Unveiling the RSS

“THE SANGH DOES NOT CONTROL, neither directly nor remotely,” Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, insisted during a conclave in August. The organisational fountainhead of the Hindu Right is celebrating its centenary this year. In a series of public events to mark the milestone, Bhagwat took on the air of an aloof parent, as if eager to distance himself from his children. The RSS is at the centre of a sprawling network of organisations, but Bhagwat claimed that Sangh affiliates “are independent, autonomous and they gradually become self-dependent.” In several of its public materials, too, the RSS repeatedly disavows a relationship with organisational progenies that fall outside the approximately three dozen affiliates it officially acknowledges.

It is, however, common knowledge that the Sangh’s influence extends far beyond this limited circle. Mere days before Bhagwat’s comments, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared, during his Independence Day speech at the Red Fort, that the RSS is the “biggest NGO in the world.” Modi’s statement leveraged the precise ambiguity Bhagwat’s comments sought to obfuscate: the existence of a wide constellation of RSS-linked organisations spread across many sectors of society, whose cumulative reach is central to the Sangh’s power.

Why has the size, shape and nature of this network never been empirically investigated till date? Well, because the Sangh is invested in keeping it that way. The RSS, as has been repeatedly noted, is not registered—not as an NGO, not as a religious trust, nor as any other legal entity. The Caravan’s July cover story, titled “The RSS does not exist,” demonstrated how this lack of traceability on paper allowed it to set up a headquarters in the heart of the national capital without having to disclose its sources of funding, or even who its members are. Most crucially, although the RSS openly works through proxies, it has constantly dodged demands to outline what those proxies are and how it is connected to them.

In fact, in Sangh public materials, one can find a dizzying variety of descriptions of what exactly these organisations are, including within a single text. For example, in Rakesh Sinha’s 2019 book Understanding RSS, these organisations are collectively described, at different points, as “affiliates,” “organs,” “fronts,” or “progeny” that “belong to the RSS.” Ratan Sharda’s RSS 360: Demystifying Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, published a year earlier, also moves fluidly between “affiliate,” “RSS-inspired,” “projects,” “sister organisations,” “allied organisations,” “RSS-related organisations” and “associate organisations” that are “run” by the RSS.

Given this fluid language, it is unsurprising that most research and reporting into the Sangh has been hamstrung by a broad environment of uncertainty and confusion. Because journalists and analysts have, for the most part, been denied meaningful access to the inner workings of the RSS, they have mostly been confined to studying its ideology or its most visible affiliates, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Vishva Hindu Parishad.

The result is a body of work that is confined to what the RSS says rather than what it does—to its grand declarations on nationalism and to its equivocations on caste and the place of Muslims in India rather than the mundane mechanics of how it builds and maintains power through a vast but concealed network. This benefits the Sangh immensely. It allows the organisation to evade basic scrutiny and accountability, to the extent that even on its hundredth anniversary, when it claims dominant power, little is conclusively known about how it moves resources, where it commands authority and where its influence ends.

Further, the excessive focus on Hindutva discourse has flattened our understanding of the Hindu Right’s organisational landscape. It has fostered the assumption that ideology alone holds the movement together, that all Hindutva actors are united and comfortably part of the Sangh. Folk understandings might mention Yati Narsinghanand, Tapan Ghosh and Dattatreya Hosabale in one breath, as if all three are equally embedded in the Sangh. But this implication—that those who subscribe to the movement are uniformly ideologically committed and that ideology alone is sufficient to unite a network—repeatedly breaks down. In this case, for instance, Narsinghanand has no identifiable links with the Sangh and regularly criticises it for being insufficiently radical, Ghosh claimed to be estranged from them, and Hosabale is the Sangh’s general secretary.

Not all Hindutva organisations are subject to the authority of the RSS, just as not all Sangh organisations are explicitly ideological. This becomes clearer when we demystify the Hindu Right and recognise that, like any other movement, it is made up of flesh and blood, brick and mortar, and messy relationships. Both within the Sangh, and among Hindutva actors outside it, conflict is rife, and the Sangh spends an enormous amount of energy managing, channelling and containing it.

The Sangh has sometimes betrayed a certain glee about the benefits of its opacity. While public figures such as Bhagwat insist there is nothing to uncover beyond mere “inspiration,” Sangh publications aimed at an internal audience strike a different note. The RSS ideologue Ratan Sharda, for example, writes that, “Fortunately for RSS, and unfortunately for other organisations, no one has studied or researched RSS with this view point”—that of the RSS coordinating a large network. “Their gaze on RSS has always been to find fault. For RSS, samanvay or harmonious co-ordination within and with organisations allied with it is a serious business, and that is the secret of the harmonious existence of this large Hindu Undivided Family.”

The Sangh’s strategic distance from thousands of other organisations allows it all sorts of benefits. It can avoid legal or financial scrutiny. It can outsource its work and claim plausible deniability. It can manage internal tensions by accommodating contesting leadership claims. It can produce a type of segmented messaging, saying all things to all people at all times. Its organisations can be managed like a switchboard, their ties to the larger network activated and hidden as required. These elaborate but covert divisions of labour are critical parts of how the RSS expands into society. They ensure far-right presence in many sectors simultaneously, reaching diverse audiences, opening opportunities for constituency expansion and carving out new terrain for the Sangh.

But the mystique of the Sangh also serves a second, mirrored purpose: to inflate its aura and to exaggerate its size. It creates the impression that the political power of the Hindu Right today is the natural expression of an organic, bottom-up upsurge. What is being hidden is not the support for the Sangh’s project, nor the organisations themselves, but the fact of its coordination. The evidence suggests we are not witnessing an organic upsurge of Hindu nationalist feeling that has magically organised itself but, rather, the deliberate cultivation of an immense bureaucratic network. When the Sangh’s hand is unseen, it is easy to conclude—prematurely, and incorrectly—that it is everywhere.

But the Sangh is neither infinite nor unknowable. A special investigation that I helped lead, conducted over a period of six years, with data now housed at Science Po’s Centre de recherches internationales, and fact-checked and released by The Caravan, has constructed the world’s first network map of the RSS, revealing over twenty-five hundred organisations with concrete, traceable, material ties leading to the Sangh.

This dataset is not a loose list of organisations with similar ideological positions. Rather, it traces a materially connected network of organisations that often share the same individuals, work out of the same addresses, regularly organise events together, claim overlapping spheres of work and are tied by shared flows of money, both domestic and foreign. This evidence suggests that these organisations are not a loose family but tightly networked parts of a single entity—an understanding that the Sangh itself admits to in its internal publications. When seen from this perspective, these organisations—whose interconnectedness Bhagwat constantly denies, and Modi regularly exalts—tells us what the Sangh actually is.

SEEN IN ISOLATION, many of the organisations we traced seem unremarkable. But, taken together, they form a vivid and revealing picture. The interstitial space between them—the very thing the Sangh seeks to hide—makes clear that the RSS is a single networked entity rather than a loose archipelago.

During our data collection, for instance, we found that a single address in the Amphalla neighbourhood of Jammu housed multiple organisations linked to the Sangh. The site, a four-hectare plot, was first granted, in December 1916, to a religious leader, Champa Nath, by Pratap Singh, the Dogra ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, for the promotion of Vedic teaching. It was accompanied by a grant of Rs 10,000, designated for the construction of a temple. A Ved Mandir Committee, instituted to manage the temple, was registered as a society in May 1964.

Somewhere in its history, the Mandir, the Committee and its premises were taken over by the Sangh. Today, this address hosts over twenty additional Sangh organisations, adding up to nearly half the Sangh’s organisational presence in Jammu and Kashmir:

1. Home for the Aged and Infirm, a living center for the elderly;

2. Jammu and Kashmir Gau Raksha Samiti, a cow shelter;

3. Shanti Sadhana Ashram, a place of worship;

4. Institute of Natural Hygiene, for natural treatments of diseases;

5. Jai Kargil Jai Bharat Kosh Trust, an NGO for Kargil War veterans;

6. the offices of Disha Chhatrawas, a hostel in the city of Katra;

7. Ved Mandir Balniketan, an orphanage for boys;

8. Ved Mandir Balikaniketan, an equivalent orphanage for girls;

9. Ved Mandir Paathshaala, a school that serves the two orphanages;

10. Ved Mandir Vocational Training Center;

11. a homeopathic dispensary;

12. Swami Vivekananda Medical Mission, a charitable hospital;

13. Jammu Kashmir Sahayta Samiti, a social-welfare organisation for residents of border areas;

14. Bhartiya Shiksha Samiti, a wing of the Sangh’s educational wing, Vidya Bharati;

15. the Jammu and Kashmir office of Sewa Bharati, the Sangh’s service wing;

16. Kesar Ben Velji Popat Bhavan, another orphanage for girls;

17. the Jammu chapter of Akhil Bharatiya Poorva Sainik Seva Parishad, an RSS affiliate working for army veterans;

18. Mata Vaishno Lok Kalyan Sanstha, which runs a nearby lodge for pilgrims;

19. The offices for Janak Madan Girls Hostel, a hostel for school-going girls run by Sewa Bharati;

20. The Jammu chapter of Bharat Vikas Parishad, a Sangh non-profit;

21. and the Maharaja Pratap Singh Ved Vidyalaya, a school for studying the Vedas.

That this cluster of organisations is materially and organisationally tied to the Sangh is certainly indicated by the fact that both the Sangh’s service and educational wings operate from this site. A deeper look, however, reveals that they are all managed by just a handful of individuals with overlapping organisational roles.

All four of the listed office-bearers at Ved Mandir Balniketan are Sangh functionaries. Its president, Gautam Mengi, is the RSS sanghchalak—coordinator—for Jammu, and comes from a family long affiliated with the Ved Mandir complex. Mengi has attended several senior RSS meetings, including that of the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha, the Sangh’s highest decision-making body. Its vice-president, Bal Krishan Gupta, who is also a member of the Ved Mandir Committee, is a regular feature at Sangh events, as is Sudesh Pal, its secretary, and Satish Mittal, its vice-secretary. Mittal also serves as the treasurer for the Bhartiya Shiksha Samiti. The president of the Ved Mandir Committee, Suresh Chander Gupta, is also the president of the Mata Vaishno Lok Kalyan Sansthan, and its vice-president, Amita Sharma, is also the president of the Bharat Vikas Parishad, Jammu. Evidently, these bodies are not independent entities but constituent parts of a single network.

The ties to the Sangh run even deeper—beyond Jammu and, indeed, beyond India. For example, the Maharaja Pratap Singh Ved Vidyalaya was established by a Pune-based organisation, the Maharshi Ved Vyas Pratishthan, whose founder, Govindadev Giri, is an RSS member, the treasurer of the VHP-controlled trust Ramjanmabhoomi Tirth Kshetra and also sits on the advisory board of the Nagpur hospital Madhav Netralaya, named after the former RSS chief Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. According to the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, Govindadev Giri’s “initial samskars as RSS swayamsevak are manifested in” the Pratishthan.

Another organisation on the premises, Kesar Ben Velji Popat Bhavan, was founded with funds raised from the India Development and Relief Fund, a US-based fundraising organisation with longstanding ties to the Sangh. It has since also been funded by the VHP of America. The Janak Madan Girls Hostel, similarly, has been sponsored by the Canadian wing of Sewa International. This network of interlinked bodies is not peripheral to the Sangh. The involvement of an RSS sanghchalak in running a small hostel speaks to the fact that these front organisations are not just a side quest in the Sangh’s broader play for power but precisely the routes through which the RSS expands and engages with, recruits from and bleeds into broader society.

Our research revealed that the Ved Mandir complex also serves as the central node for Sangh work throughout the state. The premises have been described in publications as “Keshav Bhawan,” part of a pattern of local RSS headquarters being named after the Sangh’s founder, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. The complex also regularly hosts senior RSS functionaries, such as Bhagwat, during their visits to the region.

Local publications unequivocally describe the location as a nerve center for the Sangh:

Elaborate security measures have been taken at Keshaw Bhawan, Ved Mandir where RSS chief will stay and also hold close door meetings with the top functionaries of J&K Sangh and its offshoot organisations including Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrangdal, Sanatan Dharam Sabha, Samaskar Bharti, Vidya Bharti, Sewa Bharti, Hindu Jagran Manch, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, Adhivikta Parishad, Swadeshi Jagran Manch, etc. The RSS chief will have a detailed discussion on the working of these organisations and get a feedback on their performance.

Moreover, the complex has hosted everything from conferences of Vedic scholars organised by Sanskrit Bharati, the Sangh’s wing focussed on reviving the Sanskrit language, to celebrations of local festivals, to health and wellness events. In 2012, it hosted a broad swath of the state’s Sangh ecosystem for an event hosted by Sewa Bharati Jammu and Kashmir. The Sangh publication Samvada claimed that fifty organisations were present. (Most, again, were entities with little traceable presence beyond ties that returned to the RSS itself.)

In its own accounts, the Sangh portrays these gatherings as a loose coalition of like-minded organisations with a shared commitment to Hindutva, nationalism or social service. In reality, the joint events, the shared offices and shared officials all point to a centralised bureaucracy with highly formalised roles and titles.

The Ved Mandir complex, thus, serves as a microcosm for the Sangh’s broader strategy of spawning organisations that remain managed through a thick bureaucracy. What otherwise appear to be over twenty independent entities, working across a range of fields and focus areas, is in fact a dense, well-organised cluster of duplicating organisations. How else can we understand the RSS as anything but a single holistic network when decisions are made by the same people, for the same reasons, in symmetrical organisational structures, following the same leaders and subject to the same discipline?

This approach yields all sorts of important and hitherto unanswered questions about the Sangh’s transparency and accountability. For example, seven of the organisations in this cluster all claim to be doing the same work—some combination of running a school and hostel—while a similar number of the social-welfare organisations listed also appear to have similar activities. Some of the organisations raise funds domestically through sympathetic trusts or through corporate donations, but others ostensibly receive foreign funds under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010. Keeping track of these details is likely to cause anyone whiplash. But, for the Sangh, that is precisely the point.

The point, however, is not merely that the Sangh operates through a maze of shell entities. The case of the Ved Mandir, and our research more broadly, raises a deeper existential question. If, by a rough measure, over half the Sangh’s presence in Jammu and Kashmir can be traced back to a single property, then the fundamental assumptions through which we understand the RSS, and the supposedly organic upsurge of Hindutva it “inspires,” need to be revisited. We need to return to the very foundational plumbing of the Sangh.

AS WE EXCAVATED the Sangh’s connections, it became evident that the Ved Mandir was no exception. What we uncovered in Jammu holds for virtually each of the Sangh’s 46 prants, or provinces, which are each supervised by a range of bureaucratic positions, led by pracharaks (propagandists), karyavahs (general secretaries) and sanghchalaks (coordinators). Each prant also has its own iterations of key Sangh affiliates: Vidya Bharati becomes the Sarvhitkari Shiksha Samiti in Punjab; Sewa Bharati becomes the Hindu Seva Pratishthana in Karnataka; and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram becomes the Vanvasi Kalyan Kendra in Jharkhand.

Each of these affiliates are, in turn, encouraged to found new subsidiary organisations, which are then encouraged to start their own subsidiaries. We traced the Barah Rana Smarak Chattravas, a small hostel in Sitarganj, Uttarakhand, back to the RSS through three degrees of separation: via the Barah Rana Smarak Samiti, which was founded by the Seva Prakalp Sansthan, the provincial unit of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram—which is, in turn, one of the three dozen formally acknowledged RSS affiliates.

This approach to building an expansive civil-society network clearly diverges from typical political networks. Rather than building coalitions with existing organisations, this involves a deliberate process of spawning new organisations to expand the network, while ensuring they remain tied to a central executive. I have, elsewhere, called this approach “organisational diffusion,” which is “the strategic creation of a large number of proxy civil society organisations through which central network executives can covertly organise sophisticated divisions of labor.”

Organisational diffusion works to create a snowball effect for the Sangh. The network keeps expanding but remains subject to Sangh authority, yielding a range of entities with porous, and often non-existent, boundaries. Just as in the case of Jammu, these disappearing boundaries were visible nearly everywhere we looked.

In Bengaluru, Abhyudaya, also known as the Keshava Krupa Samvardhana Samithi, shares its address with Youth for Seva, Vidya Chetna and the local Sewa Bharati office. The Adarsh Sanskar Mandal in Akola shares its office with the Dr Hedgewar Raktapedhi, a blood-bank service. Sometimes, the link is completely explicit. The Chinna Bhandara Janakamma Sanjeeva Rao Educational Charitable Public Trust, the Sewa Bharathi Trust and the Desa Sewa Samithi Kadathanad, for instance, have their offices inside their respective local RSS offices.

In fact, these patterns remain consistent even thousands of kilometres away, as far as the western suburbs of Houston, where a warehouse tied to Star Pipe Products, a company owned by the Bhutadas, a key Sangh family in the United States, also takes on the name Keshav Smruti. According to the organisation’s pamphlets, Keshav Smruti is the “southwest Houston office of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh”—the Sangh’s overseas wing. Ramesh Bhutada has long been the vice-president of the HSS. The address is simultaneously listed in online directories as the headquarters of the VHP of America—throwing into question whether the two largest Hindutva groups in the United States should even be considered distinct organisations.

But the picture grows more complex still. The address in question, 4018 Westhollow Parkway, has been traced to nearly half a dozen other cases: as an address for SVYASA, a yoga foundation co-founded by Bhutada, with close ties to Modi; as the headquarters of Hindus of Greater Houston, a local Sangh-controlled organisation; as the site for various youth camps run by the VHP of America and the HSS; as the location for speeches by India-based RSS leaders, such as Nivedita Bhide; and as an address of Sewa International, a fundraising wing covertly run by the HSS that receives millions of dollars in donations from unwitting donors, including a $2.5 million grant in 2021 from the former Twitter executive Jack Dorsey, and routes the funds to the Sangh in India.

The Bhutadas’ fingerprints are visible across the Sangh in ways that cross geographic boundaries. For example, Star Pipe Foundry, owned by the Bhutada family in Rajkot, is a key sponsor of the RSS-affiliated think tank Vision India Foundation, now rechristened as Rishihood University, and its “Integral Humanism Initiative,” which works to “galvanise or ignite the spirit of Deendayal Upadhyaya,” the former RSS pracharak and Bharatiya Jana Sangh leader. Keshav Smruti also shares an address with the Bhutada Family Foundation, which heavily bankrolls a number of other Sangh organisations. The family’s money is also put to use in US politics through the Hindu American Political Action Committee, which funds Sangh-affiliated politicians in the United States. HAPAC is, in turn, a sister organisation to the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group with a record of lobbying for the Sangh. Ramesh Bhutada’s son Rishi and his cousin Kavita Pallod are both long-time board members of the HAF.

Ramesh is a director of various other organisations: the Param Shakti Peeth of America, a foundation that fundraises for the infamous Hindu supremacist ideologue Rithambara; the Hindu Society of America, which he runs alongside other HSS officials; as well as the Patanjali Yogpeeth Foundation, which serves as a diasporic foundation for the godman Ramdev. The fact that the older Bhutada has travelled to India to attend a training camp for overseas RSS workers speaks to the Sangh’s role in coordinating even these faraway appendages.

The density of influence around the Bhutada family is not some type of US exception. Our dataset increasingly highlighted that a relatively small number of individuals can command significant influence—particularly those who are pracharaks. The majority of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the RSS’s labour wing, for instance, owes its existence to Dattopant Thengadi, the pracharak whose photo still adorns the wall of nearly every BMS affiliate. Like many Sangh branches, the BMS was explicitly imagined as a reactionary response to the historically formidable organising force of various leftist groups. The BMS remains understudied, however, and its actual strength remains unclear. It claims a membership of 10 million across five thousand affiliate unions, but evidence for this remains curiously unavailable.

In Kerala, meanwhile, the pracharak P Paramaswaran, who led the Vivekananda Kendra for twenty-five years, was also responsible for either founding or leading Kesari, a Sangh mouthpiece in Kerala; the Bharatiya Vichara Kendram, a Sangh think tank in Thiruvananthapuram, as well as its quarterly research journal, Pragati; the think tank International Forum for India’s Heritage; and the Geetha Swadhyaya Samithi, a forum to popularise the Bhagavad Gita in Kerala.

THESE EXAMPLES, and the density of ties that connected them, irrefutably pointed us in a single direction: the Sangh has always functioned as one political organism, deliberately constructed by the very leadership that claimed the opposite. It has significant internal variation, as well as competing interests, egos and abilities, but the fingerprints of the Sangh—from names like Keshav, to well-placed RSS officials in organisational leadership, to flows of money from key diaspora funders—were increasingly unmissable once you looked past the smoke and mirrors.

Crucially, the RSS itself has been aware all along of what it is and how it sees itself. Indeed, if we avoid being distracted by Sangh slipperiness and instead pay attention to the core of the messaging built into its internal publications, their cohesiveness within a single political unit becomes quite clear. The Sangh sympathiser K Jayaprasad, for example, puts it clearly:

All these associate pressure groups are controlled by the RSS. These groups have two roles, first they spread the ideas of RSS, and secondly, they protect the interest of their associations … In their daily activities these organisations act independently with their own leadership and finance. But they are under the control and guidance of the RSS.

Similarly, the Sangh commentator MG Chitkara tells us, when discussing the RSS’s relationship with Adivasi politics, that, far “from being an apolitical NGO, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram was founded to stop the conversion of tribals to Christianity. As much an RSS outfit as any other, the VKA, like all RSS affiliates, is organised and run by trained RSS workers.”

The Sangh sees itself as an essential part of realising an organicist vision of society. Organicism is an inherently far-right ideology, one in which society is seen as a natural, integral and systemic organism, and in which minorities or “foreigners” are unnatural and worthy of expulsion. Importantly, this organism, or body, is often imagined as diseased and in need of curing to achieve “national renewal.” Whether the body is suffering from a “contaminated blood” (Eknath Ranade, a prominent RSS ideologue), a “wound” (Chitkara), or “boils” (Golwalkar), it is the RSS—made from organs, cells, and muscles—whose “immunological properties” can heal it. The Sangh’s consistently articulated goal is to cleanse, and then become, this organism. This commitment to sangathan, or collective, the RSS’s leaders have long insisted, is understood as a necessary part of overcoming an alleged Hindu emasculation and disunity. For the Sangh, sangathan is both the means and the end: the path to Hindu Rashtra.

This organicism, therefore, is not simply metaphorical. It is an ecological organising principle, part of the Sangh’s stated goal of “Sangh samaj banega”—the Sangh will become society. The RSS understands that having spawning diverse organisations is not incompatible with organisational singularity. This has been repeatedly articulated by RSS leaders, from Hedgewar:

As time passes, the direction of RSS founder Dr K B Hedgewar that RSS should not be an organisation within the society, but an organisation of the society.

To Golwalkar:

The Sangh … has never entertained the idea of building an organisation as a distinct and separate unit within society. Right from its inception the Sangh has clearly marked out as its goal the moulding of the whole of society, and not merely any one part of it, into an organised entity.

To the current RSS spokesperson Sunil Ambekar:

The Sangh is a network of networks. There is no limit on the number of organisations that can be seeded to support the multiple issues in society that necessitate intervention.

Indeed, when the Sangh writes to an audience of its constituents, time and again, it makes no distinctions between its internal organisations. This might be in an Organiser article where the name Vidya Bharati Punjab is used interchangeably with that of its Punjab subsidiary, the Sarvhitkari Shiksha Samiti; in reflections from a commemorative magazine published by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh UK in which members reflect on their time in Sangh by pointing to their work in the National Hindu Students Forum; when the senior RSS ideologue Rakesh Sinha claims that “India’s biggest chain of schools run by Vidya Bharati belongs to the RSS”; or when a list of projects published by Sewa Sadhana includes projects of Saksham, the VHP, Vidya Bharati, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, Bharat Vikas Parishad, Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the ABVP and the Deendayal Research Institute, all under the heading of “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: Sewa Vibhag.”

WHEN THE ENTIRE Sangh network is apprehended as one organisational unit, new ways of understanding it emerge. For this project, our team followed the definition proposed in a 2022 article I wrote for Contemporary South Asia: that the Sangh is “that which is constituted by organisational sites through which a central Sangh executive may exert authority, (a) through existing institutionalised communication channels, and (b) without coercion.” This network-centric approach called for the charting of a specific material, organisational network—a map of the Sangh—rather than a map of organisations that only subscribe to Hindutva.

As mentioned above, expressions of far-right ideological commitment are insufficient diagnostic tools for identifying participants in these movements or understanding their operations. For example, a majority of the organisations in the Ved Mandir complex might well fail a litmus test posed solely for a visible far-right ideological commitment, but they all, nevertheless, remain subject to the authority of an RSS executive—willingly, and through specific networks of bureaucracy and organisation.

If ideology—whether publicly expressed or privately felt—cannot reliably map far-right mobilisation, our focus had to shift to material relations. We focused on human personnel, physical assets, financing, and bureaucratic management, drawing heavily from the Sangh’s own documentation. Beginning with the three dozen organisations the RSS officially acknowledges, our team delved into the vast record produced by these entities—organisational records, autobiographies, blogs and social-media posts—to identify additional organisations. Our task was to wade through the polemic, the stultifying organisational autobiographies and, often, the flat-out lies to find fragments of useful information. This produced a list of secondary organisations, held as potential Sangh organisations that would be confirmed only after multisource triangulation, confirming these details in Sangh sources with academic literature, financial filings, government documents and other Sangh sources. (Every piece of data collected by researchers was sourced from publicly available materials, while keeping the Sangh’s own sources at the centre of our work.)

To go from potential Sangh organisations to confirmed Sangh organisations, we developed a standardised metric: not to evaluate the organisation in an isolated, atomised sense but to determine whether, how and to what extent it fit into the Sangh’s connective tissue. We chose to focus much less on organisational statements and activities, and much more on shared personnel, shared offices, co-hosted events and financial flows—the unacknowledged ties that form the core of inter-organisational connections that define the Sangh network.

For example, when a researcher looked into the Donyi Polo Chhatrawas in Faridabad, they learnt that it has photos of Golwalkar and Hedgewar on its premises, that rooms in the hostel are named after Sangh personalities, and that reportedly shakha activities are held in an nearby playground. That it self-attests to being run the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, that it operates out of an office listed as the organisation’s Haryana headquarters, and that it has hosted several RSS and VKA leaders, only offered further evidence of embeddedness in the Sangh.

Similarly, one of our researchers was able to connect the seemingly innocuous Hindu Sevai Sangam in Malaysia to the Sangh only after they noticed in the Sangam’s publications the use of organisational titles such as karyavah and sah sanghchalak which was strange in an overwhelmingly Tamil community. From these fragments, the researcher expanded their search and found quotations from Golwalkar and photos on their social media resembling RSS-style shakhas. The Hindu Sevai Sangam, we eventually concluded, was simply the Malaysian avatar of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh.

An organisation named Dr Aabaji Thatte Sewa aur Anusandhan Sanstha caught our eye when we noticed that it was named after Golwalkar’s personal assistant. We then observed that its general secretary Shailesh Jogleshkar is an RSS member involved with the VHP (and was once the president of the Vidharbha chapter of Bajrang Dal), as well as one the founders of the Sangh-controlled Bhonsala Military School. That the union minister of road transport and highways, Nitin Gadkari, and the Maharasthra chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis—both Sangh leaders—speak at its events, only further confirmed our belief that the Sanstha should be considered conclusively embedded in the Sangh.

Based on this close and holistic reading of the Sangh’s published materials, our leadership team developed a list of common patterns of RSS network membership. We sharpened this list by consulting for over two years with academics, journalists and grassroots activists in India, who described to us the differing pieces of evidence they had identified in their careers that substantively indicated imbrication in the Sangh.

This yielded a comprehensive and weighted multiplexity matrix—a checklist of 34 different kinds of data points that suggested different strengths of Sangh linkage. The Sangh’s approach to organisation-building has its own clear fingerprints, bureaucratic language and tell-tale characteristics, and we managed to piece together these specific and repeated patterns into a repeatable process of evaluation. For example, if an organisation declares that it is founded by an RSS pracharak, that data point would be marked as 1. Meanwhile, an organisation displaying garlanded photos of RSS founders would receive a 0.5, and an organisation listed as an affiliate of a Sangh organisation would get a 0.25. An organisation’s cumulative score, capped at 1, represented the strength of its connection to the Sangh, with a score of 1 marking definitive inclusion within the Sangh, while an organisation with only 0.25 would, with available evidence, be considered only weakly tied to the Sangh.

OUR INVESTIGATION HAS REVEALED twenty-five hundred organisations linked to the RSS. The Sangh is organised into a centre-to-periphery model that holds a clear distinction between a densely connected core group of organisations and an outer ring of peripheral organisations, with few connections between them. Predictably, the central core of the Sangh is dominated by high-profile organisations such as the VHP, BJP, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and Sewa Bharati, and by large fundraising organisations, such as the IDRF and Support a Child USA, which are tapped to fund hundreds of organisations at once.

The Sangh executive spans both the leadership of the RSS and some non-RSS organisations.

At the core of this “Managerial RSS” is the pracharak, whose critical role in Sangh network-organising has long been known. These pracharaks are trained in the central RSS mission and, upon qualifying, sent out to Sangh appendages to maintain and consolidate control over the network, often as sangathan mantris—organisational secretaries. These are officials who have the authority, through extensive training, ideological commitment and conditioning, to make executive decisions for the central RSS in the organisations to which they are deputed. Importantly, this includes the authority to found new organisations and organisational streams, hundreds of which, we found, have been founded by pracharaks in precisely this manner.

It is the layers of the Sangh beyond this central core, however, that are especially revealing. Although the marching cadre of the RSS and the BJP are the most powerful and most publicly recognisable faces of the Sangh, governance is not necessarily its only, or even primary, objective. The presence of thousands of innocuous, little-known organisations speaks to the Sangh’s broader priority: the wholesale transformation of Indian society, not simply its administrative governance. These organisations, precisely because of and through their innocuousness, allow the Sangh to enter many different segments of society, often speaking simultaneously—and contradictorily—to many audiences. Our research broke down the Sangh’s range of organisations into a broad typology.

The Sangh’s membership-based “cadre organisations” are those with the capacity for mass mobilisation. Within these organisations are present all the key features of traditional cadre organisations: branch-based organising, formal bureaucratic hierarchies, relative ideological commitment of workers, training processes and exclusive membership. While other organisations in the Sangh have staff and beneficiaries, these are organisations with members who mobilise to “get things done.” This could be the cadre RSS, whose public marches dominate our aesthetic image of the Sangh; the ABVP mobilising students for rallies; the BJP organising members to drum up popular support for elections; the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram sending devoted workers to convert Adivasis into Sanghis; or the Bajrang Dal organising angry young men into rabble-rousing. Cadre organisations in the Sangh tend to be the direct organisational progeny of the RSS, with no intermediary organisations, retain strong pracharak control and were often founded during the Sangh’s first phases of expansion. Cadre organisations consider themselves—and are widely considered—the core of the Sangh itself and are crucial to visibilising mass public support for its politics. 

“Co-ordinating organisations” mediate the flow of information and money between core Sangh organisations and peripheries through a bureaucratic division of labour. These organisations do not necessarily possess legions of individual members, but, like the Ved Mandir Committee, are populated by surprisingly small numbers of professional staff. Much of the “actual work” of co-ordinating organisations is often done by their subsidiary organisations. For example, Vidya Bharati lays claim to a vast network of educational service provision, centered around over twelve thousand schools. (We mapped these schools as well but left them outside of this dataset to avoid crowding out other organisations.) But the actual delivery of these services is deputed to state-level organisations such as the Saraswati Shiksha Parishad in Madhya Pradesh, the Bharatiya Shiksha Samiti in Jammu or the Bharatiya Shrividya Parishad in Uttar Pradesh.

Because of the institutionalisation required to have founded, or to manage, large numbers of subsidiary organisations, co-ordinating organisations are often relatively old organisations within the Sangh and, for this reason, are also considered to be prestige organisations. The prestige, as well as their key network role as gatekeepers of the bridges between the core and the peripheries, means that a strong central executive presence is more common in these organisations than in others. After all, these mediating organisations are sites through which all communication and resources must travel. In this network, there is, on average, at least one organisation between any given organisation and the RSS. When we combine this with the fact that almost half of Sangh organisations are linked by a single tie, the importance of these mediating organisations becomes clear. If these mediating organisations, such as Sewa Bharati, IDRF, VHP, Hindu Seva Pratishthan and so on, did not exist, over half of the Sangh’s organisations would be completely cut off from the network.

At the same time, these organisations mediate the nature of the publicly acknowledged relationship between the core Sangh and the peripheries. The organisational coordination these bodies facilitate generates the ambiguity required for the strategic acknowledgement or disavowal of affiliations with the RSS. Other organisations of this type include the Bengaluru-based Bharatmata Gurukala Ashram Trust, the Madhya Pradesh-based Padma Keshav Trust, and the Delhi-based Dr Mookerjee Smruti Nyas.

“Campaign organisations” are often single-use organisations devoted to a specific mobilisation, policy change or issue and can be founded for a purpose before being discarded. Examples include the Punjab Relief Committee and the Bastuhara Sahayata Samiti, charged with refugee aid in the aftermath of Partition; disaster relief organisations such as the Morvi Relief Committee; temple agitations such as the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas; or anti-Christian mobilisations among Adivasis, such as the Janjati Suraksha Manch. Recently, the US Sangh even created the Ambedkar–Phule Network of American Dalits and Bahujans for the explicit purpose of opposing legislative measures in California to prevent caste discrimination.

At the same time, these organisations are essential to the production of the mythos of struggle within the RSS. Despite controlling a government that governs almost a fifth of humanity, the Sangh draws great sustenance from narratives of Hindu oppression and government persecution. In this context, the images of the just campaign, or the service provided when no one else would, act as important moral resources for the Sangh.

Front organisations are a term we use more precisely than its common parlance. In this case, we mean organisations that are materially indistinguishable—same funding, same activities, same organisational structure and same flows of authority, among other things—from their parent organisation but operate under a separate name in an intentional strategy of duplication and obfuscation. This definition applies to some Sangh organisations, but not all. 

For example, Sewa Bharati works all over India, but its state divisions often operate under separate names and legal identities. In Odisha, it operates through the Utkal Bipanna Sahayata Samiti, in Maharashtra as the Jankalyan Samiti, in Tripura the Vivekananda Seva Nyas, in Uttarakhand the Uttaranchal Uthana Parishad. Likewise, Vidya Bharati operates nationally, but in Jharkhand it is the Vananchal Shiksha Samiti, in Tamil Nadu it is the Vivekananda Kendra, in Delhi it is the Samarth Shiksha Samiti and in Punjab it is the Sarvhitkari Shiksha Samiti. Importantly, the distinctions between the parent and the front organisation often disappear in internal publications and conversations.

We also found a number of what we call “covert organisations.” It is these that many think of when they think of the Sangh, largely because of the organisations’ implication in the spectacular violence with which the Sangh is often associated. Covert organisations are those that do not simply conceal their ties with the Sangh but also conceal themselves, or at least their activities. The concealment is largely because of their involvement in illicit or reputationally damaging activities that could hurt the broader Sangh.

One of the Sangh’s aims is to build the image of the strong, masculine and aggressive community in its attempts to deliver on the promise of a Hindu Rashtra. Certain forms of militant mobilisations to this end often becomes a very useful tool to consolidate electorates, but it carries high reputational liabilities. Hence, covert organisations in the Sangh tend to have very few visible network connections and very little available information on them. The Hindu Jagran Manch, an array of Senas with ties to BJP leaders and caste groups, and historical examples such as the Hindu Dharm Raksha Samiti and the Rashtriya Utsav Mandal, are all examples of covert organisations.

Meanwhile, the Sangh has made efforts to build a type of strategic signalling that rehabilitates its image and lures more people into its vision for society. As the Sangh grew in strength after the late 1970s, it began to react to increasingly vocal public criticism of the Sangh’s exclusion of certain sectors of society. This produced a type of organisation than can be called a display or “showpiece organisation.”

The primary purpose of showpiece organisations is to prove a point about the Sangh by virtue of their very existence. These organisations are often highly publicised but organisationally two-dimensional. They are meant to counter or deflect accusations about the Sangh’s casteist, communalist and Hindu supremacist vision and to draw more people into its fold. The Samajik Samrasta Manch was founded in 1983 in response to the 1981 mass conversion of Meenakshipuram Dalits to Islam. The Rashtriya Sikh Sangat was founded in 1986 after the devastating anti-Sikh communal violence as a way of signalling purported compatibility between Sikhism and Hindu nationalism. In turn, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch was founded only months after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat and became a reputation management tool to suggest that the Sangh did not, in fact, hate Muslims.

The network position of these organisations usually represents a terminus, meaning that these showpiece organisations do not sprout progeny in the way other Sangh organisations do. They are usually also direct organisational children of the RSS, with a strong pracharak presence. Showpiece organisations do not appear to be the location of significant Sangh mobilisation strategies. Despite being founded over two decades ago, the fact that the MRM, for example, marks the end network point of Sangh Muslim engagement tells us a lot about this avenue as a priority for the Sangh.

We also identified a range of “training organisations.” Since its inception a century ago, the goal of man-making has, as the Sangh repeatedly insists publicly, been core to its identity. Man-making is a process of crafting the physicality, disposition, beliefs and identity of people into ideal citizens of Hindu Rashtra. Much has been said about this man-making through the shakha system, but the RSS is simply one of many Sangh organisations that undertake this mission. The Sangh has invested in a whole range of other training organisations, imagined as machines that transform non-Sangh people into instruments of Sangh expansion. Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini trains and produces political leaders. The Central Hindu Military Education Society pops out Sanghi soldiers with the hope that they will one day be Sanghi generals. Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana is an elaborate production line that rolls out yoga teachers who can spread the soft power of Hindu nationalist yoga throughout the world.

Adjacent to training organisations are what can be called “knowledge production organisations,” which produce the intellectual, cultural, emotional and artistic environments in which action by other Sangh organisations becomes legitimate. For example, Forum for Integrated National Security, Forum for Strategic and Security Studies, Jammu Kashmir Study Centre and the Vivekananda International Foundation focus on questions of policy around national security. As The Caravan has reported, the Vivekananda International Foundation will publish detailed proposals for military interventionism in Kashmir that government officials will, in turn, use to justify their annexation of the territory.

Within this category, we traced the research output of the Sangh to its ecosystems of think tanks, policy institutions and bharatiya knowledge centres. Organisations such as Deendayal Shodh Sansthan and Centre for Policy Studies focus on economic—and particularly rural—development; the Bharatiya Vichara Kendram and Vishwa Adhyayan Kendra focus on civilisational accomplishments. There are also think tanks working on issues regarding gender, such as the Drishti Stree Adhyayan Prabodhan Kendra; education, such as the Samvit Research Foundation; and indigeneity, such as the International Centre for Cultural Studies. Often, the activities of these varied research institutions represent a reactionary Sangh development against the claims that Hindu nationalists lack great intellectual giants, are uncouth populist rabble rousers and do not have a serious vision for Indian governance. The overwhelming majority of these research institutes did not develop until the late 1990s and early 2000s, precisely when Hindu nationalists were coming under attack for their role in instigating violence against minorities.

Finally, but most crucially, a large plurality of organisations within the Sangh are “last-mile organisations”—small service-provision organisations that constitute the endpoint interface between Sangh resources and non-Sangh publics. These are the tiny eye clinics, blood banks, village schools, orphanages and leprosy clinics that offer services in communities the Sangh seeks to reach. The scale and spread of these organisations, their embeddedness in communities, and the often essential services they provide, mean that these organisations have continual access to large numbers of people in a very wide variety of physical locations.

These organisations are largely peripheral within the RSS network structure. Most of them represent a terminus of the Sangh network, possessing only a single link to a co-ordinating organisation, with few or no horizontal ties with other endpoint peripheries. These organisations do not operate within a strong Sangh social milieu and often de-emphasise Hindutva ideology, presenting a non-threatening, uncontroversial entry point into the broader network for new supporters. This focus on grassroots service is fundamental to both how the Sangh sees itself and how it would like to be seen, but these organisations are also important locations for proselytisation and conditioning. They are also, it should be noted, vectors of large amounts of funding coming from the diasporic Sangh through charitable donations.

OUR TEAM IS CONFIDENT that this research will set the basis for a range of new research and journalistic directions: investigations into how the Sangh moves money and resources; new understandings of the Sangh’s less publicised priorities (such as, say, its network of hundreds of residential schools and hostels); and even a new way to imagine, and uncover, a range of internal conflicts within the Sangh that it has kept under wraps. These questions, and so many others that animate those looking into the Sangh, require, as a pre-requisite, an understanding of what the Sangh actually is. We hope we have provided an initial roadmap in this regard.

But this project’s other primary contribution, we believe, is not just empirical but conceptual. For decades, two parallel understandings of the Sangh have been allowed to proliferate. The first sees the different constituents of the Sangh as inchoately and fuzzily connected, strung together only by a shared ideological goal—one where the RSS has limited itself to “inspiring” a conveyor belt of devoted swayamsevaks and organisations. The second, on the other hand, understands the Sangh as, in fact, less shaped by conformity in visible ideology and, instead, organised by the material ties generated by an organisational bureaucracy that sees management and coordination as among its primary tasks. In this second understanding, the Sangh might often intentionally present different faces to different constituencies, but it understands these avatars to emerge from the same mothership, sees these different forms as inextricably part of the same single unit and spends considerable resources ensuring this is the case.

Both these understandings, we should remember, have been encouraged by the RSS itself. The catch, however, is that one framework is repeatedly presented to the public, whereas the other is reserved for an internal audience. As the Sangh completes a century of existence, the public deserves to know what it says about itself beyond its public transcripts and to pick their understanding of choice accordingly.

A dashboard featuring a fact-checked presentation of this data, published by The Caravan, is available here.

Requests for access to the data can be submitted to Science Po’s CERI here. Requests that do not provide details for accreditation will not be processed. Please excuse any delays in initial weeks as our team verifies requests for access.

Researchers, activists and members of the public are encouraged to submit additional data on the Sangh at this link. We welcome all submissions, but only data that is backed up by a strong evidentiary record and that can be independently verified will be considered for updating this dataset.