The Sangh Parivar (संघ परिवार, translation: Family of Associations) refers to the family of organisations built around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The Sangh Parivar represents the Indian nationalist movement. It includes the Bharatiya Janata Party and several dozen smaller organisations, whose members' expressed political opinions range from the extreme right to the relatively moderate.
The Sangh Parivar tends to promote Hindutva; economically, it advocates the Swadeshi ("self-reliance") philosophy, though this has also been a source of major disputes between various factions of the Sangh Parivar.
Religious impact
The Sangh Parivar has spread
Hindu nationalism through local "Bhagat schools", in which children are provided a Sangh-sanctioned education. In many villages across
India,
dharma raksha samitis (Religion protection committees) promote religious discourse and form an arena for
bhajan performance. The Sangh sponsors calendars of Hindu deities and provides instruction on sanctioned methods of conducting
Ganesh Chaturthi and
Navaratri. This phenomenon has been documented in
Tamil Nadu, where high caste workers of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and
Hindu Munnani teach Tamil
dalits (untouchables) devotional hymns and persuaded many dalits to begin celebrating
Ganesh Chaturthi, a festival not widely marked in
Tamil Nadu.
The Sangh has also promoted changes in caste identity as its promotion of the God Krishna in Uttar Pradesh led to the lower caste Ahirs joining the Yadav caste, though the Yadav's en masse do not support Hindutva. This phenomenon is described by Poornima Mankekar and Christopher Fuller as an "incorporation of Hindu nationalist themes in the local Yadav narratives".
Reception
The Sangh Parivar has been described with monikers spanning the spectrum from "patriotic Hindus to "Hindu nationalist" to "Hindu chauvinist".
There has been considerable debate whether the RSS and Sangh Parivar could be considered fascist. While its constituent organisations present themselves as embedded in the traditional ethos of Hinduism, they have also been characterised as the representatives of authoritarian, xenophobic and majoritarian religious nationalism in India.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which represents the Sangh Parivar in national politics, has formed several governments in India, most recently being in power from 1998 to 2004 under prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Opponents of the BJP maintain that the party's moderate face merely serves to cover the Sangh Parivar's "hidden agenda" of undiluted Hindutva, detectable by the BJP's efforts to change the content of history textbooks and syllabi as well as other aspects of the education system.
Members
The Sangh Parivar includes the following organisations (1998 membership figures in brackets):
- Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Indian People's Party (17m)
- Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), National Volunteer Association (2.5m)
- Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, Indian Farmers' Association (8m)
- Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, Indian Labour Association (4.5m)
- Adivasi Kalyan Kendra (2.3m)
- Fishermen's Co-op Societies (2.2m)
- Vivekananda Medical Mission (1.7m)
- Adhyapak Parishad (1.8m)
- Vivekananda Kendra (1.8m)
- Bharatiya Vikas Parishad (1.8m)
- Deen Dayal Shodh Sansthan (1.7m)
- Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, National Volunteer Association for Women (1.8m)
- Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, All India Students' Forum (1.8m)
- Janata Yuva Morcha (1.8m)
- Shikha Bharati (2.1m)
- Vishwa Hindu Parishad, World Hindu Council (2.8m)
- Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, Hindu Volunteer Association – overseas wing
- Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, Nativist Awakening Front
- Saraswati Shishu Mandir, Nursery
- Vidya Bharati, Educational Institutes
- Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, Organisation for the improvement of tribals
- Bajrang Dal, Army of Hanuman
- Vijnana Bharati, Indian Science Movement
- Samkalp,
- Sanskar Bharati, Organisation of artists
- Sahkar Bharati, Organisation of co-operatives
- Adhivakta Parishad, Lawyers' association
- Vit Salahkar Parishad, Financial consultants' association
- Seva Bharati, Organisation for service of the needy, founded in 1984.
- Bharatiya Vichara Kendra
Footnotes
References
- Anderson, Walter K.; Damle, Sridhar D. (1987). The Brotherhood in Saffron. Delhi, India: Vistaar Publishers.
- Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002). Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Bhatt, Chetan (2001). Hindu Nationalism. Oxford, UK / New York, NY: Berg Publishers. ISBN 1859733484.
- de la Cadena, Marisol; Orin Starn (2007). Indigenous Experience Today. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers. ISBN 9781845205188.
- Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu Mind. New Delhi, India: Rupa. ISBN 81-291-0746-5.
- Fuller, Christopher (2004). The Camphor Flame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691120485.
- Jaffrelot, Christophe (2007). Hindu Nationalism. Princeton, NJ / Woodstock, UK: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691130981.
- Jelen, Ted Gerard (2002). Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective: The One, The Few, and The Many. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052165971X.
- Mishra, Pankaj (2006). Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. New York City: Macmillan. ISBN 9780374173210.
- Saha, Santosh (2004). Religious Fundamentalism in the Contemporary World: Critical Social and Political Issues. Lexington, MA: Lexington Press. ISBN 9780739107607.
- Thakurta, Paranjoy Guha; Shankar Raghuraman (2004). A Time of Coalitions: Divided We Stand. New Delhi, India/Thousand Oaks, CA/London, UK: SAGE. ISBN 0761932372.
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