The RSS at 100: Time to Get the Facts Right
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organization), known throughout India by its initials RSS, turns 100 years old today. Ceremonially founded on October 2, 1925 by an Indian medical doctor and nationalist activist named K.B. Hedgewar, the RSS is one of the world's largest and most consequential civil society organizations. India's prime minister Narendra Modi is a member, and more than that: he is a lifelong pracharak (activist) who has devoted his life to the RSS and its "Sangh Parivar" (organization family). This family takes in a range of dozens of related civil society organizations, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council).
Interestingly, despite having Sanskrit (or Sanskritized) names, all three of these organizations—the RSS, the BJP, and the VHP—are known by their initials in the Latin alphabet. This practice reflects a pragmatism and flexibility that belies Western impressions that these organizations are somehow primitive and backward-looking. The RSS and the Sangh Parivar it leads are often characterized as traditional or ultraorthodox; they are in fact modern agents of change in Indian (and in the case of the VHP, global Hindu) society. The reforms they pursue may not be the reforms that secular Western reformers would prefer, but they represent a break with tradition all the same. In the language of multiple modernities, they represent the Indian (and more specifically: Hindu) face of global modernization.
From its founding 100 years ago, the RSS has viewed itself as "a movement for national reconstruction." It is what social scientists call a "national rejuvenation movement," akin to Friedrich Jahn's Turnverein, Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy, and Sun Yat Sen's Kuomintang. Although the RSS is primarily a nationalist organization, it is nonetheless a thoroughly Hindu organization. Non-Hindus are allowed to join, but few do. In the Indian diaspora, the RSS eschews any pretense of ecumenicalism, branding its overseas affiliates as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS). The organization is probably best understood as a nationalist organization in a Hindu society, rather than as a "Hindu nationalist" organization. That is to say, the organization seeks to rebuild India on Hindu principles. It does not seek to expel or place legal impediments on non-Hindus.
The RSS certainly is not a "paramilitary" organization as Wikipedia, the US Library of Congress, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) would have readers believe. Members of the RSS do not train with or carry firearms, the organization has never been accused of stockpiling weapons, and the organization has never engaged in terrorism or insurrection. Historically, men meeting at RSS events have dressed in khaki shorts (later trousers) and white shirts, but that is hardly a uniform. Members of the RSS have engaged in martial arts exercises with wooden sticks ("lathis"), but not in tactical military training with practical weapons. The RSS is no more a paramilitary organization than the Boy Scouts, and much less of one than the Salvation Army.
Nor did the second head of the RSS, the lawyer and sometimes Hindu monk M.S. Golwalkar, ever say that "minorities such as Muslims were a threat to India and the country could learn from the Nazis' killing of Jews." The ABC repeated this slander in a 2024 documentary on the RSS, refusing to back away from it even when community members raised objections. Efforts to link the RSS to Nazism are propagated through anti-BJP activist networks with no ultimate basis in reality. Just as one could identify dozens (if not hundreds) of claims made in supposedly reputable media outlets and academic journals that Donald Trump is a Nazi, a lazy journalist can find sources to cite claiming that the RSS, the BJP, and even Narendra Modi are Nazis. An honest journalist would go beyond the claims to look for the reality.
All claims of a connection between the RSS and Nazis ultimately trace back to a single paragraph in a 1939 book by M.S. Golwalkar called We, or Our Nation Defined. The authorship of the book is disputed (there are claims that it was only translated by Golwalkar, not written by him), but this is beside the point. The full, unfortunate passage reads:
German race pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic Races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how wellnigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.
This was written in 1939, at a time when the Nazi regime's violent antisemitism had been publicized in the West, but well before the Holocaust. And to put this in context, it was the writing of an Indian living in a secondary city in British India, a 33-year-old who had never traveled outside India and did not use English in daily communication, at a time when Nazi Germany was widely admired by many otherwise respectable, well-informed, and well-traveled people in Western Europe and the United States. For comparison, a young John F. Kennedy wrote in 1945 (after the end of the war and with full knowledge of the Nazi death camps) that "in a few years, Hitler will emerge from the hate that now surrounds him and come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures ever to have lived."
The Kennedy comparison is not meant to excuse what Golwalkar wrote, but to contextualize it. No serious media organization would write that Kennedy was a Nazi on the "gotcha" basis of a single poorly framed sentence—and Kennedy was a highly sophisticated, Harvard-educated native English speaker. Read Golwalkar's book in full, and it becomes clear that he admired the Jewish people, and thought that they would successfully build a home in Palestine (a sentiment that might now attract opprobrium from other quarters). Reading the book, it also becomes clear that Golwalkar had only a hazy understanding of the European situation. For example, he incorrectly believed that Germany was a Catholic country with a president who had to take a "purely religious" oath of office.
We, or Our Nation Defined was a product of its time, and in any case it has long been disavowed by the RSS. The book was written at a time when Britain and France had just endorsed Hitler's version of German nationhood by acceding to the division of Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Agreement, and was mainly motivated by the desire to avoid a similar division of India. It was the British, of course, who would in fact divide India on religious lines just a few years later. Twenty-first century Western sensibilities may be offended by the idea that minority communities cannot live peacefully in multicultural societies, but anyone who condemns Golwalkar for fearing the partition of India on religious lines must even more condemn postwar Britain's Labour government for ... partitioning India on religious lines.
The final lie about the RSS that has been repeated so often that it has gained the patina of truth is that the RSS was somehow complicit in the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gahdhi. It was not. It is true that Gahdhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse, had occasionally attended RSS meetings. He held no position in the RSS, was not an RSS pracharak, did not obtain his gun from the RSS, and was not supported by the RSS after the crime. To hold the RSS responsible for Gandhi's assassination would be equivalent to holding the Episcopal Church responsible for Abraham Lincoln's assassination on the grounds that John Wilkes Booth attended its services. Decades of anti-RSS research have never established any meaningful connection between Godse and the organization.
When the RSS was founded 100 years ago, the United States was a segregated country, women in the United Kingdom still did not have full voting rights, and most European countries were ruled by authoritarian dictatorships. The past really is another country, and tenuous allegations of historical RSS misconduct must be seen in that light. Anyone who would condemn Golwalkar for his unsavory remarks must contend with the fact that Mahatma Gandhi once said that black South Africans were "troublesome, very dirty and live like animals," and wrote approvingly of "the purity of races" practiced by white Afrikaners. Like any supposed RSS admiration for (prewar) Nazi Germany, these sentiments are terrible mistakes, long repudiated. The RSS was and is no more a racist organization than Gandhi's Indian National Congress.
As the RSS celebrates its centenary, it can take pride in its history of overcoming systematic vilification and occasional official persecution to become India's most important civil society organization. It has risen from humble origins to take center stage in India's national life, and the political party it sponsors has governed India for the last 11 years. The RSS is increasingly flexing its ideological muscles as well, displacing India's forlorn communists from their final bastion: the universities. That pressure is driving ever more shrill condemnations of this broadly conservative, but generally mainstream and egalitarian organization. Western journalists would do well not to be drawn into India's internal ideological battles by taking academic criticism of the RSS at face value.
The RSS may not conform to Western prescriptions for politically correct thought, but Western intellectual colonialism has no purchase in twenty-first century India—nor in twenty-first century Bharat, the ancient and likely future name of the country. The RSS generally uses the term Bharat for India, symbolically preferencing the indigenous (and notably Hindu) name of the country over the foreign (English) one. Bharat is derived from a Sanskrit root meaning "to bear" (it is actually cognate with the English word), and apparently had the sense of bearing a responsibility or sustaining a sacred fire. In its own self-understanding, the RSS is steadfastly committed to bearing responsibility for the integrity of the Indian nation, and it does so by sustaining the flame of nationalism in India. Western observers will understand the RSS much better if they try to understand it on its own terms.
Salvatore Babones is the executive director of the Indian Century Roundtable and the author of Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World's First Democracy.
