Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded on the 27th of September 1925, in the city of Nagpur, by a doctor named K. B. Hedgewar. From that single founding meeting on a festival day called Vijaya Dashami, a gathering of just five men including Hedgewar and four Hindu Mahasabha leaders, grew what is today described as the world's largest far-right organisation by membership. It operates through a network of nearly 85,000 branches. It spawned the ruling political party of India. And it did all of this while, for most of its first quarter-century, refusing to fly the Indian national flag.
How does an organisation built on the premise of Hindu unity become so deeply intertwined with the modern Indian state? Why did it stand aside during the independence movement that freed the country it claims to champion? And what exactly happens each morning at the tens of thousands of neighbourhood gatherings where men and boys train in martial arts and recite nationalist stories? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.
K. B. Hedgewar was not a man who arrived at his convictions by accident. His mentor, B. S. Moonje, a Tilakite politician from Nagpur, sent him to Calcutta specifically to study medicine and to absorb the revolutionary techniques of Bengali secret societies. Hedgewar joined the Anushilan Samiti, an anti-British underground group, eventually reaching its inner circle. The secretive, cell-based methods he learned there became the organisational template for the RSS itself.
After reading Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva, published in 1923, and then meeting Savarkar in person at Ratnagiri prison in 1925, Hedgewar's sense of purpose sharpened into something specific. He believed that a small number of British colonialists had managed to rule the vast Indian subcontinent because Hindus lacked unity, courage, and what he called civic character. His solution was relentlessly practical: recruit energetic young Hindu men, dress them in a uniform that deliberately echoed the Indian Imperial Police, and train them with bamboo staffs, swords, javelins, and daggers.
Hindu ceremonies featured prominently in early RSS life, not primarily for devotion but to create a sense of shared history rooted in what Hedgewar called India's "glorious past." He ran weekly sessions of baudhik, or ideological education, built around questions about the Hindu nation and its heroes, especially the warrior king Shivaji. The saffron flag of Shivaji, the Bhagwa Dhwaj, became the emblem of the new organisation.
By 1927, Hedgewar had introduced the pracharak system: full-time missionaries who renounced family life and professional careers to spread the RSS network. He drew on a nationalist reinterpretation of Hindu asceticism, asking volunteers to become, in effect, secular sadhus devoted to the cause. The first pracharaks fanned out from Nagpur to establish shakhas at universities and across Maharashtra. One, Appaji Joshi, went to Sialkot in Punjab; others went to DAV colleges in Rawalpindi and Lahore. That geographic ambition, building a national grassroots grid rather than winning a single election, has remained the organisation's defining characteristic.
The 1920s were a decade of fracturing communal relations across India, and those fractures shaped the RSS from the start. The Khilafat movement, which mobilised Muslim communities around the fate of the Ottoman Caliphate, had allied with Gandhi's non-cooperation campaign. When the British government refused to meet the movement's demands, some Muslims directed their anger toward Hindus instead. The Moplah rebellion of August 1921 in Malabar produced what was widely described as mass violence against Hindu communities, and a cycle of inter-communal riots followed across India for years.
In 1923, riots broke out in Nagpur itself. Hedgewar described them as "Muslim riots" and concluded that Hindus had been "totally disorganised and panicky." That interpretation is disputed, but its political consequence was concrete: it drove Hedgewar to build an organisation explicitly directed, in the words of later scholars, against Muslims.
By 1927, with around a hundred swayamsevaks enrolled, Hedgewar staged a direct provocation. He led a Hindu religious procession playing drums past a mosque, defying the local convention against music near places of Muslim worship. What followed were three days of riots in the Mahal area of Nagpur. Muslim households left the area in large numbers to escape the violence. RSS accounts framed the events as "Hindu self-defence" against "Muslim aggressiveness"; observers such as Tapan Basu and colleagues noted the framing itself as revealing.
The Hindu Mahasabha's influence on this trajectory is rarely acknowledged, as the source notes, but it was substantial. The Mahasabha president Madan Mohan Malaviya had argued in 1923 that unity between Hindus and Muslims would only come when Hindus were strong enough that the "rowdy section among the Mahomedans" understood they could not rob or dishonour Hindus with impunity. Savarkar's Hindutva ideology, which drew a parallel between the Hindu and Jewish peoples as coherent racial-national units, gave Hedgewar the intellectual scaffolding for what he was building.
When India's independence movement reached its most intense phase, the RSS was not part of it. Hedgewar himself participated personally in Gandhi's Salt March in April 1930 but explicitly directed the organisation to stay out. The RSS celebrated the Indian National Congress's Independence Day on the 26th of January 1930 but avoided it in subsequent years. The Congress Tricolor was shunned. In 1934, the Congress passed a resolution prohibiting its members from joining the RSS.
M. S. Golwalkar, who took over as RSS chief in 1940 after Hedgewar's death, deepened this stance. He called anti-British nationalism a "reactionary view" with disastrous effects on the freedom struggle. He complied with wartime restrictions imposed by the colonial government, even formally announcing the dissolution of the RSS military department. British authorities rewarded this cooperation with official approval: the Bombay government noted approvingly that the RSS had "scrupulously kept itself within the law" during the 1942 Quit India Movement and had always shown willingness to comply with government orders. The Home Department in Delhi did not regard the RSS as a law-and-order problem.
Golwalkar later acknowledged openly that the RSS did not join the Quit India agitation, admitting that this stance had earned the organisation a reputation for inaction and empty rhetoric. The organisation equally declined to join the Royal Indian Navy mutiny against the British in 1946. Biographer C. P. Bhishikar wrote that Hedgewar had talked only about Hindu organisations and avoided any direct comment on the colonial government.
One episode cut against this pattern. In 1954, RSS members Raja Wakankar and Nana Kajrekar visited the Portuguese-ruled enclave of Dadra and Nagar Haveli multiple times to map the terrain and build local contacts. In April of that year, the RSS formed a coalition with the National Movement Liberation Organisation and the Azad Gomantak Dal. On the night of the 21st of July, volunteer teams captured key territories, and by the 11th of August the Portuguese forces had surrendered to Indian border police at Udava. A native administration was installed under Appasaheb Karmalkar of the NMLO. The following year, RSS leader Jagannathrao Joshi led agitation in Goa demanding an end to Portuguese rule; he was imprisoned by Portuguese police, and on the 15th of August 1955 the Portuguese authorities opened fire on protesters, killing around thirty unarmed civilians.
On the 30th of January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead by Nathuram Godse, a member of the RSS. The organisation was banned on the 4th of February 1948. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had already written to provincial governors the previous December that the RSS was "in the nature of a private army" proceeding "on the strictest Nazi lines."
During the court proceedings, Godse claimed he had left the RSS in 1946. The Justice Kapur Commission, whose report India's Ministry of Home Affairs published in 1970, concluded that the RSS as an organisation could not be held responsible for the murder. But Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, who had called RSS activists "patriots who love their country" just weeks before the assassination, changed course sharply after Gandhi's death. In his reply letter to Golwalkar dated the 11th of September 1948, Patel acknowledged that RSS volunteers had protected Hindu refugees during Partition violence but stated that the organisation's speeches were "full of communal poison" and that its possession of a private army inside India "cannot be permitted as a potential danger to the State." He also noted, pointedly, that the organisation's provincial heads were all Maratha Brahmins.
Patel's conditions for lifting the ban were extensive: a public written constitution, a pledge of loyalty to the Indian Constitution, acceptance of the Tricolor as national flag, internal democratic elections, parental consent before enrolling minors, and a renunciation of violence and secrecy. Golwalkar launched an agitation against these demands and was re-imprisoned. Eventually a constitution was drafted and amended, though the procedure for selecting the RSS chief and the enrolment of pre-adolescents were specifically exempted from Patel's requirements. The internal democracy written into the constitution was, as scholars noted, a dead letter in practice. On the 11th of July 1949, the government lifted the ban.
A first, brief ban had actually preceded all of this. On the 24th of January 1947, the premier of Punjab Province, Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana, banned both the RSS and the Muslim National Guard simultaneously. That ban lasted four days, lifted on the 28th of January 1947.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's relationship with the symbols of the Indian republic it now helps govern was, for decades, one of open hostility. After the Tricolor was adopted as the national flag by the Constituent Assembly on the 22nd of July 1947, the RSS's English-language magazine Organiser ran an editorial titled "National Flag" demanding that the saffron Bhagwa Dhwaj be adopted instead. A subsequent Organiser piece called the Tricolor an "evil" symbol, arguing that the number three was "in itself an evil" and would have a "very bad psychological effect." Golwalkar, in his book Bunch of Thoughts, compared the choice of the Tricolor to "an intellectual vacuum."
The RSS hoisted the Indian national flag at its Nagpur headquarters on just two occasions: the 14th of August 1947 and the 26th of January 1950. After that, it stopped. In January 2001, three activists of the Rashtrapremi Yuwa Dal, including president Baba Mendhe and members Ramesh Kalambe and Dilip Chattani, entered the RSS headquarters at Reshimbagh in Nagpur and forcibly hoisted the national flag on Republic Day. Offences were registered against the trio; they were jailed and discharged by a court only in 2013, after serving eleven years. The flag-hoisting dispute was raised in Parliament. It was not until 2002, following the formation of the flag code of India, that the national flag was raised at RSS headquarters on Republic Day for the first time in fifty-two years.
The organisation was equally hostile to the Constitution of India. An Organiser editorial from the 30th of November 1949 complained that the Constitution made no reference to the ancient Hindu text Manusmriti, whose laws it described as exciting "the admiration of the world." On the 6th of February 1950, the Organiser published a piece by retired High Court Judge Sankar Subba Aiyar reaffirming Manusmriti as the rightful lawgiving authority for Hindus. In 1966, Golwalkar described the Indian Constitution in Bunch of Thoughts as "a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various Constitutions of Western countries" with "absolutely nothing" that could be called distinctly Indian.
The RSS has no formal membership rolls. Men and boys join by attending a shakha, the basic branch unit, which meets for one hour in a public space. Women are barred from joining. Estimates as of 2024 put the membership at around 4 million, though the organisation keeps no official count.
The shakha count tells a story of political fortune. From 8,500 shakhas in 1975, the number rose to 11,000 in 1977 after the Emergency ended, then to 20,000 by 1982. By 2004, more than 51,000 operated across India, but that number fell by over 10,000 after the BJP-led government lost power that same year. When the BJP returned in 2014, the count climbed back toward 40,000, reaching 51,335 by August 2015. The RSS Annual Report of 2019 counted 84,877 shakhas in total, of which nearly 59,266 ran daily and more than 17,000 ran weekly. As of 2016, Delhi alone had 1,898 shakhas, while Uttar Pradesh had more than 8,000.
At a shakha, members train in physical fitness through yoga and games, practice first aid, and hear nationalist stories. The gatherings are, in the organisation's own words, training grounds for civic awareness and community living alongside the physical and paramilitary instruction. Shakhas became constituency-based in the early 1970s, at which point their network began feeding directly into electoral operations.
The pracharak system is the nervous system connecting these branches. Around 2,500 pracharaks operate at any given time, dedicated full-time workers who have taken vows of celibacy and poverty. The most prominent former pracharaks are former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In October 2016, the RSS retired the khaki shorts its cadre had worn since 1925, replacing them with dark brown trousers worn with a white shirt and black side cap.
The Sangh Parivar, or "Sangh family," that the RSS leads includes the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad student forum, trade unions, a farmers' association, tribal welfare bodies, and educational networks including Vidya Bharati. In most cases, pracharaks were seconded from the RSS to manage these organisations in their founding years. The RSS generally endorses the BJP, though it has at times withheld endorsement when the two diverged on policy.
The RSS has also engaged in significant disaster relief. Approximately 35,000 RSS members in uniform took part in relief efforts after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake. The affiliated NGO Seva Bharati conducted operations after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, building shelters, distributing food and medical supplies, and adopting 57 children from militancy-affected areas of Jammu and Kashmir for education through the higher secondary level. During the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, former National Minorities Commission chairman Tarlochan Singh and journalist Khushwant Singh recorded that RSS activists protected members of the Sikh community.
The organisation has also faced consistent, serious criticism. Human Rights Watch has named the RSS alongside the VHP, Bajrang Dal, and BJP as parties to the Gujarat violence that followed the Godhra train burning. The Liberhan Commission's 2009 report attributed the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 to the Sangh Parivar, stating that "the blame or the credit for the entire temple construction movement at Ayodhya must necessarily be attributed" to it. Between 2003 and 2008, nine terror attacks linked to the RSS or affiliated organisations killed nearly 150 people, mostly Muslims. In September 2022, former pracharak Yashwant Shinde stated in a sworn affidavit that he had been trained to carry out false-flag attacks on mosques in Maharashtra to inflame Islamophobia, naming a former RSS national executive member and a national BJP secretary as having knowledge of the operations. India's National Investigation Agency corroborated the broader claim, stating that the bombings were intended to "create communal rift" between Hindus and Muslims. Scholars who study the RSS broadly conclude that it spreads hatred; the organisation disputes that characterisation.
Common questions
When was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh founded and by whom?
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded on the 27th of September 1925, by K. B. Hedgewar, a doctor in Nagpur, British India. The founding meeting on Vijaya Dashami day included Hedgewar and four Hindu Mahasabha leaders: B. S. Moonje, Ganesh Savarkar, L. V. Paranjpe, and B. B. Tholkar.
Did the RSS participate in the Indian independence movement?
No. The RSS actively avoided any anti-British activity throughout the independence movement. Under both Hedgewar and his successor M. S. Golwalkar, the organisation collaborated with the British colonial regime, complied with British wartime restrictions during World War II, and declined to participate in the 1942 Quit India Movement or the 1946 Royal Indian Navy mutiny. Golwalkar later openly acknowledged this stance.
Why was the RSS banned after Gandhi's assassination?
The RSS was banned on the 4th of February 1948, following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on the 30th of January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a member of the RSS. Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel stated that RSS men had distributed sweets and expressed joy after Gandhi's death, and described the organisation's speeches as "full of communal poison." The ban was lifted on the 11th of July 1949 after the RSS agreed to adopt a formal written constitution.
How many shakhas does the RSS operate and what happens at them?
The RSS Annual Report of 2019 recorded 84,877 shakhas, of which 59,266 were held daily and more than 17,000 were weekly. At a shakha, male members train in physical fitness, yoga, and martial arts, practice first aid, and hear nationalist stories. Shakhas became constituency-based in the early 1970s, at which point they also began feeding directly into electoral operations.
What is the Sangh Parivar and which organisations does it include?
The Sangh Parivar, meaning "Sangh family," is the collective of Hindutva organisations that the RSS founded and leads. It includes the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, Vidya Bharati, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, and the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, among others. In most cases, RSS pracharaks were seconded to manage these affiliated organisations in their founding years.
What was the RSS's position on the Indian national flag and Constitution?
The RSS refused to recognise the Tricolor as India's national flag after it was adopted on the 22nd of July 1947, with its magazine Organiser demanding the saffron Bhagwa Dhwaj instead. The organisation hoisted the Tricolor at its Nagpur headquarters only twice before 2002, when it finally raised the flag on Republic Day for the first time in fifty-two years. Similarly, the RSS opposed the Constitution of India, with Golwalkar describing it in 1966 as having "absolutely nothing which can be called our own" and preferring the authority of the ancient Manusmriti.
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