Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) was a towering spiritual leader who awakened national consciousness among Indians after the British had crushed the 1857 war of independence. Few have paid a more glowing tribute to him than Jawaharlal Nehru, who writes in The Discovery of India: “Rooted in the past and full of pride in India’s heritage, Vivekananda was yet modern in his approach to life’s problems. [He had] a dynamic and fiery energy to push India forward.”
Vivekananda visited Kanyakumari before his historic voyage to America to participate in the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. For three days and three nights from December 25 to 27, 1892, he meditated on the rock, at the confluence of three seas, and discovered the mission of his life — to spread Hinduism’s message of oneness of humanity and help remove the spiritual and material suffering of enslaved Indians. After his triumphant return from the west, Vivekananda gave a clarion call for “Bharat Jodo” at a public reception in Madras in 1897. “For the next fifty years,” he stated, “let’s worship only one God — our great Mother India. Let all other vain gods disappear from our minds. The first God we have to worship are our countrymen, instead of being jealous of each other and fighting with each other.” After 50 years, India became free.
The magnificent memorial where Rahul prayed on September 7 was the brainchild of Eknath Ranade, a widely respected RSS pracharak. To build it, he launched his own variant of a “Bharat Jodo” campaign in 1963, Swamiji’s birth centenary year, raising one-rupee donations from nearly one crore common people all over India. He also mobilised the signatures of 323 MPs, mostly Congress, to support his project. President V V Giri inaugurated it on September 2, 1970. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi not only donated Rs 15 lakh, but also visited the memorial, warmly received by none other than Ranade himself. Veteran BJP leader L K Advani, who worked closely with Ranade on this project as an RSS Swayamsevak, writes in his memoirs: “How this grand monument, a tribute to one of the greatest saints of modern India, came to be built is truly an inspiring saga.”
This brief history about the Vivekananda Memorial in Kanyakumari is instructive because it has two lessons for Rahul and his colleagues, if they care to learn them. First, RSS pracharaks and swayamsevaks have done enormously more work to honour and popularise the cultural and spiritual sources of India’s unity and renaissance than Congress leaders. The latter have mostly eulogised Nehru family’s contributions and sacrifices, which, though praiseworthy, are inadequate to inspire the present generation of Indians. Second, and this is related to the first lesson, many contemporary Congress leaders either deny or are extremely reluctant to acknowledge that inclusive Hindu spiritualism and culture are the main basis of India’s unity.
The second point needs some elaboration. Congress leaders rightly affirm that secularism, understood as equal respect for all faiths, is the true guarantor of India’s unity. It is indeed the soul of India. However, they baulk at affirming that Hinduism of the kind that Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi propounded is the soul of Indian secularism. There was a time when the Congress did acknowledge this truth. On January 16, 1999, the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making body, unanimously passed a resolution stating that “Hinduism is the most effective guarantor of secularism in India”. However, it has never reiterated this view thereafter, nor backed legitimate Hindu concerns with this conviction, out of fear of losing Muslim votes. Also, for the same reason, it has never ideologically countered anti-secular, supremacist and separatist interpretation of Islam by a section of Muslims, which literally led to “Bharat Todo” in 1947. As a result, Hindus in large numbers gravitated towards the Sangh’s flawed and majoritarian idea of Hindu Rashtra, and started to question the Congress’s idea of a plural India. This, along with other factors that have atrophied the Congress, is the principal reason behind the phenomenal rise of the RSS-backed BJP.
Rahul is simply wasting his admirably large reservoir of energy by making the RSS the principal target of his ideological attack. He should understand that Hinduism is greater and more resilient than the RSS, which in turn will outlive the likes of Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath and Himanta Biswa Sarma. If Congress and other non-BJP parties win back the hearts and minds of Hindus with a non-communal narrative of nationalism and development, which is possible if they simultaneously urge the Muslim community to become more reformist, inclusive and forward-looking, the current threats to social cohesion and tolerant discourse can be overcome.
Actually, the real threat India faces is not to its unity, but to its democratic structure, its basic Constitutional values and the integrity of its institutions, because of the ominous slide towards one-man autocratic rule. The foremost Constitutional casualty is the preambular ideal of equality. Indian society has never been more iniquitous than now. All these developments have caused considerable unease even in sections of the RSS and BJP, which can become allies in the mission to save democracy. After all, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani, both of whom were part of the Sangh Parivar, had played leading roles in restoration of democracy in 1977 after the draconian Emergency rule.
Therefore, the Congress should shed its arrogance and mental rigidity, do honest introspection and also publicly own up its past mistakes. It should begin a constructive dialogue with diverse ideologies and stakeholders, including the RSS, as Mahatma Gandhi had done during the freedom struggle. India belongs to all, and none can make it Congress-mukt, RSS-mukt or Muslim-mukt. All have to rectify their shortcomings and work together for genuine “Bharat Jodo” — to bridge the gaps in our democracy, development, justice system and national fraternity.
The writer was an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Sudheendra Kulkarni writes: Rahul is simply wasting his admirably large reservoir of energy by making the RSS the principal target of his ideological attack. 
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