WHAT LIBERALISM FAILS TO SEE IN THE RSS

Western and Indian liberal critiques of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are animated by a shared anxiety that India is drifting away from a familiar, rule-book version of liberal democracy.

- PROF. RAGHAVENDRA P. TIWARI

The RSS is therefore cast as an aberration, illiberal, majoritarian, culturally coercive. What this critique rarely confronts is a more basic question: whether the liberal framework being deployed by them is adequate to the social, historical, and civilizational terrain it claims to judge.

At the core of this misreading lies a category error. Liberal analysis treats the RSS primarily as a political actor, to be assessed by its proximity to state power and its conformity to liberal norms. The RSS, however, has never understood itself chiefly as a political project. Politics, in its own self-conception, is downstream. Its primary work lies in social organisation, cultural reproduction, and moral formation, the domains that liberal theory, with its fixation on the state and individual rights, systematically underestimates.

This mismatch explains several recurring critiques. The charge that the RSS is obsessed with the past, for instance, mistakes continuity for nostalgia. The organisation's argument is not that India must return to a golden age, but that civilisations endure through habits, institutions, and shared ethical frames and not through constitutions alone. In a society whose modern state is scarcely seventy-eight years old, this insistence on civilizational depth carries a legitimacy that liberal observers often fail to register.