Women Who Wield the Stick

ON A HUMID September evening in an East Delhi park lined with Ashoka trees, a group of women gathers wearing tradi­tional clothes in white with a pink border and in white shoes. One of the women blows a whistle, signal­ling them to fall into rows. Against drum beats, the hoisting of a saffron flag and constant commands, they move synchronously swinging long wooden sticks, their dupattas tucked around their waists, hair tied up. It is followed by a rhythmic drill of martial arts moves.

“In our time, we were also taught to use the knife and sword. It was discontinued later,” says Madhuri Singh who has been at­tending shakhas of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, a Hindu nationalist women’s organisation which parallels the better known all-men Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), for over five decades. Sit­ting on a bench in the park watching the exercises, she says the youngest among the 40-50 women— professionals, students and homemakers—present in the park for the shakha would be around eight. Meaning a branch, a ‘shakha’ in RSS parlance is a way of life, emulated by the Samiti. The programme in­volves exercises, yoga, dand abhyas (wielding the stick), simple games, niyuddha (martial arts), patriotic songs, stories from the Ramayana, chanting shlokas, and prayer.

The women, like their male counterparts in the Sangh, begin with the dhwaj pranam (saluting the flag) with the right hand across the chest, palm facing down and head bowing slightly. The leader then gives commands, interjected with patriotic and religious slogans—“sangathan mein shakti hai (there is strength in organisa­tion)” or “Jai Jai Rani—Jhansi ki Rani”, referring to Rani Lakshmibai from whom the sevikas draw inspiration. They rigorously follow the leader’s instructions— movements synchronised, minds in sync—finishing before the sun sets.

Imbued in the drill of a shakha is the time-tested ideological moulding of minds, Hindutva running in the veins, be those of women or men. A senior sevika, Renu Singh, says it is better to catch them young at school. “The girls are empowered to be strong enough to defend themselves as well as society. They also learn karate and judo,” she says.

Born 11 years after the 100-year-old RSS, the rightwing wom­en’s group focuses on mobilising Hindu women in bringing about socio-cultural change. With around 50,000 sevikas acrossthe country in 4,125 shakhas, it is still just a fraction of the Sangh which has 40 lakh members as against over 73,000 shakhas, but the Samiti leaders claim that the number of women getting drawn to it has been growing faster, particularly in recent years. While the Sangh has around 3,000 pracharaks who are full-time dedicated members, having pledged celibacy, there are around 50 pracharikas in the country.

As the hour-long shakha ends, the women leave for tea at the residence of a Samiti worker living nearby. Madhuri tells a middle-aged woman, who stops by keenly watching the shakha, that she too could join and shares a phone number. As with the Sangh, the shakha members are categorised into four sets: children, adoles­cents, adults, and the elderly. Astha and Akanksha, sisters in their twenties, whose mother was a member of Seva Bharti, the com­munity service wing of RSS, joined the Samiti as children. “Several of my classmates were left-oriented. I was never able to argue with them on their ideology and atheism. After joining the Samiti, I gained knowledge about our country and culture and I have even been able to convince some,” says Astha who has completed her BTech and plans to pursue her studies and music while continuing to be with the Samiti. Akanksha, a music graduate, who now trains others in the Samiti to play in the band, also intends to continue her music education and her role in the organisation.

The Rashtra Sevika Samiti focuses on three principles and its three icons are matrutva (motherhood), represented by Jijabai Bhosale, Chhatrapati Shivaji’s mother; kartrutva (responsibility), depicted by Ahilyabai Holkar, the 18th-century queen of Indore known for her work in religion, education and culture; and ne­trutva (leadership) symbolised by Rani Lakshmibai. Focusing on family values, it draws a line between its approach to empowering women and what it views as the Western concept of feminism, arguing that the Samiti does not confine its cause to just economic independence of women.

Upholding Indian culture, it organises awareness camps on various issues, including ‘love jihad’, a term coined by Hindu activists alleging that Muslim men target Hindu women to convert them to Islam through love or marriage, eventually for demographic dominance. The Samiti, with a presence in around 1,000 districts, runs services for the poor and underprivileged like orphan­ages, computer training, libraries, tuitions, medical centres, and education for girls in remote, Maoist-affected areas. “Earlier, there was a lot of negativity about the Sangh. As people started understanding it better, more began joining,” says Sunita Bhatia, chief of the Samiti’s Delhi prant.

In a busy locality in West Delhi, on the first floor of the Mahavir temple are the city headquarters of the Delhi unit of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti. Around 15 women are huddled in a room discussing activities of its intellectual cell, which includes women from various profes­sions. This was the third meeting of the day. Unlike at the shakha, the sevikas are not in uniform, which is worn only on special occasions like major Hindu festivals. Cups of tea and mathari, an Indian snack, go around as the meeting ends. Inside a tiny room with a hospital bed is Rekha Raje, a frail septuagenarian, one of around 50 women pracharikas in the country. She was 13 when she first started going to a shakha in Nasik. “After I returned to Kanpur, where we lived then, I told my mother that I will never marry. I tied rakhis to my suitors and made them my brothers,” she recalls. After coming to Delhi in 1984, she travelled to various parts of India for the Samiti’s work.

According to Pratibha Bisht, a joint secretary in Delhi, the Samiti’s activities are spread over six broad areas: the contribution of intellectuals, consciousness about the environment, creating so­cial harmony, Dharma Raksha (under which it supports ghar wapsi or reconversion to Hinduism), focusing on family structure, and creating awareness about Indian culture. On one wall of the sitting room at the Samiti’s Delhi office are portraits of Lakshmibai Kelkar, who founded the Samiti in 1936, and Saraswati Tai Apte, who took over from Kelkar as Pramukh Sanchalika or chief. Kelkar, who was called ‘Mausiji’, it is said, met RSS founder KB Hedgewar through her Swayamsevak sons, after a rape case in Bengal left her perturbed.

In 1996, Paola Bacchetta, professor in the Department of Gen­der and Women’s Studies at the University of California at Berke­ley, quoted an undated English publication and a 1989 Hindi text to narrate two different versions of the Samiti’s inception. The English one traced its origin to opposition to the Indian leftist and liberal women’s movements of the 1930s. It explains that due to the Western impact, women were struggling for equal rights and economic freedom which could lead to a change in the attitude of women. This, it stated, might have led to disintegra­tion of the family. When Kelkar met Hedgewar and proposed a women’s wing, he conceded but only if she accepted responsibil­ity. “Here, it is the potential of Hindu femininity to go astray into feminism which renders the Samiti nec­essary. In contrast a 1989 Hindi language text cites Kelkar’s increasing awareness of the sexual exploitation of Hindu women and the need to fight back, as the motiva­tion,” writes Bacchetta.

This version cites two cases: in one, defenceless women orange pickers lose their chastity to middlemen they are in debt to; in another, a woman is sexually harassed on the streets while her husband and passersby take no action. Kelkar con­cludes that women must learn to defend themselves. When she discovers that her sons know how to wield a lathi, she asks them to teach their sister and herself its use. They decline, saying that they have vowed never to impart such knowledge to someone who is not a member of the Sangh. So Kelkar asks them to arrange for her to meet the Sarsanghchalak. She tells him that women are exploited, defenceless and asks if they could join the shakhas to learn self-defence. He refuses, but agrees that she can found a women’s wing.

THE SAMITI WORKS autonomously, independent of the Sangh. But the ideology, orientation and structure are similar. At its two-day all-India executive meeting in Gu­wahati in February this year, its chief V Shanta Kumari said, “To make our nation glorious, the subjects of panch parivartan (five changes)—self realisation, family values, social harmony, envi­ronmental awareness, and civic duty—will have to be brought into society by inculcating them into personal life and conduct.” This was along lines similar to what Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat had said earlier. Bhagwat addressed the Samiti volunteers in Guwahati in an organisational meeting. Later in the year, while speaking on women’s participation in the Sangh at a gathering in Delhi, he said the Samiti’s work is on the rise.

It sets itself apart from the Sangh by laying its primary focus on empowering women. When Hedgewar founded RSS in 1925, while India was under British rule, it was an all men’s organisation, founded to consolidate Hindu society and create a protective mech­anism for the country guided by its cultural and religious moor­ings, as against Western culture. The goal was to attain the param vaibhav (pinnacle of glory) of the Hindu Rashtra. Hindu youth were recruited, given a uniform of a khaki shirt and shorts, much like the police, and trained in paramilitary techniques—lathi (stick), dagger and sword—besides being given an ideological education. “In that scheme of things in those days, women did not fit in. Even in the armed forces, women were given combat roles much later. Protecting society meant physical training which was then seen as the job of men,” says R Balashankar, former editor of the Organiser, an RSS mouthpiece.

Unlike RSS, not many women from the Samiti have made it to prominence in the Sangh’s political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Among the known faces are former Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, former Union minister Sushma Swaraj and her daughter Bansuri, now an MP, who accompanied her mother to the shakhas. “After RSS was founded, people in sync with its thinking started various wings covering different fields like seva bharati, vidya bharati, sanskar bharati etc in which both women and men participated. In the Samiti, there are pracharikas dedicated to the cause, like pracharaks in the RSS. When Kelkar met Hedgewar, she told him that the main point was that women needed to be empowered,” says Mahajan, who was associated with the Samiti since her childhood in Indore.

While addressing its volunteers in 2018 when she was Lok Sabha speaker, Mahajan recalled that Hedgewar had said that the Sangh will help training the sevikas if needed. Mahajan had also said that she would be sending a book on the history of the Samiti to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who had said in Gujarat at a stu­dents’ gathering that RSS discriminates against women, pointing out that there are no women in it.

Vijay Sharma, 50, one of three pracharikas based in Delhi, says she started attending the Samiti’s shakhas as a child, inspired by her teacher. “At that time I did not even know about RSS. I thought only women’s shakhas were held. I decided against getting married and devoting myself to the service of the nation,” she says. There are 12 pracharikas in Assam, the most in a state. RSS has been active in Assam since 1946.

Every sevika has a personal story. For Sangeeta, 52, who wit­nessed RSS shakhas as a child in Haryana’s Rohtak, it was an elderly friend who introduced her to the Samiti’s shakhas in Delhi where she met Sushma Swaraj. “I had little knowledge about Hindu gods. My mother was related to the gurudwara. The acquaintance with the Sangh made me aware and I told my children bedtime stories about Hindu gods,” says Sangeeta, who went on to do her doctorate in mass communication while continuing her association with the Samiti. Charu Kalra, a Delhi prant president, said that as a child she saw her father going to shakhas. When she turned 13, she started going to the Samiti’s training camps as she continued her education and completed her doctorate.

Almost unseen in comparison to the prodigious RSS, the Samiti is quietly laying out its path in what has been a male do­main. “Earlier, we used to look for people. Now people look for us,” says Pratibha.