In yet another blatant promotion of the notion that India ought to be a Hindutva nation, K. Eshwarappa, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) unilaterally announced on May 29, 2022 that the saffron flag will become the national flag.
According to the Hindustan Times, Eshwarappa said, “In this country, the saffron flag has not got its respect today or yesterday. It has a history of thousands of years. It is a symbol of sacrifice. The RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] keeps it in front of us and prays to it every day in order to instill the same sense of sacrifice in everybody. We have no hesitation in it.”
This is not the first time that the MLA has made such inflammatory remarks against the flag. Earlier in February, he made the same claim that the tricolour may be replaced with the saffron flag as India becomes a Hindu nation. He claimed there was no shame in prioritising the saffron flag over the tricolour and said that the bhagwa flag will be hoisted even at the Red Fort.
On Sunday, the BJP leader claimed that the tricolour is the national flag only as per the Constitution. This statement further qualifies a 2017 observation by CJP Secretary Teesta Setalvad that the RSS uses communalism as an excuse to target Ambedkar’s Constitution. Her observations can be heard in the following video:
RSS and the tricolour
The pro-Hindutva RSS and the secular tricolour have a fraught history since the conception of India. The organisation lashed out at the tricolour that symbolises the united freedom struggle of India. On the eve of India’s Independence, the RSS mouth-piece Organizer said this about the tricolour:
“The people who have come to power by the kick of fate may give in our hands the tricolor but it will never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country…
“Let us no longer allow ourselves to be influenced by false notions of nationhood. Much of the mental confusion and the present and future troubles can be removed by the ready recognition of the simple fact that in Hindusthan only the Hindus form the nation and the national structure must be built on that safe and sound foundation…the nation itself must be built up of Hindus, on Hindu traditions, culture, ideas and aspirations.”
Thus, it rejected Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and all Indians following other religions. These “flaws” as the RSS calls it, were reiterated in September 2015 by Manmohan Vaidya after the BJP won elections.
After Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the right-wing outfit was banned in India. Then Home Minister Sardar Vallabhai Patel said that if the organisation wished to lift the ban, it would have to pledge its loyalty to the constitution and give a written statement acknowledging the tricolour. The same was written and submitted.
Yet, Uma Bharti in 1995 tried to hoist the saffron flag at the Hubli Idgah maidan. The same flag was forcibly hoisted at the Babri Masjid. Meanwhile, when three patriots tried to hoist the tricolour at the RSS office in 2001, they faced a lawsuit for 12 years.
“The question is does the RSS really consider the tricolour over the saffron flag or try to bring about a saffron nation?” asked Setalvad in 2017 – a question that still does not receive due attention. She concluded that the RSS’s target in all of this, is not the Muslim community but the Indian Constitution that ensures India as a secular sovereign.
When the Constitution of India was adopted on November 26, 1949 and then enforced on January 26, 1950, almost all of India was celebrating these historic events. The only exception was the RSS that had not even been a part of the freedom struggle against the British. The reason for this can be understood from this excerpt from Organizer’s November 30, 1949 editorial issue. It read:
“In our Constitution, there is no mention of the unique constitutional development in ancient Bharat. Manu’s Laws were written long before Lycurgus of Sparta or Solon of Persia. To this day, his laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world and the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity. But to our constitutional pundits that means nothing.”
The RSS thus rejected Ambedkar’s secular constitution and demanded the archaic, anti-egalitarian Manusmriti as the Constitution. Even today, we see this attitude among the Sangh Parivar groups that includes the BJP.
The Hindustan Times speculates that Eshwarappa made these statements for a harder push towards Hindutva in Karnataka ahead of the 2023 assembly election. However, the speech plays into the deeper right-wing ideology that seeks for a homogenous Indian society that contains none of the existing social diversity.
Related:
No discussion on who killed Mahatma Gandhi is complete without addressing idea of a Hindu Rashtra
August 15, 1947- When Indians Were Celebrating Independence, RSS Was Mourning
Teesta Talks: आरएसएस, भगवा और तिरंगा,