A Karnataka minister wants India's most influential volunteer organisation to show its accounts. The law is on the RSS's side. The argument is not.
ASK AN ORGANISATION with 60,000-odd branches, a uniformed marching wing and a claim on the soul of the ruling party to produce its accounts, and you can expect a fight. That is roughly what Priyank Kharge, the home minister of the southern state of Karnataka, did on June 13th, when he wrote to Mohan Bhagwat, head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), asking how an outfit of such reach gets away without registering as a society, a trust or a company. He wants to see its office-bearers, its funding and its tax filings. He has since taken to television to make the point more pungently, accusing the Sangh's defenders of acting as conscripts sent to do an argument the organisation will not have in its own name.
The episode is a useful specimen of a recurring Indian argument: what obligations should attach to power that declines to take a corporate form? The answer offered by Mr Kharge is moral and political. The answer offered by the RSS's lawyers is narrowly legal. Both have holes in them.
The minister's case
Mr Kharge's argument is essentially one of scale. He points to the Sangh's own annual reports, which boast of more than 2,000 "Samajotsava" gatherings and 562 route marches in Karnataka alone, and asks how a body capable of mustering that kind of disciplined, recurring public mobilisation can still describe itself as a private fraternity. An organisation that fills public squares with marching cadres, he suggests, has forfeited the right to the legal anonymity of a private dinner club.
This is a respectable argument, and not a new one. The Caravan magazine's investigation into the Sangh's structure made a similar point at greater length, noting that the RSS itself holds no central registration; its schools, charities and publishing arms are registered separately, while the parent body floats above the paperwork. Critics have long suspected that this is a feature, not an oversight: it lets an organisation with national reach avoid the audited accounts, membership rolls and disclosure filings that the law imposes on companies, societies and trusts.
The trouble is that scale is not, in Indian law, a threshold that triggers registration. Mr Kharge's letter reads as if transparency obligations scale automatically with influence. They do not. A church, a sports club or a residents' welfare association can mobilise thousands without incorporating, and the constitution's guarantee of free association (Article 19(1)(c)) was written precisely to protect that informality from state intrusion. By framing his demand as something the RSS is constitutionally obliged to satisfy, rather than something it would be wise, in a democracy, to volunteer, Mr Kharge invites the rebuttal that has duly arrived: that he is asking the law to do work it was never built for.
His decision to wage the argument on television, deriding lawyers and columnists as "slaves" sent to avoid a direct answer, compounds the problem. It is rhetorically satisfying and substantively beside the point: an organisation is entitled to let its sympathisers make its case in public, and the minister's annoyance at that fact does not, by itself, strengthen his legal one.
The Sangh's case
The RSS's defence — fielded by figures including Mahesh Jethmalani, a senior advocate, and S. Gurumurthy, an RSS ideologue — has two prongs. The first is constitutional: registration of voluntary bodies in India is optional, and no statute compels the Sangh to incorporate. The second is historical: the organisation's funding model, built around an annual "guru dakshina" collected by individual shakhas (branches), was tested by the income-tax department in the 1970s and found, on principles of mutuality, not to constitute taxable central income. Case closed, they argue — and has been for fifty years.
This is more solid ground, but it is not quite the closed case it is advertised as. Reporting on the Sangh's own constitutional amendments — filed with a tax officer in Nagpur in 1972, in the midst of those very proceedings — shows an organisation that altered its internal rules to insist its shakhas were wholly independent units with no central treasury, the better to keep guru dakshina outside the reach of a central tax assessment. The same filings show the RSS asserting, at other moments, that it could in fact call for funds from its branches. An organisation that amends its constitution mid-dispute to clarify, conveniently, that it has no centre to regulate is not quite the same as an organisation whose structure was always thus. The legal victory of the 1970s was real; the suggestion that it reflects an unchanging and uncomplicated organisational form is doing more work than the record supports.
Nor does "the law doesn't require it" fully answer the political question Mr Kharge is, however clumsily, gesturing at. Plenty of things are legal and still odd: a body that prints annual reports boasting of its public reach while resisting any external account of its internal one is entitled to do so, but is not thereby entitled to immunity from the observation that this is a curious sort of opacity for an organisation that insists it has nothing to hide.
The real argument, obscured
What gets lost in the shouting is that the two sides are not actually disagreeing about the same question. Mr Kharge is asking a normative one — should an organisation of this reach behave like a registered institution, as a matter of democratic good practice? The RSS's lawyers are answering a narrower one — is it legally required to? Both answers can be correct simultaneously: yes, it would be a healthier norm for an organisation that fills India's public squares to publish what registered bodies publish; and no, nothing in the constitution or the tax code forces it to.
That distinction is exactly the kind a home minister has every incentive to blur and a defence lawyer has every incentive to exploit. Mr Kharge gets to sound like a crusader for accountability while making a demand the law cannot back up. The RSS's defenders get to sound like guardians of the constitution while declining to engage with the substance of why an organisation of its size resists the disclosure that almost every other institution of comparable reach in India — companies, parties, NGOs, even temples and trusts — is required to provide.
Indian politics being what it is, neither side has much reason to resolve the ambiguity. A genuine legislative answer — a statute requiring disclosure from any unincorporated association above a certain size or public-mobilisation threshold, modelled loosely on lobbying-transparency or NGO-disclosure laws elsewhere — would settle the matter cleanly. It would also require a parliament whose ruling party grew out of the RSS's own ranks to legislate against the institution's interest, which is reason enough to expect that the argument will instead continue exactly where it is most comfortable for everyone except the public: in letters, on television, and nowhere near a courtroom or a statute book.
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