Parivar & Partition

“THE ease with which a larger number of Congressmen and women—small, big and bigger still—have walked into the RSS-BJP boat and sailed with it is not a matter of surprise. “On 11-16 December 1938, the CWC declared the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League as communal organisations and debarred elected members of Congress committees from serving on similar committees in the Mahasabha and the League. Chetan Bhatt holds that “Lala Lajpat Rai’s symbolic trajectory from the Brahmo Samaj to the Arya Samaj, thence variously into and out of Congress, his alignment with the ‘Extremist’ section of Congress and some revolutionary nationalist activities, and then his emergence as a key figure in both the pre-Savarkarite Hindu Mahasabha and the Hindu Sangathan movement is both evocative and characteristic of the shape of Hindu nationalism in this period. … “In 1899, Lajpat Rai published an article for the Indian National Congress in the Hindustan Review in which he declared that ‘Hindus are a nation in themselves, because they represent civilisation all their own’. Let our ideal be sufficiently high to cover all, sufficiently broad and extensive to include all, who take pride in a common name, a common ancestry, a common history, a common religion, a common language and a common future.” The Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1921 in opposition to the Congress’ policies on non-cooperation with the British and on the communal issue.