Indian politics has always been a theatre where ideology writes the script but personality sells the tickets. The latest rumblings between Mohan Bhagwat and the personality-orbiting Narendra Modi are less about individual friction and more about a structural contradiction at the heart of the Sangh Parivar: the uneasy marriage between cadre-based nationalism and leader-centric populism. That order has been inverted for a while. Narendra Modi is not merely a BJP leader; he is arguably India’s most successful practitioner of political personalisation since Indira Gandhi. The “Modi brand” fuses governance, nationalism, welfare delivery, and aspirational symbolism into a singular persona. The famous birthday anecdote where Modi jokingly narrated that a senior leader reminded him that he is 75, he responded that “25 years are still remaining,” it was typical Modi rhetoric: playful but layered. The remark signals longevity, inevitability, and personal political immortality. But for the RSS, such messaging triggers deeper ideological discomfort. Bhagwat’s assertion that the RSS that deserves credit for ‘achche din’ is not institutional vanity. It is strategic messaging. Neither side will escalate publicly. But both are recalibrating influence.
Founded in 1925 by KB Hedgewar, the RSS emerged from a deep suspicion of charismatic mass leaders of the freedom movement. Hedgewar admired mobilisation but feared the fragility of movements centred on individuals. It was hence designed like a slow, old-school open-source project. No flashy front-end, no celebrity CEO, just thousands of volunteers quietly pushing updates to the national consciousness. From its founding, its distrust of mass messiahs is because history shows movements built around one towering figure usually implode once that figure fades, retires, or develops a taste for immortality speeches. The RSS basically built what you could call an ideological suite—like a full political operating system—containing nationalism, cultural revival, social organisation, and grassroots mobilisation, all meant to run collectively rather than through one dominant user interface. Then came Modi, who didn’t just install himself as an admin user but became the entire graphical interface through which millions access nationalism, governance, aspiration, grievance, welfare delivery, and even emotional therapy. The BJP under Modi doesn’t merely market policies; it markets presence. The organisation consciously adopted a decentralised, almost monastic discipline. Its ethos rested on anonymity, collective identity, and slow ideological consolidation. Historically, the RSS has watched personality politics derail movements. It saw the Indian National Congress revolve around Gandhi and Nehru. It saw socialist formations fracture after charismatic leaders faded. Its own political arm, today’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was initially shaped to avoid that fate. The model was simple: ideology first, organisation second, leader third.
The undercurrent of intense internal tension has become sharper with the rise of Yogi Adityanath. Uttar Pradesh is not merely another state; it is the gravitational centre of Hindi heartland politics and, by extension, national electoral arithmetic. Like Modi nationally, Yogi regionally dominates Uttar Pradesh through a personality-driven blend of majoritarian symbolism, strongman governance imagery, and welfare delivery narratives. Within the BJP ecosystem, he represents something the RSS both values and fears: an independently charismatic Hindutva bulldozer. The upcoming Uttar Pradesh electoral cycle is therefore not just a state contest. It is a referendum on whether BJP dominance in its core territory remains organisational or shifts further toward personalised authority. Indian electoral history repeatedly confirms an uncomfortable truth: voters respond more viscerally to leaders than to ideological manifestos. Consider Atal Bihari Vajpayee. His moderate, poetic, and consensus-seeking persona expanded BJP’s acceptability beyond its ideological core. The NDA victory in 1998 and 1999 was as much Vajpayee’s personal credibility as it was ideological consolidation. Similarly, Manmohan Singh, despite lacking mass charisma, became the reassuring technocratic face of UPA governance especially after the crucial Indo-US Energy Deal which was a factor in UPA winning a second term. His credibility stabilised Congress rule between 2004 and 2014. In both cases, electoral legitimacy derived from leadership symbolism rather than pure ideological mobilisation. Modi, however, has fused ideology and personality more tightly than either Vajpayee or Singh. He is simultaneously the message, messenger, and medium.
The RSS fears historical erasure by individual power centres. The organisation spent nearly a century building networks, schools, labour unions, student bodies, and social outreach platforms that nurtured Hindutva as a civilisational narrative rather than merely a political slogan. The Modi era risks compressing that long ideological arc into a single leadership narrative. For a body that believes itself to be a generational civilisational project, this is existentially unsettling. Indian politics, in the end, still runs on leaders who can sell ideology as long-term destiny and if political power today is being marketed with a century-scale warranty, the Sangh must figure out whether it wants to remain the software architect or quietly accept that the app has become bigger than the operating system. Indian politics, ultimately, continues to orbit around personalities that transform ideology into emotional destiny—and as long as that gravitational law holds, the organisation that built the ideological constellation will remain compelled to share the sky with the stars it created.