New Delhi: The Madhya Pradesh high court on Thursday extended its support to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and said that a renowned organisation like that was “wrongly placed amongst banned organisations of the country”.
The court was disposing of a 2023 plea filed against the ban on government officials from joining or participating in RSS activities. On July 9, 2024, the Union department of personnel and training (DoPT) issued a memorandum lifting this 58-year-old ban issued in 1966.
“It took almost five decades for the Central Government to realise its mistake; to acknowledge that an internationally renowned organisation like RSS was wrongly placed amongst the banned organisations of the country and that its removal therefrom is quintessential. Aspirations of many central government employees of serving the country in many ways, therefore got diminished in these five decades because of this ban,” a bench comprising Justices Sushruta Arvind Dharmadhikari and Gajendra Singh said.
Retired Union government employee Purushottam Gupta had approached the Madhya Pradesh high court in September 2023 against the 1966 directive.
According to the Hindu, after the ban was lifted, the DoPT filed an affidavit informing the Madhya Pradesh high court about its July 9 office memorandum removing RSS from the list.
In his petition, Gupta had challenged the constitutional validity and legality of various provisions of the Central Civil Service (Conduct) Rules, 1964, the paper reported.
‘On what basis RSS activities considered unsecular?’
The court said that while they would have dismissed the writ petition as moot and academic after the DoPT affidavit was filed, the national importance of the issues raised, particularly involving the RSS, necessitated some observations before concluding the matter.
The court questioned why the ban had been imposed in the first place. “The question therefore arises is, on what study or basis, activities of RSS organisation as a whole were treated in the decades of 1960s and 70s as communal or antisecular; what was the empirical report, statistical survey or material, that led the then government of the day to arrive at an objective satisfaction that involvement of Central Government employees with the RSS,” the court asked. It also questioned the treatment of RSS’s subsidiary non-political organisations.
The court directed the DoPT and the Union home ministry to display the July 9 order on their website’s respective home pages and inform all departments within 15 days.
Bans and RSS
RSS, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation, was banned for the first time in January 1947, before India gained independence. The RSS along with the Muslim National Guard, another paramilitary organisation functional at the time, were banned by Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana, the premier of the ruling Unionist Party. The ban was lifted four days later.
In 1948, following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by RSS member Nathuram Godse, the RSS was banned for a second time. Although the right-wing organisation tried to disown Godse, Sardar Patel at the time had said, “There is no doubt in my mind that the extreme section of the Hindu Mahasabha was involved in the conspiracy [to kill Gandhi]. The activities of the RSS constituted a clear threat to the existence of [the] Government and the State. Our reports show that those activities, despite the ban, have not died down. Indeed, as time has marched on, the RSS circles are becoming more defiant and are indulging in their subversive activities in an increasing measure.”
The 1948 communique issued by Patel said the ban was being imposed to “to root out the forces of hate and violence that are at work in our country and imperil the freedom of the Nation and darken her fair name”. The ban was eventually lifted on July 11, 1949 on the condition that it would express its allegiance to the Indian Constitution and the national flag.