The Fight for the Republic: Sitaram Yechury's Critical Analysis of Hindutva and RSS

The Hindu

4 days ago

Published : Aug 15, 2025 08:48 IST - 9 MINS READ
How does one contribute to the fight to preserve the secular-democratic character of India? The first step would be to understand the very movements that seek to undermine the basic values upheld by the Constitution. Understanding these movements will require one to understand their worldview—what drives those movements, and what their vision of future society is.
Sitaram Yechury's The Fight for the Republic is one that eminently serves this purpose by providing a trenchant critique of the RSS and its affiliated organisations, including the BJP. The book, published after Yechury's untimely demise in September 2024, is a collection of three essays that had been published separately earlier. The collection has been introduced by the renowned economist and thinker Prabhat Patnaik, who was also Yechury's professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
The Fight for the Republic
By Sitaram Yechury Tulika Books-SAHMAT Pages: 120 Price: Rs.250
The first two essays, titled 'Pseudo-Hinduism Exposed' and 'What is Hindu Rashtra?' respectively, were originally published in 1993, soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. This was when the RSS, the BJP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Bajrang Dal jointly provided a horrifying demonstration of their destructive power and contempt for the basic principles of the Constitution. Yechury gives this combine the moniker SS (Saffron Shirts), pointing out their resemblance to the Nazi paramilitary organisations SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squadron) and Brown Shirts (Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers).
Yechury devotes the first essay to enumerate and demolish several claims made by the RSS and its 'family' of Hindutva organisations. In the second essay, he explains the true nature of the RSS' concept of Hindu Rashtra.
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Responding to the claim that it was enraged 'Hindu sentiments' that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Yechury points out that an overwhelming majority of Hindus had, through the freedom struggle, embraced secularism. With the destruction of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, the Hindutva forces attacked the very values that the majority of Hindus had imbibed. The Hindutva organisations were, in fact, acting in accordance with the vision of Hindu Rashtra that was outlined by M.S. Golwalkar, the second RSS chief. Yechury produces several excerpts from Golwalkar's 1939 book We or Our Nationhood Defined to demonstrate this point.
For instance, Golwalkar had the following to say about Indians who are not Hindus: 'They have no place in national life, unless they abandon their differences, adopt the religion, culture and language of the nation, and completely merge themselves in the national race. So long, however, as they maintain their racial, religious and cultural differences, they cannot but be only foreigners...'Further, he wrote: 'the foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea except the glorification of the Hindu religion and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation, and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or they may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen's rights... We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races who have chosen to live in our country.'
Guruji's guru
Golwalkar, whom RSS men consider their 'Guruji', projects the path followed by Nazi Germany as the model to be followed to 'deal' with 'foreign races':
'To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the semitic race—the Jews… Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the roots, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.'
Yechury writes: 'Hitler thus emerges as the 'Guruji's guru'.'
In his book, Golwalkar uses the terms 'Hindu' and 'Aryan race' synonymously. To bolster his argument that non-Hindu Indians are 'foreign races', he claims that Aryans originated in India and did not migrate to India from elsewhere, dismissing all historical evidence to the contrary. After examining various related claims by Golwalkar and showing them to be spurious, Yechury hits the nail on the head: 'If, according to him [Golwalkar], the Hindus were Aryans, who then were these Aryans that Hitler was championing? If those were also Aryans, then why did they migrate from India to Germany or vice versa? According to Golwalkar's theory, both India and Germany should be part of a single nation!'
Hindutva forces have no respect for the Hindu religion itself, Yechury argues. Along with the Babri Masjid, they had also destroyed the Ayodhya temples of Ram Chabutra and Sita ki Rasoi on December 6, 1992.
The RSS was banned after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. During the period after the lifting of the ban, Golwalkar played a vital role in establishing an organisational structure for the 'Saffron Brigade' in order to achieve its aim of a fascistic Hindu Rashtra. In public, the RSS was to confine itself to 'cultural activity', while its affiliates would branch out into various sections spreading the message of 'Hindu Rashtra'. The setting up of the VHP with the RSS pracharak Shivram Shankar Apte as its first general secretary, and the sending of RSS cadres to help Shyama Prasad Mukherjee to set up the Bharatiya Jana Sangh which later morphed into the BJP, were among the crucial organisational measures taken by Golwalkar. This is the organisational network that expanded into the one that is in power in India today.
Remarkably, Abul A'la Maududi, the founder of the Islamist fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, had appealed to Indians to organise their state and society on the basis of Hindu scriptures and laws, just as Pakistan would be organised based on Islamic laws. In a speech in Pathankot in May 1947, Maududi had said: 'If a Hindu government based on Hindu law came to India and the law of Manu became the law of the land as a result of which Muslims were treated as untouchables and were not given any share in the government, they did not even get the citizenship rights, I would have no objection.'
In other words, Islamist fundamentalists and Hindu communalists strengthen each other, and are conscious about their symbiotic relationship. As one variety of communalism grows, polarisation on religious lines grows, which in turn leads to the growth of other kinds of communalism and religious fundamentalism. Rejecting all kinds of communalism and religious fundamentalism is, therefore, necessary to save the secular fabric and unity of the country. It is clear from the words of the leaders of communal and religious fundamentalist movements that under a religious state, no democracy will exist for any minority community.
India at 75
The third essay in this book, titled 'India at 75', was written in 2021, by which time the Hindutva forces were well-entrenched in power. The essay begins by discussing the 'new narrative' being scripted to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra, a narrative which claims that India did not win freedom on August 15, 1947, but with the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 2019, and the commencement of the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya on August 5, 2020.
This narrative is the product of a long struggle, going back to the time of the national movement for Independence, between contending political-ideological visions. The mainstream Congress vision was that independent India should be a secular-democratic republic. The Communist vision, while agreeing with this aim, argued that political freedom must be extended to the socio-economic realm as well, and that it would be possible only under socialism.
Opposed to both these visions was a third one, which argued that the religious affiliations of India's people should determine the character of independent India. The Muslim League that championed the concept of the Islamic State, and the RSS which championed the cause of the Hindu Rashtra were both votaries of this vision. The former succeeded in partitioning the country with the support of the British colonial rulers, while the latter continued its efforts to turn India into a 'rabidly intolerant, fascistic Hindu Rashtra'.
The communists have argued all along that the capitalist path of development weakens the foundations of the secular-democratic republic. First, it relegates the anti-imperialist consciousness forged during the freedom struggle to the background, thus encouraging a social consciousness inflamed by caste and communal passions. Second, the path of capitalist development increasingly excludes the majority of the people, thereby providing the breeding ground for communal and fascist forces which can grow by exploiting popular discontent. The validity of this argument has been confirmed by the experience of post-independence India.
For the RSS, carrying forward its vision would require the undermining of the Constitution which has secular democracy, federalism, social justice, and economic sovereignty as its foundational pillars. All of these have been under severe assault since 2014, carried out under the aegis of a corporate-communal nexus that pursues 'unbridled neoliberal reforms, looting of national assets, intensifying economic exploitation and social oppression, and establishing a unitary state structure'. Democratic rights and civil liberties are being violated, even as crucial institutions such as Parliament, the judiciary, and the Election Commission are being undermined.
By propagating communalism and unreason through the educational system (by communalising curricula and by appointing RSS-BJP acolytes to head educational institutions), and by controlling the media and social media, the Hindutva forces seek to divert people's attention from their own miseries and from struggles against exploitation and oppression.
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Yechury emphasises that saving the secular-democratic republic will require the creation of a 'counter-hegemony' through the creation of a new culture that embraces class struggle against economic exploitation, and struggles against the Hindutva ideology. Strengthening the struggles of the working people, women, Dalits, Adivasis, youth, and students is necessary to build such a counter-hegemony. He concludes that on the basis of these struggles, a wide-ranging unity such as the one witnessed during the freedom struggle needs to be built 'to save India today in order to change it for a better tomorrow'.
While the three essays by Sitaram Yechury primarily focus on the ideology of the RSS, the introduction by Prabhat Patnaik highlights the economic conditions that have paved the way for the ascendancy of neo-fascist movements across the globe, so as to provide a more comprehensive picture of the current conjuncture.
For those who want to strive to defend the cherished principles of secularism and democracy in India, this book is a timely reminder of what they are up against.
Subin Dennis is an economist and researcher at Tricontinental Research, New Delhi.