Sita Ram Goel

India’s only communalist

(Excerpts from the author’s A Short biography of Sita Ram Goel.)

A lot of people in India and abroad talk about Communalism, often in grave tones, describing it as a threat to secularism, to regional and world peace. But can anyone show us a communalist? If we look more closely into the case of any so-called communalist, we find that he turns out to be something else. Could Syed Shahabuddin be a communalist? Wrong: If you read any page of any issue of Shahabuddin’s monthly Muslim India, you will find that he brandishes the notion of “secularism” as the alpha and omega of his politics, and that he directs all his attacks against Hindu “communalism”. The same propensity is evident in the whole Muslim “communalist” press, e.g. the Jamaat-e-Islami weekly Radiance. Yet, emphatically secularist parties like the Congress party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have never hesitated to include the Muslim League in coalitions governing the State of Kerala. No true communalist would get such a chance.

On the Hindu side then, at least the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh could qualify as “communalist”? Certainly, it is called just that by all its numerous enemies. But, when you look through any issue of Organiser, you will find it brandishing the notion of “positive” or “genuine secularism”, and denouncing “pseudo-secularism”, i.e. minority communalism. No, for full-blooded communalists, we have to look elsewhere.

There is only one man in India whom I have ever known to say: “I am a (Hindu) communalist.” To an extent, this is in jest, as a rhetorical device to avoid the tangle in which RSS always gets trapped: being called “communalist!” and then spending the rest of your time trying to prove to your hecklers what a good secularist you are. But to an extent, it is because he accepts at least one definition of “communalism” as applying to himself, especially to his view of India’s history since the 7th century. Many historians try to prove their “secularism” by minimising religious adherence as a factor of conflict in Indian history, and explaining so-called religious conflicts as merely a camouflage for socio-economic conflicts. By contrast, the historian under consideration accepts, and claims to have thoroughly documented, the allegedly “communalist” view that the major developments in medieval and modern Indian history can only be understood as resulting from an intrinsic hostility between religions.

Unlike the Hindutva politicians, Goel did not seek the cover of “genuine secularism”. He accepted the notion that Hindu India has always been “secular” in the adapted Indian sense of “religiously pluralistic”. After all, in Nehruvian India the term “secular” has by now acquired a specific meaning far removed from the original European usage, and even from the above-mentioned Indian adaptation. If Voltaire, the secularist par excellence, were to live in India today and repeat his attacks on the Church, echoing the Hindutva activists in denouncing the Church’s grip on public life in Christianized pockets like Mizoram and Nagaland, he would most certainly be denounced as “anti-minority” and hence “anti-secular”.

In India, the term has shed its anti-Christian bias and acquired an anti-Hindu bias instead, a phenomenon described by the author under consideration as an example of the current “perversion of India’s political parlance”. Therefore, he attacks the whole Nehruvian notion of “secularism” head-on, e.g., in the self-explanatory title of his Hindi booklet Saikyularizm: râshtradroha kâ dûsra nâm (“Secularism: the Alternative Name for Treason”). The name of India’s only self-avowed communalist is Sita Ram Goel.

A few months later, Shri Ram Swarup came to stay with him in Calcutta and converted him as well as his employer, Hari Prasad Lohia, out of Communism. Goel’s career as a combative and prolific writer on controversial matters of historical fact can only be understood in conjunction with Ram Swarup’s sparser, more reflective writings on fundamental doctrinal issues. Much later, in a speech before the Yogakshema Society, Calcutta 1983, he explained his relation with Ram Swarup as follows: “In fact, it would have been in the fitness of things if the speaker today had been Ram Swarup, because whatever I have written and whatever I have to say today really comes from him. He gives me the seed—ideas, which sprout into my articles (…) He gives me the framework of my thought. Only the language is mine. The language also would have been much better if it was his own. My language becomes sharp at times; it annoys people. He has a way of saying things in a firm but polite manner, which discipline I have never been able to acquire.” (The Emerging National Vision, p.1.) S.R. Goel’s first important publications were written as part of the work of the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia.

All through his career as a polemical writer, the most remarkable feature of Sita Ram Goel’s position in the Indian intellectual arena was that nobody even tried to give a serious rebuttal to his theses: The only counter-strategy has always been, and still is, “strangling by silence”, simply refusing to ever mention his name, publications and arguments.

An aspect of history yet to be studied is how such anti-Communist movements in the third world were not at all helped (in fact, often opposed) by Western interest groups whose understanding of Communist ideology and strategy was just too superficial. Most US representatives starkly ignored the SDFA’s work, and preferred to enjoy the company of more prestigious (implying: fashionably anti-Communist) opinion makers. Goel himself noted in 1961 about his Western anti-Communist contacts like Freda Utley, Suzanne Labin and Raymond Aron, who were routinely dismissed as bores, querulants CIA agents: Communism was “opposed only by individuals and groups who have done so mostly at the cost of their reputation (...) A history of these heroes and their endless endeavour has still to be written.” (Genesis and Growth of Nehruism, 212)

During the Chinese invasion in 1962, some government officials including, P.N. Haksar, Nurul Hasan and I.K. Gujral, demanded Goel’s arrest. But at the same time, the Home Ministry invited him to take a leadership role in the plans for a guerrilla war against the then widely expected Chinese occupation of eastern India. He made his co-operation conditional on Nehru’s abdication as Prime Minister, and nothing ever came of it. In 1963, Goel had a book published under his own name, which he had published in 1961-62 as a series in Organiser under the pen name Ekaki (“solitary”): a critique of Nehru’s consistent pro-Communist policies, titled In Defence of Comrade Krishna Menon. An update of this book was published in 1993: Genesis and Growth of Nehruism.

In 1981, Sita Ram Goel started the Voice of India with donations from sympathetic businessmen. Goel’s declared aim is to defend Hinduism by placing before the public correct information about the situation of Hindu culture and society, and about the nature, motives and strategies of its enemies. For, as the title of his book Hindu Society under Siege indicates, Goel claimed that Hindu society has been suffering a sustained attack from Islam since the 7th century, from Christianity since the 15th century, this century also from Marxism, and all three have carved out a place for themselves in Indian society from which they besiege Hinduism. The avowed objective of each of these three world-conquering movements, with their massive resources, is diagnosed as the replacement of Hinduism by their own ideology, or in effect: the destruction of Hinduism.

Apart from numerous articles, letters, contributions to other books and translations (e.g. the Hindi version of Taslima Nasreen’s Bengali book Lajja, he had contributed various books to the inter-religious debate.

One of the grossest misconceptions about the Hindu movement is that it is a creation of political parties like the BJP and the Shiv Sena. In reality, there is a substratum of Hindu activist tendencies in many corners of Hindu society, often in unorganised form and almost invariably lacking in intellectual articulation. To this widespread Hindu unrest about the uncertain future of Hindu culture, Voice of India provided an intellectual focus. The importance of Ram Swarup’s and Sita Ram Goel’s work can hardly be over-estimated. I for one have no doubt that future textbooks on comparative religion as well as those on Indian political and intellectual history will devote crucial chapters to their analysis. They are the first to give a first-hand “pagan” reply to the versions of history and “comparative religion” imposed by the monotheist world-conquerors, both at the level of historical fact and of fundamental doctrine, both in terms of the specific Hindu experience and of a more generalised theory of religion free from prophetic-monotheistic bias. Their long-term intellectual importance is that they have contributed immensely to breaking the spell of all kinds of Christian, Muslim and Marxist prejudices and misrepresentations of Hinduism and the Hindu revivalist movement.