Can a fractured civilization be restored? Only three groups in the modern world can claim to have made a serious attempt to solve that question. All three were founded in the 1920s during an upsurge of nationalism and anticolonial sentiment that roiled their humiliated civilizations: the Chinese Communist Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Westerners tend to be familiar with the first two, but the third—despite being arguably the most successful of the three—remains largely unknown.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) translates into English as “National Volunteer Organization.” It is an innocuous description for a group that launched the world’s largest political party, Hinduism’s most prominent religious council, and India’s largest labor union, private school network, and student union. Birthed in support of “a glorious revival” of Hindu civilization, in the words of its second chief, the RSS has left its mark on virtually every facet of Indian society.
Last month, the organization’s current head, Mohan Bhagwat, made his public debut across the Anglosphere, capping off a year of expansive celebrations for the organization’s 100th anniversary. The substance of his addresses could not have been more benign—extolling the importance of sustainability, compassion, and universality of truth. But the engagements were far from smooth. In New York, where he addressed roughly 5,000 people at Madison Square Garden, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was pressed to cancel the event and called the RSS’s vision “exclusionary” and its rise “incredibly troubling.” A U.S. federal commission that has sought sanctions against the organization asked that Bhagwat’s visa be revoked. Ahead of his Toronto appearance, nearly 270 organizations petitioned the Canadian government to bar him from the country and to mull over designating the RSS a terrorist group. In London, activists lobbied the mayor to boycott all of his events. To those familiar with the organization, the uproar was predictable. But to everyone else—the overwhelming majority of the West—the organization continued to go unnoticed.
The RSS’s goal is to train men physically and intellectually in Hindu nationalism, a worldview that asserts the primacy of the Hindu tradition and the need for it to take a more muscular approach to the world. This takes place primarily through a network of tens of thousands of daily gatherings called shakhas that include a combination of patriotic songs, ideology classes, physical games, and exercises across India. With a network of parallel organizations in more than 40 countries, the closest analogue might be something like a more ideological Boy Scouts—if the Boy Scouts had become the backbone of a mass political, social, and cultural movement bending the arc of Western civilization.
The celebrations of the organization’s 100th anniversary beginning last October underscore how the RSS grew from an obscure clique into a force that reordered Hindu society. Many of the top-ranking officials of India’s government today, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, began their careers by taking monklike vows required of RSS community organizers, forswearing marriage and wealth. Prior to taking the vows, Modi abandoned a very short-lived marriage that local tradition dictated he enter when he was 18, despite his misgivings.
At a minimum, the group can safely claim to be the most influential organization in the world that most educated Westerners have never heard of, though it is indispensable for understanding India. It is an instructive experiment in civilizational renewal.
Order From Decay
The RSS’s ascent is remarkable in part because of its backwater origins. The founder, a Brahmin medical doctor named Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, founded the organization by inviting young men around his neighborhood to his family’s house in Nagpur, a third tier city in central India, for regular meetings. In what must have seemed a quixotic ambition at the time, his stated purpose was nothing less than to “organise and make our Hindu Society so powerful that no power on earth will dare cast an evil eye upon it.”
Like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Chinese Communist Party, its early founders stood well outside the ruling classes. All three had to face moments of tremendous social acceleration as the gigantic populations they represented reckoned with the need to compete with the Western world’s technological superiority. All three organizations were simultaneously modernizing and traditionalist—they sought to revive the civilizational genius that they believed fueled their respective golden ages, even as they worked to strengthen their social, political, and technological might through modernizing means.
All three also quickly faced severe repression from governing authorities. In the RSS’s case, the group was outlawed in 1948 in the wake of Gandhi’s murder—his assassin was a former RSS member. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi banned the organization again in 1975 amid a broader targeting of many of her political opponents, but despite the repeated imprisonment of its leadership and the enduring stigma of its association with Gandhi’s murderer, the RSS today is remaking the whole of India, and its cadres operate at the highest levels of Indian politics.
This compares favorably with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose offshoots may have spread from Egypt to have an appreciable presence in politics and social work across much of the Islamic world, especially in more educated, modern middle-class populations. But they have largely failed to hold political power, and have struggled to compete with more radical Islamist groups—not to mention contain the militancy within their own ranks. The extremism within and outside of the Brotherhood has hamstrung many of the efforts to productively consolidate the Muslim world into an effective civilizational revivalist movement.
True, the Chinese Communist Party captured the Chinese state early and has ruled for many decades, but that “success” can be misleading: much of the CCP’s consolidation of power only came off the back of rival nationalist forces that bore the brunt of fighting against Japanese invaders, only to have their victory hijacked by the communists who exploited their weakened position. In building its rule, the CCP also enjoyed substantial Soviet support to consolidate its reign over a population that already had a deep tradition of a strong central state authority.
Having taken the state, it also compressed modernization into a series of coercive campaigns that repeatedly tore apart the society it was supposed to be rejuvenating due to disastrous policies like the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, or One-Child Policy—damage the party is still, under Xi, failing to repair. The party still fears its own people more than anything else, spending more on internal security than its military, and it is this fear that explains the draconian measures taken to ensure public order during crises like the Tiananmen Square protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, for example.
The RSS, by contrast, is unique in having overcome considerable opposition with little external support, especially given the lack of a strong tradition of political centralization across India. In its first decades, the organization spread into virtually every geographic corner of India as a decidedly social, rather than political, organization. Later on, it began to sprout service projects and spin-off organizations that encompassed all facets of Indian society, spanning themes like health, religion, farming, women’s empowerment, veteran affairs, and family values. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which, at 140 million members, is the largest political party in history, is a child of the RSS and only one among its many organizations that are collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, or “Organization Family.”
This is not to say that the RSS has driven as substantial a transformation for India as the CCP has for China, of course. China’s economic and social transformation since 1949 obviously exceeds India’s. But it is impossible to compare outcomes between the two, given that the CCP has ruled for almost eight consecutive decades in an all-powerful single-party state, compared to only 12 years of consecutive political preeminence for Hindu nationalists in a much more decentralized, weak state, after a much more organic and peaceful process of modernization.
Claims that China’s harsh methods were the secret to China’s growing economic dominance over India are clearly misguided, given that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all grew their economies considerably faster and to a greater degree than China, without the need for destructive interventions that still haunt their people. The RSS, in its century-long campaign for social support from the bottom-up, may well be creating the conditions needed to implement the hard economic reforms needed for India to find alternatives to Chinese economic dominance and become a global power. For the overwhelming majority of the world that is unlikely to be co-opted by a Leninist party state, and whose societies must therefore be won over, the RSS’s model of success is more impressive and transferable.
Consolidating The Hindus
Much of the RSS’s growth, then and now, has come by riding the same wave of modernization it sought to channel. As inherited religious authority, local mutual aid, hereditary occupations, and other traditional village structures eroded throughout the twentieth century, the RSS found a country full of Indians losing the social architecture their parents had relied on.
Their core model centers around male-only daily gatherings to build the character of Hindus through a combination of ideological classes, games, songs, and martial exercises. The camp-like atmosphere of these shakhas cultivates an ethos of nationalistic service and intense fraternal bonds around a shared vision of Hindu civilization. The RSS’s 83,000 chapters are led by a combination of thousands of lay volunteers and a corps of devoted full-time operatives called pracharaks, who often join as children and later vow to neither marry nor accumulate wealth to serve the organization and nation, drawing on Hinduism’s ancient renunciant traditions.
These shakhas spread along the railways that integrated colonial India, becoming substitute kin networks in cities full of strangers. The RSS’s spin-off organizations multiplied after independence, meeting the country wherever it was changing fastest—often among students, industrial labor, and farmers—as well as absorbing the rising professional classes—engineers, doctors, civil servants, entrepreneurs as these classes were taking shape. As new communications technologies appeared, from cassette tapes to satellite television, the organization proved adept at using each to its advantage, and so the BJP’s electoral consolidation arrived alongside the smartphone, cheap mobile data, and WhatsApp.
This core model acts as a vast talent identification and development pipeline. Daily shakhas in tens of thousands of locations across India give the organization intimate exposure to a far larger pool of young Indians than any university, party, or corporation could reach—particularly in the small towns and rural districts that have historically lain outside the elite-formation circuits of metropolitan India. Promising recruits are identified, drawn deeper into the network, and tested in progressively more demanding roles. Modi himself is a tea seller’s son from a small Gujarati town, identified early through the shakha system. He was channeled into the student wing for his organizing and public-speaking abilities, and only later loaned out to the BJP.
That the network of organizations the RSS founded has become such a source of its influence is ironic, as the RSS’s leadership was initially very reluctant to move beyond its founding mandate of character formation—skeptical most of all about engaging with politics. The RSS’s founder scrupulously avoided sanctioning political activism, even for Hindu nationalist causes. His successor, the spiritually inclined M. S. Golwalkar, a former lawyer and zoology lecturer who had briefly abandoned both to become a monk, compared politics to “a woman of the multitude” for its fickleness, and believed that it was best for virtuous individuals to avoid the sector altogether.
It was only after the first ban on the RSS in 1948 that Golwalkar began to seriously consider political involvement out of necessity, and dispatched some of the organization’s most promising volunteers to take up party roles. In the mid-twentieth century, it began building a handful of spin-off, mission-specific institutions targeted at particularly influential sectors of society, launching student, labor, and religious organizations. Since the 1980s, the RSS has encouraged entrepreneurial civic organization, encouraging its cadres to go out and build institutions to address society’s needs as they encounter them.
One recent study mapped more than 2,500 organizations birthed out of the RSS’s network, spanning everything from blood banks to publishing houses to yoga centers. Most of these initiatives only ever become “RSS-inspired” projects or groups, not formally affiliated with the RSS. But some, usually after an incubation period, are formally absorbed into the RSS’s umbrella of affiliated organizations. The list of activities and organizations undertaken by both formally and informally linked groups continues to evolve by design, with the intent of addressing the changing needs of a rapidly transforming nation.
Another secret to the RSS’s success is the flexible model it evolved for managing the complexity and scale of the Sangh Parivar. The RSS grants a high degree of autonomy to all of the organizations that spring up from it and permits divergences among them on most issues. Its labor-focused organizations often oppose the BJP’s economic liberalization efforts. Competing RSS-rooted organizations vie over whether it is better to convert Indian Muslims back to Hinduism or acculturate them into Hindu traditions as Muslims. And while some organizations champion Hindi as a unified national language, others defend the importance of local and regional languages.
The RSS’s mainstream may have a predominant view on many of these issues, but the organization is reluctant to take an official stance until its affiliates reach a high degree of consensus, often after decades of deliberation. This allows ample space for disagreements—and a much broader tent than would otherwise be possible. Because the RSS itself is not a political organization, it does not need to take stances as rapidly as a political party, allowing it to hold opposing factions on one issue together in tension, while building consensus between them elsewhere.
The RSS maintains unity by loaning its most dedicated monklike pracharaks, like Modi, to work in high-level management positions across its many organizations, ensuring fraternal bonds between each organization and the RSS, and some level of ideological consistency. The RSS also organizes regular representative forums for all the member organizations of the Organization Family to coordinate on policy issues at the city, state, and national level. The ruling BJP participates in these forums, lending each of these organizations a certain parapolitical weight.
The cumulative effect has been the creation, over decades, of a new counter-elite. Many of the most powerful figures in contemporary India did not come from the families, schools, or networks that produced the old, Anglicized Indian National Congress establishment. Contemporary India’s home and defense ministers are cases in point, as are the chief ministers of several of India’s largest states: Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. They came up through the RSS’s talent networks, often from places that the legacy elite never encountered, and often retained habits of austerity and vernacular fluency that their predecessors lacked.
Projecting Power
To assess the power the RSS can expect to wield in the decades ahead, it’s worth starting with its limitations. The first is that the organization’s rise has been mired in controversy, both domestically and internationally. As a stridently Hindu-first project, critics allege that it relegates India’s massive Muslim and Christian minorities to second-class citizenship, a charge buttressed by reports of the frequency and brutality of violence against those minorities in areas where the RSS’s Hindu nationalist message is most popular. Some say that the RSS often has a direct hand in these attacks, which it denies. The organization has never shaken its association with Gandhi’s murderer, who subscribed to a form of Hindu nationalism, despite his claim that he left the RSS to pursue a more active political approach to defending the Hindu cause.
Accusations of violence committed by members of the RSS or its affiliates point to the organization’s martial displays as proof of its militancy, but must also reckon with the fact that the RSS has never encouraged the use of firearms, even when many other groups—such as Bengal’s revolutionary societies and the Muslim League National Guard—did in its early decades, when violence was much more common across the subcontinent. Persistent claims that the organization subtly reinforces caste are hard to square with its pronounced emphasis on breaking down caste divisions among Hindus, including the requirement that members avoid use of caste titles during RSS functions, that they serve food for one another, and that they clean latrines—traditionally forbidden, impure acts for high castes.
Broadly speaking, these controversies orbit around the organization’s greatest limitation: with some notable exceptions, it has not yet found a way to integrate India’s sizable Christian and Muslim minorities into its vision, creating a major fault line in its project for Indian society. f Religious minorities make up roughly a fifth of India’s population—15 percent Muslim and about 2 percent Christian as of 2020, with Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains accounting for most of the remainder, according to Pew. Pew’s 2015 projections, the most recent available, put Hindus at about 77 percent of India by 2050 and Muslims at 18 percent. In absolute numbers, India’s 213 million Muslims are among the three largest Muslim populations in the world, alongside Indonesia’s and Pakistan’s. Tensions between India’s Hindu majority and such sizable minorities have the potential for severe escalation domestically, with international reverberations from India’s Muslim-majority neighbors and the Christian-majority United States, India’s second-largest trading partner.
It can also be tempting to overstate the RSS’s political power. The RSS stood up the BJP and continues to play an influential role in guiding it—rumor has it that the chief of the RSS was pivotal in choosing Narendra Modi as the BJP’s candidate for prime minister, for instance. Since Modi’s election, the RSS chief’s annual address has been aired on national television. But the ties between the BJP and the RSS are ultimately informal. The RSS expects and encourages the BJP to attract as wide a base as possible, including by appealing to those—often by caste—who would not otherwise be sympathetic to the RSS. The RSS’s membership is purported to be about 5 million, which is massive for a volunteer NGO, but only a small slice of India’s 1.4 billion people and less than 4 percent of the BJP’s stated membership.
Modi and the BJP’s success has also changed the center of gravity in the Hindu nationalist movement, precipitating a renegotiation of power between it and the RSS. That dynamic has ebbed and flowed. Rumors that the BJP began to assert greater independence from RSS leadership were followed by stories about the BJP’s demonstrated dependence on the RSS’s grassroots presence to strengthen its election campaigns.
Despite continuing controversy and an evolving relationship with its most powerful offspring, there is little doubt that the RSS will continue to reshape India as it rises to become one of the world’s largest economies. However its influence over the BJP evolves, it is very unlikely to lose its guiding role altogether, and even opposition parties have started to emphasize Hindu identity, dubbed as “soft Hindutva,” to win votes—a testament to the success of the RSS in becoming an upstream force in Indian culture.
Beyond India
What the RSS has built is worth taking seriously beyond India. At a moment of significant technological change and deepening uncertainty about the trajectory of Western civilization, the Hindu nationalist movement offers a working example of how a civilizational tradition can be carried through technological flux rather than swept away by it, by ordinary people who started with limited inherited advantages.
One lesson is that the RSS did not try to redirect the existing elite. Many organizations concerned with the trajectory of Western civilization have spent decades attempting to recapture the universities, the legacy media, and the professional credentialing bodies—on the theory that whoever holds those institutions controls cultural production in general. The RSS declined that contest. It built a parallel ecosystem from the ground up instead, with its own schools, service organizations, publishing houses, and talent pipelines. By the time that ecosystem began to interface seriously with establishment institutions, it had its own leaders to send into them. Building is more effective than capturing, and a movement willing to operate outside the existing prestige hierarchies can produce a competitive one of its own within a generation or two.
Over time, the RSS has been able to identify capable young men from places the old elite never looked, develop them across decades, and move them between roles as their gifts and the needs of the movement evolved. Most Western institutions claiming to identify and develop talent are actually just sorting candidates who have already self-selected through legacy filters: prestigious universities and jobs, predominantly. A movement that wants to produce a serious counter-elite has to do the searching itself, and has to be prepared to develop what it finds.
The shakhas give young men a sense of historical purpose, bodily discipline, and a fraternity of peers committed to the same project, beginning in childhood. Crucially, it also calls these men to austerity and sacrifice, helping to curb the degeneration that often comes with success. Celibate pracharaks don’t even have heirs to pass their resources on to. In a hierarchical culture where family dynasties dominate business and politics, the RSS’s constraints offer reassurance to the masses and inspiration to its followers.
The fact that it provides these things to millions of young Indian men at a moment when young men across most modern societies are disoriented and disenfranchised is itself instructive. The institutions that win the twenty-first century may be the ones that can offer something to belong to and something challenging to overcome, be it physical or spiritual development.
Perhaps most important is how little of a clear, conventional ideology the movement holds. While it holds a view of Hindu civilizational consciousness, a particular Hindu reading of Indian history, and a culturally conservative outlook, it has no settled economic doctrine, no fixed religious program, no theory of the state, and no canonical text. In this, it differs from twentieth-century vanguard movements, which typically required converts to subscribe to elaborate ideological apparatuses before being trusted with responsibility.
The RSS asks only for a shared civilizational sensibility and a willingness to work, and lets the program emerge from its network. The looseness of the vision is what lets the Sangh Parivar absorb diverse people, ideas, and projects within the Hindu fold, and gives it room to keep evolving into whatever India becomes next.
Its success also suggests that, contrary to the prevailing beliefs of today’s political scientists, there is strong salience to the idea of civilization at a popular level—and that recognition of it can be the basis for developing civil society. Given its heterogeneity on so many social and economic issues, it would be difficult to imagine the success of the RSS without channeling, and giving some structure to, a strong sense of Hindu civilization that transcends the barriers of caste, language, class, and geography. The BJP is in part the political manifestation of this growing self-awareness.
The RSS is so indigenous to India that few in the outside world have recognized its growth for what it is. But it is succeeding in its vision to reorder its civilization in conditions none would have predicted it could, by methods almost no one outside India has bothered to consider. Whatever one thinks of its goals, the rest of the world ought to be taking note of its methods.