In the first edition of Rashtra Dharm, Deendayal Upadhyaya wrote that the establishment of Buddhism created a break in the continuum of the Hindu nation.

When the RSS decided to include Mahatma Gandhi among the great men and women of India to be remembered in its morning prayers, there were vociferous protests from within its ranks. A person who witnessed the 1963 debate in Nagpur remembers that the proposal was approved after much acrimony and still left many seething.Fifty-six years after the recalibration, much of the Sangh Parivar now accepts Gandhi but there are still many who love to hate the Mahatma.It is generally believed that many dislike Gandhi because of his steadfast support to Muslims, which, they believe, somehow led to Partition. In a private conversation, one Sangh official pointed out a commonality — many volunteers who detest Gandhi belong to families that migrated from Pakistan. The theoretical origin of the aversion, however, lies much deeper: in their loathing for Gautama Buddha’s intervention in history.Gandhi considered Buddha as one of the greatest teachers of mankind, and ahimsa as the greatest truth uttered by him. Buddhist ideas of truth, nonviolence and self-purification formed the core of Gandhian thought. Others considered the very same qualities to have corroded the edifice of the Hindu nation.Swami Vivekananda was convinced that Gautama Buddha destroyed India’s social life with his teachings and robbed the country of its vigour. He said that while all the strong men followed the Buddha and became monks, only “weaklings” were left to “continue the race”. Buddhist tenets were anathema to the Hindu monk, who wanted Indian men to develop “muscles of iron and nerves of steel’’.Hindutva theorist and politician VD Savarkar, who greatly loathed Gandhi, strongly believed in the notion that Buddha emasculated the Hindus.“The Enlightened [the Buddha] could have remained unaffected by them [invaders] but the rest of Hindus then could not drink with equanimity this cup of bitterness and political servitude at the hands of those whose barbarous violence could still be soothed by the mealy-mouthed formulas of ahimsa and spiritual brotherhood, and whose steel could still be blunted by the soft palm leaves and rhymed charms,” Savarkar wrote in his thesis on Hindutva.The aversion to Buddhist philosophy binds BJP’s ideological father figure Deendayal Upadhyaya with the same thread. In the first edition of Rashtra Dharm, a publication of which he was general manager and Atal Bihari Vajpayee the founding editor, Upadhyaya wrote that the establishment of Buddhism created a break in the continuum of the Hindu nation.Buddha sought to cut off India from its Vedic roots. For several centuries after the Buddha, his followers and Hindus lived in conflict with one another. Eventually, destroying Buddhism became the “national duty” of men like Shankaracharya, Upadhyaya argued.It was the same sentiment that Sambhaji Bhide, an accused in the Bhima Koregaon caste violence of January 1, 2018, was echoing when he reportedly said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was wrong to reference the Buddha’s message of peace and tolerance at the UN General Assembly.The Hindu nationalist narrative says that nonviolence is anyway second nature to Hindus and they become violent only to defend their people and nation. Gandhian principles are often seen as rigid, but the Mahatma was bound by anything but dogma.In one instance, he says, “…refraining from taking life can in no circumstances be an absolute duty”. He says ahimsa does not simply mean non-killing. In fact, it is the duty of everyone to kill a man who runs amok violently. Such exceptional circumstances do not arise in the national context. “Those who rise to power by murder will certainly not make the nation happy,” Gandhi writes in Hind Swaraj.Barely concealing his disapproval of Savarkar, he writes, “Those who believe that India has gained by Dhingra’s (Savarkar’s associate in London Madanlal Dhingra who assassinated British official Curzon Wyllie) act and such other acts in India make a serious mistake. Dhingra was a patriot but his love was blind.” The advocates of muscular nationalism and avowed guardians of culture, however, miss the key point that the self-declared Sanatani makes about Indian civilisation.To the Mahatma, it did not matter who fought for the cause of the country. “My patriotism does not teach me that I am to allow people to be crushed under the heel of Indian princes, if only the English retire.”If it were an Englishman who was fighting for its freedom, Gandhi was more than willing to accept that too. If the Englishman dedicated his life to resisting tyranny and serving the land, he would consider him an Indian as any. “By patriotism I mean the welfare of the whole people, and if I could secure it at the hands of the English, I should bow down my head to them.”The Mahatma says although he was not at all afraid that the British were well armed, to fight them with weapons posed a practical problem; how many Indians would need to be armed and how long would it take? The deeper, philosophical issue to him was about preserving the Indian civilisation, the cornerstones of which were truth and nonviolence.“To arm India on a large scale is to Europeanise it…. This means, in short, that India must accept European civilisation, and, if that is what we want, the best thing is that we have among us those who are well trained in that civilisation…. But the fact is that the Indian nation will not adopt arms, and it is well that it does not.” That civilisational lesson hidden in Gandhi’s ahimsa has long been forgotten.