In 1925, K B Hedgewar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, envisioned that his organisation would ultimately become “the Hindu Rashtra in miniature”. One hundred years later, the Sangh has become a massive institution, with 73,117 shakhas (branches whose members meet daily), giving the organisation a presence in 45,600 localities. Besides, RSS front organisations have flourished to form the Sangh parivar, the family of the RSS.
Today, its student union, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, claims to be the largest student organisation with 4.5 million members. Its labour union, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, has become the country’s leading trade union with 10 million members. Its peasants’ union, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, claims one million members. And its Vidya Bharati network runs 14,000 schools that employ 73,000 teachers, teaching 3.2 million students.
Lately, the Sangh parivar has reached out to new social categories. In 1992, it created the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad, which has become “the largest organisation of lawyers across India”, according to a report by S Patnaik. And in 2001, the RSS, which sees itself as a reserve army, set up an organisation for retired military personnel, the Akhil Bharatiya Poorva Sainik Seva Parishad.
This quite incomplete list testifies to the RSS’s effort to cover a large number of sectors of society and influence them from the inside. The Sangh parivar’s unity stems mainly from the fact that all its cadres have been trained in the RSS and share the same ideology. But it also stems, at district and state levels, from Samanvaya Samitis (Coordination Committees) which harmonise the positions of all the components of the parivar. At the national level, meetings are held at the annual Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha, which, however, has lost some of its effectiveness.
There are three reasons why the achievements mentioned above need to be qualified.
First, the Sangh parivar’s growth has not only resulted from its efforts for promoting Hindutva, but also because of its activities against the Others, because of its attempts at creating fear and anger among Hindus vis-a-vis the Indian Muslims in particular. This agenda has flourished on the polarisation mode after the third RSS chief, Balasaheb Deoras, opted for the making of a Hindu vote bank in reaction to the dual membership controversy—the moment he realised, with the demise of the Janata Party experiment in 1979-80, that the RSS would not be in a position to implement its agenda till it could rely on a political majority. It embarked on a massive mobilisation of the Hindu community that resulted, eventually, in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
In the process, the RSS subcontracted to organisations such as the newly created Bajrang Dal the job of unleashing communal violence. This move helped the RSS preserve a clean image, but this façade of respectability hardly concealed the now openly Islamophobic face of Hindutva that was to become the order of the day after 2014, with campaigns against ‘love jihad’, for cow protection or in favour of reconversion—that has now become the new normal, with a litany of lynchings, bulldozer demolitions and riots.
Secondly, by helping the BJP rise to power, the RSS leaders have lost the initiative, at least in the political domain. Till 2014, Nagpur had a say in BJP’s strategy. The RSS leaders certainly never micro-managed the party, but they exerted a great influence over its programme and the selection of its candidates. Things have changed under Narendra Modi, who had started to emancipate from the RSS, which he had joined as a child, when he was the chief minister of Gujarat.
Modi, after he transitioned from the position of an organisation man to that of a politician, stopped reporting to the mother organisation. No Hindu nationalist leaders had done the same and got away with it. Jana Sangh president Balraj Madhok was sidelined the moment he tried to go it alone. Modi could afford to do so as early as 2007 because he had built his parallel power structure and was in a position to short-circuit the Sangh parivar (including the BJP) by relating directly to people via yatras, social media, holograms, TV channels etc.
RSS leaders could not help but support him because of his popularity, in particular among the young swayamsevaks. It remains to be seen whether this transformation in the balance of power within the parivar is irreversible. Will Nagpur be in a position to, at least, play the role of a referee regarding the BJP’s affairs after Modi leaves the scene? Only the future will tell.
Thirdly, the Hindutva milieu the RSS is presiding over has lost the moral authority its leaders enjoyed when they fought against corruption as key players of the JP movement or during the fight against the Emergency. If Nanaji Deshmukh, D P Thengadi and Kushabhau Thakre were back on Earth, they would not recognise their Sangh parivar. They claimed that their simplicity and sacrifice for the cause of Hindu nationalism reflected a value system—hence the idea that BJP was “a party with a difference”. Their influence over swayamsevaks and beyond came not only from their ideology, but also from the prestige of their renunciation of material comforts and even a professional career; they dedicated their lives to the quasi-sacred mission that was embodied in the RSS.
None of the Sangh parivar leaders today fulfils this ideal. The political economy the Modi government is promoting is its opposite, as is evident from the wealth oligarchs have amassed at the expense of the cottage industries that Deendayal Upadhyay tried to protect—against the Nehruvian model of development—in the 1960s.
The RSS’s transformations were partly inevitable. To survive, such an old organisation needs to adapt to society—and the Indian society has changed so much since the 1920s, and even more since the 1990s. Access to power was bound to change the parivar, because “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
But one may well argue that continuity probably prevails over change in the case of RSS, not only because the shakhas have remained its modus operandi, but also—and mostly—because its core ideology is intact. To transform India into a Hindu Rashtra was the top priority of the RSS founders and still is the number one objective of its leaders today. In that sense, the RSS has not changed, but it has changed India, destroying pillars of the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
Christophe Jaffrelot is Research Director at CERI-SciencesPo/CNRS and Professor of Indian politics and sociology at King’s College London. He writes a fortnightly column for the website The Wire.
(Views are personal)