Rarely does an organization get a chance to enjoy the pride of reaching its peak in its centenary year. India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological-organizational parent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has achieved that feat.
In its 100th year, the RSS’ influence is not only widespread but also so well entrenched is its network across India that future governments will find it enormously challenging to shake off its grip over every aspect of Indian politics and life.
The RSS was founded during British colonial rule on September 25, 1925, to raise a disciplined and dedicated volunteer force for “Hindu revival” and to establish a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation). Although it was formed during British colonial rule, it did not participate in India’s anti-colonial freedom struggle.
It claims to be a socio-cultural organization and has sought to project itself as uninvolved in India’s politics. Yet, its role in the political arena is enormous; it now has a large presence across India and wields overwhelming influence on almost all spheres of governance at the federal level, and also in over a third of Indian states where BJP-led alliances are in power.
From ministries like education, culture, information, and science and technology to autonomous institutes like public universities, archeological and historical research institutes, and statutory bodies like the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes and National Commission for Minorities, RSS functionaries are at the helm of affairs in all of contemporary India’s institutions.
“The nature of democratic contest in India has completely changed and the reason is that one organization called RSS – a fundamentalist, fascist organization – has basically captured pretty much all of India’s institutions,” India’s key opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said in 2023.
It is a strictly male-only organization but has a separate women’s wing, Rashtra Sevika Samiti, while its affiliates like the BJP, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and Sewa Bharti have women organizers.
Even in states ruled by parties opposed to the BJP, the RSS has made deep inroads through its work among different sections of society, working mostly through a network of organizations registered as nonprofits. This overwhelming control has been possible because, in these hundred years, the RSS has transformed into a massive banyan tree that stands on a hundred of its trunks.
While Hindu “revival” is the mainstay of all organizations affiliated to and inspired by the RSS, it is active among scientists, historians, archeologists, geologists, advocates, retired judges, civil servants, retired armed force personnel, farmers, formal and informal workers, tribal people, lower and upper Hindu castes, teachers, students, mothers, teenage and young adult women, the elderly, the differently abled, and expatriates.
It has a wing for every section of life and society – politics, religion, health, sports, science, formal and informal education, foreign policy, trade union, vocational training, nation-building, national security, prenatal care, civil service coaching, cow-centric village economy. It is now set to start residential schools to prepare children for a career in the army.
In its early years, the RSS is also said to have been influenced by the ideas of Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In 1931, B.S. Moonje, one of India’s early Hindu nationalist leaders during the colonial period and a mentor of RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar, was deeply impressed by fascism after visiting a few military establishments in Italy and meeting.
To what extent Moonje influenced Hedgewar and the RSS functioning remains debatable. Nevertheless, Hedgewar’s successor, M.S. Golwalkar, who held the post between 1940 and 1973, did not hide his admiration for Germany’s Nazis on the building of national identity.
Teachings of all RSS-linked organizations emphasize duties over rights. This is reflected in Modi’s designating India’s current times as “Kartavya Kaal” or the age of duty.
RSS-linked organizations work in coordination. Full-time RSS members, called pracharak or campaigners, are routinely transferred from one organization to another. Modi himself was an RSS full-timer before he was transferred to the BJP, the political wing.
This massive RSS network of a range of apparently apolitical organizations gives the BJP an advantage over its political rivals in at least two ways — building public opinion on difficult issues with a long-term approach and controlling the government apparatus with an ideologically committed workforce.
While many RSS volunteers are leading various governments as BJP lawmakers, the organization itself does not interfere with routine affairs of governance. Through these lawmakers and the affiliated organizations, it shapes the formation and implementation of government policies in the spheres of religion, laws, education, culture, and information. The most common method is various government departments’ collaborations with RSS-linked nonprofits for the conceptualization and implementation of programs.
What unites the RSS’ diverse programs – from sewing training institutes to handicrafts cooperatives to yoga and archery clubs – is the unmissable presence of their ideology. At the core of their indoctrination program in all organizations lies developing a love for the saffron flag, which they describe as “the civilizational flag of Bharat,” and respect for traditional Hindu religious values, rituals, practices, and Hindu nationalist icons who fought against Mughals. In essence, through their work, they preach the idea of a Hindu-oriented India.
Hindus form four-fifths of India’s population but are known for being a greatly diverse society in rituals and practices – linguistic, cultural, dietary, and caste-wise.
“The BJP is not like other parties a power seeker, but is part of an ideological movement represented by the RSS whose ideology itself is inalienable from those of cultural nationalists,” senior RSS intellectual Rakesh Sinha wrote a quarter of a century ago.
Sinha named as “cultural nationalists” some of India’s early nationalists who, during the 1880s and 1890s, considered the period of Muslim rulers, especially the Mughal period, as a colonial rule. In reality, many of those Sinha named later changed their views and considered only British rule as India’s colonized period.
From the first decade of the 20th century, India’s leading nationalists considered Muslims to be as integral to India as the Hindus, and Mughal rule to be as much Indian as that of any Hindu ruler.
That the RSS and the BJP disagree with the top leaders of India’s freedom struggle is evident from Modi’s repeated reference to India’s “1,000 years of slavery,” indicating the entry of Muslims into India as the beginning of its subjugation.
While the RSS has been active since 1925 in creating new organizations and expanding its areas of operations, both geographically and in social sections, it remained in the margins for decades, largely because of Hindu nationalists’ role in the assassination of India’s founding father, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
It began rising to prominence in India’s socio-political scene mainly from the early 1990s with the movement seeking the destruction of the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, claiming it was built on the site of a temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Ram at his birthplace.
Through the work of its organizations, the RSS has spread the idea that India is the land of Hindu culture and it should be governed in the Hindu way. A look at the mottos of some of the organizations belonging to the RSS family would make it clearer.
The motto of Vidya Bharati, the school education wing, for example, is “to develop a national system of education which would help build a younger generation which is committed to Hindutva and infused with patriotic fervor; physically, vitally, mentally, and spiritually fully developed.”
Officials belonging to the Vidya Bharati school network are now playing key roles in rewriting India’s school textbooks and implementing the controversial National Education Policy (2020). The RSS history-rewriting wing, Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY), aims to “reconstruct the authentic and truthful history of India according to the Indian chronology.”
Indian chronology means relying on ancient epics and mythologies as authentic sources of history, an approach that many of India’s stalwart historians have criticized for decades. The RSS, though, is fond of this approach as the interpretation of Indian mythologies allows them to portray ancient Vedic Hinduism as the pinnacle of world civilization. ABISY members are now at the helm of affairs at the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), India’s top public institute for the promotion of historical research.
As for the RSS tribal wing, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA), its main objective “is to eliminate the chasm between the Hindu community and their Vanvasi [forest dwellers] brethren with affection and good faith.” However, many tribal rights activists have accused the VKA and the VHP of converting tribals to Hinduism.
Vijnana Bharati, the science wing, describes itself as “a vibrant movement for the development of Swadeshi (national) Sciences.” It focuses on championing “the cause of Bharatiya Heritage with a harmonious synthesis of physical and spiritual sciences” and “interlinking traditional and modern sciences on the one hand, and natural and spiritual sciences on the other hand.” This organization now collaborates with India’s top science and research institutes, including the Indian Institutes of Technology, and the federal government on its mission “to spread the awareness of the unique contributions of ancient Bharat in the development of modern science.”
Samvardhini Nyas, one of its women’s organizations, teaches pregnant women how to imbibe cultural values and patriotism in the baby while still in the womb. RSS-run schools teach students that the whole of Asia was once under Hindu influence. Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini “build awareness” against what they call “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory claiming that Muslim men entrap Hindu women as part of their jihad or religious war.
With the RSS grip strengthened in crucial federal ministries and appointments in autonomous and statutory bodies and educational institutions over the past 10 years of Modi rule, many observers believe the Hindu nationalist influence in all spheres of administration and governance will outlive the Modi government or BJP rule.
In short, whoever forms a non-BJP government in India in whichever year will have a great number of RSS functionaries in every sphere of administration to deal with.