Backstory | On its 100th Year, RSS Emerges with Extra Shine Thanks to Media’s Polishing Job

Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have his power struggles with the RSS, but he more than anyone else knows how important the organisation is for his own political ambitions and agendas. He has therefore spared no effort during its 100th year to project it as the epitome of Indian “nationhood”. Not only did he shower praise on the Sangh in his Independence Day peroration, terming it as “one of the world’s biggest NGOSs for national building”, he made sure to release a special postal stamp, depicting RSS cadres taking part in the 1963 Republic Day parade, along with a freshly minted silver coin featuring them paying obeisance to the figure of Bharat Mata. 

The mainstream media played piper to these ceremonies with aplomb. Not once did they ask what really constitutes such “nation building” when the Constitution of the country is simultaneously being eroded. As for expecting them to fact check the prime minister by reminding their audiences that this was an organisation that did nothing, literally zilch, to win independence for this country, that is like asking for the moon (‘Historical Evidence Contradicts Modi’s Claims About the RSS’s Role in the Freedom Struggle’, The Wire, October 3). The fact is that as a Wire commentator noted a year ago, “The biggest accusation against the RSS is that it did not take part in the national liberation movement. In fact, on many occasions, it actually worked against it” (‘The RSS’s Struggle for Legitimacy: Rewriting India’s Freedom Narrative’, October 16, 2024).

Yet there was a time when newspapers of the day shone the searchlight on this organisation that drew from V.D. Savarkar’s ideological labours and faithfully organised itself to conform to the framework set by its founder, K.B. Hedgewar. In 1948, the year that M.K. Gandhi was assassinated, saw the RSS come under unprecedented political and newspaper scrutiny. Although Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, maintained during his trial that he had no links with the RSS, this was subsequently refuted by his family members. Dhirendra Jha’s 2021 book, Gandhi’s Assassin, provides further proof of how deeply influenced was Godse by the RSS. A Nagpur-based reporter, Walter Alfred, who was at that point working for the news agency Press Trust of India feverishly put together the assassination story on the evening of January 30, 1948. The next day he visited the Nagpur headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and was “surprised to find that there was some joy on the faces of people there. They could not hide their feelings”. On February 4 of that year, Union home minister Vallabhbhai Patel banned the organisation “to root out the forces of hate and violence that are at work in our country and imperil the freedom of the nation and darken her fair name…Undesirable and even dangerous activities have been carried on by members of the Sangh. It has been found that in several parts of the country individual members of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have indulged in acts of violence involving arson, robbery, dacoity, and murder and have collected illicit arms and ammunition.” 

The newspapers carried his words and ensured that they remained as reminders of the intent of the government of the day. Today, when every attempt is being made to transform historical facts to better conform to the narratives of power, the value of such documentation – an important function of everyday reporting – cannot be underlined emphatically enough. We may have, otherwise, an NCERT school textbook claiming that Patel had made no public statement on the RSS’s role in the assassination.

Forty four years later, once again saw the media rose to the task of telling the country the exact nature of the RSS when the domes of the Babri Masjid were brought down in December 1992. Graphic accounts of the manner the RSS was deeply embedded in the mobs that took part in that savage destruction, attacked journalists and set fire to Muslim homes, did make it to newspapers. The front page editorial of the Times of India of December 7, 1992 – on the morning after the demolition – minced no words about the involvement of the Sangh: “To achieve its political ends, the Sangh parivar has wantonly exploited religious sentiments. Its brand of nationalism…has sown seeds of distrust and divisiveness.” 

But that was also the moment in the long arc of media reportage on the RSS, when its world view began to be increasingly endorsed in some sections of the media. Nothing reflected this more eloquently than the manner in which secularism as an idea and ideal was disparaged, and a term identified with Rath Yatra messiah L.K. Advani – “pseudo-secularism” – quickly made its way into the mainstream reportage and opinion.

The year 2025 appears to mark the fruition of the RSS’s silent project, as historian Tanika Sarkar observed in a recent interview with the Federal, of merging Hindutva with nationalism and erasing the boundaries between Nation, Religion, and Itself. It was a process of “man-making”, she said, building up a collectivity, person by person, space by space. The mainstream media has been indispensable in helping it to achieve this goal by applauding and furthering it through its coverage. 

The Ambani channel CNN-News 18 featured Rahul Shivshankar’s show, The Hard Facts, on October 3. It began with the anchor emphatically stating that the new emphasis of the Sangh is now on “inclusiveness”. He is not wrong. The Sangh has become “inclusive” by ensuring the erasure of the Other, with direct assistance from the media. Indeed, if we follow recent news reports put out by channels like Shivshankar’s, it is clear that the viewer is never made to realise the deep RSS embedding that ensured the destruction of a mosque in Sambal, on one day, or the amazing transformation of tranquil Cuttack into a hot bed of communal violence, on the next (‘Why Cuttack, a '1000-Year-Old' Symbol of Amity, Saw Communal Violence Last Weekend, October 7; ‘Manufactured Communal Clash During Durga Puja Threatens Odisha’s Secular Legacy’, October 8, both appeared in the Wire). The viewer is never made aware that the VHP – the face of the violence – is just an extension of the RSS; that while the parent body wears a “peaceable”, “reasonable” face of “inclusiveness”, its progeny are allowed to go on regular hate rampages. When a shoe is thrown at the Chief Justice of India in his courtroom, the viewer has no clue that the mind that perpetrated that utterly vicious, casteist and condemnable act has been shaped by the ideologues of the RSS in their “man-making” project.

Yet, while the general viewer is consigned to the zone of darkness about such matters, there are those following Shivshanker’s journalism with eyes wide open. One such individual, going by the name Kapil Bagga, was upfront about his opinion: “Make the country hindurashtra,” he posted in response to Shivshankar. 

That, after all, has been and will always be the RSS’s ultimate design.

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Font fanatics and grammar guardians 

Every now and then, we come across characters who are true eccentrics in their practice of journalism. For instance, there are the Font Fanatics, who can reel out the different fonts available, carefully making a distinction between Cambria and Calibri or Arial and Algeria. They may even know that there is a font named after our very own finance minister – Nirmala UI. Not perhaps inspired by Nirmala tai herself but by some unknown designer who shared her name, who knows? They also know there’s an Elephant that lurks in this jungle of font designs, as indeed a hound of Baskerville. They may be aware of interesting legends behind such nomenclature as Poor Richard and Jokerman. But if you ask them which, among this treasury of riches, is their favourite, the answer invariably would be Times New Roman, which was birthed on newsprint in 1929 by typographer Stanley Morison for – you guessed it – the Times of London. They will also have an argument for why it is their favourite: it is serifed and therefore easy on the eye besides being narrower than most typefaces and thus being able to accommodate more text.

But more than the Font Fanatics, I am impressed by the Grammar Guardians, who could on occasion be even more authoritarian than your harmless, garden variety of Font Fanatics. I remember the ones who crossed my path holding up dictionaries like a shield as if they were on some sort of crusade. One such bearded individual, slight in form but ferocious in minding the grammar line, corrected me on several occasions: “it is not drunken driving, it is drunk driving,” he pronounced on one occasion. “And there is no need to say ‘exiled person’, the correct usage is ‘exile’ – with the noun and the verb being the same.” As often happens when certain usage is defended to the death, both versions turn out to be kosher: ‘exiled person’ works, as does ‘exile’. Drunken driving is synonymous with drunk driving – which means the exact same thing, driving under intoxication. 

But, hey, why stomp all over someone’s preferred intoxication – in this case the intoxication with grammar? The New Yorker has just carried a lovely piece on Harold Ross whose commitment to what he saw as correct usage has put its permanent impress on the magazine’s preferred style book (‘The Autocrat of English Usage’, September 22). Ross, who was the founder of The New Yorker, was a great and careful follower of Fowler’s ‘A Dictionary of Modern English Usage’. What struck him as simply brilliant was the distinction Fowler made between ‘that’ and ‘which’ – eight pages of his book were devoted to disentangling the two terms – and it is said that Ross sometimes read that passage for “relaxation”! To Fowler, correct usage of ‘that’ and ‘which’ would depend on (and I am sure you are dying to know) whether while “linking a noun or a noun phrase with a clause” defines it or merely describes it. The first would demand ‘that’, while the second requires merely a ‘which’! Vow, try and wrap your head around this, you desk-masters at the Wire!

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Readers Write In

Angst in Ladakh

A young student, Aaditya Singh, at the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, sent this post from Ladakh…

“I am writing to you with the hope that you could bring some attention to the problem of Ladakh's statehood. The people of Ladakh are actively protesting for the implementation of the 6th schedule or statehood in Ladakh. It is currently a union territory under the administration of the Lieutenant Governor, who is appointed by the central government. They do not always represent the interests of the largely tribal population. The importance of safeguarding these tribal people is not only important to protect their identity, but also they serve as a natural boundary to important geopolitical states like China and Pakistan. 

“Earlier, when Ladakh was a part of Jammu and Kashmir, they had their own representatives as four MLAs in the assembly. But now, the authority of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council is being questioned by the UT administration. The people of Ladakh want control over the governance of their land so that they can protect their immediate environment from rapid modernisation and safeguard it for future generations. 

“Environmentalist Sonam Wangchuk is currently struggling for this purpose but his voice is being suppressed. The crisis has disturbed the functioning of our university. Several media houses are circulating narratives of Wangchuk being anti-national. This was done before and was exposed as fake. I request you to bring some attention to these protests as they are crucial for the preservation of the culture, welfare and land in Ladakh.”

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Another anguished note from another student, who prefers to be anonymous…

“I am an unemployed student in Ladakh. For the past five years we have been harassed and dominated by the UT Government here. The real power is with the LG and DC. The DC, who is often an outsider, is the de facto chief minister of Ladakh.. The LG is the face of the UT government but he is often not concerned and strongly aligned with the BJP. The BJP renamed our monastries as mandirs on Google. On the very day the UT status was granted to us, the RSS did a march in city. 

“Enormous buildings of the BJP are being built on grabbed land. The party has captured so much land in Ladakh that it could put even the Muftis and Abdullahs to shame. For the past five years they have been suppressing our voices. Ladakh Scouts, which was the bread and butter of entire Ladakh, has been put under the Agniveer scheme, even though we had expected some exceptions for Ladakhis. After separating from J&K, the Kashmir administration immediately prevented Ladakhis from entry into JKPSC.  As soon as it came to power, BJP privatised all the government jobs. Even those youth seleced in contractual jobs are harassed and overworked. After four years, BJP finally recruited for GROUP C/D posts which were occupied by the cream of the students who were highly educated. Many of even those students have resigned due to harassment. 

“Whenever the CEC (Equivalent to Chief Minister) comes on ‘Leh News’ (a half an hour news broadcast done within J&K news channels), he threatens the youth not to post anything on social media indirectly. However, he speaks in Ladakhi so mainstream media does not pay much heed to it. The administration does not select students who speak up for permanent jobs so the pent up anger in the entire youth is growing. This has been exacerbated by a firing incident. The CEC has compared Narendra Modi to Gautam Buddha which hurt the religious sentiments of the people. There is curb on freedom of speech in Ladakh. Please raise our voice. Please come to Ladakh and take interviews of the youth even if they do so in masks it will be enough to expose the draconion rule of BJP here. Your reporting is very valuable.”

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Please start a Telegram channel

Prashanth Kumar, a law student, has a suggestion for the Wire:

“It would be very helpful if the Wire could start a Telegram channel for instant updates, like LiveLaw and Bar & Bench. This would make it easier for readers like me to stay connected in real time.”

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Is this equal justice?

Porus Desai from Pune writes on a pressing matter:

“I am constrained to write this letter as a litigant before the Bombay High Court, highlighting a matter of grave concern that affects the majority of ordinary citizens who approach the Court for justice. It has been observed that while influential litigants manage to have their cases listed within a single day—often appearing in the top matters of the daily cause list—most ordinary litigants wait for weeks and months without their matters even being taken up for hearing. This disparity is not only unfair but also strikes at the very foundation of equal access to justice.

“This issue requires urgent attention. I therefore request the press to highlight this disparity and call for an independent inquiry into the listing process of the Bombay High Court. Transparency, fairness, and equal treatment must be ensured if public confidence in the judiciary is to be preserved. I place this grievance before you in the larger public interest and in the hope that corrective measures will be initiated.”

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Pertinent questions

From Santosh Kumar…

“A friend asked a pertinent question: why is President Murmu silent on atrocities against Adivasis? Is it because of Dhankhar fate? Is it a case of enjoying life as the going is good?”

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‘Activate my subscription’

Wire reader, Aadarsh Joshi, has a complaint…

“I’m writing to raise an issue regarding my subscription to The India Cable. I made the payment on 25 September, but so far, my subscription hasn’t been activated. I’m unable to access the full newsletter on the Substack app, and I haven’t started receiving it over email either. I’ve written several emails and left a couple of messages—both directly to the editor and on Substack—but haven’t received any response. I was genuinely moved by the call to support independent journalism, which is why I subscribed, but this lack of response has been disappointing. Could you please look into this and let me know what’s going on? If the issue can’t be resolved soon, I’d appreciate a full refund.”

My response: I have redirected your letter to the Editorial Team for immediate action. 

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End note: During the recent press conference held by Afghanistan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Amir Khan Muttaqi on October 10 in the Capital, women reporters were kept out. Why did the India’s MEA cooperate with this blatant misogyny? Does it not have the agency to stick to the values of the Indian Constitution while hosting foreign dignitaries? Yes, and the question also arose in media circles as to why did their male counterparts did not raise a hue and cry, and boycott the press meet, instead of quietly covering it. Unacceptable behaviour all around…

Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.

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