RSS at 100: The next phase of its evolution should make it more open

As it turns 100, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) could look back with some satisfaction at having achieved its avowed objective of unifying and awakening the Hindus when it was founded on the Vijayadashami day (September 27) in 1925. That it is also at its mightiest, with its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), leading the government at the Centre for the past 11 years, and in over a dozen states, and with a former RSS pracharak as the country’s third-longest-serving Prime Minister, is  evidence of the self-proclaimed apolitical Sangh’s electoral success. 

Over the past hundred years, despite bans and a political climate that was not conducive to its survival, the RSS has continued to expand. For long on the margins of India’s academia and intellectual discourse, the RSS’ history and its icons are part of school curricula. Its affiliates — particularly the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, and  Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram — shape narratives in their respective fields of work, and through these affiliates the Sangh Parivar has a presence in all walks of life. But with great power have come new sets of responsibilities and challenges, including how it prepares its volunteers, several of whom go on to join politics, to make sense of a diverse nation, how it reshapes India’s perception in the comity of nations, and how it continues to be relevant to a younger generation of Indians. RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat’s three-day discourse at the national capital’s Vigyan Bhavan in the last week of August suggested that the Sangh’s leadership was keenly aware of the need to take the edge off some of its positions.

 

Beyond its target of increasing the number of its “shakhas”, or locations where it holds its morning meetings, from 85,000 to 100,000 and enrol three-four  million swayamsevaks, or “active volunteers”, to take its number of such volunteers to 10 million, the Sangh has to address questions on admitting women to its “shakhas”, although it argues that it has women-specific Rashtra Sevika Samitis, and its views on people’s sexual orientations, food choices, and how it views India’s minorities. As Mr Bhagwat observed in a previous series of discourses in 2018, the RSS is not dogmatic but dynamic, and pointed out that Bunch of Thoughts, by its second chief, M S Golwalkar, included speeches delivered in a particular context and could not be eternally valid.

Over the years, the Sangh has shown adaptability, but there is an increasing acknowledgement that the model needs a relook. At least since the 1981 Meenakshipuram conversions of Scheduled Castes, and the Ekatmata Yatra of 1983, which a Sangh affiliate launched in its wake, the RSS has shown the ability to adapt, particularly on the question of addressing the Hindu caste system. On the question of minorities, especially Muslims, the RSS is of the view that Indians could be of any religious persuasion, but the important aspect is whether they honour the ethos of the country. But its ambivalence on whether it might support its affiliates in launching campaigns to “reclaim” temples at Mathura and Varanasi, and flagging of demographic change as the next big threat, indicates that it is unprepared to let go of its penchant to villainise a particular community. As the RSS enters the next phase of its evolution, its challenge would be to convince its swayamsevaks to imbibe the magnanimity required of a true cultural organisation.