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Mohan Bhagwat wants women inside the house; RSS chief misquoted, says Ram Madhav

A day after he courted controversy by saying that 'rapes took place in India and not Bharat', Sangh supremo Mohan Bhagwat on Sunday stirred up yet another controversy at the start of a one-day congregation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at Indore when he said women should restrict themselves to the house.

At the congregation being attended by 1.5lakh RSS workers from Malwa region's fifteen districts, including Indore and Ujjain, Bhagwat said, a husband and a wife are bound by a social contract where the wife must take care of the household chores while the husband earns for the house and protect his wife.

"There is a theory of social contract in the universe. A husband and a wife are bound by a contract which says - you (woman) look after the household chores and satisfy me, I (man) will take care of your needs and will protect you. Till she delivers her duties without fail, he keeps her on the contract and if she fails to honour the contract, he disowns her. And if it is the husband who is not honouring the contract, she can also abandon him. One can go for a new contract then," he was quoted on channel CNN-IBN.

Later in the day, RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav said, Bhagwat had been misquoted and that he was referring to western marriage system being a contractual system. "The RSS chief has been misrepresented. What he said was Indian marriages were sacred while the western system of marriage is marked by contractual obligations," said Madhav.

Earlier, on Friday, while addressing a gathering of RSS workers in Silchar (Assam), Bhagwat said rapes happened in cities and not in the rural areas. "Such crimes (rapes) hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occur in India," Bhagwat had said indicating that "westernisation" in Indian cities was the reason behind increasing cases of rapes.