Measured Power

Congress leaders have revived a familiar trope once again with party president Mallikarjun Kharge’s shrill call to ban the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Few institutions in India provoke as much loathing among their critics or as much loyalty among their adherents as the RSS. Born in 1925, the RSS has survived bans, vilification and decades of political hostility.

Yet, each attempt to outlaw it - by colonial authorities, by Nehru’s Congress government after Gandhi’s assassination, and by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency has only strengthened its reach.

Now, as Kharge and other Congress leaders raise the familiar cry, the Sangh’s response has been tellingly mild. In fact, the organisation’s quiet endurance and restraint speak volumes about its discipline.

At the end of a three-day meeting in Nagpur, RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale responded to Kharge’s call not with outrage but with perspective. He recalled that efforts to ban the organisation had failed repeatedly in the past, discredited both by public opinion and the courts. Rather than indulging in political one-upmanship, Hosabale’s remarks underscored a quiet confidence born of history.

That such composure comes from an organisation often caricatured as domineering is telling. The Sangh’s critics routinely accuse it of ideological rigidity; yet when faced with provocation, it responds with stoicism rather than shrillness. The contrast with the Congress’s rhetoric could not be sharper. Kharge’s statement, echoed by others within the party in the past, betrays a reflexive impulse for censorship.

Several Opposition leaders including Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, have derided the RSS as a purveyor of communalism. In Maharashtra, Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) has made a habit of organising marches against the Sangh, most recently in Sambhajinagar. Yet, despite frequent vilification and occasional hostility on the ground, the RSS rarely responds in kind. It neither floods the streets with counter-protests nor seeks to muzzle dissent.

Unlike most political movements, the RSS does not measure its influence in television airtime or electoral arithmetic. Its strength lies in its dense social network. By keeping its composure, it allows its critics to expend their fury while it continues to expand quietly.

To the RSS’ detractors, this calmness is unsettling. The Sangh’s leadership refrains from personal invective, couching its language instead in appeals to unity, culture and national self-reliance.

Any renewed attempt to ban the RSS would be not only constitutionally dubious but politically self-defeating. Every previous proscription - from 1948 to 1975 - ended up strengthening the organisation’s legitimacy and deepening its roots. Kharge and his allies would do well to remember that pattern.

The RSS’s enduring appeal lies less in ideology than in discipline and in its ability to command loyalty without coercion. That same discipline also tempers its power. It could, if it wished, mobilise thousands in retaliation to those who vilify it, but it chooses restraint. In an age of performative outrage, that self-control is both its shield and its strength.