From opposition to endorsement: The RSS and the tricolour

By Shamsul Islam

The RSS-BJP government had called upon citizens to unfurl the Tricolour on the eve of India’s 79th Independence Day. In several BJP-ruled states, it has been made mandatory for madrasas to do so.

Ironically, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has historically expressed reservations about the Tricolour. On August 14, 1947, the RSS’s English weekly Organiser wrote:

“The people who have come to power by the kick of fate may give in our hands the Tricolour 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.”

In the decades after independence, the organisation’s stance did not change. In his essay Drifting and Drifting, later published in the RSS publication Bunch of Thoughts, the organisation’s second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, stated:

“Our leaders have set up a new flag for our country. Why did they do so? It is just a case of drifting and imitating…. Ours is an ancient and great nation with a glorious past. Then, had we no flag of our own? Had we no national emblem at all these thousands of years? Undoubtedly we had. Then why this utter void, this utter vacuum in our minds?”

(Bunch of Thoughts, Sahitya Sindhu, Bangalore, 1996, pp. 237–238)

This text continues to appear in the latest edition of Bunch of Thoughts, printed in 2022. There has been no public withdrawal or modification of these statements by the RSS.

While the organisation now publicly supports the display of the national flag, its earlier documented positions have been a point of discussion among historians, political observers, and critics. These contrasting phases — past opposition to the Tricolour and present-day promotion of it — continue to fuel debate about the RSS’s evolving relationship with national symbols.

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*Links to Shamsul Islam’s writings and video interviews/debates:

http://du-in.academia.edu/ShamsulIslam; Facebook: https://facebook.com/shamsul.islam.33; Twitter: @shamsforjustice; http://shamsforpeace.blogspot.com/.

Link for procuring Shamsul Islam’s books:

https://tinyurl.com/shams-books

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