THE DHARMA OF BALANCE

The fundamental ideological quest of the RSS is not power. It is balance. And its head has underlined this as the organisation completes a century.

- HINDOL SENGUPTA

I am among the people invited to listen to Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), across three days to mark the centenary of the organisation, which is the ideological parent of India's ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Much has been written about the history of the RSS and the fact that its dedicated, and lifelong, followers run the Indian government, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and many of his top cabinet ministers.

I had opportunity to consider this history at length in my book on the history of political Hinduism, Soul and Sword. But there is one critical thing that has rarely been considered at length, and this is the nature of its core ideology. This is often simply stated as the recrafting of India as a Hindu Rashtra in line with the core belief of Hindutva, which is best described as a cultural distillate of the lived experience of being Hindu in a sociopolitical context.

In such a baseline understanding, the RSS, a voluntary organisation of around 5-6 million members, and more than 70,000 branches, hopes to transform Indian society towards its beliefs, and leverage this transformation to ensure that its political arm, the BJP, stays in power. But since the BJP has not been in power for most of India's independent history since 1947, this is, at the very least, a limiting framework.

A much better question to ask is—what is the RSS mainly concerned with?

The usual answer is power (not merely political power, but the power of societal influence). This, in my opinion, of having studied the organisation for more than a decade now, is the wrong answer.

What the RSS is most concerned about is, in fact, balance. Through its history since 1925, and through the readings of Indian philosophical texts, the RSS leadership has repeatedly come to the conclusion that a sense of balance is the most vital nurturing and enabling force of Indian nationhood.