Ghandhiji. An orgy of murder, loot and arson had been let loose on innocent people by anti-national and subversive elements. One such murderous mob attacked a house. Only the lady of the house was in. Out of terror she opened the door. On seeing her alone, the mob paused for a while. Notorious ruffians were leading the mob. But even then the ancient call of our culture matruvat paradareshu (look upon women as mother) which was in their blood, made them treat her with utmost courtesy. They told her that they were out to burn and loot, but would arrange for her conduct to a place of safety. Two of them were even deputed for her escort! In spite of the past thousand-year-long corroding influence of foreigners and the all-round immorality raging among our 'top-class' at present, such glowing instances of character are still to be found in our common people. This gives us an idea of the distinctively pure and sublime culture, which has been reared in our hearts. It has given us a complexion all our own.

Also, down all these thousands of years, we have produced a whole galaxy of seers and sages, savants and heroes who have led us in our march in search of God and attainment of material affluence and hounour. They built up a social order to meet the needs of various kinds of individuals, developed economic systems for the proper production and distribution of wealth and formed political institutions for the protection and upkeep of the orderly evolution of society. As a result, during all these centuries of our existence here, we have had similar experiences of prosperity and adversity, of friendship and hostility, all our interests having been inextricably joined together.

Whenever, by mistake, we fought with one another imagining that the interests of a particular group were in opposition to those of another and developed separate and mutually hostile kingdoms, we lost the battle against the foreigners, and all were reduced to abject slavery and misery. Same was the result when one section of our people was friendly to some foreign power while another was struggling against it. The case of Prithviraj Chouhan is in point. His enemy was Mohammed Ghori. Jayachand made friends with Mohammed Ghori. Here were two prominent persons of our country-one of them an enemy and the other a friend of the same invader. The result was that Prithviraj was defeated and killed. Jayachand also was destroyed. Mohammed Ghori became the king. And the whole train of disasters over the last eight hundred years, and which in the present times has culminated in the Partition, was set in motion. On the other hand, whenever we realised, even for a short period, that our interests were indivisible, that our friends and foes were alike to all of us, such immense power was generated in our national life that the power of the foreigner lay shattered at our feet. All the requisites for making a full-fledged nation are thus fulfilled in the life of this great Hindu People. Therefore, we say that in this land of ours, Bharat, the national life is of the Hindu People. In short, this is the Hindu Nation.

 

 

But some of the so-called 'secularists' of our country become 'restless' when they hear words like dharma and samskriti while discussing the concept of a 'nation'. "Why do you bring religion into politics?" they ask. So let us take the instance of Stalin, who had denounced God and religion as being an opium meant to delude the ignorant. Explaining the concept of 'nation', he once said that a nation is not formed out of mere common economic or political interests of a people residing in a common territory but that it is 'a community of spiritual consciousness'.

Swami Vivekananda, the great harbinger of our national renaissance in modern times, had time and again declared in unequivocal terms that this is Hindu Nation and placed before us the great Hindu ideals of Guru Govind Singh and Chhatrapati Shivaji. In fact, he defined our nation as composed of those "whose hearts beat to the same spiritual tune."

We thus say that our Hindu Nationhood is a truth, borne out by logic, experience, and history. It is the supreme solid fact of our national life and not any fleeting 'ism' born out of political and economic theories or exigencies.

 

 

When we say "This is the Hindu Nation", there are some who immediately come up with the question, "What about the Muslims and the Christians dwelling in this land? Are they not also born and bred here? How could they become aliens just because they have changed their faith?" But the crucial point is whether THEY remember that they are the children of this soil. What is the use of merely OUR remembering? That feeling, that memory, should be cherished by THEM. We are not so mean as to say that with a mere change in the method of worship, an individual ceases to be a son of the soil. We have no objection to God being called by any name whatever. We, in the Sangh, are Hindus to the core. That is why we have respect for all faiths and religious beliefs. He cannot be a Hindu at all who is intolerant of other faiths. But the question before us now is, what is the attitude of those people who have been converted to Islam or Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt. But are they true to their salt? Are they grateful to this land which has brought them up? Do they feel that they are the children of this land and its tradition, and that to serve it is their great good fortune? Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in their faith, gone is the spirit of love and devotion for the nation.

Nor does it end there. They have also developed a feeling of identification with the enemies of this land. They call themselves 'Sheikhs' and 'Syeds'. Sheikhs and Syeds are certain clans in Arabia. How then did these people come to feel that they are their descendants? That is because they have cut off their ancestral national moorings of this land and mentally merged themselves with the aggressors. They still think that they have come here only to conquer and establish their kingdoms. So we see that it is not merely a case of change of faith, but a change even in national identity. What else is it, if not treason, to join the camp of the enemy leaving their mother-nation in the lurch?

An eminent American Professor once asked me the question, 'Muslims and Christians are of this land alone. Why don't you consider them as of your own?" To that, I put him a counter-question: "Suppose one of our countrymen goes to America, settles there and wants to become an American citizen. However, he refuses to accept your Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and others as his national heroes. Would you then call him a national of America? Tell me frankly." He said, "No."

Then I told him, "Why should not the same criterion be applied to our country also? How can you say that we should call such people nationals who, while living here, work against the honour and traditions of the country, and insult our national heroes and objects of national veneration?"

 

 

The mere fact of birth or nurture in a particular territory, without a corresponding mental pattern, can never give a person the status of a national in that land, Mental allegiance has been, in fact, the universally accepted criterion for nationality.

There is an old story with a lesson for us. Once a lioness roaming in the jungle found a small baby jackal and brought it to her cave. The lioness had a few cubs. She began to feed the infant jackal also with her milk along with her cubs. They all began to grow and play about as brothers. Once when they had gone into the thick of the jungle an elephant came that way. The jackal kid, on seeing that colossal animal, cried out in terror to his brothers to run away. The lion cubs replied, "What a fool your are! After so many days we have come across such fine prey. If you are afraid, you go home. We will fight." The jackal kid came running to the cave and narrated to the lioness that a great calamity had befallen his younger brothers by their refusing to heed to his elderly advice. The lioness just smiled and told the kid, "No doubt, you have grown here on my milk. But you cannot help your nature."

 

शूरोसि कृतविद्योसि दर्शनीयोसि पुत्रक ।

यस्मिन् कुले त्वमुत्पन्नः गजस्तत्र न हन्यते ।।

 

(Doubtless, you are brave, adept at learning, handsome to look at, but the species in which you are born in not the one that can kill an elephant.)

So also is the case with nations. Mere common residence in a particular territory cannot forge an unified national society with common character and qualities. The newcomers should bring about a total metamorphosis in their life-attitudes and take a rebirth, as it were, in that ancient national lineage.

The example of democratic England is instructive. Over a hundred years ago, some Germans settled there and were given the rights of citizenship. They were not looked upon as strangers. One of them came to our country as a servant of England and was employed as an ICS official in Madhya Pradesh. But when war broke out in 1914, he was promptly detained, lest his attachment to Germany be roused. On a mere suspicion, he was kept under detention. This is their mature and correct understanding of nationalism.

So too is the case with our nation. Mere common residence or birth and growth in our land cannot imply that the same loyalties, qualities and pattern of life exist amongst all its residents.

 

 

So, all that we say is that the Muslims and Christians here should give up their present foreign mental complexion and merge in the common stream of our national life.

Everybody knows that only a handful of Muslims came here as enemies and invaders. So also, only a few foreign Christian missionaries came here. Now the Muslims and Christians have enormously grown in number. They did not grow just by multiplication as in the case of fishes. They converted the local population. We can trace our ancestry to a common source, from where one portion was taken away from the Hindu fold and became Muslim and another became Christian. The rest could not be converted and they have remained as Hindus. Now, how did the converts leave their ancestral home? Was it out of their own sweet will and out of conviction of the superiority of those faiths? Well, history does not record a single notable instance of that sort.

On the contrary, history tells us that the reason was the fear of death or coercion or the various temptations of power, position, etc., or the desire to please the powers that be by adopting their ways and customs and finally even taking to their faiths. There was a lot of deception also. A piece of beef or a loaf used to be thrown into the water tank of a village and the villagers ignorant of what had happened, used to take the water as usual. On the next morning the missionary or the moulvi would come and declare that since they had used the polluted water they had all lost their religion and the only way left for them was to join his fold! In this way, whole villages have been converted to Islam in the North and to Christianity on the West Coast. This is deception, pure and simple. Thus it was the mad zeal for increasing one's numbers for political strategy under its grab. The foreign invader not only subjugated them politically and culturally but ultimately converted them to his faith. That too is foreign domination. There are political, economic and cultural domination and this is religious domination.

It is our duty to call these our forlorn brothers, suffering under religious slavery for centuries, back to their ancestral home. As honest freedom-loving men, let them overthrow all signs of slavery and domination and follow the ancestral ways of devotion and national life. All types of slavery are repugnant to our nature and should be given up. This is a call for all those brothers to take their original place in our national life. And let us all celebrate a great Diwali on the return of those "prodigal sons" of our society. The parable of the "prodigal son" is to be found in the Bible. A son parted form his family taking away his portion of wealth. He lived extravagantly and became a pauper. He returned to his place, but not having the courage to go home, he stayed out of the precincts of the village. The old father who was on his way to his farm espied his son standing at a distance with his head hung in shame. The father immediately called him to his side, embraced him and exclaimed, "Oh, I am so happy that you have come back." He asked his other son to go home and arrange for a big feast. The other son was perplexed and asked his father, "Father, I have been here devoted to you all along. But you have never held a feast in my honour. This fellow has squandered away all his money and you intend to have a feast for him!" The father replied, "Look here, my boy, true, your brother had gone away for some time and I thought that I had lost a son. But now by the grace of God I have got back my son. Should we not love him as before and honour him? Should we not rejoice at his homecoming?"

So also we shall rejoice and offer our love and respect when all those our brethren who have been wandering for so many centuries outside our house come back to our fold. There is no compulsion here. This is only a call and request to them to understand things properly and come back and identify themselves with their ancestral Hindu way of life in dress, customs, performing marriage ceremonies and funeral rites and such other things.

There are some people who claim that they have achieved unity of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and all others on the political and economic plane. But why limit the oneness only there? Why not make it more wide and more comprehensive so as to fuse them all in the Hindu way of life, in our dharma and take them back as lost brothers? To those who speak of unity on the political and economic plane, we say that we stand not only for political and economic unity but also for cultural and religious unity. We have thrown open our homes, our sanctuaries and temples, our age-old culture and heritage. Undoubtedly, this is a broader outlook.

 

There are many who feel the same way in their heart of hearts. For example, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has written a forward to a Hindi book, Samskriti ke Char Adhyay, wherein he has given expression to his innermost feelings of intense love for the Hindu Culture-which he calls Bharatiya Culture-and intense desire to see it once again in all its pristine powers of assimilation. He has said that there had been two stages in our cultural history. In the first stage all the foreign races like Hunas and Shakas who came as invaders finally gave up their original customs and faiths and began calling themselves Rajputs. They all got absorbed in our fold gladly, spontaneously. Then we had the courage, strength and power of assimilation and absorbed them wholly in the great cultural current of our national life. We also took up whatever good points there were in them. Then, he says, the second stage came when invaders of a virulent character invaded our land and our people shut themselves up behind rules of 'do's and 'don't's, seeking protection in their rigid social structure. They thus became narrow-minded, keeping aloof from all and segregated by themselves.

Unfortunately, he has mentioned only two stages. There is another painful aspect. Some of those who claimed to love Hindu Culture, finding it difficult to face the foreign onslaught, thought that they could protect it by surrendering themselves at the feet of the invaders and adopting their manners and customs. This has happened in the past. Fifty or sixty years ago a vazir of Hyderabad, a Hindu, was doing namaz five times every day like a most devout Muslim! This is sharanagati (surrender). If the first stage be called parakarma-vad (assimilation-ism) and the second, sankuchitata-vad (contraction-ism), then this can be called sharangati-vad (surrender-ism). Even today it is going on. Even in language, 33 per cent of English, 33 per cent of Persian words are introduced in our Army commands. Will such juxtapositions, calculations and mathematics bring about assimilation and ensure integrity of the people? This is nothing but appeasement, surrendering and kneeling down before the invaders. Because they have been intractable, this sharanagati-vad has caught the imagination of our people as a way out of the impasse.

We must revive once again the parakrama-vad. For that, we should make it clear that the non-Hindu who lives here has a rashtra dharma (national responsibility), a samaja dharma (duty to society), a kula dharma (duty to ancestors), and only in his vyakti dharma (personal faith) he can choose any path which satisfies his spiritual urge. If, even after fulfilling all those various duties in social life, anybody says that he has studied Quran Sherif or the Bible and that way of worship strikes a sympathetic chord in his heart, that he can pray better through that path of devotion, we have absolutely no objection. Thus he has his choice in a portion of his individual life. For the rest, he must be one with the national current. That is real assimilation.

That is how we had conducted ourselves in the past. We had always been hospitable. Any one was welcome to stay here. But all of them were required to act up to our national codes and conventions. Several centuries ago, when barbaric hordes of Arabs and Turks invaded Persia, some Parsis left their motherland and sailed forth with their Holy Fire and Holy Book and landed at Surat. King Yadava Rana welcomed them with open arms and consulted the Shankarachrya of Dwaraka Math as to how to accept them. They were asked to give up beef-eating, respect mother-cow as an object of national faith and live here in peace. These followers of Zaratushtra have kept up their promise even to this day. They live here with their religion intact, but have merged themselves wholly in the mainstream of national life.

Once Pandit Nehru had remarked at Jabalpur that there was no reason why we should not be able to absorb the Muslims even as we had assimialated in historical times the Hunas and the Shakas. Indisputably, this is the correct and the only way of integrating our national life.

This is our concept of Hindu Nation and our attitude towards the non-Hindus residing here-the only rational, practical and right approach.

In spite of this rational and positive approach, there are some who imagine that the concept of Hindu Nation is a challenge to the very existence of the Muslim and the Christian co-citizens and they will be thrown out and exterminated. Nothing could be more absurd or detrimental to our national sentiment. It is insult to our great and all-embracing cultural heritage. Do we not know, for example, that even in the latest powerful expression of Hindu resurgence under Shivaji, one of his army officers was a Ranadulla Khan? Later on, on the battlefield of Panipat in 1761, in that life-and-death struggle for the rising Hindu Swaraj, the key position of the Artillery Chief was held by one Ibrahim Gardi. With such historical evidence and national traditions for the past thousands of years staring in our eyes, how strange that some persons still say that the non-Hindus live in peril if the Hindu Nation comes into its own!

 

 

Today we often hear our political leaders speaking of 'national integration', 'emotional integration' and so on. But what is that 'common emotion', that common basis on which all can come together? What are those eternal life-springs of our national life that go to make it unified, resurgent and glorious?

In the first place, feeling of burning devotion to the land, which, from times immemorial, we have regarded as our sacred Matrubhoomi,

-in the second place, the feeling of fellowship, of fraternity, born out of the realisation that we are the children of that one great common Mother,

-in the third place, the intense awareness of a common current of national life, born out of a common culture and heritage, of common history and traditions, of common ideals and aspirations,

-this trinity of values or, in a word, Hindu Nationalism, forms the bedrock of our national edifice.