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As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh celebrates its centenary, it finds itself both triumphant and unsettled. Its swayamsevaks dominate India’s political landscape with PM Modi, himself a lifelong pracharak, delivering the RSS its most dazzling political success in history. And yet, in Nagpur, there is restlessness. The Sangh’s political child has become too large, too confident, and too independent to be lectured.
This tension has burst into public view repeatedly since June 2024. BJP lost its majority in 2024 and was forced to rely on allies, Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS Sarsanghchalak, rebuked,“A true sevak is never arrogant”. It was the kind of sermon that PM Vajpayee once faced.
Bhagwat’s remarks were not a one-off event. He spoke against attempts to stoke new temple disputes in December 2024. In July 2025, he went further asking leaders to retire when they turn 75. No name was mentioned, but everyone knew who he meant. For veterans of the Vajpayee years, this was déjà vu. KS Sudarshan, former RSS chief, had made a habit of chastising the BJP’s top brass when Vajpayee was PM. He could do so as Vajpayee still leaned on shakha cadre for rallies and campaigns. However, Modi’s BJP no longer needs Nagpur’s logistical muscle. Modi and Amit Shah have built a formidable machine that has penetrated regions where the Sangh had failed for decades – Bengal, Assam, Tripura, even Kerala.
If this turbulence needed a symbol, it came in the unlikely form of Sanjay Joshi. Once, Joshi was a powerful figure in Gujarat BJP until Modi became CM and made him exit the political scene when a controversial CD emerged at BJP’s 2005 national executive.
Amid the delay in naming a new BJP president as Modi and Shah want a loyalist, but Nagpur wants one of its own. Whispers in Delhi suggest Joshi is being considered for BJP National President or even General Secretary (Organisation). For Modi, for whom Joshi was a big rival back in the day, accepting Joshi’s resurrection – when he is dented by a reduced majority – is nothing short of humiliation. For the RSS, floating Joshi’s name is not about rehabilitating an old warhorse. This is politics, Sangh-style.
This is why Bhagwat’s rebukes matter less for their content than for what they reveal. There is no ideological rupture here. Modi remains the Sangh’s most faithful son in worldview.
His nationalism, civilisational vocabulary, rejection of westernisation, and embrace of Hindu assertiveness are all pure RSS. But his style is another matter.
This divergence was visible even before Modi became Prime Minister. In 2000, Karan Thapar, interviewing KS Sudarshan, encountered Modi (1). Modi told him bluntly: “Mediocrity has crept into the RSS. It no longer stands for excellence.” Modi was diagnosing what many already knew: despite its vast cadre network, the RSS had failed to build mainstream institutions of social service. Unlike Christian missionaries schools, or left-aligned newspapers, or spiritual sects like Sai Baba’s or Radha Soami, RSS had little to show. It had not produced a single university, newspaper or newspaper of national reach, not even a think tank of serious influence.
This is why the Sangh’s statements since June 2024 feel both familiar and hollow. The RSS has always rebuked its political child when it grows too independent. It did it with Vajpayee. It is doing it with Modi. But Vajpayee needed the RSS; Modi does not. JP Nadda said it openly before the 2024 elections: “the BJP no longer needs RSS to run its affairs”. That is the real wound. Moreover, Modi has been very clear: ideological alignment will remain, palace politics will not.
At the grassroots, swayamsevaks toil in obscurity via thousands of ordinary pracharaks, nameless to the outside world, running health camps and relief work, especially during disasters. But at the top, the RSS now lives in a five-star bubble. Leaders shuttle between Delhi and Nagpur, dabbling in palace intrigue, whispering about appointments, claiming credit for victories, blaming the BJP for defeats.
Nevertheless, Modi has extended gestures of reconciliation to Nagpur, seeking to ease the post-2024 tug-of-war. In March 2025, he visited the RSS headquarters in Nagpur – his first as PM. A few months later, in his Independence Day speech, he mentioned the RSS for the very first time. These overtures came only after the BJP’s victories in Haryana and Maharashtra restored Modi’s political mojo.
Taken together, the visit and the speech were less about deference and more about reconciliation — Modi’s way of acknowledging the Sangh’s symbolic authority while quietly asserting that the terms of the relationship will be set by him.
And so, as the RSS marks its 100th year, it faces an existential choice. It can continue dabbling in palace politics or can transform itself into what Modi implied back in 2000: a civilisational service organisation, with schools, think tanks, cultural institutions, and a reach that matches its political child. If it does not, it risks irrelevance in the very moment of its greatest triumph.
Sources:
- “Go, Mr. Modi, and go now”, Sunday Sentiments, ITV (March 2002)
Other Sources:
- Mohan Bhagwat: True sevak is never arrogant… in polls, decorum was not maintained, Indian Express (June 2024)
- Mohan Bhagwat: Ram temple matter of faith, raking up new issues unacceptable, Indian Express (December 2024)
- Mohan Bhagwat suggests leaders should ‘step aside’ after 75, Oppn calls remark a ‘reminder to Modi’, ThePrint (July 2025)
- “Sex and the CD: Sanjay Joshi’s rise and fall”, Rediff (December 2005)
- “BJP in a soup; Sanjay Joshi quits after sex scandal”, Times of India (December 2005)
- “RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat bats for inclusive society; frowns upon new disputes”, New Indian Express (December 2024)
- “RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat draws the line at 75. India’s politics stares at the Modi Exception”, ThePrint (July 2025)
- “Nadda on BJP-RSS ties: We have grown, more capable now… the BJP runs itself” The Indian Express (May, 2024)
- “RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat says leaders should retire at 75, Congress asks PM Modi to pick up the bag”, Economic Times (July 2025)
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.