Registered Morality

The Congress Party’s jibe at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that the latter is “not a registered organisation” and therefore of suspect legitimacy reveals more about the Opposition’s intellectual fatigue than about the Sangh itself. The attack reeks of bureaucratic pettiness dressed up as moral indignation.

At a recent event marking 100 years of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, calmly turned the argument on its head when he pointed that the Sangh, founded in 1925, predated the very notion of postcolonial registration. To expect it to have sought permission from the British is absurd, Bhagwat pointed out. The Congress’s newfound zeal for registration certificates forgets that many of India’s most consequential institutions - political parties, trade unions, even religious orders - began life outside formal codification. Was India’s own independence movement registered? The Congress of 1885 was a voluntary association, not a state-sanctioned entity. But such facts conveniently pass by Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and other Congress honchos.

Bhagwat’s response went further than historical context. He explained that under Indian law, the Sangh is recognised as a “body of individuals” - a legal category acknowledged by the Income Tax department and upheld by courts. It is exempt from income tax, enjoys recognition under law and operates transparently under its defined constitutional framework. Bhagwat’s riposte was laced with irony: if the RSS supposedly lacked legal existence, he quipped that it is worth asking whom successive Congress governments thought they were banning - and not once, but three times.

Past Congress governments have repeatedly proscribed the Sangh - first after Gandhi’s assassination, again during the Emergency and once more in the turbulence of the 1990s. Those bans were not imposed on an invisible, untraceable phantom.

The Congress’s fixation with ‘registration’ is therefore a proxy attack on the Sangh’s moral and cultural influence. The Congress has long tiptoed around the accountability of its own ecosystem: shell trusts, foundations, and foreign-funded outfits operating under the guise of civil society. When Congress leaders demand to see the RSS’s registration papers, they seem unaware of the mirror they hold to themselves.

For the Sangh, the charge of illegitimacy is almost comical. Since 1925, it has grown from a small voluntary organisation in Nagpur into India’s most formidable socio-cultural network, spanning schools, charities and service initiatives. Its cadres are among the first to reach disaster zones, and its alumni occupy positions of influence across politics and administration. The Sangh, as Bhagwat implied, belongs to a civilisational rather than bureaucratic tradition. It measures authenticity not by stamps and seals, but by endurance and influence. To dismiss that as ‘illegitimate’ is to apply the mindset of the colonial registry to the moral architecture of a living civilisation.

A century after its founding, the RSS continues to shape India’s political grammar through conviction, not compulsion. Unregistered yet recognised, the RSS remains what the Congress is not - an idea that does not need official sanction to endure.