RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has said that Mahatma Gandhi was mistaken when he wrote that India was not united before British rule. Speaking at a book festival in Nagpur on Saturday, Bhagwat argued that this belief came from what the British taught Indians, not from India’s own history.
“Gandhi ji wrote in Hind Swaraj that we were not united before the Britishers, but that is a false narrative taught to us by the British,” Bhagwat said in Hindi. He added that Gandhi’s view “that before the British came, we were not one” was shaped by colonial education. “We were taught by the British,” he said.
Bhagwat insisted that India’s “rashtra” existed long before modern nation-states and cannot be described using today’s political language. “Our rashtra was not created by a State. We have existed since forever. Even when there was no State, we were there. We were there when we were free, we were there even when we were enslaved, and we were there when there was only one Chakravarti Samrat,” he said.
He said that confusion often arises because people mix up the ideas of “state” and “nation.” “If you use the word state in your writing, then the feeling you want to convey will not be conveyed. That is a completely different feeling,” Bhagwat said.
He also spoke about how nationalism is understood today. “People ask me, are you a nationalist? I say, I am a nationalist. Why do you have to talk about this? Are you a nationalist because of your feelings, or are you a nationalist because of your rationality?” he said. According to him, nationalism is not something that can be explained purely through logic. “A lot of things in the world are beyond logic. It is beyond logic,” he said.
Bhagwat argued that India’s nationhood should not be compared with Western concepts, saying Western political ideas developed in societies shaped by conflict. “Once an opinion is formed, anything apart from that thought becomes unacceptable. They close doors to other thoughts and start calling it ‘…ism’,” he said.
According to him, this is why India’s civilisational identity was labelled “nationalism” by outsiders. “They do not understand our views about nationhood, so they started calling it ‘nationalism’,” he said. “Our concept of a rashtra is different from the Western idea of a nation.”
Bhagwat added that the RSS prefers the term “nationality,” saying, “Excessive pride about the nation led to two world wars, which is why some people fear the word nationalism.”
