Why does the Right suddenly love Bhagat Singh?

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people. People cannot be really happy until they have been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion”.

These often-paraphrased lines from Karl Marx against religiosity, doctrine and communalism were quoted by Bhagat Singh in his ‘jail notebooks’. If he were alive today, there is no doubt that he would have been branded ‘anti-national sickular‘ in the eyes of BJP, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) leaning twitter trolls and the conforming news channels. So, it is remarkable that for the past few years, PM Narendra Modi with his RSS roots has tweeted on March 23  about how inspiring Singh’s sacrifice was and how he was the real son of the soil.

If we go back 90-odd years, things were never rosy between Singh and the Sangh. During the late 1920s, the founder of RSS, KB Hedgewar was completely focused on developing the organisational framework for his new outfit and he steered clear of anti-colonial politics. He was so busy in strengthening his clutch on Hindus that he never showed interest in even the Congress’ efforts towards the freedom struggle. Likewise, the British never considered Hedgewar a threat and labelled him the same in their annual intelligence reports. Finally, when Bhagat Singh was executed in 1931, Hedgewar was busy in Varanasi arranging RSS programs and had nothing to say about this gross travesty of justice.

Another Sangh ideologue of the time, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was busy bringing together the upper-caste Hindus and untouchables during Singh’s final days. Savarkar was more pro-British than even Hedgewar and was released by the British from jail after he pledged to never practice politics again. Also, Savarkar was typically infamous because of his multiple pleading letters and requests of mercy to the British. We can take a pause and compare this with what Singh did instead. In fact, Balasahab Deoras, the third chief of the RSS had less than flattering things to say about Singh and his contemporaries in his writings.

RSS thinking and ideology is expressed in its regular magazines/newspapers and surprisingly there is not a single line challenging, exposing, criticising or confronting the British rule in their entire literature from 1925 to 1947. It is also well documented that the Sangh did not take part in the Quit India movement but there is more to it than just maintaining the status-quo. Syama Prasad Mukherjee, who was then the Hindu Mahasabha president and later founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (which would evolve into the BJP) collaborated with the British to kill the Quit India Movement. So, how on the earth does today’s BJP try to lay claim to Bhagat Singh, a young maverick whose only life goal was to see an independent India and a vocal Marxist, a word that cannot go down the throat of a single BJP affiliate.

Bhagat Singh is not the only one from history books whom the Sangh has tried to retroactively claim. They’ve vehemently laid similar claims on Sardar Patel and Ambedkar. In the absence of a nationally acceptable hero of their own, this liberal co-opting of those who have nothing in common with their ideology seems a desperate or perhaps a sly agenda on part of the Sangh.