As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh enters the 100th year of its formation, why is it imperative to listen attentively to the words, spoken and unspoken, of Mohan Madhukar Rao Bhagwat, the Sarsangchalak or supreme leader of the Sangh?
The RSS is today the world’s largest civic organisation of the far-right, with an estimated 50,000 branches. A volunteer Hindu nationalist paramilitary association, it was founded on the notion of Hindu supremacy and opposition to the idea of equal citizenship to Muslims and Christians in India. It has spawned myriad formations inspired by the ideology of the RSS, often described as the Sangh Parivar, including the more openly combative Bajrang Dal and Vishva Hindu Prashad. The political arm of the Sangh is the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party.
It was on Dussehra in 1925, 99 years ago, when Keshav Baliram Hegdewar, a doctor in Nagpur, met four senior leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha. Together, they resolved to constitute a new volunteer paramilitary Hindu organisation, the RSS. Their dream was to unite the Hindus of British India and stir in them valour and civic character based on India’s glorious ancient traditions, unsullied by Muslim and Christian influences.
This meeting was destined to have reverberations even a century later. It is commemorated every year by a public address by the Sarsangchalak or leading patriarch of the RSS on Vijayadashami at Nagpur.
The RSS is the ideological lodestar of the BJP. Although unelected, it is the mentor and guide of the ruling government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, since he was an adolescent, was a whole-time worker of the RSS, and for decades a pracharak or active full-time missionary, responsible for spreading the Sangh’s doctrine, until he joined whole-time politics.
Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the Sangh, has no official position, yet since 2016 he has been given highest Z-plus security by the central government, making him one of the most protected and guarded Indian citizens. He holds no official position, yet his lecture was broadcast live by a majority of television channels.
When Bhagwat rose for his 2024 Vijayadashami address, he did so against the backdrop of a humbled BJP. After 10 years of the hubris of seemingly unassailable power, voters in the 2024 national elections had reduced the party to a minority. Modi’s popularity graph was ebbing. The political opposition to the BJP was resurgent. There were signs of popular unrest in many parts of the country, against unemployment, inflation and farmer distress. Hate violence against Muslims was rising further, but with less visible popular resonance.
Many observers, therefore, listened attentively to his address, to read between the lines of his speech if the RSS and therefore the BJP government would in any significant way moderate their ideological hardline. Would they steer the country away from its triumphal march to a Hindu nation back to the pathways of secular democracy mandated by the constitution? Bhagwat’s tone was measured, and he even made an allusion to the Constitution. But his message was unmistakable. The Hindutva creed of the RSS was undiluted from the time of its founding a century earlier.
One central message of the address of the RSS patriarch was that Hindus are weak and disunited, and therefore vulnerable to the onslaughts of various “enemies”. He quoted a proverb, that “Even the gods punish the weak. It is not a horse or elephant, and never the tiger, that is sacrificed. It is always the goat”. Bhagwat spoke of “atrocities” against the Hindu minority of Bangladesh, which he claimed was the outcome of Hindus there “being unorganised and weak” and for this reason they were “inviting atrocities by the wicked”. This, he said, is a lesson that the Hindu community across the world should learn.
He echoed the central conviction of successive leaders of the RSS, beginning with the founder, that Hindus are feeble, timid and defenceless. Hedgewar was convinced that the reason that the vast and ancient country of India was colonised by a small number of British officials and soldiers was because Hindus were disunited, were deficient in valour (pararkram) and in civic character.
Scholar Christophe Jaffrelot points to the ideology of the RSS, the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha, that Muslims, Christians (and the British) were “foreign bodies” implanted in the Hindu nation, and they prevailed because of the disunity and weakness of the Hindus. To overcome the assaults of these “threatening others”, the Hindus needed to emulate what gave them strength and power over Hindus. This was their militant organisation focussed on unity and nationalism.
This is why the RSS from the start assumed a paramilitary character. Its uniform was patterned after the colonial police – black cap, khaki shirt and khaki shorts. The khaki shirt gave way to a white shirt in 1939, and the khaki shorts were replaced only as late as in 2016 to long brown trousers. The volunteer Hindu youth were trained in paramilitary combat with lathis (bamboo sticks), swords, javelins and daggers. A hundred years later, gatherings of shakhas or branches of the RSS each morning practice these paramilitary drills.
Bhagwat, in his 2024 Vijayadashami address, identified the enemies of the Hindu nation to fight against whom the Hindu must become strong, organised and militarised. He never mentions explicitly the Muslim in his address, but they are central to his oration. He speaks of “an identity-based group” which in a society where people live together “is motivated to separate on the basis of its actual or artificially created specialty [sic], demand, need or a problem. A feeling of victimhood,” he claimed “is created in them. By fanning discontent, that element is pulled apart from the rest of the society, and made aggressive against the system. Direct conflicts are created by finding fault lines in the society. An atmosphere of anarchy and fear is created by intensifying distrust and hatred towards the system, laws, governance, administration etc.”.
The other “enemies” that he specifically invokes are the “Deep State, Wokeism and the Cultural Marxist”. His reference to the deep state mystifies me, because the RSS and BJP are embedded in this deep state of a government of the BJP. But the hostility to the Left is vintage RSS.
In Bhagwat’s words, “they are the declared enemies of all cultural traditions. Complete destruction of values, traditions and whatever is considered virtuous and auspicious is a part of the modus operandi of this group. The first step of this modus operandi is to bring the mind-shaping systems and institutions of the society under one’s influence – for example, the education system and educational institutions, media, intellectual discourse, etc, and to destroy the thoughts, values and belief of the society through them”. Then by stoking discontent among Muslims, it “makes it easy to establish one’s dominance over the country”.
His reference to “wokeism” is instructive, because this is a new term of abuse against progressive and liberal elements increasingly deployed by the far-right around the world. The word “woke” is an African-American usage derived from “awake”. Since the 2010s, it has been used for awareness of social inequalities like racism, sexism and homophobia. But by 2019, it began to be used as a pejorative by the far-right in the Global North to target Left and progressive movements. That Bhagwat chose to adopt this term in the RSS lexicon reflects a self-conscious linkage of the RSS and BJP with far-right political formations around the world.
The solutions proposed by Bhagwat to the alleged threat to the Hindu nation by these multiple enemies was to both militarise and unify often antagonistic sections of the Hindus against the Muslims. This, again, is vintage RSS strategy. When MS Golwalkar, the leader of the RSS from 1940, wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru asking for the ban on the RSS after MK Gandhi’s assassination to be withdrawn, Nehru replied that the government had proof that RSS activities were “anti-national” because they were “communalist”. He wrote to chief ministers in December 1947 that “we have a great deal of evidence to show that RSS is an organisation which is in the nature of a private army and which is definitely proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines, even following the techniques of the organisation”.
This calls to mind, for instance, the earliest days of the formation of the RSS, when in 1927, Hegdewar led a Ganesh procession to change its route and instead pass by a mosque. Here they halted and played loud music and drums until rioting broke out. The army was ultimately called in to quell the violence after three days. The RSS accounts of the incident were of “Muslim aggressiveness” and the “Hindu self-defence”, very different from what actually had transpired.
Little has changed a century later. Hindu religious processions are widely diverted to stop before mosques. Now, frenzied crowds resort to Hindutva pop songs that abuse Muslims and threaten mass killings to catchy music. If violence breaks out, Muslims are invariably blamed for these, often with the arrests of several Muslims and the official bulldozing of their homes.
Hindus are sought to be unified, partly by harking back to a reconstructed history of a glorious unblemished past. The RSS did not join the struggle for freedom against the British colonialists. Golwarkar declared instead that the RSS was devoted to achieving freedom through “defending religion and culture”.
The saffron flag of Shivaji, the Bhagwa Dhwaj, became the emblem of the RSS. For 52 years, the RSS refused to raise the Indian tricolour at its headquarters. The RSS and its affiliate organisations participated extensively in Hindu rituals and festivals, not for religious observance as much as to bind them into a religious communion bound by a recreated history of a magnificent ancient past that was savaged by Muslim invaders. Bhagwat in his 2024 speech again spoke glowingly of heroes of the Hindu nation, much in line with the practice of RSS leaders from Hegdewar onward.
The RSS and BJP have always sought the unity of Hindus to advance the Hindu nation. However, any pathway to Hindu unity must traverse the fraught ground of caste discrimination. The solution that the RSS, from Hegdewar to Bhagwat, proposes is not the annihilation of caste that BR Ambedkar called for. It is of the charity of the privileged castes.
“I was in a meeting where our Valmiki [Dalit] brothers were present,” Bhagwat said. “They said our children do not have schools. People from the Rajput community were there. They got up and said your colony is adjacent to ours and we have a school. We will take 20% students from your colony and teach them without any fees. Just as the strong members of a family make more provisions for the weaker members, sometimes even at the cost of their own loss, similarly such needs should be considered with the feeling of belongingness to each other.”
Bhagwat in his address speaks of fidelity to the Constitution. This would seem, on the face of it, a welcome departure from the determined, even vitriolic, rejection of the Constitution by the RSS in the many decades after Independence.
The RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, wrote at the time the Constituent Assembly had finalised the Constitution that in it “there is no mention of that unique constitutional development in ancient Bharat… To this day [Manu’s] laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity. But to our constitutional pundits that means nothing.” In 1966, Golwalkar, in his book Bunch of Thoughts declared, “Our Constitution too is just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various Constitutions of Western countries. It has absolutely nothing, which can be called our own”.
Bhagwat in 2024 is much more circumspect. He calls for everyone “to discharge the duties given by the constitution and the law properly… There are traffic rules; different types of taxes to be paid on time; and there is also the discipline of clean and transparent financial transactions, personal or public. All such rules should be fully and wisely followed. Rules and regulations should be followed both in letter and spirit. … The discipline of mutual conduct passed on by the family; piety, cordiality and decency in mutual behaviour; devotion towards motherland and affinity towards the society in social behaviours, along with flawless observance of law and constitution, all these together form the personal and national character”.
But the Constitution is very far from a mandate to follow traffic rules, pay taxes scrupulously, maintain piety, family cordiality and devotion to the motherland. Bhagwat misses entirely the essence of the Constitution, its pledges and morality: justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, secularism, socialism and democracy, the freedoms of conscience and of religious faith, and the equal citizenship rights of religious, caste and gender minorities.
The past decade when the BJP – and behind it the RSS – was in power in India, has seen a terrifying rise in hate violence, especially targeting Muslims and Christians and also Dalits. It has seen the surge of politics centered around stoking emotions of hate, fear, resentment, anger; a supremacist, masculinist, militarist nasty hyper-nationalism, an official corrosion, erosion and dismantling of all democratic institutions and processes; anti-intellectualism, anti-science, anti -“woke”, anti-left politics; the manufacture and propagation of fake news and hate propaganda; the growing crassness of public discourse; the burgeoning of oligarchic crony capitalism; and a spectacular absence of public compassion.
Nothing at all that the RSS patriarch relayed to his faithful followers in paramilitary uniforms, to RSS cadres and governments and to the people of India, suggests that the RSS and BJP will return to the constitutional imagination of a country that is kind, equal and just.
Harsh Mander, justice and peace worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to counter hate violence with love and solidarity. He teaches at FAU University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Heidelberg University, Germany; Vrije University, Amsterdam; and IIM, Ahmedabad.