By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

India's Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, translated as 'National Volunteer Union' or 'National Volunteer Corps', is an Indian right-wing, Hindutva-oriented volunteer paramilitary organization. It is the progenitor and leader of a large body of Hindutva organizations called the Sangh Parivar (Hindi for "Sangh family"), which has developed a presence in all facets of Indian society and includes the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ruling political party under Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. Mohan Bhagwat currently serves as the Sarsanghchalak (lit. 'Chief') of the RSS, with Dattatreya Hosabale serving as the Sarkaryavah, meaning General Secretary.

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by an Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh member.

Whereby Nehru believed that the murder of Gandhi was part of a “fairly widespread conspiracy” on the part of the Hindu right to seize power; he saw the situation as analogous to that in Europe on the eve of the fascist takeovers. And he believed that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS was the power behind this.

Prime Minister Modi, who joined the RSS as a pracharak (campaigner) when he was a young man, praised the organization at an event in Delhi on Wednesday, and released a special commemorative stamp and coin to mark the occasion.

Founded in 1925 by an Indian physician, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the RSS, seen as the ideological fountainhead of the country's ruling political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has become the most influential organization in the country.

The conventional narrative presents the RSS as formed primarily in response to Hindu-Muslim riots and the perceived threat of Muslim domination. While this communal dimension is real and well-documented, it obscures an equally, if not more, important motivation: the Brahminical elite’s response to the rising tide of anti-caste movements threatening their social, economic, and political dominance. Understanding RSS formation requires examining both threats simultaneously: the external threat of Muslim political assertion and the internal threat of lower-caste liberation movements challenging Brahminical supremacy.

The founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925 in Nagpur, today celebrated as the ideological capital of Hindu nationalism, carries a deep historical irony. Nagpur in the early 20th century was not merely a provincial town in Central India; it was a site of intense social transformation. The region had witnessed the spread of Jotiba Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, the rise of non-Brahmin movements, and the emergence of early Dalit political activity. Far from being a tabula rasa for Hindu unity, it was a crucible of caste contestation and anti-Brahmin ferment. Against this backdrop, the RSS’s rhetoric of Hindu ekata (Hindu unity) can be read less as an inclusive.

The founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925 in Nagpur, today celebrated as the ideological capital of Hindu nationalism, carries a deep historical irony. Nagpur in the early 20th century was not merely a provincial town in Central India; it was a site of intense social transformation. The region had witnessed the spread of Jotiba Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, the rise of non-Brahmin movements, and the emergence of early Dalit political activity. Far from being a tabula rasa for Hindu unity, it was a crucible of caste contestation and anti-Brahmin ferment. Against this backdrop, the RSS’s rhetoric of Hindu ekata (Hindu unity) can be read less as an inclusive reformulation of Hindu identity and more as a strategic counter-revolution, a project to neutralise the twin challenges posed by Muslim assertion and Dalit/non-Brahmin mobilization.

 

Communal Consolidation as Counter-Mobilization

The Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909 marked a watershed in Indian political history. They not only granted separate electorates to Muslims but also accepted the Muslim League’s contention that the Untouchables and Tribal communities should not be counted as Hindus.

This development profoundly unsettled the Brahminical leadership, which had long assumed that the reins of political power would naturally pass into its hands once the British left India. With the British promising further devolution of power through the forthcoming Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919), the Congress and the Muslim League sought to present a united front through the Lucknow Pact of 1916.

However, the arrangement had unintended consequences. It became imperative for the Congress to retain the Depressed Classes within the Hindu fold, lest its numerical and political strength vis-à-vis the Muslim League be weakened. The Pact thus inadvertently expanded the representational field beyond the Hindu-Muslim binary. Once the principle of communal representation had been conceded, the Depressed Classes could justifiably claim separate political recognition, something that threatened to upend the Congress’s political calculus.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat led the centenary celebrations of the organization

 

The Brahminical anxiety in Nagpur

Nagpur, the future birthplace of the RSS, was by 1920 a crucible of caste contestation. The Nagpur elite, largely Chitpavan and Deshastha Brahmins, viewed these developments with alarm. Archival evidence from the Central Provinces Intelligence Reports (1921–23) reveals growing concern over “subversive activities” among Depressed Class associations, which were seen as “encouraged by missionary and non-Hindu elements”. The anxiety was not only about religion but about loss of social control. Brahmin-led Hindu reform bodies like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Seva Samiti began organizing counter-meetings to “reintegrate the untouchables into the Hindu fold”.

In this context, K.B. Hedgewar, who founded the RSS in Nagpur in 1925, had already been active in the Hindu Mahasabha’s local chapter. His speeches from 1922-23 reveal his conviction that Hindu society’s strength lay in “discipline and unity” and that “caste divisions and foreign religions weaken the nation”. While this has been read as an anti-Muslim sentiment, it equally reflects a response to the alienation of Dalits.

The organizational form of the RSS, a militarized, hierarchical, and celibate cadre of Hindu men trained in physical discipline, was not merely a reaction to communal violence but a deliberate strategy to regiment the Hindu social body. The shakha (branch) model was intended to bypass caste distinctions through symbolic fraternity, yet in practice it preserved Brahminical control of ideology and leadership.

This dual purpose is evident from Hedgewar’s correspondence with B. S. Moonje, a senior leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and later president of the Central Hindu Military Education Society at Nashik. In a 1925 letter, Moonje praised the nascent RSS for instilling discipline among Hindus and noted that “even the lower orders are now joining the daily drill. The subtext is unmistakable: Dalit mobilization was to be co-opted into the Hindu fold under upper-caste leadership, neutralizing its potential for independent political assertion.

Thus, Hindu communalism served as a politically acceptable cover for caste consolidation. The public rhetoric of “Hindu unity” masked the deeper project of Brahminical social control. While the Congress appeared ambiguous on caste reform, the RSS sought to transform Hinduism’s internal contradictions into an ideological resource, presenting caste hierarchy as “functional diversity” within a single civilisational organism.

 

Strategy to deal with dual threats

Mainstream historiography’s silence on the caste dimension of the RSS’s origin is itself revealing. However, the RSS’s birth in 1925 was not merely a reaction to communal disturbances but the culmination of a dual anxiety: first, the communal threat of Muslim political ascendancy after the Lucknow Pact and Khilafat movement; and second, the caste threat posed by the growing mobilization of the Depressed Classes demanding rights and representation. Hedgewar’s innovation, if one may use that term for a deeply regressive enterprise, lay in fusing these two anxieties into a single ideological framework. Hindu nationalism was crafted to mobilize lower castes against Muslims while simultaneously deflecting their mobilization against caste oppression. This dual function explains several otherwise puzzling features of the RSS’s early trajectory: its abstention from the independence movement, rife as it was with social contradictions; its exclusive focus on Hindu unity without any challenge to caste hierarchy; and its secretive, tightly disciplined organization that managed caste internally while projecting external solidarity.

For the Brahmin elites of early 20th-century India, the rising anti-caste movements represented a far more complex and insidious challenge than Muslim political mobilization. The Muslim “threat” could be handled through familiar communal strategies – invoking religious identity, inflaming fears of external domination, and rallying Hindus under the pretext of defending the faith and the nation. The caste question, however, could not be managed this way. Here, the “enemy” was internal: the very people whose labor and exclusion sustained Brahminical privilege. The open defense of caste hierarchy had become untenable in an era influenced by modern, democratic, and egalitarian ideas. The upper castes were too few to maintain dominance through exclusion alone; they needed the participation, or at least the acquiescence, of the lower castes. Hence, the strategy shifted from confrontation to co-option.

The RSS was designed precisely to meet this need – to produce a disciplined, hierarchically ordered Hindu collectivity purged of caste conflict yet obedient to Brahminical leadership. Its genius lay in translating the defense of caste privilege into the idiom of national regeneration. Through daily drills, uniformed discipline, and mythic invocations of a glorious Hindu past, it sought to overwrite the politics of caste emancipation with the emotional unity of the “Hindu nation.” In doing so, it provided the perfect response to the internal crisis of Brahminism: maintaining social control not through coercion alone, but through ideological consent.

 

Conclusion: Caste, communalism, and the counter-revolution

The dual-threat thesis offers a fuller explanation of the RSS’s formation than the conventional communal narrative. Evidence suggests that the organization arose not merely in reaction to Muslim political assertion but equally, if not more, as a response to the rising tide of anti-caste mobilization. Its militarized cadre provided the means to manage both: outwardly confronting the “Muslim threat” while inwardly containing the caste question. Hindu communalism thus functioned as a respectable façade for caste consolidation.

The timing, geography, and leadership of the RSS, rooted in Brahmin-dominated Nagpur in the 1920s, align precisely with this interpretation. The organization was, in essence, a Brahminical counter-revolutionary project: an attempt to neutralize the dual dangers of Muslim assertion and lower-caste emancipation through the unifying fiction of Hindu nationalism. Its ideological ingenuity lay in mobilizing the oppressed against an external “other” while leaving internal hierarchies untouched.

To understand this origin is to see why the RSS has never genuinely opposed caste oppression despite its rhetoric of Hindu unity, and why its vision of national integration continually depends on the invention of new enemies – first Muslims, then Christians, now “urban Naxals.” The denial of caste remains the hidden foundation of its politics. Recovering this suppressed genealogy is, therefore, not merely an act of historical correction but a political necessity: it reminds us that the true revolutionary challenge to the Indian social order has always come from within, from those who refused to remain untouchable.

 

 

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