Genesis of ghar wapsi

Gowalkar said “a nation, unlike the jungle, cannot have jackals – a reference to Muslims and Christians – living in it”. They must be turned into lions. “The newcomers should bring about a total metamorphosis in their life-attitudes and take a rebirth, as it were, in that ancient national lineage,” he declares.

Put simply, religious minorities should convert to Hinduism or, alternatively, eject elements of their “Muslimness” and “Christianness”. In Bunch of Thoughts, Golwalkar contends that most Muslims and Christians in India are Hindus who converted out of fear, or for power and pelf, or because they were fooled. Of those in the last category, he claims, were villagers who had drawn water from a tank in which a piece of beef or a loaf had been thrown. The next day, a maulvi or a missionary would tell them that they had lost their Hindu religion because they had drunk the polluted water. Through such deception, Golwalkar contends without citing any evidence, entire villages in the north and on the west coast had been converted to Islam and Christianity.

“It is our duty to call these our forlorn brothers, suffering under religious slavery for centuries, back to their ancestral home,” he declares. “This is only a call and request to them to understand things properly and come back and identify themselves with their ancestral Hindu way of life in dress, customs, performing marriage ceremonies and funeral rites and such other things.”

Here then is the seed of the campaign that has grown into ghar wapsi. It is also why the current RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat periodically insists that Muslims are also Hindus.

Bhagwat is merely echoing the ideas articulated in Bunch of Thoughts, albeit without Golwalkar’s frightening clarity. For instance, Golwalkar says Muslims and Christians can be made to embrace the Hindu way of life through the strategy of “parakarma vad” or “assimilationism”. To justify his project, he invokes Nehru and attributes to him statements he never made.