Table of Contents

Foreword Kumar Ketkar
Introduction
Original Design of the RSS: An Analysis
Political Ethnography of the RSS
Other Dominant Tendencies of the Golwalkar Era
Withdrawal, Return and Ascent of Deoras
The Emergency and Post-Emergency
The BJP, the Parivar and Deoras: 1980-85
Catapulting the Hindu to the Centre Stage
Road to Political Power and Its Aftermath
The Unipolar World and the RSS′ Response
The Future, If Any
The New Hindutva (Violent) Forces
Epilogue: The Problem of Ideologies
Postscript: Ayodhya Judgement and Bihar Assembly Elections
Appendices
Glossary
References
Index

About the Author

Sanjeev Kelkar has seen the RSS at close quarters, and at all levels, for the last 43 years. He was brought up in a diehard RSS family in Nagpur. It had close connections with the founder of the RSS, Golwalkar, Deoras and many others.

As a part of his social commitment, he left Mumbai for a rural tribal area medical service project and worked there for 11 years.

He is best described as an institution builder, an excellent trainer, an educational technologist, a wizard at project management and a gambler with his life. The excellent second-level referral hospital that he created was for him a laboratory to develop models to address the numerous needs of rural health care.

He then made the unlikely leap from the rural to the highly complex tertiary care super-specialty practice in CIIMS Hospital, Nagpur. He won an award of Rs. 200,000 for his short essay, ‘Program Proposal for Tuberculosis Control in India in 1995’.

Giving up his medical practice overnight, he joined a multinational pharma giant for the next six years. As their education director, he has trained numerous medical postgraduates in diabetes with extraordinary results.

Giving up medicine, for the last several years, he has engaged himself in political and literary writing. This book on the comparative study of the leftist–socialist, centrist and particularly the right-wing politics in India is an altogether different interpretation compared to the conventional wisdom.

He is presently working on his novel based on his experiences as a medical practitioner.

Reviews

Whatever the future, given the RSS’ multi-layered history, this was a story waiting to be told. Mr Kelkar’s intention may be to analyse the history of the RSS as a believer as well as an opponent. But objectivism is easier said than achieved. In Mr Kelkar’s case, the opponent’s viewpoint resembles that of a mother, bitterly disappointed in her child but unrelenting in her support and affection nonetheless. So expect a historical account of a "misunderstood" organization and a loyalist’s take on the way forward.
*Business Standard*