RSS, Rahul Gandhi and the case that should not have been

The Supreme Court hearing on RSS versus Rahul Gandhi is peculiar in the sense that it is both funny and harmful. Funny in the sense that it makes the RSS guilty of considering Mr. Rahul Gandhi’s utterances seriously, which is a mistake even an illiterate person of India is not doing today. Another important point is that it is a wastage of Supreme Court’s precious time when the Honorable Supreme Court has much more precious issues like preservation of Collegium system.

Except perennial RSS baiters, the common man of India has lost interest in the question of who killed Gandhiji. It can be best illustrated by the example of an interesting political incidence. Kolhapur in Maharashtra was the citadel of anti RSS camp in 1948. The RSS people suffered violent attacks on them in this region after the murder of Mahatma Gandhi. Some 20 years back in the same Kolhapur city Mr. Chagan Bhujbal, in his erstwhile ‘Avatar’ of Shiva sena leader announced in an election rally that there should be public statues of Nathuram Godse, the killer of Mahatma Gandhi. Surprisingly, the Shiv sena candidate won the seat by a good margin. Furthermore Mr. Chagan Bhujbal was welcomed with open arms by both the Congress and the Rashtravadi Congress when he left Shiv Sena, without asking him to take back his statement. Ultimately he joined Rashtravadi Congress and its hall of fame of corruption.

What Mr. Rahul Gandhi said at the election meeting in 2014 had no impact on the outcome of the election, either of that parliamentary seat or in general. It would have gone unnoticed but for the bravado of filing a law suit. Mr. Rahul Gandhi announced that he is quite eager to face the defamation suit and then went to fight up to Supreme Court to avoid facing the same defamation suit! weird, is it? But Mr. Rahul Gandhi does not think so. He also finds it logical to say that 'RSS people' killed Gandhiji but he is not blaming RSS for it! Nowadays Mr. Rahul Gandhi should easily be able to afford the luxury of spending ample time and money on such issues and of engaging some fine legal brains to quibble over the words and phrases. On the other hand the RSS can perhaps have the necessary money, but they possibly have 100 better reasons and better activities to spend their funds.  That is why the dangerous argument may get established that not ‘RSS’ but ‘RSS people’ killed gandhiji.

In logic, there is the concept of ‘Faulty generalization’. That is, if we meet an angry person from a given country X, we may suspect that most people in country X are often angry. If we meet a lazy recipient of social welfare benefits, we may suspect that all welfare recipients are lazy. Faulty generalizations may lead to further incorrect conclusions. We may for example conclude that citizens of country X are genetically inferior, or that poverty is generally the fault of the poor. Then there is well known fallacy of considering wrong attributes to come to a conclusion. In the sentence 'Black cat always kills mouse' cat is the relevant attribute while being black is incidental. A red cat will also kill a mouse while a black elephant may not.

To put these fallacies in historical context, saying ‘[some] RSS people killed Gandhiji’ is like saying ‘[some] Sikh people killed Indira Gandhi’, or ‘[some] Tamil people killed Rajiv Gandhi’. It is faulty generalization. The attribute of belonging to RSS or Sikh community or Being Tamil is not the root cause which prompted these killers for the heinous acts. But such faulty generalizations served the purpose of Congress to spread the hatred which resulted in 1948 victimization of RSS and 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. Perhaps it is the same hatred which Mr. Rahul Gandhi again wants to spread about RSS. But it may not work because by now people have learnt to differentiate between Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

When Lokmanya Tilak was sentenced to jail by British Court, he mentioned the ‘superior court’ which is definitely going to give the verdict of not guilty for him. He was referring to the divine force since India was in slavery then. Now that the India is a sovereign nation, is the RSS, already exonerated by the ‘superior Court’ of ‘We The People’ wasting time and energy in trying to do the impossible task of teaching logic to Mr. Rahul Gandhi?