This is no club of harmless eccentrics. The rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh–the “National Volunteer Organization”– terrifies India’s ethnic minorities. The morning workouts quickly lose their air of ineffectuality when RSS members begin to chant Hindu supremacist slogans. “Victory for the motherland!” they shout. “Hindustan for the Hindus!”
Even scarier, the RSS is the wellspring of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Each group denies any formal connection to the other. But some of the BJP’s most powerful men, including the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the home minister, L.K. Advani, are veteran RSS members. With more than 10 million adherents nationwide, including about 1 million hard-core activists, the RSS had mobilized voters for the BJP in the 1998 elections. And yet the RSS is widely blamed for much of a recent tide of Hindu attacks on Muslims and Christians.
RSS leaders hotly deny any role in the violence. But hardly anyone outside the RSS believes them. The group began in 1925 as a militant foe of British colonial rule and of the Muslim separatists who eventually created Pakistan. The RSS has been banned three times in its history. The first was under the Raj. The second was after the 1948 assassination of Mohandas K. Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist. The third was in 1992, when RSS cadres led the wrecking of a 16th-century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya, provoking India’s worst ethnic violence since Partition. The ban was lifted in 1993.
Muslims are not the only targets of RSS brutality. Attacks on India’s 24 million Christians were practically unheard of until the BJP came to power in 1998. There have been more than 100 incidents since then, including murders of priests, rapes of nuns and church burnings. In a new Human Rights Watch report on anti-Christian violence, the RSS and its offshoots such as the Bajrang Dal, a militant youth group spawned by the RSS in the 1980s, are cited as the people “most responsible” the attacks. A particularly ugly incident occurred early this year in the state of Orissa. An Australian missionary, Graham Staines, was burned to death in his Jeep, along with his two sons, Timothy, 8, and Philip, 10, while a mob cheered: “Long live the Bajrang Dal!”
The horrors continue. In September a Roman Catholic priest, Father Arul Doss, was murdered by men with spears in northern Orissa. Later that month in Bihar, a nun was abducted near her convent. Two men stripped her and forced her to drink their urine. " ‘After the election is over we’ll be back and put an end to what you Christians are doing’," the nun’s attackers warned her, according to the Rev. Dominic Emmanuel of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India. He adds: “These people expect that the Raj of the BJP, the RSS and the Bajrang Dal is at hand.”
Hate alone does not explain the popularity of the RSS. The group is famous for its heroic relief efforts in times of floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters. The RSS also sponsors about 15,000 schools, making it India’s biggest educator aside from the government itself. The classes emphasize Hindu nationalist themes, of course, but at least the pupils learn to read and write.
The secretary of the RSS, K. Sudarshan, speaks eloquently of decentralizing industry to stop the stampede of jobless Indians to big cities. Yet in the next breath, he rails wildly about American missionaries provoking rebels in northeastern India. “If the Americans can get these areas to secede,” he warns darkly, “they can put in bases to control India, China and Russia.”
The BJP’s rise has made the RSS stronger than ever. “Before the BJP won office, the RSS was dying on its feet,” says Prof. D. L. Sheth, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies. “Young people particularly didn’t see the point of joining an organization with no political power.” Vajpayee remains a member of the RSS. “We are not ‘back-seat driving’ the BJP,” insists Sudarshan. “Our role is just to make suggestions.” Those suggestions are what many Indians are afraid of.
