RSS and Taliban: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

The diktats by the moral police – that couples cannot hold hands in public; violently attacking young men and women for their sinful 'western behaviour' for partying, drinking and dancing; couples caught in parks threatened to have their hair cut off and faces blackened; threats to forcibly marry couples caught celebrating Valentine’s Day as it encourages obscene acts – are some of the terrifying punishments meted out to the public over the years.

Did you assume this was the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the country’s foreign minister is in India for a visit? No, these are the actions of none other than the various Hindutva vigilante groups that roam various parts of the country, forcing “Indian traditional culture” with threats and violence.

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, they imposed the Sharia law as the supreme law of the land. The government has since enforced a rigid and austere interpretation of it. The Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia, or religious code for living, lays down strict rules for dress, food, marriage and women among other things. 

In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its myriad Hindutva groups have sworn to unite the Hindu community by providing character training through ‘Hindu discipline’, spread Hindutva to ‘strengthen’ the Hindu community and finally establish a Hindu Rashtra. 

Are the RSS and the Taliban twinning in the neighbourhood? While both may recoil at the similarities – after all, the Taliban and RSS both believe that minorities are second class citizens in their own countries – it is indeed ironic that it is an RSS pracharak, Narendra Modi, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which has given a red-carpet welcome to the Taliban in India.  

Here are five ways in which the RSS and Taliban seem to be twinning – even as the RSS dreams of an Akhand Bharat or Undivided India that stretches in the North from Afghanistan to Myanmar in the East, while the Taliban settles for its own territory of an Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan. 

Constitution constrains

Within a year of taking over Afghanistan, the Taliban abolished the 2004 Constitution of the Islamic Republic and officially declared that it was the Quran that would now function as the unwritten Constitution. 

With all executive, legislative and judicial power vested in the Supreme Leader and his band of clerics – declaring edicts and judgements arbitrarily, based on their interpretation of the Quran – there has been global condemnation for their authoritarian and unaccountable reign and human rights abuses. 

The RSS too has been critical of the Indian Constitution, saying it is based on western concepts borrowed from various foreign countries and that it does not ground itself on ancient Indian laws like the Manusmriti, as it wrote in its magazine, Organizer, in 1949. 

The Manusmriti has been denounced for promoting the caste system and being unabashedly anti-women. Sample this from the text: Cutting off the tongue of a Shudra for insulting a Brahmin; Kshatriyas or rulers were created from the arm of the Brahmin; while women are lustful creatures, unfit for independence and unworthy as witnesses.

In June, RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale asked for a public debate to remove the words 'secular' and 'socialist' from the preamble of the Constitution, arguing that they were “forcibly inserted” during the Emergency in 1975. 

He was criticised by opposition parties for trying to destroy the country’s pluralistic ethos. The Supreme Court too had dismissed a bunch of petitions asking for the same in December 2024, when it said the Constitution is a living document and is open to change. One of the main petitioners in the case was Dr Subramaniam Swamy, who previously identified himself as a BJP member.

Women invisible

It is not surprising that the Taliban banned women journalists at its first press conference in Delhi, only to bow under pressure and call a second one, with women in the front rows this time. But the fact is that the Modi government allowed the ban on female journalists in a constitutionally elected democratic country. 

The Taliban government formed the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on the premise that women are the source of all evil, so they must be controlled for the good of society. 

Women were banned from securing employment, including in government and NGO offices, and restricted from attending mosques and schools after the age of 13. They were also monitored for good behaviour in public places like bazars and even private celebrations like weddings. All this, under the cover of full-body abaya, with only the eyes visible to see the outside world. 

Punishment for non-adherence is public flogging, fines and prison term. Men would lose their jobs if they failed to accompany women to hospitals or ensure that the women in the family did not abide by the law.

Sounds familiar? The Uttar Pradesh government was the first to pass the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020, followed by seven other BJP-ruled states, which specifically included clauses of inter-faith marriages. All this under the benign watch of the Modi government at the Centre.  

The laws were intended to stop inter-caste and inter-faith marriages, or ‘Love Jihad’, with criminal punishment. This gave Hindutva groups like the Bajrang Dal a licence to go on violent sprees to break up any blossoming romance. 

‘Love jihad’ is the term Hindutva politicians have coined and used to describe a conspiracy in which Muslim men supposedly dupe unsuspecting Hindu girls into marriage in order to convert them to Islam.

Hindutva groups from Ram Sene to Hindu Jagran Manch have smashed pubs, fashion shows and Valentine parties, saying these do not represent ‘Bharatiya’ culture.

The RSS’s women’s wing, Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, bases its ideology on Matrutva (universal motherhood) and Kartruvta (efficiency and social activism), reinforcing women’s traditional role to restore the glories of an ancient past by fulfilling their duties to family and community.

But despite the RSS chief’s pious declarations for modernisation – largely seen as superficial given its anti-minority, anti-liberal utterances – it was not long before RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat at a Hindu Unity Conference in Kerala earlier this year, signalled the code for Hindus – wear only the traditional dress, no speaking in English and having only Indian cuisine.

Procreation

The Taliban has banned contraception and birth control pills saying it’s a western conspiracy to control the Muslim population. It has led to a terrifying surge in high-risk pregnancies and maternal and child mortality in Afghanistan. Dire poverty is driving families to force young children to marry in exchange for dowry.

The RSS too has called for families to have more children. Bhagwat reiterated yet again the bogey of population control, as he declared on Dussehra Day, “We are worried about demographic changes as we have seen what happens (because of it). It has led to partition not just in India… More than the population it is the intent of the people that is concerning,” he said. 

Two years ago, he had said, “Population imbalance leads to changes in geographical boundaries… population control and religion-based population is an important subject that can no longer be ignored…” And added that falling “birth rate is one reason; conversions by force, lure or greed, and infiltration are also big reasons.”

Bhagwat also said that “marrying at the right age and having three children ensures good health to both parents and children”. If Bhagwat was insinuating Muslim population growth, research shows that from 1992 to 2015, Muslim fertility rate declined from 4.4 to 2.6, for Hindus, it dropped from 3.3 to 2.1. 

As for child marriage, while the RSS opposes it due to the strict laws against it, its women's wing has suggested that the government should not interfere in every aspect of family life and that some social issues are best left to society to resolve on its own.

Same sex marriage

The Taliban’s interpretation of the Sharia law for same sex relationship positions it as a grave sin that is punishable by torture and death. In fact its declared punishment, upheld by Taliban judges, is death by stoning or being crushed under a wall. Many LGBTQ+ individuals have been hunted down through cellphone chats and executed in the country. 

In January this year, the ICC requested arrest warrants against the Taliban leadership for the persecution of LGBTQ+ as a crime against humanity.

India legalised same sex relationships in 2018, but the RSS’ stance on homosexuality keeps changing. While Bhagwat said in March 2023 that people from LGBTQ+ community “should have their own private and social space”, shifting from its earlier stance that it was “unnatural;” today the RSS says it has tried to look at the issue “with a humane approach.” 

But barely two months later, the Samwardhini Nyas, an affiliate of the Sevika Samiti, conducted a survey which said that many doctors and allied medical professionals believe that homosexuality is a “disorder” and will increase if same sex marriage is legalised.

Rights activists have denounced the survey as dangerous and misleading for spreading misinformation, and asked for the licenses of the doctors to be cancelled.

The RSS was also in sync with the Modi government’s opposition to same sex marriage and welcomed the Supreme Court’s October 2023 decision to ask parliament to decide on the matter. 

The fountainhead

The Taliban’s Supreme Leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has not hesitated in declaring that democracy was over in the country and implementing the Sharia law was his government’s lifelong responsibility to make the Islamic system strong and powerful. 

He proudly announced his commitment to his interpretation of Islamic laws and that jurisprudence would enforce punishments such as amputations, public flogging, stoning and death. 

If it’s the Sharia in Afghanistan, the RSS would like Hindutva to be the guiding light for India; and it has never hidden its dream to make India a Hindu Rashtra. The RSS has actively advocated its Hindu nationalistic agenda by pushing Hindutva ideals and culture, even as it insists it is only a cultural organisation that seeks to preserve and promote its interpretation of Hindu culture, values and traditions. 

But how true are the RSS’s assertions when it has actively promoted its agenda through the BJP, which has many of its members in government, beginning with Modi himself?

Even the Rs 100 coin to commemorate 100 years of the RSS, released by Modi recently, has the saffron Hindutva flag on one side. The RSS began hoisting the national flag at its headquarters in Nagpur only from 2002, after significant public pressure. It only used the Hindutva saffron flag until then. 

The Union government and BJP-ruled states have come up with various laws to promote the Hindutva way of life – rolling out the RSS’s agenda of the Uniform Civil Code starting with Uttarakhand, which is seen as a model for other states; banning cow slaughter or ‘saving’ cows from beef-eaters; revising school and university text books to align with its interpretation of the past; making religious conversion a criminal act and ensuring Sangh-approved appointments in universities and administration. There have been a flurry of meetings this year between Bhagwat and Modi after a long hiatus in the last ten years. The RSS is finally digging its heels in. 

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