One Hundred Years Of... Sacred and the Scared

An organisation that takes pride in being rock solid in times of liquid modernity, can it catch up with the change?

- PRASHANT PANJIAR

"IT was the best of times, it was the worst of times," the opening lines from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities fits well with a similar epithet regarding the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The RSS has changed immensely over the years but there is no visible change. The best possible way to capture the journey of 100 years for the RSS is this moebius kind of inside-out and outside-in. The RSS has changed, relentlessly contradicting, overturning and denying many of its past practices, but in essence there seems to be no change in its approach to politics and its vision of a cultural/religious majoritarian state.

Why does it claim the changes it does? But why are they then not the changes that they wish to project. If one can make sense of this mirage, one can approximate the means and methods of the RSS. One can also, perhaps, map the unprecedented rise of the RSS in the last 100 years—from the rugged margins of Indian society and politics to the centre stage of wielding power (without much of accountability). In order to understand these dilemmas, this special issue of Outlook does not recount the familiar history of the RSS, but attempts to bring to the readers a set of issues that found little attention in the public domain. The familiar issues of the role of the RSS or lack of it in the national movement, their reluctance to accept the national flag, their role in Mahatma Gandhi's assassination or denial of it, among many such issues have been recounted multiple times. Also, the reach of the RSS today is growing for other reasons that some of these issues may not be able to account for, however important they may remain historically. And that is what has changed, or has it? The attempt is to wedge-open the space for a deeper understanding. There seems to be a liminal space of unchanging change.