The RSS isn’t an NGO, it very much a government organisation

Following the nation-wide police raids and arrests of several social activists – eerily reminiscent of an autocratic Indira Gandhi’s Emergency – Rahul Gandhi ironically remarked that the RSS, the Hindu right-wing organisation, was the only NGO, non-government organisation, left in the country.

The NDA government has been vigorously clamping down on many NGOs on the allegation that, in the guise of championing tribal rights, they support and fund subversive anti-national elements such as Naxals.

However, the Congress president’s remark that the RSS is the only NGO in the country isn’t accurate.  Because the RSS – for all its claims of being purely a social organisation which remains uninvolved with politics – the RSS is very much a part of the political establishment of India.

From the current prime minister downwards, many of the leaders in the ruling party have an RSS background.

The ‘cultural nationalism’ espoused by the RSS and the political agenda of the BJP to change the secular Constitution of India and turn the Republic into a Hindu Rashtra are one and the same.

Any individual, or institution, dissenting against this common agenda of the Hindufication of India is deemed by the RSS and the BJP to be anti-national.

The RSS cadres – who have infiltrated the bureaucracy and the media – are the foot soldiers of the BJP, deployed tactically to pursue the saffron party’s agenda.

The leadership of the RSS is the military headquarters of the BJP laying down the broader strategy of the party.

The RSS is emphatically not an NGO.  It is very much a government organization – if not the government itself, thinly disguised.