Gopal Mukund Huddar
Gopal Mukund Huddar, also known as Balaji Huddar, was an Indian anti-colonial activist and soldier. A founding member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindutva paramilitary organisation, Huddar served as its first sarkaryavah (transl. General Secretary). Upon travelling to London to study journalism, exposure to left-wing and anti-fascist circles led him to volunteer for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Due to his shift towards communism and his calls for the RSS to engage in the Indian independence movement, the leadership of the organisation, particularly its sarsanghchalak (transl. Chief) K. B. Hedgewar, increasingly estranged themselves from him.
Quotes
[edit]1938
[edit]- This great anti-Fascist body of men have assured me that they will fight side by side with the Indian peoples.
- Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, The Man Behind the Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2024), p. 68.
- The honour you have done me is really the honour to the cause of democracy and freedom which Spanish workers and peasants are defending with their lives. [...] The fight for democracy is in India just as it is in Spain. The very same British Imperialism which helps Franco and Mussolini in their attempt to destroy Spain is holding us down. We have to fight against it. We have to build the unity of the workers, peasants and the middle classes just as the Spanish people have done.
- Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, The Man Behind the Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2024), pp. 68–69.
1979
[edit]- I brought it to his [Hedgewar's] notice that the RSS remained a static organisation and that it did not develop into a dynamic movement, while we know that it was the dynamism of a movement alone that made an organisation powerful—otherwise it degenerated into a samsthan [...] The RSS had to guard against this danger which helped the growth of complacency and self-righteousness. My words fell on deaf ears and all my efforts to woo the Sarsanghchalak came to a naught.
- The RSS and Netaji (7 October 1979), Illustrated Weekly of India. Huddar recounts a meeting that took place between him and K. B. Hedgewar in December 1938.
- One evening, he [Bose] called me to his place in Bombay [...] One Mr. Shah, with whom I was not acquainted, was with him. Netaji asked me if I would be his emissary to Dr. Hedgewar, with whom he would like to have a talk. He asked me to go to Nasik where Dr. Hedgewar was spending the summer with Babasaheb Ghatate [...] Mr. Shah was to accompany me [...] In Nasik, Babasaheb greeted me warmly and enquired about our mission. I told him that we had come to see Doctorsaheb. Mr. Shah waited outside and I was ushered into the room where Doctorsaheb was joking and laughing with some youngsters—all volunteers of the RSS [...] Doctorsaheb protested that he had been in Nasik as he was ill and was suffering from some unknown malady [...] I entreated him not to give up this chace of an interview with a great leader of the Congress and the nationalist force in India, but he would not pay heed to me. He protested all through that he was too ill to have a talk [...] As I left the room, the RSS volunteers entered and laughter broke out again.
- The RSS and Netaji (7 October 1979), Illustrated Weekly of India. Huddar recounts a meeting that took place between him and K. B. Hedgewar in July 1939, where he served as an emissary of Subhas Chandra Bose.
Quotes about Huddar
[edit]D
[edit]- Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
- G. P. Deshpande, The Missed Centenary of Balaji Huddar (23–29 August 2003), Economic and Political Weekly, p. 3520
H
[edit]- I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
- K. B. Hedgewar, Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, The Man Behind the Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2024), p. 65. Wrote in a letter to two of his associates in August 1929.
J
[edit]Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, The Man Behind the Machine (2024)
[edit]- by Dhirendra K. Jha: Simon & Schuster
- Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- p. 65.
- Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
- p. 66.
- By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.
- p. 68.
