The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), ideological parent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is celebrating its hundredth anniversary. Calling it the world’s largest non-state, military-style organisation is not an exaggeration.
With more than 75,000 shakhas across the country, local leaders known as shakha pramukhs assemble men and boys at dawn in open grounds for drill, physical discipline and lessons that are framed as character building but function as ideological training.
Founded in October 1925 by Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the RSS is now led by its sixth sarsanghchalak, Mohan Bhagwat. The BJP is its political arm.
Usually reclusive and media shy, the RSS has broken its pattern in the past few years by coming out of the closet. Recently, Bhagwat hosted a two-day centenary conference in New Delhi. Diplomats, scholars, journalists and business leaders were invited. On the final day, the RSS chief answered questions collected the day before.
Significantly, his tone toward Muslims sounded conciliatory. He said Islam has been part of India for centuries.
“Those who think Islam will disappear from India are not guided by Hindu philosophy,” he said. “This conflict will end only when mutual trust is built. We must first accept that we are one.”
He also underlined that while the RSS played a pivotal role in building the Ram temple on the Babri site, Hindus should not hunt for a temple under every mosque. The implied assurance on the safety of other mosques drew cautious welcome. Both factions of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, led by Maulana Arshad Madani and Mahmood Madani, praised his remarks. Arshad Madani even met Bhagwat in Delhi.
Yet two days later came a reminder of the ground reality. In a plush housing complex in the outskirts of Delhi, an RSS pracharak told residents not to hire Muslim security guards, electricians, plumbers or vegetable vendors and urged them to source workers through the local shakha.
He claimed India got “real freedom” only in 2014, belittled Gandhi’s leadership, said a millennium of Muslim rule made Hindus “cowardly,” and alleged more Hindus than Muslims died in the pandemic. He then signed up volunteers.
This is the recurring doublespeak: the sarsanghchalak talks of unity, the shakha pramukh preaches exclusion. In practice, the latter sets the day-to-day tone.
Journalist Sanjay Jha, writing in The Wire, questions that when people hear BJP chief ministers’ toxic rhetoric against Muslims, what will they think of Bhagwat’s sermons on peace and harmony?
“Effects of character-building should be manifested through words and deeds. Bhagwat says the RSS seeks unity in society, not antagonism towards any religion or community, while BJP governments continue to deal with Muslims through threats, discrimination and coercive action. Is appreciation of this hypocrisy a new form of patriotism in Amrit Kaal?”
This goes to the heart of the contradiction. If character building is the claim, the test is conduct. When ministers and party leaders normalise hate speech or punitive policy signals, appeals to “social harmony” ring hollow. Jha’s question lands because it uses the RSS’ own vocabulary of morality and asks for evidence.
Jha pushes this further with concrete examples:
“Bhagwat should understand his words on character-building will carry weight only if the society sees evidence of nobility on the ground. If a fake Baba arrested for rape and murder is alleged to be close to the Sangh Parivar, doubts will emerge. If a corrupt leader hounded by central agencies finds refuge in the BJP’s embrace, its claims of honesty will dissipate in the air. If thugs and rioters are nurtured by the Sangh Parivar, lofty words on peace and harmony will invite contempt and ridicule. If traders and tricksters are presented as ‘sant samaj’, the society will be sceptical of RSS character.”
The analysis is straightforward. Repeated exceptions create a rule. If impunity is extended to the violent and political shelter is provided to the tainted, the moral brand devalues. The RSS cannot outsource the costs of these choices to the BJP because the party is presented as its disciplined cadre front.
The centenary has also revealed a quiet contest between the RSS chief and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Jha claims that Bhagwat, who had looked like a docile assistant during the inaugural ceremony of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, has clawed back his lost authority.
“Modi had to write articles, published in different languages, praising the RSS chief on his birthday. He hailed the RSS in his Independence Day speech this year and released a postal stamp and a coin on its 100th anniversary. The RSS must have been delighted to see the prime minister inventing its role in the freedom struggle, but even that did not prompt Bhagwat to reciprocate Modi’s gesture. Bhagwat avoided any spectacle on Modi’s 75th birthday.”
The point here is not ceremony but leverage. Jha’s reading suggests the RSS wanted visible deference from the most powerful BJP leader ever, and got it, while keeping its own distance. That distance preserves the hierarchy in which Nagpur remains the fountainhead and the party remains the instrument.
“It is truly ironic that a government blessed by those who lay emphasis on character-building is accused of vote-chori (vote theft) and manipulation of democratic processes. Empirical evidence, not hollow claims, will compel society to see merit in the ‘character-building’ boast.”
That frames the centenary as an accountability moment. If the RSS links its legacy to virtue, then the measure must be verifiable fairness, restraint and equality under law.
During his interactions with the media, BJP veteran L.K. Advani would often place his party at par with Europe’s respectable conservatives. He would mention Tories in the UK, Republicans in the US and Christian Democrats in Germany and compare the BJP with these right-wing parties, which provide an alternative to people. He would say, when the world can work with these right-wing parties and they do not invoke any fear, there is no cause that the BJP should create any apprehensions.
But the late legal scholar A.G. Noorani, in his book RSS: A Menace to India, argues that, unlike the Western right wing, the BJP’s autonomy is cosmetic and is subservient to RSS, whose ideology is quite well documented. The BJP’s most powerful functionary, the organising general secretary, comes from the RSS. So does the party headquarters chief.
I recall, while covering the BJP for more than a decade, there used to be a man in worn slippers at the Ashoka Road office, but greeted by ministers and kept them waiting outside his room. He was Ram Lal, an RSS pracharak serving as the BJP’s organisation head. The office manager, R.K. Sinha, another RSS hand, used to manage the party headquarters. Both of them controlled finances. The mechanism still works.
The purpose of this pipeline is control without show. It makes the party the executive limb of a larger project.
Noorani also documented the RSS’s record under the British. It did not join the freedom struggle, and it cooperated with the Raj. After independence, it built a vast network of schools, charities and clubs to spread its worldview. The organisation was banned in 1948 after Gandhi’s assassination by Nathuram Godse, again during the Emergency in 1975–77, and after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992.
The RSS works through daily shakhas that have grown from 8,500 in 1975 to more than 75,000 in 2025. With Narendra Modi, a former pracharak, as prime minister, the RSS’s reach now runs through politics, bureaucracy and culture.
Its political arm began as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951, merged into the Janata Party in 1977 and re-emerged as the BJP in 1980. What was once parallel has become intertwined.
Ideologue M. G. Vaidya once asked, “Who are India’s Muslims?” He answered that most were once Hindus who could “return home.” That logic underwrote ghar wapsi drives.
History has been another battleground. The RSS says left scholars saddled Hindus with self-loathing. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee formed a government in 1998, the RSS insisted that education not be ceded to coalition partners. Murli Manohar Joshi led the ministry and rewired curricula. In 2015, the Modi-government restructured the Indian Council of Historical Research to align outputs with Hindutva preferences.
On reporting trips during the 2014 Jammu and Kashmir elections, I saw Ekal Vidyalaya one-teacher schools in the Chenab hills, staffed by volunteers who took months off from corporate jobs and engineering posts to teach under the RSS banner. The scale is part of the strategy: seed institutions that shape minds long before politics does.
In conversation, former VHP leader Dr Pravin Togadia, a cancer specialist, told me he spends half the month treating patients and half serving the Sangh. When asked how healing people and spreading hate can coexist, he replied, “I remove cancer in both cases. Muslims, madrasas and Marxism are the cancers I fight.” The answer was free of euphemism. It matched the ground rhetoric of many shakhas.
In 2015, Bhagwat said Hindutva is the only philosophy that unites humanity and that India is, in essence, a Hindu Rashtra that should become one in fact. To weld a society fractured by caste, the RSS identified a common foe and built pantheons around caste-specific heroes who fought Muslim rulers: Suheldev for Rajbhars, Suraj Mal for Jats, Pratap Singha for the Ahoms, and Shivaji for the Marathas. There is a long list.
In 2000, RSS chief K. S. Sudarshan demanded a new Constitution that reflects “Indian traditions and aspirations,” replacing the “1935 British model.” The Ram temple and the end of Kashmir’s special status advanced that agenda. Rewriting the Constitution remains the unfinished task, paused because it alarms Dalits and other backward classes whose support the project needs.
Noorani claims that RSS has travelled a distance from Hindu Mahasabha’s Hindu Raj (rule), which could be a genuine aspiration to seek empowerment of the majority Hindu community in a system to RSS’ Hindu Rashtra (nation).
British archives called the RSS a “Hindu right-wing paramilitary.” Uttar Pradesh chief secretary Rajeshwar Dayal wrote that RSS head M. S. Golwalkar was once caught “with the smoking gun” before Gandhi’s assassination but released under pressure from a sympathetic chief minister.
Italian scholar Marzia Casolari has shown how early RSS figures borrowed from European fascism. B. S. Moonje, a Hindu Mahasabha leader close to Hedgewar, met Mussolini in 1931 and later set up the Bhonsla Military School. V. D. Savarkar admired Hitler’s nationalism. The British, for their part, appreciated the RSS’s decision to avoid Congress’ civil disobedience and to keep its cadres away from Quit India.
Today, the RSS family includes 36 affiliates across politics, agriculture, education, health, religion, business and veterans’ welfare. Trishakti works with women. The Rashtriya Muslim Manch is kept outside the core structure and projects outreach without influence.
RSS branches Overseas
Abroad, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh functions in over 30 countries and helps stage the optics at Modi’s overseas events, alongside the Overseas Friends of BJP run from Delhi.
Organizationally, below the sarsanghchalak sits the sarkaryavah, or general secretary, currently Dattatreya Hosabale, with six joint general secretaries handling media, outreach, training, service and more.
The Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal is the 48-member central executive. The Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha is the 1,400-member general assembly. Among affiliates are ABVP for students, Adhivakta Parishad for lawyers and judges, Bal Gokulam for children, Bharatiya Shikshan Mandal for educators, National Medico Organisation for doctors, Vijnana Bharati for scientists and Sainik Seva Parishad for veterans.
The RSS’s publishing wing has promoted a Punya Bhumi Bharat map in which Kabul becomes Kubha Nagar, Peshawar Purushapura and Sri Lanka Singaldeep. The ideologue Dr Sadanand Damodaran’s book on Akhand Bharat urges families to hang that map at home to keep the “pain of partition” alive and the aim of an undivided India vivid.
The political question is simple. How do you reunite South Asia while training your cadre to despise tens of millions of its Muslims as the Other?
This is why Jha’s “character-building” yardstick matters. It flips the RSS’s preferred language and asks for proof. If the organisation and its parivar celebrate the violent, recruit the tainted and mock due process, then the centenary cannot be a moral triumph. It is a stress test.
The RSS’s defenders will argue that such cases are exceptions and that social service, relief work and civic discipline outweigh them. The record shows both kinds of evidence. The deciding factor is not rhetoric but the preponderance of behaviour on the ground.
At 100, the RSS remains the most powerful extra-constitutional force in India. It preaches unity while organising through division. It venerates Gandhi’s vocabulary while venerating his assassin’s ideology. It claims moral renewal while its political arm normalises threat and reward.
Bhagwat’s recent lines about trust and coexistence can only gain weight if shakhas stop instructing gated communities to shut out Muslim workers, if ministers stop treating citizens as suspects based on faith, and if the organisation applies the same standards to its own allies that it demands of its critics.
As Jha writes, empirical evidence will decide whether “character building” is an honest project or a branding exercise. A century in, the RSS has the authority to change course. The question is whether it has the will.
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