Family Matters

Acharya Dharmendra, enfant terrible of the Ayodhya movement, is notorious for his strident tone. Sitting across a table, he looks a Hindu bon vivant, a hand-pumping impresario with Byronic grey curls. He wears cream silk dhoti and kurta, set off with a gold watch and transparent beads. His clean-shaven face and rich baritone voice are as media-friendly as any Page Three star’s and his conversation is peppered with lines from Bollywood songs. ‘‘How can you accuse us of trying to eliminate Urdu? We consider Bismillah Khan sahib as one of our gurus. But there is a difference between him and Osama Bin Laden.’’

Born in Viraatnagar in Rajasthan, Dharmendra and started his career in oratory at the age of eight. His father, Hindu Mahasabha leader Ramchandra, taught him how to keep an audience enthralled through katha and ramjap. At the age of 13, he started a newspaper called Vajrang, then another newspaper called Gokul and by the age of 16 he had written a critique of Gandhian thought called ‘Bharat ke do Mahatma’. He has even written an anthology of poems entitled Go-shala as a riposte to Harivanshrai Bachchan’s Madhushala.

Dharmendra comes from a family of mahants who served the princes of Rajasthan. Like most conservative Hindus — like the wealthy Marwari families of Vishnu Hari Dalmia and of Ashok Singhal (originally from Rajasthan) —Dharmendra’s family joined the Hindu fold because they became increasingly suspicious of Nehru’s ‘westernised’ ‘leftist’ Congress. In fact, losing out on the mainstream is an important feature of VHP thought. Their members constantly voice feelings of ‘exclusion’ from the metropolitan English-speaking world of the ‘Gymkhana Club sahibs’ and the ‘Doon school baba log’. Their vicious rhetoric is like a conscious act of defiance against those ‘Nehruvians’ who play by the rules of Westminster democracy. ‘‘Hum Kurukshetra ke maidan me hain, aap five star hotel mein hain,’’ says a VHP worker.

Dharmendra lives in Jaipur, runs his math in Viraatnagar, the only temple to Hanuman where the idol is of a man not a monkey, he says proudly. He contested elections twice in 1962 and 1967 on Hindu Mahasabha tickets, but lost both times. The interesting thing about Dharmendra is that he seems proud of his ‘fundamentalism’ and acknowledges his anti-Muslim speeches as any actor would a bravura Ram Lila performance. ‘‘Agar koi kathmullah ne hamari behen Shabana Azmi ko tawaif kaha, to ham uski darhiyan noch lenge!’’

Pravin Togadia’s ferocity is equally cheerful. He is smaller and thinner than he appears on TV and like Dharmendra, he too is dressed in creamy silk dhoti kurta and hung with malas. He launches into harangues about secularists and Muslims, but immediately leans back, drops and act and pleads: ‘‘Now you please argue me down! I am Taliban. I am fundamentalist. I’ll never agree with you. But once Hindu rashtra comes, you will all lose your jobs. And we will get jobs.’’

Togadia was born in a family of marginal farmers in Sajan Timba, near Amreli in Saurashtra. His father came to Ahmedabad to work in a mill and Togadia grew up in a chawl. He was an excellent student, and encouraged to join the RSS by a teacher. By 22, he was a trainer, instructing the much older Shankersinh Vaghela. He prides himself on his library and says he reads novels in his spare time. His favourite author? Lord Krishna. Does he ever lighten up? ‘‘I can’t be light. I’m a serious person.’’ Does he worry about the effect of his speeches on the youth? ‘‘Youth?’’ he cries. ‘‘What youth? I am the youth. Thousands of youth are with me. Is my hair grey?’’

‘‘The militant Hindu act is a consummate performance,’’ says Pralay Kanungo, author of RSS’ Tryst with Politics, ‘‘it is an act which provides social status and upward mobility.’’ The majority of new recruits are OBC men for whom membership provides opportunities to become middle-class.

Organised Hinduism also brings hard cash. A career in organised Hinduism provides monthly salaries as high as Rs 15,000, motorbikes and even real estate contracts. Journalist and BJP MP Dinanath Mishra says that a certain public meeting with Rithambhara was so electrifying that the crowd donated Rs 50 lakh in a single evening.

The older generation of VHP leaders is more austere than either Dharmendra or Togadia. Acharya Giriraj Kishore, a purnakalik pracharak (full-time worker) of the RSS, was loaned to the VHP from the RSS and was one of the founders of the ABVP. He speaks fluent Bengali and spent many years in Orissa. He devours Hindi novels and likes Jaishankar Prasad best. Kishore comes from a zamindari family in Misouli, UP, and was educated in Aligarh and Benares. He says he joined the RSS because ‘‘hatred of the British and of the West permeated my entire being’’.

Imitation of the West bothers him most of all, but sometimes gets him into trouble. In London, his friends advised him against travelling in the underground because his dhoti, tilak and long hair would mark him out as a fundamentalist and he might be beaten up. ‘‘I was disappointed,’’ says Kishore, ‘‘I wanted to go in the tube.’’ Ten years ago, he went on a cruise with Vishnu Hari Dalmia and found that in a Mediterranean island, the taxi drivers didn’t understand English. ‘‘I realised then that English was not a world language.’’

Youth is the present obsession of Sadhvi Rithambara. Cast aside by the Sangh leadership for her excessively savage speeches, she now runs an orphanage named Vatsalya Gram on the Delhi-Mathura highway. The project, still under construction, is meant to be an ideal community with homes designed in the ancient Indian style, each house decorated with an angan and tulsi and each child looked after by a mausi and a nani. Rithambhara is the collective didi ma to the (as of now) 37 children and all women volunteers are, like her, unmarried.

A single characteristic unites VHP leaders: powerful oratory. They never have stage fright. They even send themselves up. Says Togadia: ‘‘ I have lots of goondas. Shall I send them to capture your house? Then let’s see how many years you wait to reclaim it.’’ The words are half-joke, half-threat. Just as the VHP agenda is half a matter of life and half a matter of death.