Manufactured Menace: Why the Congress cannot stop fearing the RSS

Unable to counter the RSS’s grassroots reach, the Congress has chosen to criminalise it by transforming ideological rivalry into institutional vendetta.

The acquittal of all seven accused in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case has brought to an ignominious close one of the most audacious political and investigative misadventures in independent India. The ruling, delivered by a special court in Mumbai, exposed not merely the inadequacies of the prosecution, but something far more sinister: a decades-long obsession within the Congress party to demonise the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and by extension, a large segment of India’s Hindu electorate. That such an effort involved torture, deliberate misdirection of investigations and even an alleged attempt to arrest the sitting RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, speaks volumes of the paranoia that the Sangh evokes among its most determined detractors.

The Malegaon blast was tragic. Six lives were lost in a crowded marketplace during Ramzan in 2008. But the real scandal is what followed. The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), under the then Congress-NCP-led state government, acted with such haste and certainty in pinning the blame on members of the Hindu right that it upended all norms of investigative integrity.

Pragya Singh Thakur, an ascetic and political nonentity at the time, was arrested after the ATS traced the blast-site motorcycle to her - a fact later found to rest on tenuous forensic grounds. She was reportedly tortured for 11 days, subjected to inhuman conditions that left her unable to walk. Lt Col Prasad Purohit, an army officer with an intelligence background and a record of counter-infiltration against Islamist groups in Kashmir, was similarly arrested, physically assaulted in the most brutal manner possible and traumatized, spending nearly nine years in jail. Even as he was being stripped of his dignity, he remained remarkably composed, stoic and loyal to the very nation whose institutions were failing him.

In the aftermath of the verdict, the real jaw-dropper came not from the court, but from within the investigative ranks. Mehboob Mujawar, a former ATS officer involved in the Malegaon case, alleged that he was instructed to arrest Mohan Bhagwat, who was not yet RSS chief. According to Mujawar, there was a clear design to frame the RSS in order to cement the phrase “Hindu terror” into India’s political lexicon. When he resisted, he claims, false cases were filed against him, leading to his suspension.

This brings us to a lingering question as to why the Congress remains so fixated on the RSS. Since its founding in 1925, the RSS has been the bête noire of the Congress establishment: a cadre-driven, discipline-oriented Hindu nationalist organisation that refuses to play by the rules of patronage and deference the Congress spent decades cultivating.

Its founder, K.B. Hedgewar viewed India not as a project of modernity but as an ancient civilisation needing cultural renewal. While the Congress clung to drawing-room debates, petitions to the Crown and performative fasts as the means to win independence, the RSS quietly went about forging a resilient Hindu society from the ground up. Where the Congress was captive to the English-speaking elite and their obsession with constitutional niceties, the RSS drilled character and discipline into young men through its shakhas.

That bottom-up approach unnerved the Congress from the outset. By the late 1930s, the RSS had grown quietly influential, especially in Maharashtra and parts of North India, without participating in the freedom struggle in the way Congress defined it

The RSS, with its austere culture, grassroots reach and ideological clarity, offered a mass nationalist alternative to the Nehruvian consensus and more threateningly, it did so without needing the state’s patronage.

The first ban on the RSS came in the aftermath of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Although there was no conclusive evidence linking the RSS to Nathuram Godse (who had left the organisation years before), Jawaharlal Nehru swiftly imposed a ban, which lasted over a year. It was lifted only after the RSS agreed to adopt a constitution and stay away from politics. Nehru’s successors would follow his example.

In 1975, Indira Gandhi imposed another ban during the Emergency, when thousands of RSS workers were arrested, tortured, or forced underground. The organisation’s unflinching opposition to authoritarianism and its ability to mobilise mass resistance during this period sowed the seeds of its transformation from a cultural organisation to a political powerhouse. The third ban came after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, when the Congress, reeling from electoral defeats and desperately trying to consolidate the Muslim vote, again sought to blame the RSS for fomenting communal tension.

In each instance, the aim of the ban was to curb the influence of an ideological adversary the Congress could neither co-opt nor out-organise.

In truth, the RSS is less interested in politics than the Congress imagines. It has consistently described itself as a socio-cultural organisation and has formally kept itself aloof from party politics, even if its ideological progeny - the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - benefits from its organisational muscle. But it is precisely this mass appeal and discipline that make the Congress uncomfortable. The Sangh’s quiet spread across rural India, with its shishu mandirs, shakhas and seva projects, has built a vast grassroots presence that Congress’ crumbling cadre base cannot match.

By the mid-2000s, with the BJP growing in national stature, the Congress faced a strategic dilemma. Its traditional plank of ‘secularism’ was losing its electoral resonance, increasingly seen as a euphemism for minority appeasement. At the same time, the malevolent spectre of Islamist terror - from Parliament attacks to 26/11 - was becoming too large to ignore. Into this breach stepped the theory of “saffron terror.”

The Malegaon blasts lit the fuse for this diabolical plan to be set in motion. The propagation of this term was a series of insinuations and rhetorical flourishes, from Sharad Pawar’s conception of it to Digvijaya Singh’s repeated references to the RSS as a “bomb-making factory.” Home Minister P. Chidambaram gave it institutional legitimacy in 2010 by invoking "saffron terror" in an address to intelligence officials. In 2013, Sushilkumar Shinde escalated further, alleging that BJP and RSS were running “terror training camps”.

International validation came via WikiLeaks, which revealed that Rahul Gandhi had told US Ambassador Timothy Roemer that “radical Hindu groups” were more dangerous than Lashkar-e-Taiba. Former National Security Advisor (NSA) M.K. Narayanan echoed similar concerns in meetings with FBI officials. These remarks are evidence of a party so fearful of losing ground to a ‘nationalist’ revival that it sought to criminalise its cultural nemesis on the global stage.

Faced with the rising tide of Hindu consolidation, the Congress attempted to inject moral equivalence into the discourse. If Islamist terror was real, then Hindutva terror had to be manufactured to counterbalance it.

The irony is that in the process, the Congress inflicted deep institutional wounds. It compromised the credibility of its own police forces, undermined anti-terror efforts and politicised agencies that were meant to function above party fray. Even the Army was dragged into this morass. Officers like Purohit, who had risked their lives to infiltrate terror networks, were instead vilified and jailed.

The Congress’s long war with the RSS is all about existential anxiety. The Sangh represents a version of India that the Congress neither understands nor can control. It speaks in the idiom of dharma, duty and civilisational pride. This is foreign to a party whose identity has long rested on borrowed liberalism and colonial institutions. Unable to counter it ideologically or outmatch it organisationally, the Congress chooses instead to demonise.

The RSS is the only organisation in modern Indian history that has managed to build a mass base, instil loyalty, and influence national policy without ever holding direct power. That makes it uniquely dangerous to a party like the Congress, which for decades conflated state control with political legitimacy.

However, the Congress’ strategy to snare the RSS is now falling apart. The Malegaon verdict should be the epitaph of a deceitful political project.