The common Muslim is concerned about his security. Will the RSS chief impress upon the government to release those Muslims who have been put into jail for North East Delhi riots on flimsy grounds? Will he ask the government to take action against the erring police officers? Will he tell the government to pay substantial compensation to the family of the victim of lynching, RSS has been reiterating that all Indians have the same DNA. It is their way to call everybody a Hindu. People want to know if they believe that the DNA of the Aryans and the Dravidians is the same,first step of dialogue was taken by principal Maulana Arshad Madani of Darul uloom a Muslim centre in 2019 when he met Mr Bhagwat. It was a great risk because some sections of the community were not in favour of it. For how long you would fight; the global scenario is such that you have to sit across the table and talk.”

Conversion has been and will remain an issue. People have to get over it. If our DNA is the same, how does it matter? Every year hundreds of people convert to Islam and several Muslims become Hindus. Many of them because of love. Will Mr Bhagwat make the controversial temple priest understand that it is not ‘love jihad’ Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s words and deeds do not always match, which is why Mohan Bhagwat’s first visit to a mosque and a madrasa has generated more cynicism than hope RSS, undeniably, is yet to utter a word to condemn or denounce the lynching of Muslims, wants to deny them space to offer Friday prayers and calls for the economic boycott of Muslims and genocide; RSS has also been silent on the brazen remission of life-sentences awarded to the accused in the Bilkis Bano gangrape case; which is why the visit generated much more cynicism than hope.

Indresh Kumar, the RSS ‘leader’ who heads the Rashtriya Muslim Manch and has been at the forefront of the Sangh’s ‘Muslim outreach’, however, dismissed speculation that the Sangh was poised to become more inclusive. Umer Ahmed Ilyasi, the chief Imam of the All India Imam Organisation, claimed that the RSS chief had visited the mosque and the madrasa at his invitation. The elated Imam, in his exuberance, called Bhagwat the ‘Rashtrapita’, raising eyebrows. The RSS chief’s meeting with five prominent Muslim intellectuals a month ago was also said to have been arranged at the initiative of the intellectuals themselves. The group of five included the former chief election commissioner S Y Qureshi, former Aligarh Muslim University vice chancellor Zameer Uddin Shah, editor and journalist Shahid Siddiqui, former Delhi Lt Governor Najeeb Jung and businessman Saeed Shervani.

But this recent outreach by rss chief have failed to inspire much confidence because BJP-ruled states have bent over backwards to harass Muslims. Anti-NRC protestors were jailed, houses of Muslim protestors were demolished, in Assam Muslims continue to be persecuted as foreigners and in Karnataka Muslim girl students have been barred from wearing the hijab; and of course Muslims continue to be discriminated in recruitment and the RSS has done little to stop the calls for economic boycott of Muslims. The hypocrisy of the RSS chief is also borne out by the fact that for the first time after Independence, the ruling party does not have a single Muslim MP in the Lok Sabha to represent 15 per cent of the country’s population. There is no Muslim minister either in the Union cabinet. RSS and its offshoots have made no bones about their conviction that Muslims must live as second-class citizens in a ‘Hindu Rashtra’.

Equality of Hindus and Muslims is not something that the RSS is known to have championed. There are other reasons to believe that Bhagwat’s visit to the mosque is much ado about nothing. Even as the RSS chief was visiting the mosque, the Attorney General of India was defending the ban on hijabs in schools and colleges of Karnataka in the Supreme Court. The Yogi government in Uttar Pradesh continued with its contentious ‘survey’ of madrasas, attended by less than four per cent of Muslim school-going children; and BJP leaders made snide remarks at a photograph of Rahul Gandhi walking hand-in-hand with a little girl in a burqa.

It is, therefore, difficult to take the RSS chief’s tokenism seriously. The gesture, however, may well have been prompted by the compulsion of the Sangh to hold out an olive branch to the Islamic countries in the Middle East and elsewhere. It is no secret that the VHP and the RSS have been expanding their footprint in these countries. But following the backlash at the profanities on TV uttered by BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma about the prophet, the gesture may have become necessary. RSS has also been at the receiving end of international criticism for exporting communal hatred, bigotry, racism and caste hierarchies. The RSS ‘outreach’ can be seen as a damage-control measure in this light. the ‘outreach’ could be part of the RSS and BJP’s design to sow confusion among the Muslims and divide Muslim votes. The consolidation of Muslim votes in favour of the Opposition is not quite what they look forward to.