On October 2 this year, Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary, the RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat will mount the rostrum at his Nagpur headquarters to deliver the annual Vijayadashami address. His speech is likely to be the centrepiece of the centenary celebrations of the foundation of the RSS. Among the most dissected portions of the speech will presumably be his message for the country’s Muslim citizens. What is Bhagwat likely to say? The most influential RSS sarsanghchalak, M.S. Golwalkar, once praised Hitler for “purging” his country of Jews, calling the steps taken in preparation for the genocide “a good lesson for us in Hindustan”.
Since Independence, however, the pronouncements of the RSS leaders have exuded a lesser inclination for “purging” Muslims than for their “purgation”. In Catholic doctrine, purgation is a period of purifying suffering that certain souls have to undergo before they ascend to heaven. The concept of purgation thus implies the possibility, even the near certainty, of ultimate reconciliation and redemption. It is such an offer of redemption that Bhagwat has consistently waved at Muslims over the past decade, and which he will likely stress again in his speech.
The Muslim outreach
In 2017, for the first time in its history, the RSS hosted a Muslim as the chief guest for its Vijayadashami function: Munawar Yusuf, a homoeopath from the Bohra community. The next year, at a seminar at Delhi, the RSS chief emphasised that “everyone who lives in India is Hindu by identity, nationality”. He further claimed: “Hindu Rashtra doesn’t mean there’s no place for Muslims. The day it becomes so, it won’t be Hindutva.” Similarly, in his 2020 Vijayadashami address, Bhagwat underlined that the term “Hindu” includes everyone “who accepted India as their own” and therefore “applies to all 130 crore individuals of our society”.
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Together, these speeches and gestures have been widely interpreted as marking somewhat of an “inclusivist turn” by the RSS—portents of a pathway of reconciliation between the Sangh and Muslims. The scholar Walter Andersen, a long-time observer of the RSS, characterised Bhagwat’s statements in the afore-mentioned 2018 Delhi seminar as evidence of the “evolution of the RSS thinking on Muslims”. In Andersen’s sympathetic reading, this thawing of RSS hostility towards Muslims can be traced back to the anti-Emergency movement, when Sangh leaders “shared jail time with Muslims”. The next milestone, for Andersen, is the decision in 2002 by the RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan to establish the Muslim Rashtriya Manch “to work for improved Hindu-Muslim relations”. Thus, in Andersen’s interpretation, Bhagwat is merely climbing the next step on the reconciliation ladder with his message “to the family” on “keeping a tighter rein on anti-Muslim violence”. We can term this the accommodation thesis.
Muslim Rashtriya Manch activists burning an effigy of the actor Aamir Khan, who had spoken out on the growing intolerance in the country, in Lucknow in 2015. | Photo Credit: RAJEEV BHATT
Then there is a more sceptical genre of explanation, which sees in the RSS’ Muslim outreach a concerted push towards communal resolution via assimilation of Muslims. The logic of assimilation entails a project of relentlessly denuding the identity markers of subordinate groups until they merge into a homogenised dominant identity. An oft-cited example of this process is the formation of European nation states. In a 2022 essay rather ominously titled “The RSS’ Plans to Resolve the Muslim Question”, the journalist Sanya Dhingra portrays the RSS’ overtures towards Muslims as part of a well-planned strategy to fulfil its long-term objective of “assimilating” Muslims within a Hindu identity. The RSS intention, according to this view, is not to accommodate Muslim identity by granting it legitimate space within the Hindu nation. Rather, it is to “digest” its enemy by dissolving its identity. A key component of this plan, according to Dhingra, has been the outreach to Pasmanda Muslims, the subordinate caste groups within the Muslim community.
The point of convergence between these two theses—accommodation and assimilation—is the shared underlying assumption that the outreach by the RSS does indeed offer a genuine path of resolution for Muslims. They differ only in how they view the terms of the resolution: to what extent will the RSS include the identity and interests of the Muslim community within the grand bargain. The corollary being that Muslims are participants in the bargain. In Anderson’s narrative, they are an equal counterparty and have an opportunity to negotiate the terms of eventual reconciliation. For Dhingra, the broad terms of resolution have already been set by the RSS. Yet, even in her interpretation, Pasmanda Muslims, the vast majority of the Muslim community, have been accorded a viable (if demanding) path to inclusion within the Hindu umbrella, perhaps like the tribal or Dalit community in an earlier era. They can choose to dilute their particularistic identity, accept the patronage of the RSS, and integrate into the Hindu nation.
Lack of ideological evolution
Contrary to both these explanations, this essay argues that there has not been any genuine “evolution” of the RSS ideological stance towards Muslims. The offers of reconciliation and the threats of assimilation are merely two interwoven strands of an endlessly recursive fantasy play. The play is not meant to have a denouement where the “Muslim problem” is resolved in any neat pattern or grand bargain. It is only designed to showcase a Hindu protagonist who struts on the stage, performing magnanimity and hostility in turns, leaving the Muslim antagonist little to do except inhabit a background zone of purgation, with no possibility for exit.
The core reason why the RSS has managed to not just survive but expand over the last century is that it offers a powerful antidote to what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai termed the “anxiety of incompleteness”. Every nation state, according to Appadurai, is stalked by the unsettling knowledge that it is composed of messy pluralities and yearns for the surety of “a single ethnic substance, some kind of ethnic purity”. One can imagine that the Indian nation state (particularly its privileged overseers) suffers from an acute case of “anxiety of incompleteness”, containing as it does the most anarchic jumble of identities (culture, language, ethnicity, caste, religious practices) ever assembled under the rubric of a singular nation state. The ideological alchemy perfected by the RSS is to coalesce the force of this national anxiety onto a single target (minorities, specifically Muslims), in the process combining the rest of the pluralities in a single bedrock Hindu identity. Imagine a prism that takes in a whole spectrum of colour rays but emits only saffron and green.
A Muslim woman watching an RSS march (Path Sanchalan) over the supposed decline in the Hindu population and an alleged rise in the Muslim population, in Bhopal, a file photograph. The Hindu community being under threat by the Muslim ‘other’ is a fiction the RSS stokes carefully to remain relevant. | Photo Credit: A.M. FARUQUI
It is this task of ordering the cacophony of cultural differences (along with the related desire for autonomous organisation and assertive expression) into a manageable and disciplined duality that the RSS has performed for the nation state, for which it receives sympathy, whether overt or tacit, from the country’s social, bureaucratic, and economic elites.
“Every Hindu Indian recognises that the land is not completely Hindu,” Appadurai told an interviewer, but that by itself “does not necessarily lead to an effort to obliterate the minorities” even though it may burst into episodic pogroms like the 2002 Gujarat riots. If the “anxiety of incompleteness” (narrowly focussed on the Hindu-Muslim cleavages) is the fuel that has made the RSS the most successful right-wing organisation in world history (in terms of sheer durability and scope of support base), it stands to reason that the organisation has a vested interest in keeping the anxiety not just alive but in a state of perpetual stimulation.
Muslim Manch
To put it bluntly, resolution or reconciliation with the Muslim community would not mean the ultimate triumph of Hindu nationalism but its ultimate death.
To illustrate concretely the rather abstract points sketched out above, we can turn to the extensive fieldwork carried out by the scholar Felix Pal on the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, the RSS affiliate that is held by both Andersen and Dhingra as a key component of the RSS’ Muslim outreach.
If the RSS objective of accommodation or assimilation is sincere, surely, we would see evidence of it at least in the controlled space of the Muslim Manch and its choreographed events simulating “interreligious syncretism”. Yet, according to Pal, the Manch organises “insincere” spectacles of syncretism that are instrumentalised precisely to project “domination over India’s Muslims”. In a syncretic yoga programme attended by Pal, overseen by the Manch head Indresh Kumar, participants were asked to shout “Jai Shri Ram” (victory to Lord Ram) and “Allah Hu” (God is). Whereas all the assembled maulanas shouted Jai Shri Ram with “gusto”, none of the Hindu swamis uttered Allah Hu. Even in the ostensibly “syncretic” space, Pal noted enforced segregation between Hindus and Muslims. “The swamis who would not say Allah Hu stayed far away from the maulanas who chanted Jai Shri Ram.”
At an event supporting the construction of the Ram Temple, during a Manch imam’s recitation of the Quran’s most sacred verse, his microphone was snatched mid-recitation to announce the arrival of Indresh Kumar. During a Manch iftar function, an elderly Muslim “stood up to politely interrupt” Indresh Kumar’s “rambling speech” to ask permission to break the fast. “Sit down, old man, I am not finished,” Kumar replied. “You must make yourself conflict-free, so the world can be made conflict-free,” Kumar told the Muslim crowd. We can note here that Indresh Kumar is the same RSS leader who was questioned by the CBI in the 2007 Mecca Masjid blasts and named in the Rajasthan Police charge sheet in the 2007 Ajmer Sherif blasts case.
According to Pal, the purpose of Manch events is not just to “ritually humiliate” Muslim participants (contra accommodation) but also to produce an “intentionally incomplete proximity” (contra assimilation). It might be worthwhile to reproduce a few telling passages from Pal’s analysis of such syncretism:
“Manch syncretism is Muslim proximity to Hinduness, but a proximity the RSS will never allow Muslims to realise. Manch Muslims must eternally strive in the direction of Hinduness but cannot achieve it. In some ways this resembles the power dynamics of hazing rituals. Hazing is a form of initiation ritual where initiates to university clubs, army squadrons, or sporting groups undertake servile labour, glorify club members, or ritually humiliate themselves. Scholars often understand this process as one designed to consolidate the dominant position of those conducting the hazing. These rituals provide powerful affective benefits to the hazers, who seek feelings of power and superiority.”
Yet, Pal also underlines a key difference between hazing and RSS “rituals of subservience” that speaks to the contention of this essay that the RSS only offers to Muslims a “purgation with no possibility of exit”:
“While hazing and intentionally incomplete proximity share rituals of subservience, the former allows pathways to inclusion, while the latter remains deliberately incomplete. If the goal is not for the Muslim to arrive at Hinduism, or entry to the club, then the point must be the journey, the rituals. Considering continued RSS violence and vitriol against Muslims, it is hard to imagine that this journey is some didactic device for Muslim self-improvement. If the point then is the striving, not the arriving, and the beneficiary is not the striver, then it must be that this motion, or the image of this motion, is designed to be viewed and consumed.”
‘Communal fantasy’
As we have already noted, the audience of the RSS’ Muslim outreach is not Muslims but its Hindutva constituency (besides observers like Andersen and Dhingra). As Pal observes, the membership of the Manch’s Facebook page is overwhelmingly Hindu nationalists who revel in consuming these majoritarian rituals of domination over the Muslim minority.
The RSS’ symbolic representation of the place of “Hindus” and “Muslims” within the nation, then, presents a stark contrast to the thesis of either accommodation or assimilation. Now let us turn to the RSS’ guiding vision.
At the heart of the idealised end-state, or telos, of Hindutva lies what we shall call the “communal fantasy”. The notion of communal fantasy is borrowed from the concept of racist fantasy, as described by the academic Todd McGowan in his book The Racist Fantasy: Unconscious Roots of Hatred.
According to McGowan, the racist frame of mind is rooted in the psychic structure of fantasy, which relates three primary figures: the subject, the object desired, and the other (obstacle to that object). In the communal fantasy of the RSS, the subject is the Hindu nation, the object is “Akhand Bharat” (Undivided Bharat), and the other/obstacle is the Muslim enemy.
M.S. Golwalkar, the most influential RSS sarsang- chalak, who praised Hitler for “purging” his country of Jews, called the steps taken in preparation for the genocide “a good lesson for us in Hindustan”. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
The RSS leadership often insists that that the country is already a Hindu Rashtra (or Hindu nation), and has been so for millennia. The catch is that the subject (Hindu nation) is always said to be “ontologically insecure”: under threat from enemies (primarily the “hydra-headed Muslim enemy” as well as the divided social consciousness of Hindus). This predicate allows the RSS to assume the mantle of the principal agent or vanguard of the Hindu nation, whereby it stakes its moral legitimacy on providing the organisational leadership required to reorient the Hindu community’s social consciousness towards the demands of protecting the subject (Hindu nation) from its enemies (the Muslim other).
The object of the RSS is Akhand Bharat, which can be defined as “one country, one people, one culture, and one nation”. The RSS’ stake in keeping the Hindu nation ontologically insecure can be seen in its imagination of Akhand Bharat. The map of Akhand Bharat, revered by the RSS, contains not just the territory of India but the entire subcontinent, with Bangladesh and Pakistan accorded special attention. The RSS has never accepted the Partition as a settled fact and holds on to the fantasy of “reclaiming” the “lost territories”. In fact, RSS branches still celebrate August 14 as “Akhand Bharat Sankalp Diwas”, a practice that dates back to the immediate post-Independence period.
Commitment to Akhand Bharat
Mohan Bhagwat has reinforced the RSS commitment to the Akhand Bharat goal. In a 2022 function at Bhopal, Bhagwat claimed that Akhand Bharat was an undisputed truth and a divided Bharat was a nightmare. “A broken body cannot survive, it has to be fixed,” Bhagwat said, arguing that Pakistan was “unhappy” at its separation from India and would one day be merged into Akhand Bharat. At another event the same year, in Haridwar, Bhagwat raised the possibility of realising Akhand Bharat in the near future. It is worth reproducing his comments:
“Our car is on its way. It has no brakes and only the accelerator. Anyone who comes in the way will be destroyed. Those who want can come join us in the car. This car won’t stop… Akhand Bharat will be a reality in the next 20-25 years if we keep going at the current pace, but if we put a little more effort—which we definitely will—this time will be reduced by half and we’ll see it happen in 10-15 years,” Bhagwat said.
RSS functionaries then clarified that Bhagwat’s comments must be interpreted as a vision for a confederation of all of India’s neighbours, with Bharat as its leader. In any case, the precise content of the Akhand Bharat fantasy is beside the point. As McGowan writes: “The object is actually unimportant in the fantasy. The only significance [it] has is that it is unattainable…. But… the obstacle to the object—what bars the subject’s access to unrestrained enjoyment—is the racial other.”
McGowan draws on the argument of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte that “we create ourselves and the world through an act of self-positing or self-determination, but this positing always encounters an obstacle that both limits it and drives it onward”. Without the figure of the Muslim other, the Hindu nation would cease to be ontologically insecure, the Akhand Bharat fantasy would be bereft of meaning, and the RSS would lose its moral legitimacy and organisational raison d’être.
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As far as the RSS leadership is concerned, the importance of the communal fantasy goes far beyond its emotional attraction. The crucial aspect of the fantasy—and the figure of the Muslim other—is to provide the RSS with a map to navigate the social terrain: what counts as significant; what compromises are acceptable; what positions are desirable.
For instance, in his Vijayadashami address last year, Bhagwat claimed that Hindus were still victims because they were weak and divided, while referring to (Muslim) “attacks” on Ganesh processions in Maharashtra. He held Hindu weakness responsible for (Muslim) atrocities on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. This logic is hardwired in Sangh thinking, explaining everything from Partition to the “thousand years of slavery” (“Muslim” and “British” rule). The only guarantor of security, for Bhagwat, is in a unified Hindu body. Thus, Bhagwat issued a fervent appeal to privileged-caste Hindus to come forward and embrace their Dalit brethren, following the “Rajput Valmiki model”. Simultaneously, he effectively delegitimised assertive Dalit, tribal, linguistic, and feminist politics as emblems of treacherous “wokeism and cultural Marxism”.
Aliens forever?
The founding sarsangchalak, K.B. Hedgewar, used to describe Muslims as “yavana snakes”, yavana being the Sanskrit term for Greeks, meaning aliens. In this imagination, whether the Hindu body accommodates this toxic alien or ingests it, the ultimate result would be its death. The important thing is to keep the “dance of scorpions” going, with both sides (Hindu and Muslim) circling each other warily without either landing a deathly sting. The only “digestion” that happens in this dance is of the assertive consciousness of marginalised Hindu segments.
Meanwhile, the figure of the “unaccommodated” Muslim other shall continue to lie at the core of the organisational raison d’être of the RSS: framing the telos of its ideology and forming a reliable signpost for its strategy. In this respect, Bhagwat is correct to point out that there is indeed no Hindutva without Muslims.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist based in Delhi.
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