Sixty years ago, during the second India–Pakistan war, the Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri invited MS Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to join an all-party meeting in Delhi. “In that meeting a certain gentleman said ‘Let us first define our war aims,’” Golwalkar recounted, while addressing Sangh workers in March 1970. The address is recorded alongside several of his other foreign-policy adventures in Shri Guruji: Pioneer of a New Era, a biography of Golwalkar published by a Sangh-affiliated organisation. “We must win the war at any cost,” Golwalkar recalled saying at the all-party meeting. “It is for those who commit aggression on others to define their aims. Our aim is clear as day light. It is victory, nothing short of total victory. It is to make the aggressor bite the dust. Talking of defining war aims would amount to hindering the war efforts.”
In his 33-year-long reign as the head of the RSS, Golwalkar led the organisation through the critical period leading up to Independence and then, through India’s three wars with Pakistan and one with China. Yet, his view was at odds with a well-established rule of war—that a country must have an overarching political objective that shapes its military objectives and efforts, before going into battle. A coherent, consistent war aim also helps to draw public support and international legitimacy for the state’s actions, maintains troop morale and strengthens the state’s negotiating position. Golwalkar, still lionised across more than eighty thousand local units of the RSS today, pushed for a foreign policy that was rooted in Hindu philosophy. His ideas on the formation of Pakistan, the status of Indian Muslims, and what the political leadership at the time should have done during the 1965 India–Pakistan war, are helpful to understand Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent policy towards Pakistan and the political atmosphere in the wake of this year’s Pahalgam militant attack. Modi, who spent his formative years in the RSS, paid tribute to Golwalkar in March this year by naming an upcoming eye hospital in Nagpur after him.
The Modi government launched Operation Sindoor after accusing the Pakistani state of involvement in the attack, in which militants killed over two dozen people. The Indian armed forces stated that their objective was to destroy militant camps, and not to harm the Pakistani military. In the aftermath of the operation, however, Modi framed it as “not merely a military action” but a “reflection of Indian values and emotions.” We now know that the Pakistan military targeted Indian military installations and also downed an uncertain number of aircraft. Many experts, including The Caravan’s consulting editor Sushant Singh, have argued that the political objective should have been to establish a deterrent against “Pakistan-backed terrorism.” There is widespread consensus that the government may have failed in achieving this, while simultaneously exposing our war threshold and changing India’s diplomatic posture regarding the Kashmir dispute. Meanwhile, more than two months since the Pahalgam attack, the government has failed to establish accountability for the security lapses leading up to it.