4 min readSep 5, 2026 09:59 AM IST
First published on: Sep 4, 2026 at 06:03 PM IST
It was, at the very least, heartening to hear the RSS chief speak at Madison Square Garden in New York in a language that reaffirmed India’s inclusive character. His assertion that a Hindu who does not want Muslims in India cannot be a true Hindu was unambiguous. It was also a reminder of the elementary truth that Muslims do not live in India by anybody’s permission. They are citizens of India. The important question is what happens to this inclusiveness when the political discourse returns home.
If a Hindu who does not want Muslims in India is not a true Hindu, what are we to make of the dog-whistles around Muslims that have become part of our political vocabulary? What are we to make of ministers, chief ministers, and party functionaries who use polarising slogans and coded appeals to majoritarian anxieties? And what are we to make of the silence of the organisational leadership when such language is used?
The RSS is the BJP’s ideological fountainhead. Either the party’s discourse has drifted from the parent body’s teaching or it has not, in which case Madison Square Garden was an act of translation for a particular audience rather than a statement of principle. Also, statements of this kind are rarely spontaneous; they are responses to some pressure that has become difficult to contain. Was it the scrutiny of an international audience? Or, the arithmetic of politics that has begun to find polarisation yielding diminishing returns?
The RSS and the BJP cannot have two vocabularies of India. Gandhi would have found this distinction unsettling. His India was one in which the majority carried a moral responsibility for the security, dignity, and equal belonging of minorities. For Gandhi, Hinduism was inseparable from the capacity to recognise the humanity of the other. This was beautifully captured in the bhajan he cherished, ‘Vaishnav Jan To Tene Kahiye’, where true religiosity is measured by one’s ability to feel another’s pain and respond to it. That was Gandhi’s idea of faith and, ultimately, of India.
Nehru translated a similar civilisational intuition into the language of the modern republic because he understood that diversity was the substance of the nation. India was a nation because generations of Indians had learnt to inhabit difference together. That is also why we should be wary of the language of “tolerance”, which can suggest that the majority has the power to permit the minority to exist. Constitutional citizenship begins with the recognition that every citizen has an equal claim to dignity, security and belonging.
It is therefore not enough to say that Muslims belong in India. The political culture must stop producing the conditions under which their belonging is repeatedly questioned. There is a significant difference between an explicit statement of inclusion and an environment in which exclusion is constantly suggested without being formally declared. This is how the boundaries of citizenship begin to shift through language. The danger is greater when such language comes from those in positions of power. A chief minister’s remark or the calculated silence of a powerful organisation acquires weight. It tells citizens what can now be said, whom it is acceptable to mock, and whose anxieties deserve political attention.
That is why the RSS chief’s statement deserves to be noted, but cannot be viewed in isolation from the larger context. If the assertion is sincere, it should travel to every political rally in India, and the polarising discourses should be done away with forever. Such statements should be heard wherever Muslims are turned into electoral shorthand, their patriotism questioned, their names, food, dress or faith made into political ammunition. They should be heard inside party meetings and cabinet rooms. It may be pragmatic to embrace the language of pluralism abroad, but the real test is whether we are willing to practise it at home. The idea of India is meaningful only when every citizen feels equally secure in belonging to it.
The writer is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal
The RSS is the BJP’s ideological fountainhead. Either the party’s discourse has drifted from the parent body’s teaching or it has not, in which case Madison Square Garden was an act of translation for a particular audience rather than a statement of principle 
Share
