That the threw me out of college like many students of my time.

Eventually i ended up in St Xavier’s

college under the benign guidance of late Professor Oza, a well known Marxist economist, for this same
crime a fellow volunteer, my friend Girish Bodas, a student of IIT Mumbai, was put behind MISA on the
grounds of complaint field by our college authorities. Incidentally the whole Bodas family is a devoted
sangh family. While two brothers in jail, their mother and father worked silently for their respected
sangh related organisations for women and teachers. Their mode of communication in those days was
leaving behind small notes of paper about their likely time of returning home. Such is dedications of
members of RSS and its associate organisations. It is a telling commentary on the bias of so called
scholars and of modern Indian history chroniclers like Ramchandra Guha that they simply gloss over
these facts of history or write disparagingly about RSS contribution rather than highlights the exemplary
way they bore the brunt of atrocities in and outside jail even as their careers, family lives and businesses
were damaged or ruined.

Even RSS sympathisers and activists who were not active any more were picked up on the basis of crime
investigation department (CID) reports made years, an illustrative case is raid police made to search for
my elder brother who had long since moved surat but his name appeared due to his activities a decade
before. They didn’t search for my belongings thought i was very active at that time. We used to hear of
such humorous mix ups in many places.

We in Mumbai were little lucky and police generally behaved decently with the agitators, realising that
we were disciplined and law building. I suspect that police probably also understood the nature of the
struggle and was sympathetic my cases. Only if burdened with political pressure did they behave
boorishly with volunteers. But we listened and read about the incredible horror stories of torture of RSS
activists in police stations and jails, especially in states ruled by