Likening it to a “vat vriksh (grand banyan tree)”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Friday praised the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and said it has been conducting “a sacred cultural ritual to take India’s great tradition and culture to the new generation”. The organisation, he said, had inspired “lakhs like me” to “live for our country”. Modi was addressing the inaugural function of the three-day 98th Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, which returned to Delhi after a gap of 71 years and is being held months after the Centre accorded the classical language status to Marathi. Sharing the dais with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Nationalist Congress Party (SP) chief Sharad Pawar, Modi said it was due to the RSS he had the “good fortune of getting affiliated with Marathi culture and language”. Recounting the milestones associated with historic figures from Maharashtra, such as Shivaji Maharaj, Ahilyabai Holkar and Dr B R Ambedkar, Modi also referred to the RSS founder, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, although without naming him. “This conference is happening at a time when the coronation of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj has completed 350 years, when it is Punya Shlok Ahilyabai Holkar’s 300th birth anniversary, and the Constitution, made with the efforts of Babasaheb Ambedkar, is in its 75th year. we will also take pride in the fact that it was on Maharashtra’s land, one great Marathi-speaking man, sowed the seeds of RSS 100 years ago,” Modi said. “Today, like a grand banyan tree, it is celebrating its centenary year. From Vedas to Vivekananda, it is conducting a sacred cultural ritual for the past 100 years to take India’s great tradition and culture to the new generation. It is my good fortune that lakhs like me have taken inspiration from RSS to live for our country. It is because of Sangh that I got the good fortune of affiliating with Marathi culture and language,” he said. On Marathi getting the classical language status, Modi said, “Crores of people were waiting for this. I consider this as a great milestone in my life.” In the backdrop of a row over UP CM Yogi Adityanath’s remarks on Urdu in the Assembly, Modi said languages have always enriched each other and become prosperous. “Bhashaon mai kabhi koi aapsi bair nahi raha. Bhashaon ne hamesha ek dusre ko apnaya hai, ek dusre ko samruddha kiya hai. (There was never any animosity between languages. They have always embraced each other, made each other prosperous),” he said. Before Modi’s speech, Tara Bhawalkar, this year’s conference president also spoke on the role of languages in uniting people. “Languages should unite, not divide,” she said. Sharad Pawar, the head of this conference’s reception committee, thanked Modi for accepting his invite to inaugurate the event. Amid allegations by the state’s politicians and reports that the literary event was being politicised, Pawar said there is “a mutual flow between politics and literature and they are complementary”. Invoking Shivaji Maharaj, Fadnavis said the Maratha king was a pioneer in pushing for the holistic adoption and use of Marathi language across daily life. “When invaders tried to pollute our language.Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj decided that only Marathi will be used in administrative works and he issued an order to replace Farsi and Arabic words. thus we have learnt the insistence on using our mother tongue and taking pride in it from Shivaji Maharaj,” he said.
