The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) enters its centenary in 2025, and the moment invites reflection not only on its contemporary role but also on its lesser-known journey through India’s freedom struggle and nation-building.
The Sangh recently marked the occasion with a three-day lecture series at Vigyan Bhawan in Delhi, where Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat spoke of unity, inclusivity, and India’s role as a guiding civilisation. “Hindu is one who respects all paths,” he reminded the audience, adding that India’s DNA has remained one for forty thousand years. In his view, Hindu Rashtra is not an exclusionary slogan but an affirmation of harmony—“our culture is to live in unity, not conflict.”
Often spoken of only through the lens of politics, the Sangh is better understood as an idea—an attempt to forge national unity through disciplined character and quiet service.
The story of Sangh began with a young doctor. As a medical student in Calcutta, he found himself drawn into revolutionary circles that defied colonial authority. That early exposure to discipline, secrecy, and sacrifice would later shape his vision of building a cultural organisation rooted in character and service. In 1921, he was arrested for delivering a fiery speech during the Non-Cooperation Movement and sentenced to prison.
Throughout the 1920s, he participated actively in Congress Satyagrahas. However, over time, he became convinced that while agitation could stir the masses, it could not by itself produce the disciplined citizenry needed to sustain freedom once it was won.
This vision led him to conceive a movement aimed at cultivating such discipline and dedication among citizens. He was none other than Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, whose contribution laid the foundation for this enduring organisation.
From that conviction was born the shakha—a daily meeting ground where young men of different castes and classes meet daily to exercise together, pray together, and learn to see the nation as one family.
During the 1930s and 1940s, swayamsevaks continued to contribute to the Freedom Struggle, most often as individuals. The organisation itself never issued a call for Satyagraha, but its members joined protests, underground networks, and in many towns lent quiet support to Congress leaders during the Quit India movement.
In Vidarbha and Bengal, there are accounts of swayamsevaks sheltering activists and circulating banned literature when the colonial state cracked down. Nana Palkar, a senior pracharak, recalled how many young volunteers risked imprisonment by joining Satyagrahas alongside Congress cadres.
Dr. Manmohan Vaidya has observed in his book, We and the World Around, that even renowned historian R.C. Majumdar warned against reducing India’s freedom to any single movement or ideology. Independence, he argued, was not a “gift” from the British, nor the sole achievement of one party, but the result of “countless small and large efforts” that together made colonial rule impossible to sustain. By this yardstick, the RSS made its own contribution—by preparing disciplined, service-minded youth who placed the nation’s cause above all else.
Walter Andersen, who has studied the organisation for decades, calls the shakha a “moral laboratory.” It was here that a new kind of nationalist citizen was shaped—one who broke free from caste barriers, learned self-control through physical discipline, and imbibed a sense of duty through collective prayer and service. These were not spectacular acts of resistance like marches or mutinies, but Andersen reminds us that such daily practices created the civic culture without which the edifice of Independence would have been fragile.
In the philosophical sense, the Sangh’s approach echoed what Samuel P. Huntington later worried about in his book Who Are We?, when he warned that nations could disintegrate if they lost a common culture. For India, the Sangh argued, the antidote to fragmentation lay in reviving dharma as the civilisational glue—unity not by uniformity but by a shared sense of belonging.
As M.S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak, often put it: “No one is superior or inferior; all are brothers.” In a society fractured by colonial policies of divide and rule, this message was radical in its simplicity. Dr. Bhagwat reinforced this timeless note when he defined Hindutva in three words: satya, prem aur ekta—truth, love, and oneness—a civilisational ethos that sees fraternity as strength.
Over time, this ethos translated into a wide arc of social action. The Sangh’s affiliates became a sprawling network of organisations that extended its ideals into schools, unions, and welfare projects. Vidya Bharati built schools across the country; Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram worked in tribal belts; Seva Bharati entered urban slums; Ekal Vidyalayas brought literacy to remote hamlets.
The same volunteers trained in the shakhas have become frontline relief workers during national disasters. They played significant roles in relief and rescue operations during the Gujarat earthquake, the Orissa cyclone, and the Covid-19 pandemic. More recently, they actively contributed to the rescue and relief efforts during the devastating floods in Uttarakhand and Jammu & Kashmir in 2025. Swayamsevaks were often among the first to arrive and the last to leave, carrying bodies, distributing food, and offering solace. For them, seva was not charity but duty, and the discipline of the shakha became the muscle-memory of service in moments of crisis.
The Freedom Struggle was thus only the beginning of the Sangh’s civilisational project. Dr. Hedgewar had famously said that the real work of nation-building would begin after Independence, when India would need to rediscover its cultural self and social cohesion. The hundred years since then have borne out his vision.
The Sangh has never claimed that it alone delivered freedom or progress. Rather, it has insisted, as R.C. Majumdar did, that history is shaped by the accumulation of many hands, many sacrifices, and many streams of thought. In this sense, Dr. Bhagwat’s reminder that Akhand Bharat is not a political project but a civilisational idea resonates with Hedgewar’s insight. A united people, he argued, need not erase differences; they only need to rediscover fraternity.
In his centenary address, the Sarsanghchalak reminded the audience that the Sangh’s durability rests on samanvay, or consensus building, rather than imposition. He pointed to affiliates like the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, which represents the interests of workers, and Laghu Udyog Bharati, which speaks for small and medium entrepreneurs. By their very nature, labour and industry often have conflicting priorities, yet within the Sangh they are brought together to deliberate, adjust, and arrive at common ground.
This spirit of consensus, he argued, is what has enabled the Sangh to branch into education, labour, rural development, health, and culture without fracturing. “Any organisation that imposes cannot survive for a hundred years,” he observed, underlining how swayamsevaks have learnt to debate and persuade rather than dictate.
The Sangh, he stressed, has endured precisely because it works not for transient power but for the deeper task of nation-building. Governments may come and go, but the Sangh has supported every administration insofar as its programmes strengthened society and the nation.
Hundred years into its foundation, the message of Sangh remains resonant even for contemporary times. Service is not charity but duty. Unity is not sameness but fraternity. A nation is not only a political contract but also a civilisational inheritance. Progress is measured not by the comfort of the strong, but by the rise of the weak.
As Walter Andersen has observed, the Sangh’s strength lies not only in numbers but in its ability to “inculcate a sense of purpose and belonging that outlives immediate politics.” That may well be its enduring legacy: that in a century marked by upheavals, shifting ideologies, and global anxieties, the RSS has continued to remind Indians of the deeper rhythms of their civilisation, and of the quiet but transformative power of disciplined service to the nation.
In the philosophical sense, the Sangh’s approach echoed what
Samuel P. Huntington later worried about in his book “Who
Are We?”, when he warned that nations could disintegrate
if they lost a common culture. For India, the Sangh argued,
the antidote to fragmentation lay in reviving dharma as the
civilisational glue, unity not by uniformity but by a shared sense
of belonging. As M.S. Golwalkar, the second Sarsanghchalak,
often put it: “No one is superior or inferior; all are brothers.”
—Kartikeya Sharma is Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha.
