Did RSS think Quit India Movement was futile, not worth joining?

The fiery discussions in Parliament on the national song Vande Mataram has reopened the debate on the role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the BJP, in the 1942 Quit India Movement.

Few would know that the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha, Muslim League and even the Communists found themselves on the same side of the ideological and political fence in opposing the Quit India Movement announced by Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress.

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Despite its stated aversion to the Muslim League and its politics, the Hindu Mahasabha, then led by Hindutva ideologue V.D. Savarkar, had allied with the League to form ministries in Sindh and the North West Frontier Province.

Shyama Prasad Mookerji was the finance minister in the Bengal ministry led by Maulvi A.K. Fazlul Haq, who had moved the Pakistan Resolution in the Lahore session of the Muslim League in 1940. As A.G. Noorani writes in his book The RSS: A Menace to India, the Mahasabha was part of the Sindh ministry despite its assembly adopting a resolution supporting partition.

Mookerji, who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the political forebearer of the BJP, in 1951, wrote to Bengal governor Sir John Herbert on July 26, 1942, “advising him to crush the revolt (impending Quit India Movement that began on August 8, 1942) which had begun to brew”.

“The question is how to combat this movement in Bengal?