This past September marks the hundredth-year anniversary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). On September 27, 1925, on Vijayadashami/Dussehra, a small group of young men in the central Indian and ethnically diverse city of Nagpur, led by a recently graduated medical doctor from a Telugu Brahmin family, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, laid the foundation of the RSS. The original training took place in neighborhood meeting grounds (referred to as a shakha) and involved assembling each day to create a kind of brotherhood whose participants were committed to each other in the common pursuit of unifying the diverse Hindu community. Partly to discourage personality based hero-worship, Hedgewar selected the RSS flag (the “bhagwa dhwaj”), a symbol of the united Hindu nation, to be the “guru” of the RSS, and thus emphasise the teacher-student imagery. From this modest start, the RSS was to blossom into what is today one of the world’s most influential non-government organizations that penetrates all parts of India as well as those outside India.
Much has been written about the RSS and its founders, yet what they were trying to achieve has been widely misinterpreted as deliberately divisive socially. Rather, the overarching goal over the past hundred years has been to better unify society. A key question is how has the sarsanghchalak, the head of the organisation, navigated the significant challenges that the organisation faced? Another question is how has the organization managed to retain its core message that Hedgewar and Golwalkar considered imperative for a strong national culture and society. The sarsanghchalaks are largely responsible for maintaining internal dialogue between the RSS and its affiliates and to mediate differences, and they have managed to do so over the past hundred years. The robustness of internal debate ensured that the organisation maintained its culture of deliberation, consultation and discussion which were envisaged as critical by its founding fathers. The selection of a sarsanghchalak has likewise been a carefully considered decision based on widespread consultation and required a culture of sacrifice and adherence to its core principles.
The RSS has lasted longer than parallel organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha. The partition of India was a realisation for the RSS and organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha, that the political consequences of a deeply divided Hindu society remained and needed to be addressed. While the Hindu Mahasabha had strong roots in north and central India, it had failed to resolve internal differences which eventually led to its decline. During the 1948-49 restrictions on the Mahasabha and a simultaneous ban on the RSS, many senior members of the Hindu Mahasabha resigned from the organisation fearing police action and many even joined the Congress party. The death of Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the most Hindu oriented member of Prime Minister Nehru’s cabinet, on December 15, 1950, brought about an enduring rift between the RSS and the Nehru government. In these circumstances, the RSS was convinced that it must now assume a central role in reviving the Hindu community.
There is now an RSS attempt to take control of its own narrative, with Mohan Bhagwat, the current sarsanghchalak, addressing tough questions at open forums. The approach is more relaxed and forthcoming and addressing ideological questions that emerge from academia, civil society and media, especially regarding its current inclusiveness. Naysayers argue that the organisation is trying to revamp itself as a ‘gentler version’ of its former self, implying that major parts of its alleged earlier intolerance remain and that it maintains a rigid top-down structure that limits debate. The organisation has had an open membership for years, has a committed cadre of followers both within and outside the country who are committed to the organization.
To understand the RSS today, we need to understand the influences it drew upon, especially from its founding fathers. A major influence on Hedgewar’s thinking to revive a fragmented Hindu community was a handwritten manuscript of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s “Hindutva”, whose central theses were that Hindus constitute a nation, that despite cultural differences they are a single national group, analogous for example to recently united Italians and Germans constituting a people with their own country. During his tenure as sarsanghchalak, Hedgewar constructed a training system for pracharaks that would create a type of fraternal brotherhood committed to each other, to the RSS and to its value system. Neither at its founding nor now does the RSS espouse the metaphysical (religious) aspects of Hinduism. As the current RSS head has repeatedly stated, any person (of any religion) loyal to India is a Hindu.
Much of the success of the RSS over the past hundred years is also due to the careful selection of its leaders, the sarsanghchalaks. The RSS has had six sarsanghchalaks who were selected by their predecessors who, after extensive consultation, looked for persons with a proven managerial experience, were committed to the goal of Hindu unity, and were suited to emerging political and socio-economic trends. Hedgewar in 1940 selected Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar, a religiously inclined academic, to maintain stability at a time of growing international and national tensions. During Golwalkar’s tenure, Indian faced the complications of a war in Asia followed shortly by the post-war communal violence triggered by the United Kingdom’s poorly conceived partition dividing the subcontinent and resulting in one of the world’s largest involuntary movement of people. Partition induced migration caused a great deal of civil unrest, forced migrations and complete collapse of state authority. The situation in Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir was particularly problematic and Nehru in a secret and personal letter to the Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir on December 30, 1947 wrote that Sheikh Abdullah was the only political leader in the state with the confidence of the state’s Muslim population and thus had to be placated at any cost, whereas the RSS questioned the Sheikh’s motives and also blamed him for military defeats which caused Indian forces to make s critical retreat.
Following the January 30, 1948, assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the RSS was banned on February 4, 1948, for activities that allegedly fostered a spirit of violence, a ban that was lifted on July 11, 1949, when it prepared a formal constitution rejecting politics. While the ban took a major toll on RSS membership, the pracharak cadre remained largely intact, ready to engage in rebuilding the RSS.
Golwalkar in 1973 chose Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras as his successor to rebuild the RSS. In doing so, Deoras reached out to non-Hindus, most prominently Muslims and Christians. He also focused on the uplift of low caste Hindus and on more aggressively addressing deep-seated social problems like untouchability. He famously declared that untouchability was a moral sin.
The RSS witnessed another ban in the wake of a two-year state of emergency declared in 1975 by the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to silence her political opposition, which included the RSS. Deoras and much of the cadre, especially pracharaks, were arrested, bringing the politically shrewd Deoras into long lasting relations with a broad range of opposition parties also opposed to the Emergency. Deoras’ response to these challenges was to unleash the activist cadre who went on to form a range of affiliates addressing a wide spectrum of social and economic problems. A spin-off of this activism was a surge in participation within the RSS itself. Thus, it becomes imperative to revisit the history of the RSS as it completes a 100 years to make sense of why it remains relevant even today.
Andersen is a former professor of South Asia studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism and The RSS: A view to the Inside. Pandit is a professor of history at O P Jindal Global University and author of Claiming Citizenship and Nation: Muslim Politics and State Building in North India, 1947-86 and Indian Renaissance (The Modi Decade)
