Indianness underlined: What RSS chief said in his Vijayadashami address

Delivering his annual Dussehra speech at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters in Nagpur, Mohan Bhagwat said Bharat has to stand on its own strong foundation of nature and culture.

Delivering his annual Dussehra speech to a gathering of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) cadres in Nagpur, Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat outlined some key challenges facing the country, and listed the changes that the country’s society and economy must undertake if “our ultimate goal” of “making Bharat glorious and prosperous” is to be realised.

What 2019 elections showed

Bhagwat started by looking back at the 2019 Lok Sabha election results. He said the main question before the 2019 election had been whether the BJP’s victory in the previous 2014 election was “a mere result of a negative political wave born out of the disenchantment against the previous government”, or whether Indians had “made up their mind to go in a specific direction”.

J&K: A long way to go

Bhagwat said that the government’s move to nullify Article 370, which gave Jammu and Kashmir a special status, “once again proved that it has the courage to fulfill those expectations and respect people’s sentiments and wishes in the interest of the country”. But, he stressed, that there is more to be done on this front.

“This effort will come to fruition only when justice denied under the influence of Article 370 is restored, injustices occurred are brought to an end. It will happen when our Kashmiri Pandits who were unjustly driven away are brought back and rehabilitated and allowed to remain secure, fearless, patriotic and Hindu,” Bhagwat said.

“Landing” on the Moon

Bhagwat said that Indian scientists had won global applause after they “landed” Chandrayaan’s Vikram lander on the hitherto unexplored South Polar region of the Moon.

Several “crises”

Bhagwat cautioned that Indians should not get lazy because of these achievements because “There are some crises before us, which needed to be overcome”.

Threat across the border

He pointed to the threat along India’s borders, and said that while security alertness was better than before, “the number of guards and checkposts on land borders, and surveillance along the maritime border, especially on islands, have to be increased”.

The enemy within

Bhagwat spoke at length about the threat emanating from within the country. “The agents that cause many a trouble reside in the body,” he said. Over the past few years, there has been “a transformation in the direction of the thought process of Bharat” but many do not want this and continue to “distort” and “misinterpret” even the “well-meaning” policies of the government, he said.

In this regard, he pointed to how incidents of one community attacking another were sometimes “deliberately fabricated” and published with distortions. He claimed that “such incidents have not been one-sided” and “there are reports of incidents happening from both sides”. He did, however, add that “the Sangh has never supported the people who were involved in such incidents and it stands against each and every such incident”.

Yet, Bhagwat said that “by branding such incidents by the words like ‘lynching'” — which denotes “traditions which were alien to Bharat” — “efforts are underway to defame our country and the entire Hindu society” and create fear among the “so-called” minority communities.

He asked his audience to understand that “such a conspiracy is also being hatched”. He asked his audience to “keep away from talking in provocative language or indulging in provocative acts”.


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