Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar was a Congressman and had been a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. After his death in 1940, he handed the organisation over to Guru Golwalkar. Organisation was of supreme importance for the Guruji and under him, the network spread all over India, including in Karachi. The ideology of the Sangh was Hindu cultural nationalism as distinct from the inclusive, pluralistic nationalism of the Congress. Among the first three Congress presidents, one was Christian, one Muslim and one Parsi. But the Congress was a political organisation and the RSS proclaimed that it intended to keep away from politics and ‘culturally’ consolidate the Hindu masses.

It is necessary to remember that the Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1915, a decade before the RSS, when Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was undergoing life imprisonment. If the objective was the same, then Dr. Hedgewar and his colleagues would have joined the HMS, or Veer Savarkar would have joined the RSS. But the fact is that RSS and the HMS had distinct identities. The HMS was an upfront political organisation, which believed in armed struggle to achieve independence from the British. It sought to establish a Hindu Rashtra politically, almost on the same lines of what later became Pakistan. Indeed, the Savarkarites used to ridicule the RSS swayamsevaks for their ‘political timidity’. It was much later that the RSS began to appropriate Savarkar’s ideology. Savarkar died in 1966, never having ‘officially’ endorsed the RSS. Even after the Jan Sangh was formed in 1950 as a political wing of the RSS, the HMS fought elections in several constituencies against the Jan Sangh candidates.

... contd.