Secession, Struggle, and Strength

Wherever secessionist forces were active in India, RSS Swayamsevaks and Pracharaks faced the brunt of their hate simply because they stood for India’s cultural and geographical unity. They spoke of her civilisational continuity, worked for social cohesion, for the empowerment of the marginalised and resisted their exploitation. In the 1980s and 1990s and for a number of years into the new millennium, India’s northeast faced a number of such challenging situations.

The RSS’s Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS), in its resolution on Assam in 1991, analysed the situation. Condoling the death of Pracharak Omprakash Chaturvedi and the abduction and disappearance of Pracharak Murali Manohar from Kerala, it pointed at the nexus of separatist forces and terrorist organisations in trying to dismember India. The ABPS resolution observed how, “documents recovered by the army during their raids on the secret hideouts of the U.L.F.A. have clearly revealed its clandestine links with N.S.C.N. of Nagaland - a banned fundamentalist Christian Organisation, the People’s Liberation Army of Manipur, leftist secessionists of Burma, L.T.T.E. of Sri Lanka and Khalistanis of Punjab-all of which work in collusion with the international conspiracy to dismember Bharat.”

Since they were at the forefront in society of trying to foil this conspiracy of dismembering Bharat, RSS Pracharaks and Swayamsevaks faced the onslaught. The communist parties or their cadres did not face such a situation. Their ideology acted as their shield. They did not believe in the fundamental and civilisational unity of India. Such an ideology suited separatists.

Under the CPIM-led Left Front rule in Tripura, four RSS Pracharaks were kidnapped by the terror outfit National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) on August 6, 1999. Senior RSS Pracharak, Shashikant Chauthaiwale, records in his memoirs “My Journey as a Pracharak”, that unnerving phase, when Shyamal Kanti Sengupta, kshetra karyavah of Assam and West Bengal, Pracharaks Sudhamay Dutta, Dinendranath Dutta, and Shubhankar Dutta were waylaid and abducted by NLFT terrorists from the densely forested Dhalai district of Tripura.

Attempts to trace them proved futile for over 6-7 months. Around 2001, a self-styled “commander” of the NLFT, Nayanbasi Jamatya, who had deserted the outfit and surrendered, claimed that the RSS Pracharaks were taken away to Bangladesh and were executed in the Chittagong Hill Tracts area, following orders from the NLFT’s top leadership.

The fault of these Pracharaks? They dared to work among people, at a difficult time, posing a challenge to secessionist forces and spoke for the unity of India and of greater integration of India’s northeast. The CPIM never condoled their disappearance and death. In their records and annals, these abductions and deaths are of no consequence.

The Congress’s approach in the northeast was to keep the pot boiling. A number of conflicts and separatist movements were allowed to fester and seemed never-ending. It was not just a lack of political will; it seemed to be a calculated political policy that was followed by the Congress High Command in Delhi and its party’s governments in various states across the northeast.

That India’s northeast needed special attention and a greater development focus was seen much later when, under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as Prime Minister, the Ministry for Development of the North-Eastern Region (DONER) was launched in 2001. It was the first time since independence that a ministry dedicated to the growth and progress of India’s northeast was formed.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong Pracharak, as Prime Minister, took it upon himself not only to expand the development framework for the northeast but also to solve several festering conflicts. PM Modi’s mantra for the northeast, “Act East, Act Fast, Act First”, paid dividends on the ground in terms of expediting projects and launching new initiatives. To be precise, in the last decade, the region has witnessed a 71 per cent reduction in violent incidents and an 86 per cent decrease in civilian deaths, while 10,754 insurgents eschewed violence, gave up arms and joined the mainstream. With PM Modi insisting that members of his cabinet tour the northeast, one saw central ministers spending over 700 nights in the region, with the Prime Minister himself visiting the northeast 65 times in the last decade. It is an unprecedented effort in connecting with the region.

In September 2024, after long decades of uncertainty and conflict, the Modi government, through an agreement between the NLFT and the ATTF (All Tripura Tiger Force), ended the 35-year-long conflict. In the decade that he has been Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has successfully worked out 12 such crucial agreements in the northeast, bringing to an end conflicts and separatist movements which had festered for decades. The NLFT-ATTF accord also saw the sanctioning of a 250-crore package for the development of the region.

It took a Pracharak, belonging to the lineage of RSS Pracharaks who had made India’s northeast their home and strove for a lifetime to integrate it, to preserve its diversities and to celebrate its uniqueness, to solve a number of crisis and delays dogging the region for decades. Why communists, who once wielded enormous political clout in Delhi, in the states and in the region, could do none of this, is of course best left to the analysis and verdict of history.

When comrade Brinda and comrade Vijayan refer to “martyrs”, it becomes a tad tedious to discern which “martyrs” they are referring to. Were they referring to those numerous RSS Swayamsevaks and BJP activists killed in Punjab, or in Tripura and Kerala, under their party’s rule? Do they, for instance, think that Modi’s praise for the RSS was an insult to that valiant teacher and activist from Kerala, Sadanandan Master, whose legs, comrades Brinda and Vijayan’s party cadres had chopped off?

In 1994, Sadanandan was just 30 when CPIM marauders carried out the murderous assault. But the indomitable spirit, inexhaustible dynamism and resolute determination that the RSS instils in its Swayamsevaks saw Sadanandan withstand the near-fatal attack and emerge as a societal and intellectual symbol and leader.

BJP leader and RSS Pracharak, BL Santhosh, spoke for lakhs of karyakartas and Swayamsevaks when he wrote that “Sadanandan master is a symbol of Nationalist Resistance to inhuman Communist ideology and violence across the globe.”

Late MGS Narayanan, eminent historian from Kerala, rightly argues in his preface to E Balakrishnan’s authoritative study “History of the Communist Movement in Kerala”, that “scholars and politicians in the capital and other parts of India, who have never had the experience of living under a Communist regime, are usually inclined to take the Communists at their word, and judge them by their lofty pronouncements and vigorous criticism of the establishment.”

The communists, MGS argues, “are capable of creating a good image when they are in opposition, as long as they have no chance of wielding power. It has been proved again and again in history that all critics of an existing order are not invariably better than their opponents, and that some of them like the Communists and Fascists are actually worse.” MGS points out that a “romantic and utopian view of Communism” was often seen prevailing among intellectuals and social activists “in areas which have never had the taste of Communist rule with its hidden agenda of destroying national self-respect and communal harmony to impose the party’s hegemony.”

Naturally, with their hidden agenda of destroying national self-respect and communal harmony, communists take it as an insult if the RSS, its Pracharaks and Swayamsevaks, all of whom stand for national self-respect and national unity, are commended.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC), BJP, and the Chairman of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation.