Gandhi’s Birthday, RSS’s Vijaya Dashami and My Own Reckoning
October is the month when India and the world remember Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolent resistance who became the conscience of the 20th century. Gandhi’s influence crossed continents. Leaders like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. openly acknowledged him as a guiding light for their own struggles. His insistence on truth, inclusivity and dignity showed the world that moral courage could topple empires.
But this October also marks another anniversary: 100 years since Vijaya Dashami 1925, the day the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded. Unlike Gandhi’s Congress-led movement, the RSS had no role in India’s independence struggle. While countless Indians gave their lives, went to prison or abandoned careers to fight the British Raj, the RSS stayed away. Its leaders instead looked to Hitler and Mussolini for inspiration, imagining a “Hindu rashtra” where minorities would be second-class citizens.
My years in the RSS
This is not just history to me. For nearly two decades of my youth, I was deeply involved with the RSS and its affiliates, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). I rose through the ranks, admired for my discipline and leadership. My father, Jitendra Nath Banerjee, was an RSS pracharak close to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani. After Gandhi’s assassination, when the RSS was briefly banned, he even went to jail.
As a young activist, I believed I was serving India. Over time, I saw another truth. Muslims, Christians, Dalits and secular Hindus were demonised. Gandhi was mocked as weak, while Nathuram Godse – the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha activist who shot Gandhi dead six months after independence – was privately praised.
The ideology was not about building a free, pluralist India. It was about building a sectarian, authoritarian state. Forty years ago, I left the RSS world behind. It was a painful break, especially with my family, but it freed me to dedicate my life to teaching, writing and activism for democracy, human rights and diversity.
Gandhi’s India vs RSS’s India
Today, Gandhi’s killers are India’s rulers. The BJP is the RSS’s political arm, and its most powerful leaders – Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh, Nitin Gadkari – are all lifelong swayamsevaks. The policies we see today – violent Islamophobia, attacks on Christians and Dalits, suppression of dissent, rewriting of history – are not aberrations. They are the natural outcome of an ideology that never reconciled with India’s pluralist soul.
It is important to remember that the RSS opposed the very idea of an independent, secular India. Savarkar, their intellectual mentor, openly admired European fascism. M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS’s second chief, praised Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews as a model. This was the movement that hated Gandhi’s vision – and one of its footsoldiers killed him.
The role of media silence
Yet, much of India’s mainstream media barely reminds citizens of this history. Newspapers and TV debates often sanitise the RSS’s record, presenting the BJP as just another party in the democratic arena. This is what I call the ‘Journalism of Exclusion’: the manipulation not just of what is said, but of what is left unsaid.
Rarely do we hear in mainstream discourse that the RSS never fought the British, that it opposed the tricolour flag, or that its founders admired fascists abroad. Rarely is Gandhi’s murder connected to the same ideology that now governs India. By excluding these truths, the media allows millions of otherwise good-hearted Indians to believe that the BJP is a normal democratic force, rather than the political face of a century-old supremacist movement.
Why this moment matters
This year, Gandhi Jayanti coincides with Vijaya Dashami. Symbolically, it is Gandhi versus his assassins. It forces a stark question: Do we follow Gandhi’s path of nonviolence and pluralism, or do we surrender to the heirs of Godse?
Gandhi once said, “The future depends on what we do in the present.” Our present demands vigilance. For Indians at home and in the diaspora, it is time to confront uncomfortable truths, to remember who fought for independence and who stood aside, and to decide which India we want to defend: Gandhi’s inclusive India, or the RSS’s authoritarian India.
Dr Partha Banerjee is a New York-based activist, educator and writer, with special expertise in the global politics of religion and media.
This article went live on October second, two thousand twenty five, at zero minutes past eight in the morning.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
