S Vikram Political Commentator
Apoorvanand’s recent essay in Deccan Herald is right about the symptom and incomplete about the disease. He is correct that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh resists the formal mechanisms of accountability that the Indian state imposes routinely on every other organisation claiming to act in the public interest. He is right that Priyank Kharge’s demand—that the RSS register itself, disclose its finances, and submit to scrutiny like any other body claiming non-governmental status—exposes a real and indefensible asymmetry. He is right that the RSS’s preferred answer is to compare itself to Hinduism itself: a faith, not an institution, and therefore beyond the reach of registration law.
But informality is not the disease. It is the symptom’s delivery mechanism.
The deeper question is why an organisation that has shaped the destiny of the Indian republic more than any registered political party would need this particular kind of shield—and what, precisely, it is shielding.
The registration debate assumes that the RSS is simply another political or cultural organisation that should submit to the procedural architecture of a modern state. But the RSS is not like other organisations. Its evasion of formal accountability is not an administrative convenience or a bureaucratic oversight. It is a condition of survival for an ideological project that cannot survive full constitutional scrutiny.
The shield of ambiguity is not incidental to the RSS. It is constitutive of it.
The Mechanism: A Cult That Sacralises Grievance
The RSS is best understood not as a secret society—it does not conceal its existence, its leaders, or its public activities—but as a grievance-sacralising formation. More precisely, it functions as a cult in the sociological sense: a closed, self-validating cosmology that demands loyalty as its primary virtue and treats departure or dissent as betrayal of lineage rather than disagreement of opinion.
Its defining operation is the conversion of contingent historical losses into eternal, cosmic, and non-negotiable grievances.
What losses?
The erosion, over centuries, of a Brahminical social order that once claimed exclusive authority over the sacred and the social. This order was challenged from within by Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and Bhakti traditions. It was displaced from political power by Islamic polities and later by British colonialism. Finally, it was constitutionally dethroned by the Indian republic, which replaced inherited hierarchy with equal citizenship and progressively dismantled older arrangements through affirmative action, land reform, and the slow emergence of a society that no longer accepts hierarchy as self-evidently legitimate.
These are real historical losses, and they are experienced by those who inherit the custodianship of that tradition as transgenerational obligations.
The living RSS worker is not merely defending his own status. He is understood to be the temporary trustee of an ancestral inheritance that predates him and will outlast him. To abandon the struggle is not merely to lose an advantage; it is to fail the ancestors and betray the unborn.
This lineage-custodianship framework explains both the extraordinary loyalty the movement inspires and its resistance to accommodation. It is not experienced internally as a defence of interests. It is experienced as a defence of cosmology.
There is nothing uniquely Indian about this mechanism. The structure is identical to the covenant theology that sustained Afrikaner nationalism in apartheid South Africa and to the Lost Cause mythology of the American South, where inherited domination was recast as sacred ancestral trust. In every case, transgenerational custodianship converts “I am losing an unearned advantage” into “I am betraying my ancestors.”
The emotional intensity is real. The moral claim is not thereby strengthened.
The Work Performed by “Sanatan”
This is the work that “Sanatan” performs in contemporary Hindutva discourse.
The RSS has never offered a systematic theology because Hindutva, in Savarkar’s own formulation, was never a theological category. It is a civilisational and political one. “Sanatan” adds an additional claim: eternal originality and autochthony.
It recasts every reformist or dissenting tradition—Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and the long Bhakti critique of Brahminical authority—not as corrections or alternatives but as deviations from an eternal original.
The consequence is profound.
If one’s own tradition is eternal and original, then the decline of its social dominance ceases to be ordinary historical change. It becomes a wound to dharma itself. A contingent loss becomes a cosmic injustice requiring restoration.
The Architecture of Evasion
This is why the RSS cannot register—not because it lacks administrative capacity, but because formalisation would require it to state, in a legally cognisable form, what it actually is and what it ultimately seeks.
The architecture of this evasion is remarkably precise.
No formal membership rolls—so no one can be definitively identified as a member, and the organisation can distance itself from the actions of individuals or affiliates.
No auditable internal decision-making—so no court can subpoena minutes that were never kept and no historian can reconstruct chains of responsibility that were never documented.
No legal personality—so the organisation cannot be sued, liquidated, or held institutionally liable in the manner of registered entities.
Affiliates as firewalls—the VHP, Bajrang Dal, and even the BJP maintain close ideological relationships to the RSS without legally documented lines of command.
Publications as deniable voices—organs that articulate the ideological language of the movement can be disowned whenever convenient.
This is not secrecy of existence.
The RSS is highly visible. Shakhas meet in public parks. Leaders give interviews. Processions occur openly.
What is concealed is not the organisation itself but its internal operations, decision-making processes, and institutional responsibilities.
It is a structure designed to absorb power while evading accountability.
The Instrumentalisation of Everything
A movement organised around sacralised grievance cannot afford fixed definitions because definition produces accountability.
Consequently, almost every category it employs remains deliberately elastic.
Religion becomes identity rather than theology. “Hindu” is never clearly defined because definition would expose contradictions and fracture coalitions.
Democracy becomes an electoral vehicle rather than a constitutional value. Winning through democratic means is embraced; democratic pluralism as a normative commitment is not.
Nation becomes civilisational rather than constitutional. The republic founded on equal citizenship is displaced by the idea of a Hindu civilisational state in which belonging is conditional upon cultural submission.
History becomes legitimating myth rather than critical inquiry. Institutions of historical scholarship are valuable not because they produce truth but because they produce a usable past—a narrative of uninterrupted Hindu victimhood and deferred restoration.
This instrumentalisation is not ordinary cynicism. It is internally coherent.
If the grievance is cosmic and the restoration civilisational, then every institution becomes an instrument rather than a commitment.
Widening Without Changing
The RSS’s founding leadership emerged from a narrow Brahminical milieu, but its subsequent success has depended on widening its social base.
Its expansion among OBC, Dalit, and tribal communities has been one of the most significant political developments of post-Mandal India. Yet this expansion does not alter the ideological core. It offers participation in civilisational standing against constructed external enemies—the Muslim, the Christian, the “anti-national”—rather than an internal interrogation of hierarchy itself.
The project survives by directing resentment outward.
Its social composition has changed.
Its foundational grammar has not.
The Gandhi Test
There is a criterion available from within India’s own anti-colonial tradition for distinguishing a liberation movement from a sacralised grievance movement.
Gandhi argued that the purpose of the freedom struggle was not simply to defeat the British but to free both ruler and ruled from the moral relationship of domination. The liberation of India included, in principle, the moral rehabilitation of the oppressor.
This provides a useful diagnostic:
Does a movement’s conception of victory require the redemption and inclusion of its adversary, or merely the adversary’s subordination?
By this test, the RSS fails unequivocally.
Its founding ideologue, M.S. Golwalkar, wrote that Muslims and Christians must either assimilate or remain in India “wholly subordinated,” claiming “not even citizen’s rights.”
Subordination, not coexistence.
Assimilation, not equality.
Nothing in the movement’s subsequent conduct suggests a fundamental departure from this conception, however much its vocabulary has softened for purposes of democratic respectability.
A movement whose definition of completion is the subordination of those whom the republic promised to include equally cannot complete the constitutional project.
It must overturn it.
Why the Shield Matters
This is why the registration debate matters, and why it does not go far enough.
The RSS should register.
It should disclose finances.
It should submit to the same procedures that govern every other organisation operating in public life.
But these demands address only the symptom.
The deeper issue is that a grievance-sacralising movement, structurally incapable of pluralism and committed to a civilisational project incompatible with equal citizenship, has achieved state power while retaining its institutional insulation.
It can instrumentalise democracy without believing in democratic pluralism.
It can deploy the language of nation without meaning the constitutional nation.
It can mobilise religion without defining it.
It can rewrite history without being accountable to it.
The ambiguity is not merely a shield against transparency law.
It is a shield against the very possibility of being held, by the constitutional order it inhabits, to that order’s own standards.
A republic founded on the proposition that no one’s belonging requires another’s subordination cannot be completed by a movement whose founding texts define completion as precisely that subordination.
Kharge is right to demand the paperwork.
But the paperwork is only the beginning.
The deeper demand—the one the present debate has not yet reached—is for a movement that has captured the state to submit to the state’s own constitutional commitments.
The RSS cannot do this without abandoning its foundational ideology.
And it will not do so because it no longer stands outside the republic seeking entry into it.
It now governs from within it.
The tragedy of the present moment is that the question is no longer whether the RSS will submit to the constitutional order.
The question is whether the constitutional order can survive the success of a movement that regards it not as a destination, but as an instrument.
