Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) - "National Organization of Volunteers" or "'National Patriotic Organization", also known the Sangh [the Saffron Brotherhood], is a right-wing Hindu nationalist, paramilitary, volunteer, and militant organization in India. -Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded in 1925 to mobilise Hindus. BJP was established in 1980 as the political wing of the RSS.
Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead in 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a former member of the RSS. The RSS has always distanced itself from the killing. The group was temporarily banned after the killing but subsequent probes could not find any evidence that the RSS had plotted the assassination or was aware of Godse's plans.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is an organization that aims to strengthen the Hindu community by spreading the ideology of Hindutva. The RSS draws its inspiration from European fascist movements and groups such as the Italian Fascist Party. The RSS promotes an ideal of upholding an Indian culture and its civilizational values.
The RSS treats Sikhs as part of a Hindu nation, like Jains and Buddhists, and unlike Christians and Muslims. Sikhs oppose this idea and believe their history is not about fighting Muslims. The Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of Sikhism, called for a ban on the RSS. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) passed a resolution condemning the RSS and its mission to make India a Hindu Rashtra. The SGPC perceives the RSS as a threat to all minorities.
Swami Shraddhanand, an Arya Samaj leader in north India, organised a coalition of Hindu groups which worked on the vast numbers who had accepted Islam long ago but had kept their earlier bonds and cultural practices in tact. Over a two year period, in the region around Agra and Mathura, some 163,000 were persuaded to “return” to Hinduism. The consequent anxieties among some Muslims spurred the formation of Tableeghi Jamaat, aiming to forestall future surprises. It worked among the millions throughout the subcontinent who have carried their Islamic identity lightly, urging them to become better Muslims. Similar anxieties among some Hindus came to be embodied in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and other affiliated organizations (collectively known as the Sangh Parivar) publicly claimed to respect and tolerate other religious groups; however, the RSS opposed coerced conversions from Hinduism and expressed the view that all citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation, should adhere to Hindu cultural values, which they claimed were the country's values.
India is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual democracy of more than a billion people that boasts the vibrant representation of all the world’s major religions. In this majority Hindu country with one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, the current, two-term Prime Minister is Sikh, the past president is Muslim, and the national governing alliance remains headed by a Catholic. India is the birthplace of Buddhism, the current host country to the Tibetan government-in-exile, and home to small Jewish and Parsi (Zoroastrian) communities that have lived for centuries without persecution. Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Parsi holidays are recognized as public holidays.
Nevertheless, despite this remarkable pluralism and general commitment to religious freedom, Hindu nationalist organizations retain broad popular support in many communities in India, in part because some provide needed services or function as community social organizations. Many of these organizations exist under the banner of the Sangh Parivar, a “family” of over 30 organizations that includes the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and the BJP. Sangh Parivar entities aggressively press for governmental policies to promote their Hindu nationalist agenda, and adhere in varying degrees to an ideology of Hindutva, which holds non-Hindus as foreign to India.
After a controversial 2002 non-governmental organization report described links between a Maryland-based charity and India’s RSS and other “violent and sectarian Hindu organizations,” Silicon Valley companies Cisco and Oracle suspended matching company donations to the charity. India’s central and state police and judicial apparatuses have neglected to consistently or adequately examine evidence linking Sangh Parivar entities such as the BHP, RSS, BJP, and Bajrang Dal to acts of violence.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) was founded in 1964 by a group of senior leaders from a hard-line Hindu organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to give Hindus what they believed would be a clearly defined sense of religious identity and political purpose. Its founders felt the need to present Hinduism in a rigorous though simplified form which would be comparable to most other world religions. The superiority of other faiths was believed to stem from their being far less diffuse and more uniform than Hinduism. But its critics call the VHP a hardline Hindu outfit with unmistakably close ties to its parent organisation, the extremist RSS, whose objective to ‘Hinduise’ the Indian nation, it shares.
Central to the RSS ideology has been the belief that real national unity and progress will come only when India is ‘purged’ of nonHindus, or, when members of other communities subordinate themselves ‘willingly’ to ‘Hindu superiority.’ The VHP toned down the rhetoric of Hindu supremacy and even make an occasional distinction between fellow (Muslim) citizens of the present and (Muslim) ‘marauders’ of the past.
Since the creation of the RSS, the Hindutva has remained the core ideology of the RSS consistently propagating the supremacy of the Hindu religion and race in India. This ideological thread is observed commonly in all earlier defined phases from 1925-2014. Throughout this time period, the only distinguishable phenomenon is the transition of the ownership and the use of this Hindutva ideology.
Before the Indian independence, from 1925-1947, the Hindutva ideology was exclusively owned by RSS which was a political non-entity in phase one. In phase two, from 1947-1980, this ideology remained dormant but struggled to survive with the ownership by several communal and religious organizations to include the RSS. From 1980-2014, the first high point was the transition of ownership of Hindutva ideology from a non-political RSS to a strong and politically aligned RSS. The second pinnacle can be observed after rise of Narindra Modi as the Prime Minister of India who is one of RSS’s longtime members.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), associated with Hindu nationalist groups, enjoyed rapid successin national politics. Riding a crest of rising Hindu nationalism, it increased its strength in Parliament from only two seats in 1984 to 181 seats 1999, and from 1998 to 2004 BJP controlled the Government of India. A key challenge for the BJP centered on its designation of “Hindutva” -- the idea of a unified Hindu state -- as its guiding theme. The party’s embrace of Hindutva contributed significantly to its electoral leap forward in 1991, and press-reporting indicated that senior BIP leaders without exception would be loath to abandon it. The party’s need to ally with disparate political parties in Parliament, however, prompted it to temper its religious rhetoric and slow its pursuit of some extreme goals.
The BJP originally emerged as a political outlet for several of India’s Hindu religious organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS - National Volunteer Force) and the Vishnu Hindu Parishad (VHP) -- known collectively as the Sangh Parivar. The first of these organizations was the RSS, formed before independence to unite Hindus through training in ideology, cultural awareness, and physical fitness. The Hindutva forces have attempted to consolidate themselves since the 1920s. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (Association of National Volunteers) is a Hindu nationalist organization, founded in 1925 by Keshava Baliram Hedgewar as a culture and welfare organization with the intention of promoting the idea of a Hindu nation on the basis of the Hindutva.
The scholar Marzia Casorali, in her definitive study Hindutva's foreign tie-up in the 1930s - Archival Evidence, traced the movement's inspiration to Benito Mussolini and to Adolf Hitler in the 1920s and subsequently. She writes: "an accurate search ... is bound to show the extent and importance of such organizations and Italian fascism. (They) not only adopted fascist ideas in a conscious way, but this also happened because of the direct contacts between their representatives of these organizations and fascist Italy." Casorali quotes from Mr. V Savarkar, Mr. BS Moonje, Mr. Golwalkar, the founders of the Hindutva ideology. In 1934 they said "this ideal cannot be brought to effect unless we have our own swaraj with a Hindu as a dictator like Shivaji of old or Mussolini or Hitler of the present day in Italy and Germany." The Savarkar-led Hindu Mahasabha in 1939 officially stated: "Germany's crusade against the enemies of Aryan culture will bring all the Aryan nations of the world to their senses and awaken the Indian Hindus for the restoration of their lost glory." Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who led the RSS from 1940 until 1973, saw one shining example in distinguishing between different citizens in Germany, under the Nazi rule.
In 1947, it was hoped that secularism would be the watchword of the Congress Party and that the post-Independence India will not accord any respectability to communal forces. But it was not to be. The RSS was banned in 1948-49 after one of its members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, who had emphasized Hindu-Muslim unity, and spared no pains to help in attaining it. The RSS sponsored new organizations it could control from behind the scenes. The BJP evolved from the Jana Sangh, which was established in 1951 as the political wing of the RSS. Most of the BIP’s senior leadership -- including Vajpayee -- sprang from the RSS. The RSS depended on the BJP to keep Hindu nationalism in the public eye as a political issue, and the BJP relied on the RSS for manpower and organizing grassroots electoral support.
The BJP, as the political arm of the extremist Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or National Volunteer Force), was held responsible for the outbreaks of serious communal violence in which a mosque was destroyed at Ayodhya and some 3,000 people were killed in anti-Muslim rioting in Bombay and elsewhere. While in power, the BJP worked — with limited success — to change its image from right-wing Hindu nationalist to conservative and moderate, although anti-Muslim riots in BJP-run Gujarat.
The Babri mosque dispute remains as polarizing and politically divisive as it was when the 16th century structure was demolished by Hindu activists in the city of Ayodhya in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Hindu fundamentalists, as well as some historians, claim the mosque was built on the site of Lord Rama's temple on the orders of Moghul emperor Zahir Uddin Babur. The Babri Masjid demolition was the culmination of years of campaigns by Hindu fundamentalists to construct a Lord Rama temple on the mosque's site. On December 6, 1992, the BJP, the hardline Vishva Hindu Parishad and many of its affiliates organized a rally in Ayodhya. Within hours, over 15,000 Hindu activists, known as "kar sevaks," razed the historic mosque to the ground with axes and hammers. P.V.Narasimha Rao of the Congress Party was prime minister at the time. His handling of the issue has been widely criticized. The mosque demolition sparked country-wide violence and communal riots that killed over 2,000 people and shook the secular foundations of the country. Jihadist groups cited the destruction of the mosque as a reason behind the 1993 Mumbai bombings and other attacks in the 1990s.
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