THE RSS DOES NOT EXIST: MAPPING THE HIDDEN STRUCTURE OF AN UNACCOUNTABLE ORGANISATION
Amrita Singh
THE FOOTBRIDGE OVER Desh Bandhu Gupta Road in Delhi’s Jhandewalan is typically dirty and dusty, with the staircase on one end often littered with plastic plates, food and tattered clothes. To use it at night, one has to be careful not to stumble over the homeless people who sometimes sleep at its base. Upon climbing the stairs, a massive tower comes into view—bright lights shine through a row of windows in each of the building’s 12 floors. All buildings in Jhandewalan, no matter how tall, are dimmed at night, but not this one.
The grand tower, and the two similar structures behind it, are part of Keshav Kunj, the Delhi headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, one of the world’s largest volunteer organisations, which has marshalled the cause of a Hindu Rashtra for decades.
The RSS, which celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year, is the ideological fountainhead of the Sangh Parivar—a vast constellation of organisations that includes the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party as its political arm; the Vishva Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal as its cultural-religious outfits; the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad as its student wing; the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad as its legal wing; and overseas groups such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh and NGOs such as Sewa International. The organisation has long projected itself as frugal and austere, but, since the BJP came to power in 2014, it seems far more comfortable showcasing its wealth and influence. Keshav Kunj is a case in point.
Spread over nineteen thousand square yards, the complex includes three towers housing auditoriums, a Hanuman temple, offices for RSS affiliates, conference halls, residences, a library and even a hospital. The RSS claimed that the building cost Rs150 crores, funded by volunteers. At the building’s inauguration, Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—acknowledged its ostentation. “Prosperity is necessary,” he said, “but it must come with discipline and limits. Our work must uphold the grandeur of this new building.”
Keshav Kunj is a monument to the sweeping consolidation of the Sangh’s ideological power and to its long creep into the heart of the capital. Its first office in Delhi was set up in 1936, near the Birla Mandir a few streets away. Questions about its purpose and legitimacy, which have recurred throughout the organisation’s controversial past, are not up for discussion today. This is largely thanks to the political ascent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself a former pracharak—fulltime worker. Today, the RSS is ubiquitous. Its members are embedded in civic and constitutional institutions, and operate through a dense web of affiliated trusts and organisations.
On the night of 17 September 2024—which happened to be Modi’s birthday—I went to the gate of Keshav Kunj with a colleague. Bhagwat was scheduled to visit the complex, which was still under construction. Personnel of the Central Industrial Security Force, which had been guarding the RSS office for two years, shooed us away. One of them, AK Singh, barred us from clicking photos of the building’s exterior. “Do you click photos around the prime minister’s house?” he said.
Singh would only let us in if we had permission. We asked whom we should get permission from. “The RSS people will themselves contact you if they need you,” he said. “You are not supposed to contact them.”
KESHAV KUNJ is the perfect metaphor for what the RSS is today: immense in scale and ambition, but built to evade scrutiny. Through interviews with various Sangh officials, members of its affiliates, local residents and scholars—as well as by perusing court judgments and archival documents—I was able to piece together a compelling picture of how the RSS acquires and controls land through temple trusts and its wide network of financiers. But the granular details of the project’s funders, what exactly happens inside and what laws it could be held accountable under were harder to pin down. This happens to be a feature and not a bug related to investigations into the RSS, an organisation that shapeshifts at its own convenience.
The land on which Keshav Kunj stands was once at the centre of an ownership dispute. Leased in 1947 by the Badri Bhagat Jhandewalan Temple Society to the second sarsanghchalak, MS Golwalkar, the property was later transferred to the Shree Keshav Smarak Samiti, an RSS proxy. The Delhi Development Authority initially challenged the lease, claiming the land was government-owned, but a 1990 court judgment—delivered ex parte after the DDA failed to appear—favoured the temple trust. Since then, residents near the complex have accused the trust of coercing them to vacate their homes. Many of them told me that they were facing pressure from the RSS and its affiliates but were fearful of speaking out openly. “They are land mafia in the name of the temple,” Om Prakash, one resident resisting evacuation, said.
The site was redeveloped by low-profile contractors with Sangh affiliations, without clear indication of public fundraising or financial transparency. Today, the complex operates behind closed doors; entry is closely guarded. I visited three times—once on a guided tour, another time to speak to a senior RSS official, and another for a book launch. Sangh functionaries only offer information on their own terms, and often with the aim of ideological persuasion. “If you want to understand the Sangh, then I think that you should not understand, but should get inside it,” Harsh Jitendra Rathod, a journalist with India News and member of the Sangh, told me.
From its inception, in 1925 at Nagpur, the RSS has taken inspiration from European fascism. BS Moonje, a mentor to the Sangh’s founder, KB Hedgewar, met the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and urged Hindu leaders to emulate the country’s fascist youth movements. Golwalkar praised Nazi Germany’s “race pride.” In We, or Our Nationhood Defined, he wrote, “Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole—a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”
“The ideological thread is that this is an organisation which fully works in a conspiratorial manner,” Shamsul Islam, a retired professor of political science at Delhi University who has written several books on the Sangh, told me. He pointed me to the book Param Vaibhav Ke Path Par, which was published and later withdrawn by the RSS publishing house Suruchi Prakashan. It stated that, during Partition, swayamsevaks—Sangh volunteers—pretended to be Muslims in order to infiltrate the Muslim League and gain strategic information. On 14 March 1948, the future Indian president Rajendra Prasad had even written to Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, raising concerns that RSS members were planning to disguise themselves as Muslims to attack Hindus and foment violence.
Today, the RSS glosses over its sinister history by trying to appear more benign. On its website, it speaks of tradition, “cultural roots of the nation” and “Bharat’s national glory.” It calls itself a “movement for national reconstruction” in which it will foster “a national character, uncompromising devotion to the Motherland, discipline self-restraint, courage and heroism.” This is to be done by strengthening the “foundations of the Hindu society.” Under Modi, the BJP has helped it achieve several of its aims, including the construction of a Ram temple upon the ruins of the Babri Mosque, which a Hindutva mob demolished in 1992; the passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which can work as a convenient tool to disenfranchise Muslims in the country while protecting undocumented Hindus; and the abrogation of Article 370, which bulldozed the tenuous agreement Jammu and Kashmir had made to join the Indian union.
The RSS insists that it does not directly engage in politics, despite very obviously shaping the worldview of the ruling party, supplying ground support to the BJP during elections, influencing public policy and populating government institutions with its cadre. It tries to whitewash its violent history and pretends that it is neither communal nor Brahminical. It claims to be a cultural organisation, but it is not registered as a society, a trust or a volunteer organisation. In fact, it is not registered at all, which means it is able to sidestep basic forms of public accountability. It is beyond the purview of laws that would require it to disclose its income, even to the government. Provisions of several laws such as the Societies Registration Act, the Income Tax Act, the Central Goods and Services Tax Act and the Companies Act delineate how registered nonprofits, trusts and companies—even those that are merely cultural—are supposed to pay taxes and disclose their income to the government.
The Sangh cannot legally enter into contracts, own property or receive tax-deductible donations—but it does all of these through its web of affiliated trusts and front organisations. The Shree Keshav Smarak Samiti is one such body. It is a registered society and offers tax exemptions under Sections 80G and 12A of the Income Tax Act. I asked the SKSS president, Alok Kumar—who is also the president of the VHP and a lawyer for the Sangh—if his organisation belonged to the RSS. “No,” he said. “It’s a trust by the prominent people of Delhi. There is no RSS trust.” He argued that the SKSS was “not even a trust. I told you it’s a society, under the Societies Registration Act. And it is being done by several people, including me.” When I pointed out that all its office bearers were RSS members, he responded, “Yes, we are RSS persons. I am saying the society, in law, has an independent existence.” Others, such as Rashtriya Sewa Bharti and the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana—the Sangh’s community service organisation and history wing respectively—serve similar proxy roles. This diffuse structure allows the RSS to operate in full public view and grow in strength while evading the regulatory frameworks that govern every small or big charity, NGO or religious trust.
After th RSS’s Nathuram Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, the organisation was banned until 1949. Google News Archive
The organisation escapes more than just financial scrutiny. Because the Societies Registration Act does not apply to it, it is not required to keep membership records. This loophole has allowed it to obfuscate the RSS membership of Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. As senior journalist Dhirendra K Jha has shown through archival evidence in his book Gandhi’s Assassin: The Making of Nathuram Godse and His Idea of India and a cover story published in this magazine in January 2020, Godse remained a swayamsevak until the very end. The RSS has long denied this, relying on the convenient fact that no formal registers exist. Vallabhbhai Patel had himself acknowledged this lack of transparency. In a letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, on 27 February 1948, he wrote, “In the case of a secret organisation like the RSS which has no records, registers, etc., securing authentic information whether a particular individual is active worker or not is rendered a very difficult task.” Many prominent Sangh leaders were arrested after Gandhi’s assassination, and the organisation was banned until 1949. It was also banned during Indira Gandhi’s tenure and after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
“Deceptive double talk marks the RSS utterances,” the constitutional scholar AG Noorani observes in his book The RSS: A Menace to India. He details how litigation in the 1970s on whether the RSS should be taxed demonstrated “the RSS’s proneness to lie and deceive.” The organisation simultaneously claimed to be a charitable institution before the Bombay high court and a political one before the charity commissioner—while telling the public it was merely cultural. In 1945, the future sarsanghchalak Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras told a meeting that the Sangh’s goal was to create a powerful network across the country and “at an opportune moment to seize the power on receipt of an order from our Leader.”
“It’s a very strange animal,” the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot told me. “The RSS is primarily a movement that is totalitarian, in its attempt at controlling society—but controlling society from the inside.” He described the Sangh as embodying a very Indian version of fascist control. “The state is not the objective. Society is the objective.” Politics, he argued, is just a “means to a more supreme end.” Violence where necessary can now be subcontracted to its front outfits, such as the Bajrang Dal. This structural ambiguity enables the RSS to centralise influence while diffusing responsibility. It allows it to take over institutions and to have boots on the ground, but also to be nowhere at the same time.
A hundred years later, the RSS remains steadfast on expanding its spread. It has succeeded in reorganising entire cities and towns. Its history in Delhi, more particularly in Karol Bagh and Jhandewalan, which is now the Sangh’s stronghold, provides a rich and layered history of decades of growing influence in the national capital. The use of religious bodies and local politics to seize land goes along with deep community engagement. This is a playbook it has perfected over the decades, most spectacularly in Ayodhya but also in Mathura and small towns where RSS-linked temples are turned into sympathetic Hindu community hubs—ideological nerve centres that feed back into the amorphous organisation.
Various lawyers I spoke to mentioned that, while the Constitution rightfully allows freedom of association, the application of many existing laws are meant to ensure that organisations stay within the bounds of legality, even if they are unregistered entities. “The mere fact that they are unregistered doesn’t mean they are above the law,” Prashant Bhushan told me. “Whatever the laws are, everything applies to them.” This would mean that the government could, if it wanted, pull up the RSS for hate speech, concealment of funds and land encroachment. However, the political will to scrutinise the Sangh, even in the decades before Modi came to power, has been entirely missing.
Keshav Kunj shows us what the RSS is today. Built on a contested past, powered by a vast but hidden network, it houses an unregistered organisation that has reshaped India’s political and cultural foundations. One close observer of the Sangh put it to me this way: “The RSS is a ghost. It can do anything. We know nothing about it.”
KESHAV KUNJ WAS INAUGURATED on 19 February this year. Many journalists were not allowed to enter the premises. About thirty of them were stationed across the road to capture the event from afar. The footbridge, the road divider and tempos standing in front of Keshav Kunj were all decorated with saffron flags. Police personnel and young men in white kurtas, Gandhi caps and orange scarves were manning the road. Large cars paused at the gate before passing through. Not far from the gate, among the cadre dressed in white, stood Rathod, the RSS journalist, a man of about thirty.
Rathod was also denied entry. He did not mind, he told me—he could go inside any other day. Only about two thousand dignitaries were allowed to attend. “All these people you see today, they will be big names in their jobs and institutions,” he said. Like the rest of the Sangh members I met, he believed in the higher purpose that the RSS served. “We have to be understanding.”
Over the past decade, the RSS has grown exponentially. According to a 2024–25 report by the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha, the Sangh’s highest decision-making body, the organisation now operates over eighty thousand shakhas—branches that hold daily events—in more than fifty thousand locations, almost double its 2014 figures. There are weekly and monthly congregations, reaching tens of thousands more. Its community outreach is extensive, and it organises public events such as mass marriages, healthcare camps, housing schemes and nearly ninety thousand daily service projects.
This nationwide growth is orchestrated through an intricate and decentralised structure. India is divided into 11 administrative kshetras, further split into prants, vibhags, zilas, nagars and bastis. Each level is overseen by rotating teams, or tolis, and the work is distributed across thematic departments: among others, Baudhik (ideology), Seva (service), Dharma Jagran (religious mobilisation) and Sampark (elite outreach).
Anil Gupta, the zila karyavah—coordinator—of the Sangh’s Karol Bagh unit, under whose boundary Keshav Kunj falls, told me that the sampark vibhag, for example, uses personal engagement and ideological persuasion to target those who cannot attend shakhas regularly. These include corporate executives, professionals and influential community members. “Suppose someone is at a big executive level—CEO of a company, MD of a company or someone is running a very good business—those people have a little shortage of time,” he said. “Some hesitate a little. So, there is a sampark department for meeting and contacting those people.”
The construction of the new headquarters reflects the organisation’s deep bench of loyal professionals. The building’s architect, Anup Dave, is based in Ahmedabad and allegedly has family links to the VHP. Though he initially agreed to speak to me, he stopped responding to my calls and messages about these links. The contractor, Anil Jain of Auspicious Group, told me that his role was minimal, even though his company’s name is engraved on the building and on documents. “Mujhe baksh do”—Please spare me—he said. “I’m just a small man.” I had filed an RTI related to the construction and permissions given for the construction of Keshav Kunj to the MCD over a month back, but have still not received a response.
Jain’s social-media account includes photos of him wearing BJP scarves. He has worked on Sangh projects before. “We have only participated a bit in the construction,” he claimed. “If there is a big building, even if you have a squirrel’s role, a person will write about it. There’s nothing more of our role.” Saurav Bhaik, a co-founder of Tagbin Services—a firm behind several BJP projects, including the Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya—told me his company is now designing a gallery for Keshav Kunj’s international culture centre vibhag. Ashok Sachdeva, who heads the Sangh’s media centre and is president of its Karol Bagh unit, is called in for electrical work there. He told me that he also works with the temple office.
The Sangh’s newfound visibility in the capital fills its members with pride. “Sometimes, when I’m in an auto and we cross the building, I ask the driver, ‘Whose office is this?’” Gupta told me. The replies he has received include “This is Modi’s” and “Woh nikkarwale na, unka hai”—Those people who wear shorts, a reference to the RSS uniform. He laughed and said, “People don’t have full knowledge.”
Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, addresses the dignitaries who attended the inauguration of Keshav Kunj. RSS/PTI Photo
Senior swayamsevaks I spoke to appeared satisfied with where the relationship between the RSS and the BJP stood. During his first two terms as prime minister, Modi had developed a cult of personality, seemingly eclipsing the Sangh’s authority within the broader Hindutva ecosystem. But, when the BJP returned for a third term with a weakened mandate, in 2024, the balance shifted. The RSS mouthpiece Organiser openly criticised the arrogance of BJP workers, and Mohan Bhagwat warned that “true sevaks” must not become “arrogant”—a public rebuke unthinkable even a year earlier. Sachdeva told me that all Sangh affiliates operating in his zone were required to report back on how they were implementing instructions from senior RSS leadership. “BJP people tell us what they’ve done,” he said. “We tell them how they should be doing the work.”
Both Sachdeva and Rathod said they had actively campaigned for the BJP in the Delhi assembly election on 5 February, helping bring it to power in the capital after nearly three decades. “You won’t believe, but it wasn’t possible for the BJP to win this election without the support of the RSS,” Rathod said, adding that he worked directly with Pradeep Bhandari, the national spokesperson of the BJP. On the day of the inauguration, Rathod was sure in his belief that the new chief minister of Delhi would be decided from within the complex in a few hours, and not from the BJP office. “The decision will come from here and just be announced from there,” he said. That night, it was announced that an old RSS hand, Rekha Gupta, would assume the post.
WHENEVER THE RSS is asked about its source of income, its members invoke the practice of gurudakshina—offerings to one’s teacher. Since 1928, each shakha across the country has held an annual event around Guru Purnima, during which swayamsevaks enclose any amount of their choosing in an envelope and offer it in the name of the Sangh’s saffron flag. The amount is never disclosed publicly. Various RSS functionaries told me that a database is compiled of who contributed what, but only a few officials can access it. Gupta said the money “is for the Sangh’s own operations, we don’t take from the public for this, because the Sangh is ours, because gurudakshina means dedicating to the saffron flag, which for me is akin to a guru.”
In his 1979 book Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Des Raj Goyal describes this opaque donation system and the Sangh’s untraceable membership process as operating “in the style of religious cults or mafia.” He writes that it “has given rise to many malpractices within the organisation. Above all, it creates grave suspicion that large sums of doubtful origin and character are being absorbed without any possibility of detection.” When Gandhi asked Hedgewar about the Sangh’s sources of funding, he had received the same explanation. Nearly a century later, no RSS official offers a more detailed or verifiable answer. But it was clear from my interviews in Delhi and Ayodhya, and records from past decades, that rich businessmen have long supported the Sangh.
The gurudakshina explanation cannot fully account for the organisation’s financial footprint. For instance, Saket Nilayam, a newly built office and boarding house in Ayodhya—also constructed under the aegis of a registered society—collected donations from the general public for its construction. Many other RSS affiliates follow the same practice. Some also receive foreign funds. A 2002 report by the US-based Campaign to Stop Funding Hate found that the charity India Development and Relief Fund, headquartered in Maryland, had donated nearly $4 million between 1994 and 2000 to RSS-linked organisations in India, including Rashtriya Sewa Bharti. (The IDRF claimed that it only funded humanitarian and educational causes and denied any political affiliation.) Both Rashtriya Sewa Bharti and the Bahu Rao Deoras Rashtriya Seva Nyas—an organisation registered at Keshav Kunj—hold licences under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act. This is at a time when several Indian nonprofits have struggled to obtain or renew FCRA licences, and are often accused by the Hindu Right of being anti-national and foreign-funded when their mandates diverge from that of the Sangh.
It is plausible—if not obvious—that funds are shared between the many uncounted registered and unregistered Sangh affiliates. Sachdeva told me his Karol Bagh unit often volunteers to do humanitarian work, such as assisting victims of the 15 February stampede at New Delhi Railway Station after the authorities had failed to make proper arrangements for the crowd going for the Kumbh Mela. “No one spends money from their own pocket,” he said. “Our swayamsevaks live hand to mouth. I don’t expect them to fund anything. We ask Sewa Bharti to give, they do it. Immediate expenses, I give.” Bhushan explained that if the RSS is getting foreign funding, it would be against the law. “If it is an organisation of a political nature, FCRA prohibits them from taking any foreign funds,” he said. “And there RSS and its affiliates are definitely organisations of a political nature.”
Gupta told me that it was not just swayamsevaks who donated to the building. Many “friends” of the Sangh also contributed. “We took support of some members of the public who may have gone to a shakha as a child or share our ideology,” he said. Kumar, the SKSS president, echoed this. He said that, while laying the foundation stone in 2016, Bhagwat had been clear that collection of money “will not be from the general public” but only from “those who are from the Sangh, those who love Hindutva and thus the Sangh.” By 2024, the RSS claimed the complex had cost Rs 150 crore to build. Kumar clarified that all donations had come into the SKSS account through cheques and verified sources of transaction. When I asked why the RSS and its affiliates would not make their finances public, he said, “But societies don’t need to. It is reported to all statutory authorities where it is required to be reported.” He insisted the RSS, too, was likely doing things by the book. It had several bank accounts for its shakhas, he claimed, and disclosed their income to tax authorities and filed returns regularly. The RSS did not respond to a detailed questionnaire I sent.
The SKSS registered under the Goods and Services Tax regime, in July 2017, for “renting immovable property,” but its GST number was cancelled in March 2019 for unspecified reasons. Ravinder Goyal, the RSS official overseeing construction, declined to comment on this, saying he was busy working on a third tower, whose exterior now largely seems complete. It remains unclear whether GST is currently paid—and if so, by whom. When I asked Kumar, he simply shook his head and gestured that he did not know.
The SKSS has no website or online donation portal, and its fundraising campaign has never been a public one. Kumar told me there were two campaigns to raise money, and “the rest was in continuity.” By this, he meant that, “at different stages, different people would think ‘We need this much money. Where do we bring it from?’” They would approach those connected to the Sangh. “We did not go to strangers.” About the SKSS keeping such a low profile, he said, “We are not interested in promotion.”
Gupta, too, told me that contributions were collected in two phases after 2016. He refused to share how much his unit raised. Sachdeva estimated that the Karol Bagh unit alone raised Rs 8 crore. “We had one centre for collection,” Gupta said. “Whatever money was raised by a shakha in a day was submitted to that centre the next day. The sum collected at the zila level—well, even we don’t know that. It was deposited directly to the bank.”
The RSS does not believe it owes the public any explanations about its finances. “Why should we tell the public that this person gave us Rs 1 lakh, this person gave us Rs 2 lakh?” Sharad Sharma, the VHP’s media manager in Ayodhya, told me. “Why should we publicise how much money we have?” He said that this was between the contributors and the RSS, “so, no, we don’t need to explain ourselves to anyone else.”
I FIRST WENT INSIDE Keshav Kunj on 4 February, a few weeks before its inauguration. Entry was only possible if an RSS official had given your name to the security guards. In the first tower, called Sadhna, the ground floor was occupied by a bookstore of Suruchi Prakashan. There was a hall dedicated to Ashok Singhal, the VHP leader credited with spearheading the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement. On the floors above were spaces dedicated for different wings of the Sangh—conference halls, an office and some rooms for the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana, a library, an archives department, and studios for the Sangh mouthpieces Panchjanya and Organiser. The second tower, Prerna, was out of bounds. It had a temple on the ground floor, and the floors above had rooms for pracharaks. Upon crossing the second tower, there was a garden with a statue of Hedgewar, where the Sangh can hold shakhas. Following this is an iron gate, that led to the still under-construction third tower, which will be called Archana, and house support staff of the Sangh.
I was visiting the ABISY’s national organising secretary, Balmukund Pande. He told me to not identify myself as a journalist to the security outside. Pande was in a room next to the ABISY office. It had a small puja stool, a single bed, a small table and a cupboard, with a small balcony. It was spick and span like the rest of the building, with clean white tiles and bright lighting. Another man sat in the room with us.
“I called him here,” Pande said. “You are a girl. I am an adult man. But it is somewhere in the constitution that one should not talk to any girl or woman alone in a room.” He was not speaking about the Indian Constitution but one that “must have been a thousand years ago,” because of which “the society must be functioning.” He emphasised that it was not as if “the Constitution made by Bhim Rao Ambedkar is the final constitution.” Instead, there was a more abstract one, not necessarily written. “This is our constitution, which has been running for years,” he said. “It is in Manusmriti, it is in Mahabharata, you will find it everywhere.”
The ABISY works to “rewrite history,” Pande said. In 2017, the union culture ministry gave the organisation Rs20 lakh as grant-in-aid for “Bhartiy Itihas Ke Srot Evam Itihas Lekhan”—historiography. The next year, the ministry gave the ABISY financial assistance of Rs40 lakh for organising a national workshop in Guwahati on “Purushartha Chatushtya”—the four aims of human life in Hindu scripture.
Pande felt that history-writing had been dominated by people such as Romila Thapar and DN Jha, whom he described as “these foreign-thought historians, new historians, who have nothing to do with India.” He spoke of the importance of creating new literature and “Indian sources.” He distinguished between “negative history” that “show us down” versus “positive history” that would be a guiding light. “We will have to derive the definition of history from scriptures, Sanskrit and folk texts. For that, along with historiography, we are also establishing research methodology.” The methodology involves some creativity.
“We will not move forward only with the references of the British,” Pande insisted. “So we will get the real history from the Indian sources that we will generate.” He said the archival sources historians should rely on are in the “Mahabharat, Vedas, Ram Granth, Upanishad, Gita and Guru Granth Sahib, everywhere.” He said that the University Grants Commission has accepted that the Aryans did not come from outside India—an ahistorical statement that goes with the Sangh’s ideology—and this will soon reflect in school textbooks.
Over the years, the Sangh has managed to get educational bodies to drop key aspects of Indian history. In 2023, the National Council for Educational Research and Training deleted references from school textbooks to the RSS ban and softened the language around Hindu extremism and Godse. The year before, it had dropped references to the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat—which had played out under Modi’s watch as chief minister—Mughal courts and even references to Dalit writers such as Omprakash Valmiki.
The entire tower seemed to be dedicated to the Sangh’s intellectual efforts. Kumar told me that the property had been lent to many bodies that were not RSS affiliates but doing a “useful job for the country.” As examples, he cited Organiser and Panchajanya, as well as Suruchi Prakashan, which he described as “an organisation which publishes nationalist books.” He dismissed my questions about these belonging to the RSS. Suruchi Prakashan, he said by way of explanation, was run by a trust called Suruchi Sahitya, as was Prajna Pravah, which, he said, did “research and propaganda of nationalist Hindus” and “worked for the intellectual rejuvenation of the country” in order to “decolonise the mind.” Prajna Pravah is currently headed by the senior Sangh functionary J Nandakumar.
My second visit was in the aftermath of a low-key Sangh event—organised by its lesser-known wing Bharat Bharti—of the Gujarati community in Delhi’s Rajouri Garden. “In our country, the temple runs the city,” the Delhi prant karyavah, Anil Gupta, said at the event, freshly returned from the Kumbh Mela. “You go to any country, the public runs the church. If the public stops going to the church, it will stop functioning. The public runs the masjid. If the public stops going to masjid, the masjid will stop. But, in India, this doesn’t happen. Somnath is running the entire city. Mahakal is running the whole city. Ram Mandir has transformed all of Ayodhya.”
The Sangh had maintained a database of names of the about sixty attendees to the Bharat Bharti event. The organisers called almost everyone on the stage on some pretext or the other, likely to make them feel important. They were later invited to a tour of Keshav Kunj. Some twenty middle-aged men and women from Rajouri’s Gujarat community showed up. We were addressed by two senior RSS leaders: Vijay Patel and V Venugopal, a member of the vyavastha toli—management group—of Keshav Kunj. The attendees did not seem particularly interested in what the RSS stood for but seemed excited to explore the Sangh’s new structure and meet its mid-level leaders. Some exchanged numbers. Towards the end of the Keshav Kunj visit, Venupogal said, “Next, we can arrange for you to see the Parliament.”
The leaders made no mention of a Hindu Rashtra, only speaking about the Sangh’s branches and its new office. Later, we were ushered into the Jhandewalan temple from a separate entry in the back, which was open to the Sangh.
IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Jhandewalan was a stretch of dense forest with a lot of wildlife. Among those who frequented it from neighbouring areas was Badri Bhagat Dass, a prominent cloth merchant from Chandni Chowk. One day, while meditating in the forest, Dass had a vision of an ancient temple buried underground in a cave near a spring. Later, in a dream, he saw a temple in the same area and felt inspired to find it. Acting on this vision, he dug through and found an idol of a goddess, which broke during the excavation. He installed a new idol and built a temple around it, flying a large flag on top. The flag—a jhanda—gave the temple and the locality its name.
This history is written on the website of the Badri Bhagat Jhandewalan Temple Society, which manages the temple. The land on which Keshav Kunj stands was leased by the BBJTS. A profile of its current leadership reflects how deeply the Sangh Parivar has embedded itself in the temple’s workings. Among them are Champat Rai, the vice-president of the VHP and general secretary of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra, the trust that oversaw the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya; Bajrang Lal Bagra, the VHP’s secretary general; and Kulbhushan Ahuja, a former chief of the Sangh’s Delhi prant who owns the Ahujasons shawl chain and was investigated for depositing Rs17 crore in old notes after demonetisation. (Ahuja said that the investigation did not find anything against him.) The trust’s president, Naveen Kapoor, from the founding Dass family, was recently felicitated by the union defence minister at an RSS-affiliated function.
A kilometre away from the Jhandewalan temple is the 108-Feet Shri Sankat Mochan Dhaam. This temple is impossible to miss for those who pass by Karol Bagh, or pass through the Jhandewalan station on the Delhi metro. The towering orange Hanuman statue—made popular by many recent films on Delhi—dominates the area’s skyline, its top half slightly twisted to face the intersection below.
The legend behind the Hanuman temple is similar to the Jhandewalan origin story—and also, famously, to the Ram temple at Ayodhya—having to do with a Hindu deity visiting someone in a dream. According to the narrative, an ascetic called Sevagir was meditating at the site, which was occupied by a modest Shiv temple at the time, when Hanuman asked him to build a giant statue in his image. Construction began in 1994 and took 13 years to complete.
Om Prakash Giri, the president of the trust that runs the Hanuman temple, told me that, although the statue was recent, the temple was two hundred years old. He gave me a magazine the trust had published this year to help with my research. It contained endorsements by the BJP MPs Bansuri Swaraj and Manoj Tiwari, and by Alok Kumar, the SKSS and VHP president. Giri said that he was a member of the RSS and used to attend the Keshav Kunj shakha but insisted that, while the Jhandewalan temple belonged to the Sangh, the Hanuman temple was “independent.”
Together, the two temples and the Keshav Kunj complex stand as material symbols of the Sangh’s long consolidation in the area through the fusing of religious and political goals. In Karol Bagh, like elsewhere, the RSS has been able to transform temple trusts into institutional power centres, capable of asserting control over land to sidestep legal scrutiny. In 2017, the Delhi High Court ordered an investigation into the Hanuman temple’s land records, criticising it for encroaching on public land and failing to disclose financial information. The Delhi Development Authority and the municipal corporation reportedly told the court that neither the temple or the trust was paying property tax to them. “Will prayers reach the God if you pray from illegal encroachments on pavements?” the bench had asked.
“Everything here is the Sangh’s,” Rathod told me while speaking of Keshav Kunj. He said that the Sangh even used one of the buildings inside the Jhandewalan temple complex. Sachdeva agreed that the Jhandewalan temple belonged to the Sangh, “because everyone who works there is an RSS karyakarta”—worker. “The temple is under us and we are under it,” Pande said. The registered address of the VHP’s Delhi unit is the second floor of the temple.
The relationship between the RSS and the BBJTS has been key to its expansion in Jhandewalan. It has been accompanied by several allegations of harassment. A number of residents in the area told me about how they were dispossessed of their property. Even the many small temples in and around the Jhandewalan area, they said, have been, or will be, subsumed under the BBJTS. This has affected the local economy. Jitender, whose family has run a shop selling puja accessories near the temple for almost thirty years, told me that many houses in the neighbourhood have emptied out over the years. He said that shopkeepers used to make offerings in kind to the temple, but the temple is only interested in taking money from devotees. Ahuja confirmed this and described the shopkeepers as encroachers on the trust’s property. The BBJTS has filed 22 cases against various residents.
I asked Jitender what he thought of the RSS’s hold over the area. “How will we feel about those who kick us in our stomachs?” he said. There is little income for him now. When I asked whether people of this area have always supported the RSS, he replied, “I don’t know, but people are upset.”
The Jhandewalan temple also patronises a clinic, still under construction. It is run by the Swami Vivekanand Health Mission. When one enters, a photo of Hedgewar is visible on the wall through the glass door to one of the rooms on the left. To the right, ahead in the corridor, are large portraits of Hedgewar, Golwalkar and Bharat Mata. Opposite them is a small temple. Sameer Patra, the manager, asked me to direct all queries about the hospital to the BBJTS. “It’s their building, their setup,” he said. “We just give support—doctors, employees, staff. Our system is different.” The SVHM, which he said is part of the RSS, pays for everything, but the temple trust owns the building and all its facilities. “How they tell us, we operate like that.” Sharad Pandey, a neurologist at the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in Delhi, is overseeing the clinic. Despite the manager’s comment, and other several indications, Pandey said, “It is not that they run it. But it is of their though process. It is a similar organisation.”
Other institutions carry out the Sangh’s work in the area. The RSS-affiliated think tank Deendayal Research institute, which was established by the Sangh ideologue Nanaji Deshmukh in 1972, serves as a key centre for seminars and discussions in their “endeavour of social reconstruction,” and is located less than a kilometre away from the temple and Keshav Kunj.
The Sangh’s presence in Jhandewalan did not arrive fully formed. Before Partition, the neighbourhood had a sizeable Muslim population. In the years after, its demographics changed with an influx of Punjabi Hindu refugees and a growing Dalit colony, alongside increasing political ferment, as well as the rise of a vibrant print culture, with small presses and publishing houses setting up shop.
With the arrival of leaders from Nagpur, who later became pracharaks, the consolidation began in earnest. The Sangh’s first office in the area, near the Birla Temple, emerged as an important node of its politics in the national capital. Meanwhile, Gandhi also frequented the area, staying at the Valmiki Mandir in the Dalit colony. The burgeoning printing industry in Karol Bagh and adjoining Daryaganj became a key battleground in shaping public narratives—including those around the RSS. Delhi Press, which owns this magazine, still operates out of the same area. From our office, we have seen the RSS’s new headquarters rise up over the past decade.
IN 1936, VASANTRAO OKE arrived in the capital. He was one of several leaders sent to various cities from Nagpur to grow the RSS base across the country. A main focus of their work was towns with universities, where educated youth were seen as prime recruits—alongside upper-caste businessmen and traders. Oke, a Chitpavan Brahmin who had previously served as Hedgewar’s secretary, was instructed to build links with members of the Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha and even the Muslim League, in order to gain a foothold.
He made contact with influential and wealthy locals. Among his early allies was Jugal Kishore Birla, an industrialist whose family had a long tradition of patronising temples and Hindu causes. Birla helped Oke make his first successful recruitments. Oke also managed to secure space for the Sangh’s early operations within the Hindu Mahasabha’s headquarters near the Birla Mandir—now known as Laxmi Narayan Temple, on Mandir Marg—about two kilometres from where Keshav Kunj stands today.
The Birla Mandir, now known as Laxmi Narayan Temple, near Mandir Marg. The first RSS office was set up near it in 1936. George Enell/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Delhi’s first RSS shakha emerged soon after. (Even today, Sachdeva told me, a shakha is held in a park across from the Mahasabha Bhavan in Gole Market.) Within a decade, there were around a hundred shakhas running in the city. New patrons joined the cause, including the industrialist Hans Raj Gupta, who would become Delhi’s prant sanghchalak in 1947. The RSS soon needed a space of its own.
According to Organiser, the Keshav Kunj office in Jhandewalan began as a small workspace in 1939. A fortnight before Independence, on 1 August 1947, the BBJTS leased almost twelve thousand square metres of land to Golwalkar for 99 years. Around the same time, a daily diary entry of the Delhi Police’s Criminal Investigation Department listed the Sangh’s Delhi headquarters as a building in Kamla Nagar.
The influx of refugees into Delhi after Partition offered a strategic opportunity for the RSS. Its relief work won over a section of the refugees. Noorani and others have argued that this work served primarily as ideological grooming. “Partition allowed the Sangh to nationalize what had until then been a primarily Maharashtrian movement,” Jaffrelot writes in his book The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. Swayamsevaks were implicated in anti-Muslim violence in Delhi in 1947, and Nehru was informed that RSS workers had masqueraded as Congress volunteers to convince Muslims in Red Fort camps to leave for Pakistan “for their protection.”
After Nathuram Godse killed Gandhi, at the Birla House on 30 January 1948, the RSS was banned. In his communique, Vallabhbhai Patel wrote that RSS workers had engaged in “arson, robbery, dacoity and murder,” and had collected illicit arms. Patel said in another letter that the environment created by the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha had led to this. Within two months, according to a police record, the Kamla Nagar office was raided and shut.
But the ban did not stall the organisation. Archival documents of the Delhi Police and the Intelligence Bureau—collected by Dhirendra Jha—show that the Sangh’s plans to expand and raise funds were not derailed, and it continued to have several bases in Delhi. It was in search of a mouthpiece. A CID report says that, in 1948, the Daryaganj-based Bharat Prakashan began publishing Bharatvarsh. In December that year, the chief commissioner of Delhi noted that the RSS was holding unlawful associations in the Bharat Prakashan building, as well as in rooms it had rented in Jawahar Nagar.
On 9 December 1948, the RSS began a satyagraha to protest the ban. According to a police document, it started using the office it had created in Jhandewalan as a boarding house. The office had four rooms and a kitchen, and the Sangh also used a nearby room belonging to one of its leaders. The ban was lifted in July 1949, after Golwalkar fulfilled one of the government’s demands of submitting a constitution of the RSS. This document stated, “The Sangh is aloof from politics and is devoted to social and cultural fields only.” But he added a caveat that its members were free to join any political party or institution that did not indulge in violence or “secret activities” or promote hatred.
The RSS did not abide by this. Jia Ram, a senior superintendent of Delhi Police, ordered superintendents across the city, on 3 January 1950, to keep tabs on the organisation, since it was “continuing political activities” despite claiming to be “only a cultural organisation.” The police documents also show a considerable deliberation within the Sangh to join active politics. The same month has a report on one such meeting, where the RSS took “utmost care” to “safeguard the secrecy of the meeting’s proceedings.”
The Sangh soon established more spaces of its own. A CID dairy entry on 5 September 1949 mentioned that the RSS had reopened its office on the upper storey of the same Kamla Nagar premises it had earlier occupied. It even had a Daryaganj branch. Golwalkar often stayed at Gupta’s residence, on Barakhamba Road, where he held meetings as well. This was apart from the continuing meetings at the Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan. In February 1950, Golwalkar had visited an RSS “wooden structure” in Jhandewalan, and a document of 1951 mentions a “thatched hut” there being guarded by the RSS. On 16 February 1951, an official of the “Karnal R.S.S. Delhi” asked the Bombay-based English weekly National Guardian to update the organisation’s address as “R.S.S. Office Jhandewala Mandir, Delhi.” The police described the Jhandewalan temple as a “well known meeting spot” for RSS workers.
In a 1950 meeting, Golwalkar pushed to increase membership and advised local leaders to engage government servants through seemingly innocuous activities. He mentioned that government servants were not allowed to join the RSS, but the shakhas should organise games in which they “might join freely and maintain regular contact with the organisation.” A CID diary entry states that two thousand volunteers attended the Sangh’s Republic Day ceremony at Jhandewalan in 1951.
The Sangh also sought money. In April 1950, according to a CID diary entry, Golwalkar refused to attend a Delhi event until the donation goal of Rs1 lakh was met. Once fulfilled, he accepted a “purse of Rs.1,01,001/- at a public meeting (10,000).” He left the capital by air the next morning—a rare luxury in those times. Some donors were rich and powerful. A source report of the CID, from 15 June 1950, documents the notable personalities associated with the Sangh who were present at its Officers’ Training camp—where its members are trained in using weaponry—at Ramjas School in Delhi. These included Yodh Raj, the chairperson of the Punjab National Bank and Jugal Kishore Birla. “The country was passing through a crisis and it was their duty to save her by helping the RSSS with money as it was the only organisation which could protect the country at the time of need,” Golwalkar told the invitees, according to the report. “He praised their past services rendered to the RSSS and hoped that they will continue their support in future.”
A 1951 message from the IB to the CID flagged a Soviet broadcast alleging that US imperialists were funding the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. “Among these parties receiving millions of rupees from the Americans are the Hindu Mahasabha and the R.S.S.S., which heartily help the British and the American imperialists.”
Financial backing continues today. In the same conversation where he said that most swayamsevaks were living from hand to mouth, Sachdeva mentioned that there were several rich people in the RSS. He claimed that all swayamsevaks in his Karol Bagh unit contributed some money for the new Keshav Kunj. “Twelve people gave Rs 1 crore,” he said. “Many gave Rs 50,000, many gave Rs 10,000. People donated from the heart.”
The difference between then and now is that there is no suggestion that the Delhi Police and the IB now keep tabs on who these donors could be. Both organisations report to the union home minister, Amit Shah, who rose through the ranks in the RSS and then the BJP.
IN JANUARY 1990, a Delhi High Court judgment noted that the Jhandewalan temple owned over twenty-five thousand square metres of land—bigger than the Narendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad, the largest in the world—that its founder had purchased from various private owners. The court was adjudicating on a legal dispute between the BBJTS and the Delhi Development Authority.
On 30 November 1982, the DDA had issued a notice that the BBJTS was sitting on government land and directed it to vacate the property within thirty days. It argued that the land was meant to be used only for religious purposes, but only around a thousand square metres were being used for this. The trust sued the DDA, asking for the notice to be withdrawn and calling for the statutory body to be restrained from interfering in the “possession, management and control” of the premises. The trust argued that the DDA had never acted against “dozens of Gurudwaras and Mosques in Delhi” that had been “built on unauthorised land belonging to the Government.”
Two years later, the BBJTS found itself on the receiving end of litigation. Four self-identified “Sanatanist Hindus” filed a civil suit accusing trustees of mismanaging temple properties. The petition alleged a “scramble for power” and singled out Prem Nath Kapoor—Badri Dass’s adopted great-grandson—for engaging in “undesirable activities,” such as leasing land to the RSS and misappropriating funds raised from offerings by devotees. The case was dismissed for lack of locus standi.
The BBJTS was registered under the Societies Registration Act, in 1944, by Shyam Sundar, the grandson of Badri Bhagat Dass. “Before that, it was running unregistered,” Ahuja told me. The purpose of registering the body, the BBJTS argued in court, was to protect the temple land, especially after alleged attempts at trespassing by residents of the nearby Pahari Dhiraj neighbourhood. One of their concerns was that worshippers had to cross a slaughterhouse to reach the temple. This had been a source of communal friction. In her book Delhi Between Two Empires, Narayani Gupta writes that during Bakr-Id in 1924, a riot broke out in Jhandewalan, with the “main protagonists” being the butchers of Pahari Dhiraj and the Jats of Sadar Bazar.
On 1 August 1947, just days before Independence, Golwalkar was leased 14,300 square yards (11,957 square metres) to improve the site and remove “squatterers” who carried out “unauthorised business.” According to Ahuja, it was also out of pragmatic concerns. “It was such a big land, they weren’t themselves able to control it,” he said. “That rental income had to be generated. At that time, many shops were also rented out intermittently. Many tenants also came. Then illegal occupants also came.”
The BBJTS later gave this land to the SKSS, which was registered on 4 January 1969. In October 1970, the BBJTS granted two more leases to the SKSS, at a nominal rent of Rs 100 per month. The lease documents allowed the SKSS to construct buildings and sublet the land as it wished. By 1990, the SKSS held the lease for 16,432.41 square metres. Until fifteen years ago, this land also housed an akhada, two schools and the bar association office of the Debt Recovery Tribunal, apart from some houses. None of those buildings remain. “It has all been emptied,” Kumar told me, adding that the SKSS had pursued legal battles to claim the land. “There were encroachers in them also. There were old tenants too. A school was there. It took decades to win those cases. Now there is no encroacher or tenant. Now we have our entire land.”
The society’s long possession of the land worked in its favour in the BBJTS’s case against the DDA. The court issued a stay on the eviction order. But, when the time came to argue ownership, the DDA simply failed to appear. In 1988, the court proceeded ex parte, relying only on documents submitted by the temple societies, since the DDA submitted nothing. The court ruled in favour of the BBJTS. Later, the DDA claimed that it had not realised the case had gone ex parte. It filed an application to set aside the decree, arguing that its advocate had changed in the middle of the proceedings, in 1985, and that the new advocate had simply not informed it of the summons over the years. The court dismissed the DDA’s application in 2003. The DDA did not respond to my questions.
The 1990 ruling has since been cited in multiple ongoing disputes led by the BBJTS, especially those concerning a cluster of houses adjacent to Keshav Kunj and directly behind the Jhandewalan temple.
SEVERAL RESIDENTS TOLD ME that the BBJTS has been harassing them to give up their houses. “I have given several interviews about this, but no media house has run them,” Om Prakash said. Many were reluctant to show land papers, fearing that the media was aligned with the Sangh. One petitioner warned, “I’ll be shot, and so will you.”
Om Prakash shared documents and details, and I accessed another petition and documents in a similar case. He alleged that the BBJTS was falsely claiming private homes as temple land. “No one will talk to you,” he said, “because 99.5 percent of those who approach us are from the RSS or the temple.” His double-storey home sits in a lane adjacent to Keshav Kunj, opening into a courtyard with a kitchen on one side and a locked room on the other. Om Prakash, who is in his sixties, said that his father had previously rented the house before the landlord, Gokul Chand, donated it to them, in 1980. “One night in 2019, five hundred RSS mandir people came in this lane” and managed to “lock the room on the left,” he said. “Since then, they’ve harassed us—drunkards show up at 1 am, threatening us to leave.” He was allegedly offered Rs50,000 per square yard, though he claims the market rate is more than Rs 5 lakh. Another resident reiterated that the temple was offering this rate to people in the lane.
“They keep talking nonsense,” Ahuja said when I asked about this incident and other claims of harassment. “They have all the legal ways, why are they telling you? They should go to the police. They should go to the court.”
The houses on this lane must have over a hundred residents. Many of them are Kanwars from Rajasthan, but most are from Thakur and Brahmin communities, which traditionally have been BJP supporters. Om Prakash told me he had voted for Modi in the last three general elections and even donated to the Ram temple at Ayodhya. “We are yours—and you are troubling us?”
Apart from the RSS and the BBJTS, many residents mentioned Ahuja—he was the most known figure in that lane. “See, whichever encroacher you speak to, they will say, ‘We have been living there for a hundred years. We have a bona fide right,’” Ahuja told me. “Some say we have been here for fifty years. Yes. So, we say, ‘Brother, okay, express the ownership in the court. Who is beating you? If you start doing construction, we will serve you notice. Prove it in the court. Establish your ownership.’”
There are a handful of small temples in these lanes, which many estimated to be a hundred years old. One of these temples has been shuttered and sealed—Om Prakash alleged that it had been sold to the BBJTS. Ashok Shastri, a pandit who runs a marriage bureau and was sitting in another small temple next to it, also said this but refused to share details. He called himself a Hindu nationalist. “I do not even have Muslim friends on my Facebook,” he said.
“Mandirwale harami hai”—the temple people are bastards—Shakuntala, a woman of about sixty years of age, told me. “They threaten to take everyone’s land.” She lives in Phoolon Waali Gali, a narrow lane that intersects the row of houses and runs closest to the temple. Jyoti Kanwar, another resident of the lane, who is in her thirties, reiterated Shakuntala’s claims of harassment. She estimated that more than fifty houses had been vacated in the area because the BBJTS claimed them. Kanwar took me to meet Geeta Sharma, an elderly woman who now manages a small shop run by the temple. “People have taken money and left,” Sharma said. After the meeting, Kanwar told me that all residents who did not mention the harassment were terrified of talking about the matter.
As I approached the temple from this lane, some houses were empty, following which tin-shed and construction work was visible. This entire area, residents said, had been occupied by the temple in recent years.
A couple of allegations concerned Keshav Kunj directly. Mora Devi, who must be around eighty years old, told me that she used to live in a “pakki jhugi” in her family’s “own land” where Keshav Kunj was built, and had been evicted some twelve years back too. Ashok Srivastava, who runs a tea shop in the block opposite Keshav Kunj, is related to the family that runs the Srivastava Dharamshala in the lane adjacent to the headquarters. “Some twelve years ago, the RSS broke some two metres of the dharamshala,” he said. “They said they will pay us for it but did not.” Srivastava said that the matter had been settled and that the family did not want to speak more about it.
When I asked Kumar about this, he said, “As far as Keshav Kunj is concerned, I can tell you for sure that, whether there is any work in this or in this building or in this entire premise, when we gave the map, by then we got all the tenants and encroachers to vacate either by mutual talks or through the court. That’s why we do not need to break any functioning thing.” Kumar and Ahuja denied any illegal activity on part of their societies in the construction and expansion of their operations.
Ahuja told me he often had residents telling him they would willingly give their plots to the temple for money. “We say, ‘Give money for what?’” he said. “Now they are living like in a slum area. They have broken houses. They are built in patches. You must have seen them.” He said he remained vigilant about any activities people undertook in the area. “On our own, we don’t give notice to anyone. But whoever does construction, takes rent, does sub-letting, we give notice.”
Kanwar said that the understanding among the residents was that the orders come from the RSS. “It’s all about the money,” Om Prakash said. “The temple will shut if any welfare is going on.” At the temple, “even a tonsure happens with money.” For the temple, he said, “It’s their own government. Who will say anything?” He feared that the temple expansion was merely a prelude. “Anything that happens right now will happen in the temple’s name,” he added. “Then they will hand it to the RSS on lease.”
IN AUGUST 2017, a former corporator and retired schoolteacher from Nagpur named Janardan Moon did something audacious: he tried to register an organisation called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. “We were studying this for many days,” Moon told me. “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is such a big organisation. It is working all over the world, but is it not registered.” Moon and 12 others—activists, teachers and slum workers from Bahujan communities—stepped into the breach. They filed their paperwork with the charity commissioner of Nagpur and began holding annual foundation day events. They carry out social work under the name, campaign on education and civic issues, and even supported the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance in the 2024 general election.
But Moon’s application to register his organisation was rejected by the assistant registrar of societies on the grounds that it was “identical with” a previously registered organisation and that using the term “Rashtriya,” meaning national, imputed patronage of the government . Moon challenged this in the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court. It was argued in court that Bhagwat’s RSS had been registered in Chandrapur, Maharashtra. However this turns out to be false. I filed an RTI request and the Public Trust Registration Office in Chandrapur denied this claim. The court, however, rejected Moon’s petition.
Moon explained the logic behind their attempt at registering the organisation. “This is an unauthorised organisation working across India, working on Manuvad,” he said. “Should we call this a social organisation or a casteist organisation?” It was also a way to do what the other RSS was not doing—work constitutionally, for everyone. That act, of holding up a mirror, throws the real RSS—unregistered and all-powerful—into uncomfortable relief.
That truth, Moon argued, is simple. India’s most powerful organisation, with Z-plus security, vast landholdings, and influence over the union government, is legally non-existent. “If I had a Rs 10 crore bungalow, the CBI, ED would come for me whether I am registered or not,” he said. “But, if my building is worth Rs10 crore, then I say that I get gurudakshina, our workers give us donations, will the government believe it?” Regarding Keshav Kunj, he said, Bhagwat’s RSS “should clarify that people from all over India, from all over the world donated so-and-so crores.”
The voices asking these questions of the RSS are few and far between. Since June 2021, Lalan Kishore Singh, a 64-year-old who has been a part of trade unions for most of his life, began a quest to find out how much money the government has been spending to provide security to the Sangh. “When RSS is not a registered organisation, then by what rules has the government been spending on it?” Singh told me. “And if the RSS is paying for the protection, how much has been spent?”
Singh tried to raise these questions in his RTI applications to the government. The information was refused under Section 24(4) of the Right to Information Act, which exempts government officials from providing details about intelligence and security organisations. Singh alleged that, after this, the traffic police began inquiring into him, calling him to office and keeping him waiting for long hours.
In 2024, Singh filed a writ petition in the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court detailing how, according to news reports, the CISF was providing Z-plus security—the heaviest the government can offer—to Bhagwat and the RSS headquarters in Nagpur since 2015. “About a hundred and fifty security personnel are engaged in this,” he told the court, quoting another news report that said 58 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force were providing Z-plus security to Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest industrialist, at the cost of over Rs 40 lakh per month. Based on this, Singh calculated, the government must be spending about Rs 1.25 crore per month to provide security to the RSS, since almost thrice the number of personnel had been deployed for Bhagwat. This would mean Rs 150 crore over the past decade. Singh referred to a February 2023 order by the Supreme Court that directed Ambani to bear the costs himself. Did that not mean, he argued, that the RSS also had to pay for the security provided to it? “This is public money. It needs to be utilised in public interest,” Singh told me. “Besides, it is a non-government organisation which is not even registered and which has been banned by the government three times in the past.”
The CISF has reportedly been providing Z-plus security—the heaviest the government can offer—to Mohan Bhagwat and the RSS headquarters in Nagpur since 2015. Santosh Kumar/Hindustan Times
When I asked Kumar why the RSS remained an unregistered body, he said, “Where is it necessary for it to be registered? Is there a legal compulsion? No.” He laid out how he saw the division of labour and the logic of the way the Sangh worked. “See, I know about Keshav Smarak Samiti. It performs some distinct functions, which do not directly belong to the RSS’s work. The work that the RSS has taken upon itself is not to build buildings—it is to run shakhas.” People within the Sangh might want to take on tasks, such as starting publications and knowledge dissemination, which the RSS itself does not need to take on. “So, the bodies that the swayamsevaks have formed, they have formed them for specific segments, for specific tasks,” he said. “None of those samitis run a shakha. Running a shakha is exclusive for the Sangh. That is it. We are all functional and it is the functionality that decides that what all trust or societies have to be formed.”
The RSS knows just how to escape accountability. Plausible deniability is baked into its operations. Its different parts act as if they are working independently. “I mean, I don’t know if you can believe me,” Kumar said. “I am the president of the Vishva Hindu Parishad. RSS does not order us. We sit together and discuss. Sometimes they agree with us. Sometimes maybe we have a different perception. Then they say, ‘We have given you our perception. Now you pick up whatever you wish to.’ So it is difficult to comprehend the RSS function.”
But the Sangh knows how to work patiently with its different organisations and to veer them towards its ideological aims. “The RSS will not do anything illegal,” a municipal corporation official told me. “They will twist your arm to get what they want.” This is demonstrated in the organisation’s journey over the past decades. The Sangh’s icons are being rehabilitated in the public eye and an ever-growing body of RSS members are in key positions across the country’s democratic institutions.
“The Sangh’s period of struggle is over,” Mahendra Mishra, a mandal adhyaksh—area president—of the BJP in Ayodhya, told me. Sharad Sharma, who measured his words far more than any other RSS member I met, claimed that was not the case. “But this is there—in 1990, there were bullets fired,” he said, referring to how police under the Mulayam Singh government had fired on RSS cadre who were heading to Ayodhya to demolish the Babri Masjid. “Today, there is no one to fire shots. That is the only difference. Going to jail for our struggle—now that is not happening.”
The Sangh’s new headquarters in the capital represents how far the organisation has come: a powerful, secretive, unaccountable force shaping the country to its will. “The building that is made,” Anil, the zila karyavah, told me, “it is made keeping the next hundred years in mind.”
Amrita Singh is a staff writer at The Caravan.
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/rss-unaccountable-organisation-keshav-kunj (Please consider subscribing to The Caravan).
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