New Delhi: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat has claimed that had the Hindutva organisation not tried to convert India’s tribal communities, they would have become anti-national.
Bhagwat claimed that this was what he was told to him by former Indian president, the late Pranab Mukherjee, in what was evidently a private meeting. Mukherjee passed away in 2020 and there are no public records of such a conversation having taken place. Indian Express, which reported on Bhagwat’s speech, also noted that such a comment was in contrast against political stances taken by Mukherjee and his erstwhile party, Congress, both.
Bhagwat said at an Indore event that when he went to meet Mukherjee at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the parliament had been seeing discussions on the “issue of ghar wapsi“. ‘Ghar wapsi’ – literally, ‘return home’ – is the Sangh Parivar-led programme of religious conversion to Hinduism from Islam, Christianity, and other religions in India. The Sangh’s position is that all Indians were originally Hindus and thus this conversion will necessarily mean a ‘return’.
Bhagwat spoke in Hindi. This is the transcription provided in the Indian Express report:
Dr Pranab Kumar Mukherjee Rashtrapati the. Tab main pehli baar unse milne gaya. Sansad mein Ghar Wapsi ko lekar bahut bada halla chal raha tha. Main taiyar ho ke gaya bahut poochhenge, bahut batana padega. Lekin unhone kaha ki kya aap logon ne kuch logon ko wapas laya to press conference… aisa kaise karte ho aap? Aisa karne se to halla hota hai. Kyunki wo politics hai. Main bhi aaj agar Congress party mein hota, Rashtrapati nahi hota, to main bhi Sansad mein yehi karta. Fir unhone kaha, lekin aap logon ne ye jo kaam kiya hai uske kaaran Bharat ka tees pratishat Adivasi… Is line pe aa gaye dikh hi raha tha unke tone se to humko bada aanand laga… maine kaha Christian ban jaata… bole Christian nahi, deshdrohi ban jaata. Aisa unhone kaha.
Translated, this means:
“Dr Pranab Mukherjee was the president when I went to meet him for the first time. There was huge ruckus in the parliament over the issue of ghar wapsi then. I thought he would ask many questions and I would have to answer them, so I went prepared. But he said, ‘You brought back some people and there was a press conference. Why are you people doing it this way? This creates the ruckus. Because this is politics. Had I been in the Congress, not in the president’s chair, even I would be doing this in parliament.’ Then he said, ‘But this work that you have done, because of that 30% tribals…’ I understood the line he was taking from his tone and I was very happy… I said, ‘—Would have become Christian?’ He said, ‘Not Christian, but anti-national.’ This is what he said.”
The Express report noted that Bhagwat went on to elaborate on this aspect and stressed that conversion uproots people if done through allurement.
“Conversion andar se aata hai to koi baat nahi. Hamari dharana hai ki sab tareeke (of prayers) sahi hain. Ek hi jagah pahunchayenge. Sabko apna tareeka chunne ka haq hai. Lekin agar lok laalach, zabardasti se hota hai, to uska uddeshya adhyatmik unnati nahi hota, jadon se katkar apna prabhav badhana hota hai,” he said, according to the Express report.
Translated, it says, “If conversion comes through an internal calling, it is fine. We believe all forms of prayers are right. But if conversion is achieved through allurement or through force then its real aim is not spiritual enlightenment but increasing influence through uprooting.”
Bhagwat, at the same event, also quoted Mukherjee as having apparently said that the world should not teach India secularism as secularism was part of 5,000 years of India’s civilisational history.
In 2018, Mukherjee attended RSS’s Vijaya Dashami event as the chief guest in a move that attracted significant eyeballs. An article on The Wire had noted that he told the RSS in that Nagpur speech that nationalism could not be defined in terms of one religion, language or region. He quoted Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore to drive home the point that secularism and inclusion constitute articles of faith.
