RSS at 100: Christophe Jaffrelot on Hindutva’s Long Social Project

The RSS turned 100 last year, having grown from a small organisation in Nagpur into a vast network of shakhas and affiliated bodies spread across India. The scale of that expansion helps explain why Christophe Jaffrelot has long argued that the RSS’s central project lies deeper than electoral politics. Its ambition, in his reading, is to reshape Hindu society itself. The RSS reported more than 83,000 daily shakhas across over 51,000 locations in 2025, alongside a much larger network of weekly and monthly activities. As a political scientist and sociologist, Jaffrelot has studied that project for more than three decades, from the Hindu nationalist movement’s early electoral experiments to Gujarat in 2002 to the consolidation of Narendra Modi’s India. Excerpts from the interview:

You have tracked the RSS for 30 years, from the Nagpur shakha to Gujarat 2002 and Delhi 2020. Historian Tanika Sarkar once said that the “RSS bites deep into society”. Where does that depth draw blood today? In the capture of the state, or in the capture of the neighbour?

The last two sentences of my first book, The Hindu Nationalist Movementand Indian Politics, published by Penguin in 1996 but never reprinted after 2014, said (and I summarise) that the BJP was not in power, but the Sangh Parivar was “constantly strengthening the influence of the RSS combination. The trend, if sustained, will help the latter crystallise a Hindu identity which, in the long term, could challenge the durability of India’s multicultural society”—a prediction most people dismissed when I presented my thesis in seminars. That has always been my main argument: the RSS is primarily interested in conquering society by developing its network of shakhas and a nebula of subsidiaries. Power is not a priority, because the state is an artificial creation compared with the Hindu Samaj, which carries organicist qualities inherited from the characteristics of the caste system. The objective of the RSS is to transform the Hindu Samaj into the Hindu Rashtra by reshaping the psyche of this collective entity.

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The RSS spent decades building influence below the radar through shakhas, pracharaks, and affiliated organisations. Since 2014, the BJP has exercised power through the state, while the Sangh continues its work through social networks. How do these two forms of power work together? Who writes the script?

Since 2014, the Hindu nationalist movement has indeed been a Janus-like figure: it controls the state—that is its official face—and it also controls what I call the “deeper state”, the unofficial face of power. The former is embodied in the police forces, the latter in the vigilante groups. They are two sides of the same coin or, to use another image, one is the part of the iceberg we see and the other, much bigger, is the mass below the waterline. But they work in tandem: the police remain passive when vigilantes resort to illegal methods such as lynchings, and sometimes even let the gau rakshaks use the vans of the cow-protection squads, while the vigilantes help the police—sometimes wearing parts of their uniforms. There is a continuum between these two forces forming a combination.

You ask who writes the script for them. The ideological training of the BJP-ruled State and of the vigilantes is the same, and you do not necessarily need a control room in charge of micro-management: they have been shaped the same way and can work in concert without any coordinating body. The RSS used to be that body, certainly, but today Narendra Modi does not answer to Nagpur, and on this front it makes no difference.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, former Sangh general secretary Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, and Union minister Nitin Gadkari, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the Smruti Mandir in Reshimbagh, the administrative headquarters of the RSS. | Photo Credit: @narendramodi/X

For 100 years the RSS sold itself as the incorruptible, khaki-wearing ascetic, which stands above power, money, and family. After 12 years of BJP rule, what has happened to that moral capital? Has the movement’s relationship with wealth and corporate power changed?

This is one of the most dramatic transformations of the RSS: pracharaks used to be ascetic, and they drew their prestige from a sense of sacrifice, and the Jana Sangh used to be a party of shopkeepers. Today, BJP leaders have no inhibition about wearing luxury goods and helping billionaires control the economy, the media and much else. You compare this with the Congress, but under Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao, and even Manmohan Singh, magnates such as G.D. Birla, the Bajajs, and even Dhirubhai Ambani did not wield as much power as Mukesh Ambani and, even more strikingly, Gautam Adani, whose rise is truly unprecedented.

Modi’s India exemplifies a form of oligarchy far more pronounced than during the licence raj, and this trend runs alongside the kind of social inequality that has taken us back to the British Raj, as Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel have shown. As a result, as you yourself suggest, the moral status the BJP drew on during the Anna Hazare movement is evaporating quickly: the BJP can no longer claim to be “a party with a difference”, because you cannot be that rich without being at least a little bit corrupt—something the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) is capitalising on today.

Savarkar and Golwalkar treated power as an illusion. According to them, the state is a maya or illusion; the Sangh is eternal. How does that idea survive when the BJP has accumulated unprecedented state power? Has Modi changed the RSS’ relationship with political power?

Power may not be an illusion—it helps the RSS achieve its goals, and conquering power is the best guarantee that the movement will not be banned—but, as I said, power is less a priority than the conquest, or conversion, of society. Power comes and goes with electoral cycles; society can be transformed in a sustained manner. Originally, the RSS preferred to remain outside party politics. Hedgewar and Golwalkar resisted the Hindu Mahasabha’s request for help, even after Savarkar became its leader in 1937. After Independence, Golwalkar longed to play the role of raj guru, counsellor to the ruler—a role Deoras reiterated to Mrs Gandhi when the RSS was banned during the Emergency.

But as early as the 1940s, a group of pracharaks saw the need to play a role in politics, for the reason I have just mentioned—especially after the ban that followed Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, when the RSS needed some representation in Parliament and in politics at large. But the priority remained socio-psychological reform, because for the RSS the state is an artificial construct compared with society, which it regards as a harmonious, ideal organism, as Deendayal Upadhyay explains in his Integral Humanism idea. It harks back to the valorisation of the caste system under the garb of varna vyavastha and the Brahminical ethos at large: what matters most is the perpetuation of this order, which is the core of the Sanatana Dharma, the eternal religion. Hence the emphasis on samskaras in the RSS.

RSS workers at the RSS Visakha Mahanagar meeting at Andhra University grounds, in Visakhapatnam, on February 05, 2023. | Photo Credit: V. Raju

Your book, Modi’s India, argues that the BJP has moved from being an “upper caste” party to one that actively co-opts OBC communities, while the RSS retains a Brahminical social vision. Is the BJP using OBC representation to advance a Brahminical project?

It has always done that. The co-option of OBCs was not intended to do more for the “backward” but, on the contrary, to divide them and defuse their mobilisation. The Mandir-versus-Mandal story says it all: the moment low-caste groups—in 1990, Dalits and OBCs had joined hands under the aegis of Kanshi Ram, for instance—“upper” castes and dominant castes (non-OBC Shudras, such as Patels and Jats) turned to the BJP to defuse that mobilisation by promoting a common enemy: the Muslim.

The Sangh Parivar had used this scapegoat before, in Gujarat, in reaction to the KHAM [Kshatriyas, Harijans (Dalits), Adivasis, and Muslims] coalition. Agitating for the Ram Mandir was also a way to make Dalits and OBCs Sanskritise. The BJP would have invented Narendra Modi if he did not exist—in some ways, that is what happened, because he epitomised the perfect alchemy: an OBC who behaved in the most Brahminical way. Interestingly, he began emphasising his OBC background only after he started canvassing outside Gujarat for the prime ministership.

You documented India’s “silent revolution”, in which lower castes gained political power through the ballot. Has Hindutva redirected some of that mobilisation towards religious identity, giving Dalits and OBCs a common enemy in Muslims?

Yes, and this is not unique to India: in many countries today, national-populists invest in identity politics to mobilise the sons of the soil against minorities or migrants, diverting mass attention from material issues. The strategy is even more effective where religion can be invoked—is there anything more powerful than faith? But Modi’s policy is more sophisticated: he does give something to the poor, but at the last minute, during the election campaign, after people have experienced a trajectory of impoverishment that makes the support feel vital. It is a new form of clientelism that reinforces the impact of identity politics and the pride in being Hindu that Modi has communicated to the masses.

This form of populist welfare is very different from what Manmohan Singh did with the MGNREGA, a scheme that, on the contrary, helped the poor gain some autonomy. This strategy may be reaching its limits today: if the poor have little time and energy to agitate for jobs, the middle-class students of the CJP are bringing socio-economic issues into political debate, and it may be difficult to make identity politics prevail as powerfully as before—except in the event of a war with Pakistan or a terrorist attack, of course.

You called the Gujarat violence of 2002 a state-sponsored pogrom. How should we understand the more recent use of municipal machinery to demolish homes of people from the minority communities, especially Muslims? Is this a new version of the same relationship between state power and communal politics?

You cannot compare a pogrom with the use of municipal JCBs against Muslims, but what the two have in common is the role of BJP officials, whether Chief Ministers or Mayors, because the state has been communalised too, and laws have been passed that legalise forms of symbolic and physical violence. The official state and the deeper state created by the vigilantes of the Sangh Parivar form a continuum whose actors follow the same ideology and report to the same authority. That was obvious in Gujarat under Modi, and we saw the same process take shape during his first two terms as Prime Minister.

What is new, perhaps, is the growing assertiveness of the actors of the deeper state vis-à-vis the official state: when policemen try to protect Muslims from vigilantes, they too are attacked, as happened to Subodh Kumar Singh in Bulandshahr. India may have reached a point where civil servants—bureaucrats, IPS officers, and others—see their conduct dictated by the deeper state, either out of fear or because they recognise the RSS as the main power centre.

Residents look at the remains of their burnt houses after the communal riots in Ahmedabad in 2002. | Photo Credit: PTI

The BJP lost its majority in the Lok Sabha in 2024, yet centralisation has continued. Is the prospect of losing electoral power making the Modi government more dependent on authoritarian methods?

The 2024 election was a wake-up call for the BJP, signalling that it could lose power—something neither Narendra Modi nor Amit Shah can contemplate dispassionately, given their past record in Gujarat. Leaders who are no longer certain of winning elections but want to retain power at any cost can either suspend the electoral process, as Mrs Gandhi did in 1975, or neutralise their rivals, as Erdoğan has done in Turkey, where opposition leaders are jailed. But leaders who follow such strategies cannot then claim to be democrats—something Narendra Modi keeps doing, to cultivate the image of “the world’s largest democracy” and India’s soft power.

So, elections have to take place, but on a very uneven playing field, because the media have been taken over by cronies, the BJP spends far more than other parties during campaigns, and the process is affected by tactics such as the SIR, which is eliminating large numbers of voters from groups hostile to the BJP, such as Muslims. All this amounts to a rather sophisticated brand of authoritarianism.

The BJP depends on the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Janata Dal (United) (JD(U)) to govern at the Centre. How durable do you think this arrangement is, and what does it mean for the future of regional parties and federalism?

Neutralising these two parties is fairly easy, given that in Indian politics almost every man has a price. In this case, the Centre can keep the JD(U) and the TDP content by directing resources to Bihar and Andhra Pradesh. These parties, however, are short-sighted, because the coalitions they have formed with the BJP may well seal their fate. That is what happened to the BJP’s partners in Odisha and, to a certain extent, to the Shiv Sena, which split into two factions. After Nitish leaves the scene, the BJP may well absorb the JD(U).

The decline of State parties is a major, many-sided development. It owes to the rise of the BJP, which has not only neutralised some of them in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra but has also recently dislodged another, the All India Trinamool Congress, from power. This trend strengthens the centralisation of power in India at the expense of federalism. One could argue that this happened before under the Congress too, except that before Mrs Gandhi the party was a collection of regional units, and after her it needed State parties to form large coalitions, as under Manmohan Singh, who allowed—because he had to—some decentralisation of power to flourish.

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You have written about the de-institutionalisation of courts, universities, the Election Commission of India (ECI), etc. Can elections be meaningful when the conditions of electoral competition become unequal?

Elections may not cease to matter, but the competition may become so unequal and unfair, for the reasons I have mentioned—plus the partisan conduct of the ECI—that the opposition may stop contesting in order not to legitimise a process that allows Modi to claim India is still a democracy. In Bangladesh, the opposition decided to boycott the general election, but this is not an easy decision for a party such as the Congress to make.

First, the party can still win State elections, and to control States matters both politically and financially. Second, no single party can boycott elections alone, because it would hand some constituencies to others on a plate: if opposition parties decided to boycott elections over the uneven playing field, all of them would have to do so together, and that may not happen any time soon.

Abhish K. Bose, a journalist based in Kerala, with 18 years of experience, previously worked as a staffer at The Times of India and The Deccan Chronicle-Asian Age.