Re:India's pro-business Modi storms to historic election win
by tn13 on Friday May 16, 2014 @07:33PM
(#7758512)
Correction: Nathuram Godse was not a member of RSS when he assassinated Gandhi. RSS did not agree with his radical views and hence he left RSS to start his own organization.
2002: Muslim mob burned 59 people alive on a railways station. Riots were mostly a response to this incident.
Some well-known events to contextualize the RSS:
1949: A member of the RSS (EDIT: perhaps lapsed, perhaps active), Nathuram Godse, assassinates Mahatma Gandhi for being too partial to Muslims.
1992: The RSS organizes a rally of 150k activists at the Babri Mosque, as part of a campaign to get the government to demolish it and replace it with a Hindu temple. The activists riot, and destroy it.
2002: The Gujarat riots. The RSS played a key role in the violence, organizing communal reprisals against Muslims for a terrorist attack against Hindu pilgrims[1] returning from a trip to the aforementioned demolished mosque.
There are several other of these, along with smaller things that still make you raise an eyebrow (e.g. claiming the infamous gang rape in 2012 happens only in cities and because of malign foreign influences).
Overall, the RSS is a little bit darker than a Hindu-flavored version of the Red Cross.
[1] http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2002/04/29/india-gujarat-official...