Barry O’Farrell, the former NSW premier who resigned over a bottle of Grange, is enjoying that most plum of post-political postings as high commissioner to India. He’s also been chumming it up with one of the country’s most notorious far-right Hindu nationalist organisations.
This week, O’Farrell met with Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a sprawling far-right Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organisation with a membership in the millions. And he was full of praise for the RSS’s community relief measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is the RSS?
In recent decades, the RSS has gone from occupying the loony fringe to becoming a dominant force in contemporary Indian politics. It pitches itself as a seemingly innocent social group where members go to pray, do exercise and dress in absurd khaki shorts.
But there’s more to it than that. Founded nearly a century ago, the RSS’ goal is to turn India into a Hindu nation. And that’s led to plenty of tension in a country which is officially secular and contains a large population of religious minorities.
Early RSS leaders were open admirers of European fascism. In the 1940s the group was briefly banned in India after one of its members Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi (the organisation insists he had left).
Since then, the RSS has had its fingerprints on some of India’s most horrific moments of violence. In 1992, the RSS helped lead the demolition of a controversial mosque which led to pogroms that killed thousands. It was involved in similar anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2001, and in Delhi at the start of this year.
And in 1999, Australian missionary Graham Staines was burned alive along with his sons by a mob led by a man affiliated with the organisation.
So why was O’Farrell doing meeting with the RSS? A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson told Crikey the high commissioner “meets with a wide variety of social and political groupings as part of his role”.
“Recently, Australia’s high commissioner to India has met representatives from a range of religious groups, including Muslim and Sikh leaders, to discuss the role they have played in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the spokesperson said.
Barry’s Modi connection
O’Farrell’s meeting with Bhagwat is a sign of how the RSS has become a part of the Indian mainstream. Its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party, holds a big majority. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who cut his teeth in the RSS, has a lifelong affiliation with the organisation.
O’Farrell, meanwhile, has been close to Modi for a while. They first crossed paths when O’Farrell visited Gujarat, where Modi was chief minister, in 2013 and promptly announced a sister-state agreement. At the time, Modi was still banned from entering the United States because of his government’s involvement with the 2001 pogroms in Gujarat.
Before Modi was elected prime minister, O’Farrell praised his “pro-business philosophy”. He’s recently gone further, describing India’s prime minister as “almost superhuman”. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also courted Modi, if his social media posts are anything to go by.
Meanwhile, Modi has run India according to the ideological whims of the RSS. The country has become increasingly authoritarian, and anti-Muslim violence has surged.
Australia and India often make a big show of shared values — commitment to democracy, pluralism and the like. But in Modi’s India, that is starting to change.
Should Australia’s high commissioner be meeting with the RSS? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column.
Modi failed with the economy and now uses Hindu nationalism to keep his job. Australia should distance itself from Modi and India’s rising militancy toward Muslim peoples.
Might be useful with the chinese though
Good point. Rather like those countries in the 1930s that cleverly encouraged the new German government as a counterweight to the USSR. How did that end?
That’s a very self serving reply Macgregor. I fear for many of my friends in India who aren’t supporters of this thug government (charming as its leader’s face may appear to the uninformed). Any Indian government would be and has been protective against Chinese expansionism.
As an Aussie Muslim with many Indian friends and having visited the subcontinent many times I’m seriously shocked to see O’Farrell cosying up to these out-and-out fascists of the RSS. As it happens I was one of a group of foreign Muslims touring mosques in India when the pogroms associated with the RSS claim over the Babri Mosque broke out. We were stuck in one mosque in U.P. state under 24 hour curfew for nearly two weeks. Local Muslims slipped out to the mosque under curfew to make sure we had food and other necessities, despite their own shops being shut down. It’s especially shocking to see our nation’s representative in Delhi so close to the fascists there when we have just seen government Senators behaving towards Australians of Chinese heritage in the way that RSS fascists behave towards Indian Muslims, Christians, Dalits and other members of India’s low caste and non-Hindu communities. What on earth does O’Farrell think he is doing? Is this Australia’s supposed dedication to freedom and democracy? And at the same time we are pretending to object to China’s oppression of its minorities?
What terrifies me is that the last time Modi came to Australia he was given a rock star welcome, by the Hindu diaspora.
In effect we have 2,100,000 people who live here, most are citizens and are aligned with fascism. I suspect that they also have imported some of the more dodgy Indian business practices as well.
An Australian Sikh friend of mine said that it is getting very bad in the Punjab, with the Adani’s (Modi’s friends) attempting to force the farmers to sell all their produce to them in order for them to control the food supply chain in most of India.
O’Farrell should wash his hands often after shaking Modi’s because there is blood on Modi’s.
I’m sure BJP- RSS or Modi support isn’t universal among Indian Hindus in Australia. Of almost 700,000 Indian here over 125,000 are Sikhs and about 450,000 Hindus. There are also many Muslims and Christians here who were born in India. Even among Hindus who welcomed Modi I doubt that the majority had an ideological motive. Part of the danger of the BJP is that it pretends to be an ordinary political party.
Where did you get you numbers for the Indian population in Australia from?
The 2.1 million number I got was from the census data.
Yes, the Sikh’s number 125,000, however, I do not think that they were the population hiring a train to transport themselves from Melbourne to Sydney and on to Canberra to welcome Modi as a rock star.
My comments regarding Indian business practices being worryingly imported were in regard to one of the security firms implicated in the Hotel Quarantine mess in Victoria, as well as Australian registered IT firms owned indirectly by Indian family companies, being used as a migration business/ vehicle. Very profitable and less likely to get caught out then 7/11 or Caltex franchises.
I used Wikipedia for my original comment but your query reminded me that this is not always a good reference so I went to the relevant ABS Census publication for the 2016 Census data, 2071.0 table 5 Indian origin: 619,164. That was 2016 so around 700,000 should be about right for 2020.
As an aside, it’s interesting that as part of their nationalist push the BJP/RSS want to enforce the use of Hindi. Hindi is a North Indian, Indo/Aryan language unrelated to the languages spoken in the south. Precisely in southern India where relations between Hindus and non Hindus are much better than in the north, the enforcement of a widely resented northern Indian language may well begin the undoing of the BJP.
The BJP tried that in its first spell in government, 1977- 80 after the State of Emergency. The dissent caused saw them thrown out at the first opportunity.
They tried again in 1988 with even less success.
They are nothing if not determined.
Ayodhya is merely a foretaste.
I suspect O’Farrell is just ignorant and sucked in by the hooha Modi and the RSS ramp up (a bit like Trump and his rallies and tweets). Thanks Rais for your well expressed comment. I fear for my many friends in India who are either anti-Modi or are Muslim (or Christian). It’s tragic seeing India and Hinduism itself being so degraded.
You may be right Julie, possibly O’Farrell hasn’t informed himself about the RSS. If so it’s a shocking failure, firstly on DFAT’s part if they haven’t briefed him properly and then on his own part if he has chosen to remain uninformed when the information he needs to represent us in India is so widely available that you and I know it. RSS kills Muslims and Christians and Dalits. Many Australians belong to one of these groups and our taxation is paying his generous salary. Ambassadors should be well paid but that’s because only the best, most dedicated candidates should be chosen.
This rather looks like some plan, as the german ambassador, lindner, and the US consul general from mumbai, too visited the rss headquarters.
The high commisioner surely had the blessings of the higher ups in australian govt before embarking on his rss jaunt?
He represents the Australian government in Delhi so yes, at least DFAT must be OK with it. Not a good thought.
This presumes that there are people with a better understanding of this in DFAT in Australia. That is far from certain.
Any word on how Modi’s promised 100M toilets throughout the villages (where dwell the majority of the impoverished) of India is coming along?
Or again trying to make the official language of government Hindi rather the more widely spoken English?
Saying entire RSS is bad because of one man who had in fact quit, is simplistic stereotyping and is the same as racism. All the courts have said that Modi has nothing to do with the Gujarat violence. By saying that you don’t believe the courts is the same as Donald Trump disapproving the election results. Modi has given special scholarships to minorities and in fact Muslim Gujaratis are richer and represented better than in many other states. By the way, RSS has its own muslim and christian wing and is against forced conversions and they respect all religions. Hindu religion is very liberal and doesn’t consider other gods and religions as sinisters unlike other religions who say the non-believers follow the devil or whatever.
Modi is a Hindutva fanatic, and believes that transplant surgery existed in India thousands of years ago, citing Ganesha – the elephant-headed Hindu deity – as an example of head transplantation.