Tag: RSS

• On importing self-deporting excellence

  These days, disbelief is my usual reaction on waking up and reading the news from America. The attack on universities in particular is extraordinary, even though I understand it from the perspective of diffusing the sound of discontent over Palestine, and of turning institutions into vassals. Outside university there are the economic considerations that regulate the morals of working people, the levers and guillotines of upcoming payments and insecure work, the dues seen and unseen, that constant whisper in ears to consider the fallout of a hastily expressed opinion, and think of the many ways a revelation may be used. But what could unruly university students possibly fear when there are no jobs to be lost, no real price to be paid for an opinion in a place where opinions are the fuel of understanding. Taking it away is the price of it: The abrupt end to the classroom, the confiscation of access to what a university offers, along with the debates and disagreements and the granting of the freedom their mind was assured; the idea of the university itself, where inside is freedom, outside is the prison.

  I think, on occasion, that this is not the United States, this is how the Middle East would approach ideas—with fear, suspicion, and the intent to discipline wildness. But I remember that this is wrong: in October 2001, at an airport in Oklahoma, I’m asked in a small room by two men from law enforcement, “How do you know about Al-Qaeda?” When I tell them that I read, that college students talk about things, that—naively, I say—there is nothing wrong in it, they are contemptuous. “You people live in a bubble,” one says. When I wake up and read the news now, I see that men with minds like theirs are inside universities. There is no bubble. And I imagine that to survive here now is the adopt the Middle East rules that migrants from the subcontinent imagine keep them safe: head down, keep working, make money, rise quietly. The problems of speech, propriety, and genocide are the concerns of other people, people who have accumulated enough to forget fear, people who cannot be asked to “self-deport.”

  Authoritarianism sucks the air out of a vibrant culture. It makes smaller the numbers who consider themselves entirely safe, and makes larger the cost of expression. It goes unnoticed that the burgeoning market for nostalgia is at the cost of market for modernity. It erodes trust, and corrodes ties that hold things together. Jason Stanley, the Yale professor who left for the University of Toronto, told the Financial Times, “I believe in the values of academic freedom and defending democratic institutions, not the idea that the proper response to authoritarians is to hide and hope you’re not next.”

  Momodou Taal, a doctoral candidate at Cornell who participated in protests and filed a suit to stop the deportation of protestors, chose to leave the country because “given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.”

  So there’s some kind of flight from America. The FT story talks about it, and there’s this column by Ed Luce. “American scientists are looking for jobs abroad,” he writes. “Trump has presented the world with a giant poaching opportunity.” This is what I’ve been in disbelief about every morning—the idea of job cuts and research funding drying up, and of this country’s giant talent pool looking for a new home. And then, to put this whole post in context, for a moment, I entertain the idea that India might welcome them, and make surprising progress in some field or the other. But we’ve had silence in this regard, no evidence of any thought given to the opportunity. It’s fitting, given the well-established governmental antipathy to expertise of any kind, but still dismaying. I studied the RSS for a few years, and wrote about their dedication to obfuscation. Now, with them at the center of political life, the country is unable to use this moment to invite talent, because it’s at war with what they have to offer. They fear the meandering that brings independence. Explorations must be officially approved.

  What a time to choose ignorance.

  2025.04.01

• One man’s story of leaving Hindu nationalism

  There’s an extract from the The New India in the Guardian. It’s about a writer named Partha Banerjee who joined the RSS when he was six, and left when he was a young man. It’s a story about a father and a son, and the role the organisation played in their lives. But there are other things Partha talked to me about. He explained how minds were shaped and families won over by the RSS, and what it took to finally see what he had been a part of.

  There was work, but little if any money for the rank and file, Partha said. The cost of Jitendra’s commitment to the RSS was borne by his wife and children. “My father gave up everything, a good academic career, a decent well-to-do family, their homes, mortal pleasures, everything,” Partha told me. “My mother suffered greatly because of that. I suffered greatly because of that. We ended up living in poverty all our lives. But that was the RSS.”

  That was the RSS. The organisation’s members placed great store by suffering, maintaining not only a ledger of their own sacrifice but a complete accounting of everyone they knew. Years after Partha followed his father into the RSS, and then wrote his way out of it, he too was touched by this habit. And so while he remembered his father ignoring his financial responsibilities, and remembered that other members also “starved sometimes”, he saw nobility in a voluntary renouncing of comfort. “They were not greedy, they were not liars, they were not corrupt,” he said. “They were like saints.”

  That was why he became a member and stayed with them for decades. He wanted me to understand that while he did not support Islamophobia, disparaging Dalits and gender discrimination, the people he knew who formed the RSS’s most loyal cadre “were very honest personally”. The purity of their hatred was the result of “following their own doctrines honestly”, he said. Another former RSS volunteer told me something similar: “They peddled hate, but did it very, very sincerely. It was almost like God’s work.”

  Read the whole thing.

  2024.08.10

• Eminent people

  At 2.44pm on 30 May 2022, I received an email from a professor of horticulture in Haryana. It began with such respect that I, a journalist, was immediately wary:

  “Respected Sh. Rahul Bhatia Ji. Namaskar. Sadar Vande.”

  It was the text equivalent of a guest who unexpectedly finds himself garlanded and fed sweets while someone rinses his feet. The letter writer introduced himself. He led a department at a “food technology entrepreneurship and management” university, and had one hundred and fifty scientific publications to his name. His most referenced work was about the use of compounds in food waste. But his main work was as a high-ranking officer of the RSS in Haryana.
   
  It gave him pleasure to announce that Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, would be in Delhi that August for an intimate meeting with people of some importance in public life. “It is our honour to invite you for the said meeting on 25th August in Delhi,” he wrote. “Kindly confirm your availability for the said meeting.”
   
  I thought about the said meeting endlessly, conferring with and frustrating my family and friends. Why me? I was only a reporter, not a newspaper or magazine editor. Those guys were more likely candidates for this sort of thing. Perhaps the RSS had heard about the book I was researching. Did they want to know me, and cultivate me? Was a threat implicit in the invitation? Had they heard about the fellowship? I played advocate and was convinced by the arguments, and then devil’s advocate, who I also thought made some good points. I feared, above all, that my appearance at the meeting could be used in some unanticipated way in the future. Perhaps a picture would be unearthed of me shaking hands with men who would be tried in an international court of justice someday. I thought about it, mulled over it, pondered it, and fretted about it – that was how much thinking went on. All this continued for a few weeks until the advocate’s argument could no longer be ignored. Almost two months had passed by the time I made my decision, but I sent off a letter saying yes, and purchased a plane ticket for seventeen thousand rupees. This seemed a good investment for a memorable incident in the book, I reasoned, but it worried people. My daughter woke up with a nightmare that I had been stabbed at the meeting. “Promise me that you’ll take a pocket knife,” she pleaded.
   
  On the morning of the event, I visualised how the meeting would go (I do this a lot). To be confrontational with the leader of an unaccountable militia was unwise. Perhaps drawing him out gradually would let him see that I was genuinely curious. I practiced a puzzled look, a look halfway between ‘I don’t understand’ and ‘Why do this at all?’ This was one presentation of the truth. The other, which I did not want to show, was my anger. I calmed myself and wrote down what I wanted to know, questions to answers only he could authoritatively provide. ‘Can you tell us what a Hindu nation will look like? What role will women play? What concept of rights will exist in your Hindu nation? Do you plan to change the constitution? If so, what will you change? Your newspapers spread hatred and encourage people to see themselves in religious terms. Why do they do this? What are you doing to address anti-minority rhetoric?’ Pretty basic stuff.
   
  I arrived at the India International Centre at five that evening to attend the closed-door meeting. Powerful governments came and went, but they all had the same taste in haunts. A line of German cars stopped in the driveway, ejecting passengers dressed in suits. A young man in starched clothes opened my door and said, “Your driver can wait in a special area. There’s food for him.” This was North Indian wedding-level organisation.
   
  In the lobby, outside the room where the meeting was to happen, a man in a kurta asked who I was. I told him I was Rahul Bhatia, and he smiled and held up his hands to say he should have known. “Of course,” he said, and led me toward the private lawns where well-dressed older men stood and chatted. An organiser standing nearby had overheard our conversation, and he accosted me on the way to ask my name.
   
  “I’m Rahul Bhatia,” I said.
   
  “What do you do, Mr Bhatia?” he asked.
   
  “I’m a journalist,” I said, confused by their confusion. It’s likely they didn’t know about the book.
   
  “Ah,” he said, as if he understood. “This is a closed-door meeting. You need an invitation.”
   
  “Yes, I do have an invitation,” I said. I showed him the letter and my reply.
   
  “What do you do?” he said again.
   
  Again, I told him.
   
  He thought about it and said, finally, as if it was the only way out of this situation, “This meeting is for industrialists. Thirty-five industrialists have been invited.”
   
  I remember my lips parting, and I may have laughed. At the word industrialist, I thought of a man whose electronic correspondence I frequently received. “Regarding my refund issue,” one letter began. “Rude behaviour,” another said. “Pathetic service from Ranchi airport,” was yet another. “Luggage lost… going to do suicide,” said a passenger whose baggage contained all his identification documents. I commiserated with all of them and resolved to never travel on Indigo.
   
  “Ah. There’s an industrialist named Rahul Bhatia,” I told the organiser. “He runs the airline.”
   
  “That is correct,” he said, smiling brightly. He was pleased that I had put it together. “He will be here.”
   
  Should I wait around in case he doesn’t turn up? I wanted to say. But two Rahul Bhatias were one reporter too many in a private meeting between a paramilitary organisation and industrialists.
   
  “This is next level,” I said, smiling. He looked embarrassed, and I felt embarrassed for him.
   
  “I’m very sorry for the confusion,” he said. “But have some chai and meet people.” He held my hand and insisted. I took it back. I’m not supposed to be there, I said.
   
  I crossed the street outside, keen to get away. I stood on the sidewalk with my notebook and thought about the wasted time and money. It’s true: authoritarianism does leave you poorer. Meanwhile the event went on, and more industrialists arrived in a line that was now a jam, while police stationed along the road looked every way for threats to the status quo.

  2024.05.21