Editor’s Note: A century of dissimulation

The RSS—founded on Vijayadashami of 1925—has turned 100 this year. It is the centenary of an organisation that has slowly and tenaciously insinuated itself into the body politic, penetrating social, cultural, institutional, and administrative arms. While its single-mindedness is often glorified, the cause to which it has dedicated the past century is deeply disturbing, one that has riven society and will, if left unchecked, annihilate the relative unity India managed to create despite its diversities and the departing coloniser’s best attempts to fracture and roil. As Jawaharlal Nehru said so presciently in 1954: “The danger to India is not communism. It is Hindu right-wing communalism.”

Yet, the RSS has managed to convince its vast following that it stands really for a unified nationalism. This is undoubtedly a triumph. But it is also a pointer to the organisation’s central trait: dissimulation. It is not merely the Sangh’s other attributes—discipline, dedication, and hard work—that allow it to proselytise and permeate vast sections of the population with dexterity. It is the fact that it can cloak its divisive agenda with a false veneer of unification and upliftment, allowing its more moderate supporters to delude themselves that the RSS agenda is not against anyone, but only for Hindus.

This unique ability to mask its real intentions is a strategy the RSS has had to perfect from birth. The organisation has been banned three times—1948, 1975, and 1992—and each time it has responded with mollification and by going underground. Only after the 1990s, with political power well within sight, do we see more strident pronouncements although tinged even then with caution and often mouthed by proxies, members of shadowy offshoots that do not lead back easily to the RSS. It is what the book Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags calls the “small footprints” strategy, where ideas are planted everywhere but in small and disguised ways.

The camouflage begins with its self-description as a cultural organisation. The RSS usefully borrows its symbols and signifiers from Hinduism and from India’s rich syncretic culture of myths, epics, and arts but refashions them for a sharply political agenda and ambition: Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra. Indeed, the RSS consciously shifted from the Hindu Mahasabha’s “Hindu Raj” idea—upholding the rights of Hindus—to “Hindu Rashtra”—marked by aggressive othering and identity politics. Chapter XII of Bunch of Thoughts, written by M.S. Golwalkar, the second RSS chief, describes India’s three internal threats as “Muslims, Christians, and Communists”. In 1991, RSS functionary and BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi was reported to have said that “neither Muslims nor Christians are acceptable with distinct identities of their own. They must be ‘Hinduised’.”

Hindutva itself, the cornerstone of the RSS, is not about Hinduism at all. It was a fresh credo created by V.D. Savarkar. In his book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, Savarkar writes that Hindutva must not be “confounded with the other cognate term Hinduism”; that “Hindutva is not identical with Hindu Dharma…”. Much later, in 2000, the BJP’s Sushma Swaraj said about her party’s Ram temple movement: “It was purely political in nature and had nothing to do with religion.” Even the Sangh’s vaunted focus on organised philanthropy is a means to an end—of trying to shift the average Hindu’s traditional attention from individual nirvana to community well-being in order to create political unity.

So, the RSS and its political wing the BJP pluck gods and godliness from their deeply embedded roots in Hinduism and use them as emotional props to win political power, much like appropriating the Dalit icon Babasaheb Ambedkar or Jharkhand’s tribal leader Birsa Munda to sway specific voting blocs. Such a blurring of boundaries is infinitely useful in an emotional and hyper-religious nation and is able to routinely defeat logic or rationale.

With Golwalkar, the RSS began to slowly infiltrate the country’s civil and military establishments. The political scientist Pralay Kanungo writes that by 1942, the Sangh had enrolled “government servants, teachers, and clerks” and set up shakhas in gun factories and ordnance depots “to attract military personnel”. Eight decades later, as we decry the politicisation of India’s military, one sees how successfully religion can be repurposed for political gain.

Writing in 1963, in India as a Secular State, Donald Eugene Smith spoke of the ways in which the RSS was similar to a fascist organisation: the focus on militaristic discipline, ultra-nationalism, and racial-cultural superiority, the obsession with the past and the exclusion of minorities. Smith wrote that “it is impossible to say how the RSS would respond if political power ever came within reach…. The implementation of certain aspects of its ideology (the policy towards Muslims and other minorities, for example) presupposes extensive use of the machinery of the state.”

Now, we are seeing it play out. But the continuing legerdemain ensures that the outer circle of fence-sitting supporters and voters, carefully cultivated by phrases like economic progress, elimination of corruption, or efficient bureaucracy, never see the RSS hand directing state policy. They don’t get to read the Jana Sangh’s resolution on culture published in the RSS mouthpiece Organiser in 1957, which included, among other more ordinary injunctions, such points as: “Education should be based on national culture”; and “Indian History [should] be rewritten”. All ideas we see being implemented in the present. When migrant labourers are arrested or ejected in 2025 because of their language or religion, it is easy to forget what the RSS member and Jana Sangh politician Balraj Madhok wrote in 1969: “It is the Hinduness or Hindutva of a man which makes him a national of India.”

The slow, studied, and systematic progress that the RSS has made in its pursuit of political power using the twin masks of cultural pride and majoritarian piety marks an extraordinary 100-year journey. But India is still not a Hindu Rashtra. Muslims and Christians are still minorities with constitutional rights. The spirit of secularism, liberalism, and federalism still beats strong. And that shows an equally extraordinary resilience. The next 100 years will be crucial, both for India and for the RSS.