The RSS, or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is a right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation in India. It was founded in Maharashtra in 1925 by a physician, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. The RSS identifies as a cultural organisation and is the ideological mentor of the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). Several BJP leaders, including India’s 14th prime minister Narendra Modi, started out as workers or pracharaks for the RSS. The organisation has a paramilitary nature with young volunteers joining training camps.
Its website says that in the RSS system, there is no formal membership. Those who attend the RSS shakhas are called swayamsevaks and any Hindu male can become a swayamsevak.
The RSS equates Indian society with Hindu society and calls for the preservation and propagation of Hindu-ness, or the idea of Hindutva. The organisation’s mission statement read out by Hedgewar suggested that if Hindustan is to be protected, we should first nourish the Hindu culture. He believed it is the duty of every Hindu to do his best to consolidate the Hindu society.
There is place for a little stardust and glamour in politics. For an earlier generation, that may have been represented by Ms Hema Malini. The choice of Ms Kangana Ranaut is a lot more problematic.
A wise, enlightened, far sighted tutorial. One that was much needed. How can a legitimate protest of the young and restless, centred on Janpath, but which resonated nationally, be dismissed as anti national. Or engineered by foreign elements hostile to India. Although the immediate trigger was the leak of NEET question papers, symbolising many such failures, the rocket fuel was unemployment. No bright future awaiting young Indians after they complete their education. 2. The blunt use of force, including pellet guns, in Delhi ought to have been thought through more carefully. Apart from much else, it has got India a very bad international press. 3. I don’t think this is a failure of narratives, communications, X versus Instagram. In Year Thirteen, this is one page of a Report Card that is being released by those whom we have been calling Demographic dividend. How those underlying failures are to be redressed should be causing people to lose some sleep, toss and turn in bed.