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2 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Dhirendra K Jha |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy |Purushottam Agrawal
Addressing BJP MPs in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attributed the formation of the first unabashedly Hindutva government to the “tapasya [penance] of five generations”, alluding to the efforts of the RSS (founded in 1925). The RSS was founded by K.B. Hedgewar and his colleagues to spread political Hindutva as articulated by V.D. Savarkar, but it was confined to Maharashtra until Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar took over as its second sarsanghchalak, that is supremo, in 1940.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
timesofindia.indiatimes.com | Dhirendra K Jha
Dhirendra K JhaUpdated: Jan 7, 2025, 17:05 IST ISTSenior journalist Dhirendra K Jha, in his new book, looks at the events following Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, which unleashed fury against Brahmins and shattered the RSS. Amid bans and arrests, leader MS Golwalkar scrambled to salvage the Sangh, condemning the act and distancing from Godse, despite years of incendiary rhetoricMS Golwalkar was in Madras when the news of Gandhi’s assassination reached him.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
timesofindia.indiatimes.com | Dhirendra K Jha
In this extract, the senior journalist looks at the events following Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, which unleashed fury against Brahmins and shattered the RSS. Amid bans and arrests, leader MS Golwalkar scrambled to salvage the Sangh, condemning the act and distancing from Godse, despite years of incendiary rhetoricMS Golwalkar was in Madras when the news of Gandhi’s assassination reached him.
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Dec 1, 2024 | 
thewire.in | Dhirendra K Jha
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Dhirendra K Jha
In keeping with the theory of focusing upon a single opponent, Golwalkar made Muslims the grotesque projection of all imaginable vices and dreads, the cause of tyranny in the past and a threat to Hindus in future. In We or Our Nationhood Defined, the most authentic treatise on a Hindu Rashtra, he expounded that all non-Hindus were “either traitors or enemies to the national cause, or, to take a charitable view, idiots”.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
governancenow.com | Dhirendra K Jha
Golwalkar: The Myth Behind The Man, The Man Behind The Machine
By Dhirendra K. Jha
Simon and Schuster India, 400 pages, Rs 899Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, or “Guruji” as he is reverentially referred to by his followers, is regarded as the demigod of Hindutva ideology and politics, and often accorded a status higher than even the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), K. B. Hedgewar.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
nationalheraldindia.com | Dhirendra K Jha
Dhirendra K. Jha focuses on what happened when Gandhi urged Golwalkar to ‘openly condemn the killing of Muslims’ in Delhi in 1947Title: Golwalkar: The Myth Behind The Man, The Man Behind The Machine | Author: Dhirendra K. Jha | Publisher: Simon & Schuster India| Pages: 416 | Price: Rs 899 (hardcover)By the time Mahatma Gandhi returned to Delhi on 9 September 1947, his reputation was at a new high after his triumph in Calcutta.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Dhirendra K Jha |Peter Ronald deSouza |Vaishna Roy
The final act of Golwalkar’s conflict with Gandhi was played out by Nathuram Godse, the RSS hothead from Poona. At the time, Godse edited a local Marathi journal, Hindu Rashtra, just as his mentor, Kashinath Bhaskar Limaye, the chief of the Maharashtra unit of the RSS and one of the closest aides of Golwalkar, edited Vikram, another pro-Hindutva Marathi journal published from Sangli. N. D. Apte, a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, was the general manager of Hindu Rashtra.
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May 31, 2024 | 
caravanmagazine.in | Dhirendra K Jha
IT SHOULD NOT COME as a surprise that a figure who was once deeply invested in presenting India’s history as a series of glorious, often fictive, Hindu exploits is now being memorialised in a manner that reflects his own tendency to alter facts. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Hindutva ideologue, has been the subject of numerous biographies—there are around two hundred and fifty, most in Marathi, including a spate in the last decade, with a biopic out this April.
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Feb 29, 2024 | 
caravanmagazine.in | Dhirendra K Jha
JUST BEFORE the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s links with Nathuram Godse could become an issue in the first Indian general election, the US researcher JA Curran wrote an account of the organisation that de-hyphenated it from the assassin of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In his 1951 book, Militant Hinduism in Indian Politics: A Study of the RSS, Curran described the rise of the organisation.
