The Hinduism-Hindutva debate cannot have an echo without talking about the dark side of the politicisation of the Hindu clergy
In 1982, the then RSS chief added around 100 religious preachers to VHP who were initiated as monks of akharas to fuse Hindutva with Hinduism. Representation pic
Social thinkers immersed in the debate over the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva have not asked the most relevant question: Why has the Hindu clergy, the custodian of Hinduism, not spoken out against the blurring of the divide between the political ideology of Hindutva and the religion of Hindus? Clues for answering this question can be gathered from Dhirendra K Jha’s Ascetic Games: Sadhus, Akharas and the Making of the Hindu Vote, a 2019 publication.
Jha dates the blurring to 1964, when the Vishva Hindu Parishad was formed to take Hindutva to ordinary Hindus. More significantly, in 1982, the then Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Balasaheb Deoras provided religious preachers to the VHP, an RSS affiliate. A 100 of them were, over time, initiated as monks of various akharas—the militant wings of Hindu monasteries. They assiduously fused Hindutva with Hinduism.
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It is a conundrum whether these 100 RSS volunteers experienced a spiritual awakening or they were infiltrated into the Hindu monastic order. The timeline “might be suggestive of the fact that at least a section of these RSS converts” became sanyasis with the “clear objective of mustering support from within the Hindu monastic order” for Hindutva and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, writes Jha, who interviewed some of them.
Their activities bear out Jha. Yatindra Nath Sharma worked as RSS pracharak or full time volunteer between 1980 and 1994, before becoming a monk with the name of Yatindranand Giri. In June 2021, Yatindranand demanded pan-India anti-conversion and population laws, and a review of the Constitution. His disciple, Prabodhanand Giri, runs Hindu Raksha Sena—a militia group.
Akhileshwaranand Giri was an RSS volunteer who had participated in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Now a prominent renunciant of the Juna akhara, he, in 2016, headed Madhya Pradesh’s Cow Protection Board. A former swayamsevak, Avdheshanand Giri, is now the abbot of the Juna akhara. It is him Prime Minister Narendra Modi requested to organise a symbolic Kumbh Mela this year. It is also Avdheshanand who condemned as disinformation the view that the Kumbh turned the second wave of COVID-19 brutal.
Monks spoke to Jha of how the RSS-VHP manoeuvres to install their supporters as heads of akharas, which are 13 in number, and sideline their critics in the Hindu ascetic order. Pretenders have been encouraged to challenge shankaracharyas unwilling to play ball. Genealogies have been fabricated to multiply both peethas, or religious seats, and shankaracharyas.
The VHP plays this game because of the ambiguity over the number of peethas the 8th Century philosopher-saint Adi Shankara established. There is consensus over the four peethas he founded—Jyotish peetha (Badrinath-Kedarnath), Sringeri peetha (Chikmagalur), Govardhan peetha (Jagannath Puri) and Dwarka peetha (Dwarka).
Keen to legitimise his peetha in Kanchipuram, shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati provided one of the two vehicles in which VHP leaders toured south India to mobilise people against the conversion of Dalits to Islam in Meenakshipuram in 1982. A year later, Jayendra personally participated in such a yatra. He presided over the VHP’s dharma sansad or religious parliament, in 1989, which demanded a Ram Temple in Ayodhya. He withdrew from the forefront in later years; his reputation was tarnished after he was arrested—and later exonerated—in a murder case.
The VHP, subsequently, claimed that Varanasi’s Sumeru peetha was the fifth one established by Shankara. Its shankaracharya, Narendranand, is on record asking Hindu couples to produce 10 children and for declaring the cow as the mother of the nation—and supporting Modi’s demonetisation policy as well.
In 2004, the Varanasi-based Kashi Vidvat Parishad anointed Dayanand Pandey as shankaracharya of the Sharada Sarvagya peetha, which was dubiously claimed to be in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Pandey was an accused—later exonerated—in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case.
In the Sangh’s crosshairs is Swaroopanand Saraswati, who became the shankaracharya of the Dwarka peetha in 1973, and that of the Jyotish peetha in 1982. Vasudevanand Saraswati, who has been presiding over the VHP’s dharma sansad since 1991, claimed he was the Dwarka peetha’s head. The Allahabad High Court, in 2017, asked select Hindu bodies to elect Dwarka’s shankaracharya. Swaroopanand won the re-election, which has also been judicially challenged.
A more audacious attempt to supplant Swaroopanand was of Achyutanand Tirth, who got anointed as the Jyotish peetha’s head in 2017. His usurpation was vetoed by Shaiva monks who were then reeling under the scandal involving the bestowing of spiritual titles on the pretentious in return for money. He relinquished the title of shankaracharya in 2018. To Jha, he expressed his “unflinching loyalty” to Modi.
Cut to 1915, the year in which Mahatma Gandhi attended Haridwar’s Kumbh Mela. Six years later, Gandhi disclosed, “On the last day in Haridwar, I spent the whole night thinking what I could do so that sadhus…would be real sadhus.” The Hindu clergy was vehemently opposed to Gandhi’s social reforms. Their opposition failed because, as the late philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi told me, Gandhi was a “saint, not a priest.” Gandhi’s moral power overwhelmed the monks.
Today, there ain’t saints in politics, and saints among monks seem too petrified to speak out against Hindutva. The Hinduism-Hindutva debate cannot have an echo without talking about the dark side of the politicisation of the Hindu clergy.
The writer is a senior journalist
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