WHATEVER its countless sins, the Sangh Parivar can never be accused of having produced a half-way tall intellectual. No Hindutva star, from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh founders, to the present leaders of its 30-odd affiliates, including the BJP, remotely fits the description "intellectual".
Parivar "thinkers", including Deen Dayal Upadhyay with his Integral Humanism philosophy, show very little acquaintance with history, political theory, culture, economics or social movements.
They have an extremely narrow, semi-literate Hindu-supremacist worldview, which doesn't even comprehend the richness and diversity of Hinduism, which it mindlessly glorifies.
RSS cadre training is based on half-baked business-oriented economics, authoritarian politics and Hindu Rashtra. It denies that India has for centuries been a multicultural, multireligious society, where Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and agnosticism/atheism, coexisted with Hinduism, itself composed of many strands and sects.
Rather, it glorifies one, puritanical, upper-caste strand, embodied in the Bharat Mata symbol. Bharat Mata was enslaved by "outsiders". It's time to liberate her and create a proud, powerful Hindu Rashtra, which makes the world tremble. That's the Parivar's true goal. Democracy is only a means.
When the Parivar strays into history to claim unique greatness for Indian civilisation and denigrate liberal-secular ideas, it becomes a laughing stock.
Take Narendra Modi's recent incursion. He claimed that Biharis defeated Alexander the Great on the Ganga's banks; Chandragupta founded the Gupta dynasty, Ancient India's "Golden Age"; and Takshshila, the great seat of Buddhist learning, was in Bihar.
But Alexander was halted at the Beas in Himachal. Chandragupta founded the Mauryan empire. And Takshshila is in Pakistan. Mr Modi's "fake encounter with facts" confuses it with Nalanda.
The Sangh Parivar now dishonestly claims the legacy of Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first home minister. It presents Nehru, a Western-educated Fabian-socialist liberal, as a villain, and glorifies Patel as a pro-Hindutva leader -- like Mr Modi, who is building a 182-metre-tall Patel statue.
Nehru and Patel indeed differed in political approach and ideological orientation. Patel wanted to join a revivalist campaign for rebuilding the Somnath temple. Nehru opposed this. Patel favoured strong-arm methods against dissidents. Nehru was generally moderate and respected democratic norms. Patel was all for private industry, Nehru favoured regulating it.
Nehru would probably have preferred negotiated integration of 550 princely states into India, rather than Patel's coercive approach. Eventually, Nehru acquiesced in Patel's methods.
Matters are somewhat complex here. The Congress line was that Paramountcy (of British rule over the princes) lapsed with independence. The choice to accede either to India or Pakistan couldn't be left to the princes: the people must decide.
However, the Congress government didn't oppose the offer of that very choice by the departing British. Instead, it adopted double standards. It secured Jammu and Kashmir's accession by coercive means, as many historians have documented. Maharaja Hari Singh, faced with a "tribal invasion" from Pakistan, had no choice.
New Delhi gleefully cited his concurrence. But it proceeded to integrate Hyderabad and Junagadh into India against their rulers' wishes. The Hyderabad "police action" was an army operation, resulting in the killing of 27,000-40,000 Muslims in Hindu-led pogroms, according to the Sunderlal commission appointed by the Congress.
These are far from glorious chapters in Independent India's early history. Patel played a major role in these, but Nehru went along with him. Patel represented the Congress's Right wing. Nehru was certainly in its Left wing despite moderating his mid-1930s radicalism.
These reflected differences within the Freedom Movement, itself comprising diverse currents. The Sangh Parivar, consisting of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, was not part of the Movement, but collaborated with the British against it.
The RSS exhorted its members to join the British Indian army to get arms training. Even its khaki-shorts uniform was modelled on the colonial police's attire.
The Parivar is thus sickeningly hypocritical to claim Patel's mantle. It was Patel who banned the RSS after Gandhi's assassination by Nathuram Godse. Godse was closely connected with the RSS.
The Mahasabha collected funds for Godse's defence. This infuriated Patel, who drew the logical inference, "namely, that the HM is in it" (complicit in Gandhi's assassination).
As Patel's biographer and Gandhiji's grandson Rajmohan says, the Sardar "would have been very disappointed, very pained and saddened" at the butchery of Muslims under Modi's watch in 2002.
The Mahasabha toadied up to the British. But some of its members were admirers of European fascism too. HM leader B.S. Moonje even paid a visit to Mussolini in 1931. Moonje helped mould the RSS along fascist lines as part of its plan to "militarise the Hindus" and create a Hindu Rashtra.
Patel lifted the ban on the RSS in 1949, but only on the condition that it adopt a constitution which keeps it away from politics. The Sangh has comprehensively betrayed that pledge. It became the progenitor, ideological mentor, political master and organisational gatekeeper of the Jana Sangh, and later of the BJP, formed in 1980.
The RSS has adopted an overtly political posture and profile in recent years -- first by appointing all of the BJP's organisational secretaries, and then by expelling L.K. Advani from all party positions after his speech praising Jinnah.
More recently, it nominated Modi as the BJP's prime ministerial candidate. The RSS has thus become defiant about assuming an explicitly political role. An ideologue writes in its mouthpiece Organiser, "no power in the country can stop an individual or group from entering politics."
Equally, the BJP has proved incapable of cutting its umbilical chord with the RSS and adopting moderation. Its dependence on the RSS is likely to grow as it runs an aggressive election campaign running up to 2014.
It will rely on the RSS for intensive door-to-door canvassing -- and for communally polarising the situation, as it recently did in Muzaffarnagar.
There lies the relevance of the 14-party October 30 convention against communalism in Delhi. Its call to "secular and democratic forces" to mobilise people to rebuff communalists and "defend our composite culture and strengthen the unity of the people" must be heeded.

The writer is an eminent Indian columnist. E-mail: [email protected]