Was Guru Golwalkar a Nazi?
But to give an idea of just how routinely these two quotations are employed to build the Hindutva movement's image, let us first mention their presentation in a BBC documentary on the Bharatiya Janata Party ("Indian People's Party"), broadcast on 17 June 1993.
Typically, the speaker announcing the documentary, who spent no more than two sentences on its contents, already said that it would "reveal the connections of the organization behind the BJP with Nazi Germany", this organization being the RSS. In the documentary, an actor dressed and made up to look like Golwalkar in his younger days, read out the two paragraphs. However, no actual connection between the RSS and Nazi Germany was revealed. In fact, the entire 45 minutes did not contain any other information about or quotations from the RSS's ideological classics: not from Golwalkar's later publications, nor from any other Hindutva ideologue. Till today, and even in academic publications, it is very common to see the anti-BJP rhetoric built entirely on these few sentences in Golwalkar's pamphlet of more than sixty years ago.
When this "information" trickles down to journalistic publications, we get something like this statement from the leading Flemish daily De Standaard (5-3-1998): "In the 1930s, one of the RSS leaders, Gowalkar (sic), made a plea for 'racial purity' and called Hitler's campaign against the Jews 'a source of inspiration'."
Note that Golwalkar's text mentions "racial purity" as Germany's concern but does not "make a plea" for it, and that he never described Hitler as "a source of inspiration". The latter are Christophe Jaffrelot's words of interpretation, for this passage is obviously based on Christophe Jaffrelot: The Hindu Nationalist Movement (Viking, Delhi 1996, now by far the most-consulted source among Western India watchers), p.54: "Here Golwalkar claims inspiration from Hitler's ideology: 'To keep up the purity of the race..'".
That alleged Golwalkar quotations turn out to be excerpted from the invective of his critics, is symptomatic of Hindutva-watching in general: first-hand
information is spurned in favour of hostile second-hand claims made by unscrupled commentators.
In most journalistic and academic publications on Hindutva, the number of direct quotations is tiny in comparison with quotations from secondary, hostile sources.