Hindus to the government’s equalization policy. In
fact, its supporters generally are from the upper
castes. While they criticize the distortions of the
caste system (which they blame on Muslim influ-
ence), critics believe they really want to return to
a time when caste was rigidly enforced.
RSS members conduct daily drills of martial
arts wearing khaki uniforms, mimicking the Ital-
ian and German fascists they have long admired.
Their disciplined members are often the first to
arrive at the site of natural disasters, a practice
that earns them support. The women’s wing of the
RSS is the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti; its structure is
not unlike the male sections.
The political wing of the RSS is the BHARATIYA
JANATA PARTY. It was founded in 1951 on a plat-
form of an undivided India and aimed to unify
all Hindus under a single doctrine, whereas in
the past Hindus have tolerated a wide diversity of
thought, and has rejected what it sees as European
influences on modern Hindu thought and prac-
tice. At first it also rejected industrialization, but
that orientation was eventually discarded.
During the 1940s M. S. Golwalker transformed
the RSS into the most powerful of all the national-
ist movements in India. Their influence expanded
over time through missionary work. In February
1983 the RSS was implicated with nationalists and
local police in Assam in a massacre of Muslim
immigrants. The rioters also killed local Hindus
who coexisted with the Moslems.
The RSS was also involved, along with the SHIV
SENA movement and Bharatiya Janata Party, in the
controversy that arose around the Babri Masjid
Mosque in the Uttar Pradesh city of AYODHYA.
This mosque was built in 1528 on a site that is
believed to be the birthplace of RAMA, the AVATA R
of VISHNU.
As early as the 1940s RSS members managed
to erect an image of Rama in the mosque. Later
the government sealed off the mosque to try to
dampen the dispute. In the 1980s, the RSS started
to protest the very existence of the Babri Mosque.
Lal Krishnan Advani, a leader of the VISHVA HINDU
PARISHAD (another nationalist group) led the pro-
tests; he was recently indicted for his role in the
affair. The RSS protesters eventually attacked and
destroyed the mosque in 1992. Nationwide com-
munal riots resulted, in which 3,000 people were
killed.Further reading: Gwilym Beckerlegge and Anthony
Copley, eds., Saffron and Seva (Hinduism in Public and
Private) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies,
and Modern Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001); Gerrie ter Haar and James J. Busuttil, eds., The
Freedom to Do God’s Will: Religious Fundamentalism
and Social Change (London: Routledge, 2003); Blom
Thomas Hanson, The Saffron Way: Democracy and
Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1999); Santosh C. Saha, ed., Religious
Fundamentalism in the Contemporary World: Critical
Social and Political Issues (Lanham, Md.: Lexington
Books, 2004); Santosh C. Saha and Thomas K. Carr,
eds., Religious Fundamentalism in Developing Countries
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001); Peter van
der Veer, Religious Nationalism, Hindus and Muslims in
India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).Rati
In Indian mythology Rati, Desire, is the wife of the
god of love KAMADEVA. Some stories say that she
was created from the sweat of the RISHI DAKSHA,
SHIVA’s future father-in-law. Other stories make her
the daughter of BRAHMA, who killed herself when
Brahma, ashamed of his own lust, killed himself.
Both were revived by Vishnu and she then was
given to Kamadeva, the god of love, in marriage.
Rati’s most celebrated achievement was to
persuade Shiva to revive her husband, after he
had burned him to ashes with his third eye. In the
best known version of this story, Shiva restores
Kamadeva to life but makes him invisible. In other
versions, Rati tries to revive her husband by feats
of asceticism but is stopped by the rishi NARADA,
who forces her to serve as a demon’s housemaid,K 362 Rati