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The Sangh Parivar ( , translation: Family of Associations) refers to the family of organisations of Hindu nationalists that have been started by the volunteers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or are inspired by its ideals. The Sangh Parivar represents the Hindu nationalist movement. It includes the (RSS) and several dozen smaller organisations, whose members' expressed opinions have been diverse over a range of topics.

The different organizations within the Sangh Parivar run independently and have different policies and activities, but the stated mission of these activities has been "attaining the 'Saravangeena Unnati' (all-round development)" of India . Putting it in the words of Shri M S Golwalkar “in order to be able to contribute our unique knowledge to mankind, in order to be able to live and strive for the unity and welfare of the world, we stand before the world as a self-confident, resurgent and mighty nation.”

History

In the 1960s, the volunteers of the RSS joined the different social and political movements in India, including the Bhoodan, a land reform movement led by prominent Gandhian Vinobha Bhave and the Sarvoday led by another Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan. RSS also supported the formation of a trade union, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and a student's organisation Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and many other organisations like Seva Bharati, Deendayal Research Institute etc.

These organisations started and supported by the RSS volunteers came to be known collectively as the Sangh Parivar. . Next few decades have seen a steady growth in the influence of the Sangh Parivar in the social and political space of India.

Philosophy

The ideology of the Sangh Parivar has been seen to have a diverse set of thoughts and opinions that has made it difficult to be categorized by the Western stereotypic divisions of ‘Leftists’ and ‘Rightists’. While some of their policies are seen as ‘Conservative’ and ‘Rightist’, on a range of different issues, they have shared similar concerns as Leftists, Liberals and the Green activists.

Culture and diversity

Sangh ideologue M S Golwalkar articulated the Sangh’s vision on diversity and pluralism, as follows, “Individuals and nations in all parts of the globe have distinctive traits and features, each of them having its own place in the scheme of the universe. The different human groups are marching forward, all towards the same goal, each in its own way and in keeping with its own characteristic genius. The destruction of the special characteristics, whether of an individual, or of a group, will therefore not only destroy the natural beauty of harmony but also its joy of self-expression. Evolution of human life also, which is a multifaced one, is retarded thereby.”

The political opponents of the Sangh Parivar have often termed Sangh Parivar’s concerns about cultural intrusion by the Western commercial interests as ‘Rightist’ . But as David Frawley has pointed out the cause is similar to the cause of native and tribal peoples all over the world, like Native American and African groups, who too are trying to protect their native cultures. The cause of the natives is supported by Liberals in America

Economics

While the BJP governments have been progressively seen to be industry friendly , the opinions and the views of the Sangh Parivar constituents like Bharateeya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) find consonance with the known Leftist stands on labor rights.. The Sangh Parivar, as a whole, even the BJP in its earlier days, has advocated ‘Swadeshi’ (Self Reliance).Sangh Parivar leaders have been very vocal in their criticism of Globalization especially its impact on the poor and native people. They have been suspicious of the role of International agencies such as World Bank and the IMFmarker. Sangh constituents have advocated and promoted decentralized village centric economic growth with emphasis on ecological protection.

Ecology

The constituents of the Sangh Parivar have been known for their demands for steps to “protect the environment, natural-ecology and agro-economy” and for establishment of a “self-reliant village-oriented economy”. . They have been vocal in their demand against the use of Chemical fertilizers and have supported preservation and development of Organic farming in India. Many of these views are seen to mirror the concerns of the Green Party.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, a constituent of Sangh Parivar, is one of the very few political party at that included the concerns on Climate Change in its election manifesto for the National Elections of 2009. The manifesto promised prioritising "Combating climate change and global warming", "programmes to arrest the melting of Himalayan glaciers", "afforestation" and emphaisis on "protecting India's biodiversity".

Social impact

The activities of the Sangh Parivar have had considerable social and religious impact.

Service programs

The voluntary organisations which are part of the Sangh Parivar, today run more than one lakh service projects in remote areas of the country mostly within the economically and socially neglected sections of the society. . As against the commonly held belief that the Sangh Parivar is anti-Muslim, there have been many instances where the Muslims have been directly benefitted from its service projects. One such instance was when Sewa Bharti, affiliated to the Sangh Parivar, adopted 100 children, most of them Muslims, from militancy affected areas of Jammu and Kashmir to provide them education.

Social reform

In 1979, the religious wing of the Sangh Parivar, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad got the Hindu saints and religious leaders to reaffirm that untouchability and caste discrimination had no religious sanction in the Hindu scriptures and texts. “. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also spearheading efforts to ordain Dalits as priests in temples across India, positions that were earlier usually occupied only by people of "upper castes".

The leaders of the Sangh Parivar have also been involved in the campaigns against female fetocide and movements for the education to the girl child.

Social and political empowerment

The service programs, over the years, have led to the empowerment of the economically and socially underprivileged sections of the society, mostly the tribal, who have long remained politically under-represented. Babulal Marandi belonging to the tribal community, who was the organizing secretary of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, became the first Chief Minister of the state of Jharkhandmarker. Other such leaders of Sangh Parivar who belong to the tribal community include Karia Munda, Jual Oram both ministers in the Union Government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The emergence of the Sangh Parivar in Indian politics also brought many Dalits and representatives of the backward classes, who had been victims of social neglect, to prominent positions in the Government and Administration. Dr Suraj Bhan, a dalit, who had been a member of the RSS, became the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, in 1998. . Other leaders of the Sangh Parivar from the backward classes, who rose to prominence include Gopinath Munde, the former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, and Shivraj Singh Chauhan, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh.

The Sangh Parivar has spread Hindu nationalism through local "Bhagat schools", in which children are provided a Sangh-sanctioned education. In many villages across Indiamarker, dharma raksha samitis (Religion protection committees) promote religious discourse and form an arena for bhajan performance. The Sangh sponsors calendars of Hindu deities and provides instruction on sanctioned methods of conducting Ganesh Chaturthi and Navaratri. This phenomenon has been documented in Tamil Nadumarker, where high caste workers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Munnani teach Tamil dalits (untouchables) devotional hymns and persuaded many dalits to begin celebrating Ganesh Chaturthi, a festival not widely marked in Tamil Nadumarker.

The Sangh has also promoted changes in caste identity as its promotion of the God Krishna in Uttar Pradeshmarker led to the lower caste Ahirs joining the Yadav caste, though the Yadav's en masse do not support Hindutva. This phenomenon is described by Poornima Mankekar and Christopher Fuller as an "incorporation of Hindu nationalist themes in the local Yadav narratives".

Litigation Free Model

Veteran RSS leader Nanaji Deshmukh retired from politics at the peak of his political career in 1977 and dedicated himself to building a rural based economic model of development. It was found that lot of energies of the rural people was being wasted in litigations, which left them both impoverished and exploited. He said "If people fight amongst each other, they will have no time for development". Hence a method of sorting conflicts and differences was brought about that was based on the ancient Indian principles of consensus making and alternate conflict resolution, which has been called the Litigation-Free Model. Based on this model, villagers would sort all disputes amongst themselves amicably with least dependence on the Government.

Reception

The Sangh Parivar has been described with monikers spanning the spectrum from "patriotic Hindus" to "Hindu nationalist". Some Marxists have also labeled them "Hindu chauvinist".

David Frawley, an American author and indologist observed that "Its brand of Indian nationalism, recognizing cultural and religious pluralism, is more tolerant than most American nationalism. The organization is free of caste and members are not judged by their material status."

Former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has lavished praise on veteran Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader Nanaji Deshmukh and the organization started by him, the Deendayal Research Institute (an organization of the Sangh Parivar), for giving the nation the litigation-free model of resolving disputes he had devised. The President said "In Chitrakoot, I met Nanaji Deshmukh and his team members belonging to the Deendayal Research Institute (DRI). DRI is a unique institution developing and implementing a village development model which is most suited for India," the president said. "Apart from all the development activities, the institute is facilitating a cohesive conflict free society. As a result of this, I understand that the 80 villages around Chitrakoot are almost litigation-free". "The villagers have unanimously decided that no dispute will find its way to the court. The differences will be sorted out amicably in the village itself. The reason given by Nanaji Deshmukh is that if the people fight among each other, they have no time for development," the President added. "I consider that this model may be propagated in many parts of the country by societal organisations, judicial organisations and government," Kalam contended.

Praising Nanaji Deshmukh for his single-minded devotion to the uplift of the people, Kalam said “what the octogenarian leader was doing at Chitrakoot should be an eye-opener for others.”

Prominent industrialist, Jehangir Wadia, the grandson of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is influenced by the work ofSangh organisation, Deen Dayal Research Institute (DRI), and is now a volunteer of the DRI. He says"At 26, I realised that while I was seeking responses to my questions, the answer was always in front of me. That's when I joined Nanaji and got involved in social work at Chitrakoot,"

"Nanaji (founder of DRI) envisions self reliance for 600,000 villages in his life time. It is my dream totranslate Nanaji's vision of ameliorating the lives of this rural population."

There has been considerable debate whether the RSS and Sangh Parivar could be considered fascist. While its constituent organisations present themselves as embedded in the traditional ethos of Hinduism, their ideological opponents, mainly the Marxists, have characterised them as the representatives of authoritarian, xenophobic and majoritarian religious nationalism in India. Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst has dismissed the portrayal of Sangh Parivar's ideology as fascist by some leftist groups. He writes in his doctoral thesis, which is now published as a book The Saffron Swastika, “So far, the polemical arrows have all been shot from one side, replies from the other side being extremely rare or never more than piecemeal”.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which represents the Sangh Parivar in national politics, has formed several governments in India, most recently being in power from 1998 to 2004 under prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Political opponents of the BJP maintain that the party's moderate face merely serves to cover the Sangh Parivar's "hidden agenda" of undiluted Hindutva, detectable by the BJP's efforts to change the content of history textbooks and syllabi as well as other aspects of the education system.Thakurta & Raghuraman, 2004:64

Members

The Sangh Parivar includes the following organisations (1998 membership figures in brackets):

Footnotes

  1. Saha 2004:274
  2. Thakurta & Raghuraman, 2004:91
  3. [1]
  4. M S Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Publishers: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana
  5. Suresh Ramabhai, Vinoba and his mission, Published by Akhil Bharat Sarv Seva Sangh, 1954
  6. Martha Craven Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, Published by Harvard University Press, 2007 ISBN 0674024826, 9780674024823
  7. Smith, David James, Hinduism and Modernity P189, Blackwell Publishing ISBN 0-631-20862-3
  8. [Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations/David Frawley. New Delhi, Voice of India, 2001, xiv, 247 p., ISBN 81-85990-72-7]
  9. M S Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, Publishers: Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana
  10. Thakurta & Raghuraman, 2004:91
  11. Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations/David Frawley. New Delhi, Voice of India, 2001, xiv, 247 p., ISBN 81-85990-72-7.
  12. Marcus G. Raskin, Liberalism: The Genius of American Ideals, Published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2005,ISBN 0742515915
  13. [2]
  14. [3]
  15. http://www.indianexpress.com/ie/daily/20001124/ina24069.html
  16. http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=269&page=12
  17. [4]
  18. . [5]
  19. Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations/David Frawley. New Delhi, Voice of India, 2001, xiv, 247 p., ISBN 81-85990-72-7.
  20. BJP promises measures to combat climate change[6]
  21. ([Rashtriya seva bharathi report] Sewa Activity report)
  22. JK: RSS adopts militancy hit Muslim children,oneindia.in
  23. [7]
  24. [8]
  25. [9]
  26. [10]
  27. [11]
  28. [12]
  29. Cadena, Starn 284
  30. Fuller 284
  31. Fuller 276
  32. Nanaji Deshmukh [13]
  33. Litigation free villages: A distant dream of free India? [14]
  34. Litigation Free Villages [15]
  35. VHP mail: BJP is like 'secular' Cong Times of India - July 1, 2004
  36. Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, Chakravarty 2002:56
  37. .
  38. Kalam praises RSS veteran Nanaji Deshmukh http://www.india-forums.com/news/article.asp?id=7933
  39. Utilise human resources judiciously: Kalam [16]
  40. [17] Go Air Fares will be the lowest
  41. [http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2006/01/22/stories/2006012200330500.htm High flying chief RONITA TORCATO
  42. Bhatt 2001:4
  43. Jelen 2002:253
  44. Sevabharathi.Org


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