In a speech marking the centenary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi extolled the sacrifices of its founder, K.B. Hedgewar, and his followers during the country’s fight for independence. The RSS, he suggested, was a crucible of patriotism, its members jailed alongside other freedom fighters. Yet history, less pliable than political rhetoric, tells a more complex story—one where the RSS’s role in India’s anti-colonial struggle is marginal at best.
Hedgewar, a medical doctor turned nationalist, was indeed imprisoned in 1921 for his role in Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement, a Congress-led campaign against British rule. But his flirtation with mainstream nationalism was brief. By 1925, disillusioned with Congress’s inclusive approach, he founded the RSS not to challenge colonialism but to forge a disciplined Hindu identity. The group’s mission was cultural revival, not political rebellion.
When the Quit India Movement erupted in 1942, galvanizing millions to demand British withdrawal, the RSS remained conspicuously aloof. Congress leaders like Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sardar Patel filled British jails; revolutionaries like Subhas Chandra Bose waged war. The RSS, under Hedgewar’s successor, M.S. Golwalkar, prioritized its shakhas—training camps—over street protests. British intelligence reports from the time note the group’s restraint, with some critics alleging its members even aided in maintaining public order. RSS defenders counter that individual swayamsevaks joined the freedom struggle independently, but no evidence suggests organizational commitment to the cause.
Nor did the British ever ban the RSS, unlike the Congress, which faced repeated crackdowns. The group’s bans—thrice imposed, in 1948, 1975, and 1992—came from Indian governments, sparked by concerns over communal violence after Gandhi’s assassination, during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, and following the Babri Masjid demolition. These episodes underscore the RSS’s fraught relationship with India’s secular state, not its colonial oppressors.
Mr. Modi’s portrayal of the RSS as a linchpin of the freedom struggle thus strains credulity. The movement’s giants—Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Maulana Azad, Bose—drove India’s independence through mass mobilization, diplomacy, and sacrifice. The RSS, by contrast, focused on building a Hindu cadre, a project its supporters frame as cultural nationalism but critics decry as sectarian. To conflate the two is to blur the line between history and hagiography.
This is not to dismiss the RSS’s influence. Its disciplined network has shaped modern India, particularly through its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which Mr. Modi leads. But rewriting history to cast the RSS as a freedom-fighting vanguard risks eclipsing the true architects of India’s independence. History is a mirror, not a canvas. India’s leaders would do well to face it.
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