Modi’s tussle with the RSS echoes old power struggles within India’s Hindu Right

On 5 September, Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), said at an event in Pune, “If one has to rise to such a height, one should make efforts. We should not consider ourselves as god. Let people decide if there is god in you.”.The Hindu nationalist RSS is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and was the first political home of the Indian prime minister, the BJP’s Narendra Modi. Bhagwat’s remark was perceived as a dig at Modi; during his campaign for the Indian general election earlier this year, Modi told a television channel that he had become convinced that his energy cannot come from a biological body and that he was an instrument of god..This was the third time that Bhagwat had taken on Modi in public after the election. In June, a week after the results were announced, Bhagwat addressed RSS volunteers in Nagpur, where the organisation is headquartered. He said that a true sevak, or servant, did not have arrogance and worked without causing any hurt to others, and that “decorum was not maintained” during the election campaign. Although Bhagwat did not name anyone, his remarks were broadly perceived to be directed at Modi, and were unlikely to have gone unnoticed by the top leadership of the BJP. Modi had been sworn in as prime minister for the third consecutive time only a day earlier on 10 June. .In mid-July, Bhagwat said at a public event in Jharkhand that men aim to become supermen, then devtas or deities, then bhagwan or a god and then vishwaroop or omnipresent. This was again seen as a veiled reference to Modi’s earlier remarks about having non-biological energy. Bhagwat added that instead of such aspirations, people should work towards the welfare of humanity. .Historically, the BJP’s rise to prominence and its electoral successes have depended heavily on the RSS mobilising and campaigning in its favour. However, since 2014, when Modi first won national power, the BJP has increasingly run presidential-style campaigns for Indian parliamentary elections, with Modi front and centre. In 2024, the party once again leant heavily on Modi’s massive cult of personality. Poll promises were packaged as Modi’s guarantees and party officials as well as ministers went as far as to add “Modi ka parivar” – Modi’s family – to their social media profiles. .During the campaign, the BJP president, Jagat Prakash Nadda, said that the party had grown since the time that it needed the RSS, and was now capable of running its own affairs..The BJP won 240 parliamentary seats, down from 303 seats in the last general election, in 2019. It was the first time since 2014 that the party failed to secure a majority on its own in the 543-member lower house of parliament, forcing it to rely on allies to form a coalition government. Bhagwat’s comments were therefore seen as both a chastisement and a reality check for Modi and the BJP, which had predicted that it would win at least 370 seats alone and 400 along with allies..“Mohan Bhagwat was holding a mirror to Modi,” D K Singh, the political editor at The Print, told me. “When he talked about ‘ahankaar’, or arrogance, he was obviously referring to self-obsessive I-me-Modi-focused politics and governance. The RSS believes in collective ‘we’, in what it calls its character-building and nation-building mission.” .The RSS leadership has been uncomfortable for some time now with Modi outgrowing the organisation’s influence, and with Modi sidelining top RSS leaders during his decade as prime minister..“It’s no secret that Bhagwat has not had the best of relationships with Modi for many years now,” Dhirendra K Jha, a journalist and writer following the RSS, said. “However, if you look at the entire RSS, the bottom-level and mid-level people seem very happy with Modi, whom they see as a leader capable of delivering Hindu Rashtra” – the RSS’s much desired Hindu nation. “Whatever tension that emerges occasionally is at the top level.” .Modi has delivered on two long-cherished goals of the Hindu Right – the abrogation in 2019 of Article 370 of the Indian constitution, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of statehood and special status; and the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, consecrated in January this year..Yet, Singh pointed out, unlike in 2014 and 2019, when the RSS turned out in force for Modi, RSS volunteers largely stayed away from campaigning in the 2024 election. Bhagwat might have been signalling to Modi that the BJP still needed RSS foot-soldiers to win convincingly. .Some political observers see Bhagwat’s post-election comments as a sign of a battle for control. Bhagwat has seen his power wane, and has lost much control to other RSS functionaries such as B L Santosh and Dattatreya Hosabale. Santosh, the national general secretary of the BJP since 2019, is a key intermediary between the party and the RSS. Hosabale became the RSS’s general secretary in 2021; he is second in the organisation’s hierarchy, but controls the functioning of the RSS while Bhagwat’s role is more that of a philosophical guide. Both Santosh and Hosabale are known to be close to Modi and their appointments were seen as signs of his growing clout in the balance of power between the BJP and RSS..Looming over all of this is a question of succession. Modi just turned 74, and the BJP has upheld an unwritten rule of not appointing anyone past the age of 75 to key positions. Modi himself has cited that rule in past years when refusing to appoint older candidates as ministers and refusing to give several veteran leader tickets to contest elections. In the run-up to the 2024 election, however, top BJP leaders made clear that the prime minister himself has no plans of retiring in line with the rule. But Bhagwat and disaffected figures in the RSS could yet raise the issue to put Modi in an uncomfortable position..Meanwhile, spokespersons of both the BJP and the RSS have said that everything between the organisations is well and good. “RSS chiefs have often addressed larger concerns of the society at a level that’s above party politics,” Sunil Ambekar, the RSS’s chief spokesperson, told me. “So the recent comments should also be seen in a broader way. It was not supposed to target anyone.” .“One should not read too much between the lines,” the BJP’s national spokesperson, RP Singh, said of Bhagwat’s comments in June. “It was a general statement not targeting any specific party or political leader.”.We have been covering India for the last 35 years. Support our commitment to Southasian journalism. Become a Patron to support Himal.THE INTERNAL tug of war between the RSS and BJP is nothing new, even if it might now be playing out at unprecedented intensity..The RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar ostensibly as an apolitical organisation focused on socio-cultural goals – among them, spreading Hindu dominance across India. In 1948, the group was banned following the assassination of M K Gandhi by a member of the RSS. That ban was lifted the following year, and the RSS gradually realised the importance of participating in electoral politics to amass the power it needed to achieve its objectives. Hedgewar was dead by then, and his deputy, Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar, had taken charge as the new RSS sarsanghchalak, or “supreme chief” – the same position that Bhagwat holds today..In 1951, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a member of the Hindu Mahasabha party and among the few non-Congress ministers in the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of an independent India, resigned his ministerial post and formed a party called the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The RSS supported him and later co-opted the party as its political arm, while keeping for itself the role of ideological master. .But the RSS’s relationship with the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and its eventual successor, the BJP, has not always been straightforward. It has been marked by a series of intermittent power struggles, divergences and compromises..After Atal Behari Vajpayee became the first BJP leader and RSS man to become the prime minister of India, the RSS pressured him on political decisions both during his time in office and beyond. .Tensions between the RSS and Vajpayee began soon after he became the prime minister in 1998 and had to appoint members in his cabinet. “Vajpayee had to literally genuflect to the RSS when it came to the choice of appointing his council of ministers,” the journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay writes in The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right. While Vajpayee wanted to appoint his close associate Jaswant Singh as finance minister, the RSS picked Yashwant Sinha for the role. Sinha was from the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, an RSS affiliate that deals with economic and trade-related issues. The RSS believed that Sinha would work towards its preferred economic vision, and it had the final word in the matter. This experience led Vajpayee to adopt a strategy of keeping the RSS at a distance and not letting it dictate policy..“As a practical man, he [Vajpayee] was not ready to be dictated to by the Sangh on every move that he made and every step that he took,” the journalist and editor Kingshuk Nag writes in in his book Atal Bihari Vajpayee: A Man For All Seasons. “What made him successfully resist the pressure from the RSS was the fact that he was head and shoulders above all those who could challenge him in the BJP and the Jana Sangh before that. Moreover, there was nobody in the RSS who could be seconded to the party to challenge him.” .This marked the beginning of a long phase of simmering tensions. The RSS and its offshoots went on to become some of the most vocal critics of the Vajpayee government, especially after Kuppahalli Sitaramayya Sudarshan became the RSS chief in 2000. The most forceful attacks came for the Vishva Hindu Parishad, part of the RSS’s extensive universe of affiliated organisations, which kept blaming the Vajpayee government for not doing enough to build a Ram temple at a disputed site in Ayodhya where a 16th-century mosque had been razed by a Hindutva mob in 1992..Vajpayee’s government was voted out in 2004. But the bitterness between the RSS and the BJP’s top leadership carried on. In 2005, Sudarshan said in an interview that Vajpayee and his close aide Lal Krishna Advani should step aside and pave the way for younger leaders in the party. He also compared Vajpayee with former prime ministers such as P V Narasimha Rao and Indira Gandhi of the rival Indian National Congress party to suggest that Vajpayee had not done anything remarkable during his tenure..In Vajpayee, Sudarshan saw a prime minister who was straying from his ideological moorings. In Modi, Bhagwat sees a prime minister whose massive popularity has meant he has outgrown the control the RSS once exercised over him. Both are intolerable scenarios for the RSS, which has always considered itself the supreme guiding force of Hindu nationalism..EVERY TIME the BJP or the Jana Sangh before it tasted power or tried to pull away from RSS control, the RSS responded by tightening its grip. During the Jana Sangh’s early years, Mookerjee appointed two national general secretaries in the party in order to balance the influences of RSS and non-RSS forces within the political party. In 1952, the two posts were held by Deendayal Upadhyaya, an influential RSS leader, and Mauli Chandra Sharma, a Delhi-based lawyer not affiliated to the RSS..After Mookerjee died in 1953, the party established a new organisational structure. While Sharma became the working president, Upadhyaya emerged as the main decision-making authority. Multiple accounts suggest tensions between Sharma and Upadhyaya that escalated with the appointment of working-committee members. Sharma pushed for major reforms including the removal of the post of organising secretary, through which the RSS exercised control over the party. He failed to gather enough support and was forced out in 1954..The Janata Party that came to power in 1977 after the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi consisted of critics and rivals of Gandhi’s government, including the Jana Sangh and breakaway factions of the Congress. This was India’s first non-Congress government, and was led by Morarji Desai as prime minister. The power struggles that eventually emerged within this group were in no small part due to the RSS wanting to exert its influence through Jana Sangh members. .All Janata Party constituents initially agreed to distance themselves from any theocratic ideologies. But Jana Sangh members soon dismissed demands to cut ties with the RSS. Others under the Janata Party umbrella worried that the Jana Sangh group would use the RSS’s organisational strength to take over the party. This issue of “dual membership” was never resolved. .In Janata Party Experiment: An Insider’s Account of Opposition Politics – 1977-1980, the socialist leader Madhu Limaye writes about how the RSS started playing one Janata Party constituent against another months after Desai took charge as prime minister. It was one of the several reasons that led to the breaking up of the Janata Party in 1980. Advani said later, in 2005, that the BJP would not have been born in 1980 had the Janata Party not raised the issue of dual membership..The RSS never allowed room for leaders in its affiliated party who did not toe its line or challenged its authority. It managed to maintain the upper hand through most of its history with the Jana Sangh and, later, the BJP. But that dynamic has changed in the last decade with Modi’s BJP. .THE RSS HAS always had an aversion to personality-centric politics. “The kind of personalisation of power that Narendra Modi cultivates is at odds with the ethos of the RSS,” the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot said in an interview to The Wire in June. “That is an organisation where personalities must come second, they should merge with the organisation, not prevail.” .But Modi’s politics has always been about his personality, right from his days as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat. .RSS affiliates such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, supported Modi in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots, when he came under attack – including from within the BJP – for not preventing mass violence that killed at least a thousand people, most of them Muslims. He also owed his political start to the RSS: after many years in the organisation, he was appointed to work in the BJP starting in the mid 1980s. But, over time, Modi built a parallel power structure within the BJP that included an influential lobby of politicians backing him personally, industrialists funding his campaigns and grassroots workers connecting directly with his voters. This significantly reduced his dependence on the RSS..Even before Modi became prime minister, there had already been friction behind the scenes between him and the RSS. In 2007, the RSS stayed away from Modi and the Gujarat BJP’s campaign for state assembly polls. Modi still emerged victorious and went on to sideline many RSS leaders in Gujarat over the next few years, ensuring that only his writ ran in the state. .Despite such friction, the RSS supported Modi’s run for the prime ministership because the stakes were high enough. In Modi, the RSS leadership saw a man who could lead the BJP – and, consequently, the RSS – to national power. It was a compromise that paid off to a large extent. .The RSS had held a grudge against the Vajpayee government for not giving it enough say in the cultural space. Modi gave them no reason to complain. After his victory in 2014, he put RSS men in charge of several prominent education and cultural institutions, including the Central Board of Secondary Education, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Indian Council of Historical Research, Jawaharlal Nehru University and some of the Indian Institutes of Technology. RSS loyalists also found places in Modi’s cabinet. An analysis in The Print showed that out of the 66 BJP ministers who took oath in 2014, 41 were rooted in the RSS and its affiliates. In 2020, 38 of the 52 BJP ministers in Modi’s cabinet had an RSS background..But Modi retained the most powerful offices for his own inner circle. The current home minister, Amit Shah, is Modi’s long-standing lieutenant from the Gujarat days, and owes his rise directly to Modi rather than to his connection with the RSS. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the external affairs minister, and Ajit Doval, the national security adviser, are also Modi loyalists who received their posts thanks to Modi himself, and have no history of RSS membership. .“Gone are the days when the RSS’s top leadership used to play an influential role in deciding things for the BJP,” Jha, the journalist following the RSS, said. This extends to appointing cabinet ministers, electing the party president, and choosing members of the BJP parliamentary board – its top decision-making body. “A section within the top RSS leadership, which includes Mohan Bhagwat, has been disgruntled for a while because Modi stopped consulting them on policy matters, important appointments and political decisions,” Jha explained. “However, they cannot voice their disgruntlement in public because Modi has been instrumental in helping the Sangh achieve its long-held dreams.”.Earlier this year, Hosabale was reappointed the general secretary of the RSS. He proved his usefulness and loyalty to Modi many years ago, starting with a willingness to allow the BJP to use the RSS machinery for electoral campaigns in Gujarat. Later, Hosabale was one of the seniormost RSS leaders involved in the organisation’s voter-mobilisation campaign before the 2014 election – particularly in Varanasi, Modi’s parliamentary constituency. His reappointment is a sign that Modi’s power within the RSS remains considerable. .Bhagwat’s comments after the BJP’s relatively modest performance in the 2024 election suggest that key figures in the RSS have been emboldened in their push to reassert control over the BJP. “It’s only when the Narendra Modi government is under attack that the RSS speaks,” Jaffrelot said in the interview to The Wire. “Otherwise, they have to admit that the implementation of their policies and their ideology are still very popular among young sevaks” – the RSS’s volunteers. “It’s only when there are tensions, when there is a decline in Modi’s popularity, that the RSS speaks out.”.Power struggles between the RSS and the BJP have typically played out behind closed doors, which is why Bhagwat’s recent comments have stood out. And while the RSS has often prevailed in the past, Modi’s unparalleled popularity with the RSS cadre and beyond may ensure that he maintains the upper hand this time around. .According to Jha, Modi showed Bhagwat who the boss is when he became prime minister in 2014, and Bhagwat seemed to have made his peace with this for the most part. “His comments in June reflected panic triggered by the BJP’s decline in seats in the parliament and the fear of losing power,” he said. “There’s nothing beyond that. Overall, I do not look at the current development as an instance of conflict between the BJP and RSS.”