A Mother of Many Sons: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Gendered Justifications for Violence Caity Rose Campana RLG 5149: Religion, Violence, and Conflict Professor Oren Stier 10 December 2020 1 On a spring day in 2017, before a crowd in Madhya Pradesh, India, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh1 mahanagar pramukh (district chief) named Kundan Chandrawat gave a rousing speech. Comprised of RSS members and supporters,2 Chandrawat’s audience cheered as the local leader, clad in a pink kurta, condemned the actions of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)3 and called for the beheading of Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of the southern Indian state of Kerala. Although jarring in the violence it advocates, this was not the most striking of Chandrawat’s remarks. He went on to invoke the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which over 1,000 people—most of them Muslims—died,4 bragging that “You5 killed 56, we sent 2,000 to the graveyard. We—this same Hindu community—shoved their corpses underground. You6 have killed 300 pracharaks [RSS recruiters] and activists, we will present Bharat Mata [Mother India] with a garland of 300,000 skulls in return.”7,8 It is Chandrawat’s last sentence, uttered with 1 Hereafter RSS. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh translates from Sanskrit/Marathi to “National Volunteer Organization.” This group will be discussed at length in the third section of the essay, The RSS: Historical Elements and Ideology. 2 The event Chandrawat spoke at was organized by a local political group with the support of the RSS. 3 The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the alliance of which it is a member, the Left Democratic Front (LDF), had been accused by the RSS of killing right-wing party workers in Kerala. A day before Chandrawat’s speech, right-wing organizations held anti-LDF demonstrations in the state. Pinarayi Vijayan also made controversial statements about the intentions of right-wing groups like the RSS, accusing them of attempting to divide the country and of modeling their organizational structure and ideology after those of World War II-era fascist European regimes. 4 Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1. 5 Likely a reference to alleged Islamic extremists who killed Hindu pilgrims in a 2002 incident known as the Godhra train burning (discussed in the essay’s final section). It should be noted that Chandrawat’s numbers do not align with widely accepted statistics pertaining to the train burning, the Gujarat riots, or the violent clashes between right-wing and left-wing groups in India. 6 Likely a reference to the LDF and related accusations described in note 3. 7 “RSS Leader Boasts of Hindus Killing 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat, Wants Kerala CM Beheaded,” The Wire, last modified March 2, 2017, https://thewire.in/communalism/rss-behead-kerala-cm-gujarat-killed-2000-ranawat. 8 Translated from Hindi. 2 hyper-aggressive conviction and upheld fist, that echoes the phenomenon with which this paper is concerned: the persistent overlap between RSS rhetoric and doctrine, gender, and violence in India. The following questions frame my exploration of these topics: What are the gendered social ideals promoted by the RSS? What is the significance of Bharat Mata as an ideal woman, and how does the conceptualization of India as a Hindu mother inform RSS ideology and action? Finally, what are Hindu nationalist (specifically RSS) justifications for violence against religious minorities, and how do these acts of violence invoke certain ideas about gender and gender roles? Although a truly thorough analysis of each question goes far beyond the scope of this paper, I draw on various primary and secondary sources to argue (1) that RSS teachings understand women as important, yet primarily symbolic elements of Hindu culture, while men’s roles are understood as action based. Historically, this action has taken the form of shakhas (daily communal gatherings), rallies, training camps, robust political participation, and—in the most extreme cases—violence. Next, (2) that the RSS is not an overtly violent organization, but in cases where the group is associated with acts of violence, gendered narratives of protecting, serving, and defending Hindu women frequently operate as justifications for such acts; and (3) that these justifications are the result of a desire to foster (in the verbiage of my chosen theoretical framework) authority ranking relationships between Hindu men and Hindu women as well as communal sharing relationships exclusively between RSS members and their ideological counterparts, at the great expense of those unto whom any violence is done. Finally, (4) that the aforementioned gendered narratives are informed by both the concept of Hindu women’s bodies as sources of national pride and reproductive potential as well as by the concept of Bharat Mata, imagined as a perfect, resilient, yet simultaneously vulnerable Hindu mother. 3 The concept of morality-centered violence, based upon relational models and outlined by Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai in their work Virtuous Violence (2015), serves as the essay’s theoretical backdrop. Following a summary of this theory, a brief historical introduction to gender roles in Hinduism is provided, amplified by the work of Tanika Sarkar and Ujjayini Ray. Highlighting research conducted by Walter Andersen, Shridhar Damle, Parvis Ghassem- Fachandi, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the third section explores the rise of the RSS, with an emphasis on its role in communal violence as well as the organization’s key decision to exclude women from its ranks. The final portion of the essay is devoted to an application of Fiske and Rai’s theory to these and other related issues. Through this analysis, I hope to show that, in keeping with broader notions embedded in Hindu nationalist ideology and Indian culture, the RSS envisions Hindu women as symbols and Hindu men as active protectors of those symbols. At times, this protection takes the form of violence, which the RSS justifies via situation within a moral context. That is, these enactors of violence tend to adopt a moral high ground that encompasses not just the defending of women’s bodies or sacred ideals of motherhood, but also the defending of each Hindu man’s shared mother: the nation itself. Virtuous Violence Theory Countless scholars have sought to explain the violence in our world. For those who have looked to morality-based rationalizations, like Donald Black (1983), arguments that violence is used as a means to punish wrongdoing (in the eyes of the perpetrator) and assert dominance abound. Fiske and Rai take this concept one step further, going beyond the notion that violence is simply a manifestation of retribution by positing that “people are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, 4 legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, or ethically gratifying.”9 Aptly named, this virtuous violence theory focuses primarily on physical forms of harm, although the authors suggest that various instances of violence—emotional, economic, and others—potentially fit into their framework. They also note that their goal is to address most violence, but not all violence: some acts, they grant, are motivated purely by selfish or immediate factors instead of moral reasoning. Although logical enough, the thesis that individuals “are morally motivated to do violence to create, conduct, protect, redress, terminate, or mourn social relationships with the victim or with others”10 seems innately problematic. How could anyone, but especially experts trained in the social sciences, imply that honor killings, child abuse, or the horrific violence visited upon minority groups by agents of political, social, or religious power are moral acts? Fortunately, this is not at all what Fiske and Rai intend to say. Rather, their definition of “moral” here revolves around what is considered good and right by the perpetrator, not by the authors personally. This is in part what renders the virtuous violence theory challenging, thought provoking, and—in terms of preventing or seeking solutions to violence—constructive. Indeed, it asks us to put ourselves in the very uncomfortable shoes of the murderer, the rapist, and the amorphous “bad guy,” not as a way to sympathize, but as an avenue to understanding—and ideally stopping— violence. Relational models, first proposed by Fiske after conducting fieldwork among the Mossi people of Burkina Faso in the late 1970s, are central to virtuous violence theory. Each of the four models—communal sharing (CS), authority ranking (AR), equality matching (EM), and market pricing (MP)—has an associated moral motive, or relational “goal” it is organized to achieve, as 9 Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 10 Ibid., 1-2. 5 described below: We use CS models when we perceive people in the same group or dyad as undifferentiated and equivalent in a salient feature, while others are not. Families, teams, brotherhoods, military units, nationalities, ethnicities, and some close friendships are often organized by CS. The moral motive guiding CS models is unity. Unity is directed toward caring for and supporting the integrity of in-groups through a sense of collective responsibility and common fate. … When we rank or order individuals along a dimension, we are using an AR model. AR is a linear ordering of the relative position of individuals in a linear hierarchy, such as between dominant and subordinate individuals, between adults and children, among military officers, and among people of different castes, ages, or genders in many societies. The moral motive guiding AR models is hierarchy. Hierarchy is directed toward creating and maintaining linear ranking in social groups.