The Bhagwat Doctrine

The RSS chief has defied caricatures and unsettled detractors with a more measured vision of India.

Marking the centenary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) this week, Mohan Bhagwat repeated a theme he has long favoured. He argued that the DNA of all who inhabited ‘Akhand Bharat’ has been the same for 40,000 years. Hindus and Muslims, he insisted, shared a common ancestry, and India was both “undivided” and a “Hindu Rashtra.”

The formulation was not new. In 2021 he drew flak from some of his own supporters by suggesting that Hindus and Muslims are descendants of the same forebears. This time, with the RSS entering its second century, he framed the idea in the language of continuity rather than concession. Hindu and Muslim identities may diverge, Bhagwat said, but the people themselves remain tied to a single civilisational inheritance.

Bhagwat, 74, leads the RSS at a moment of unprecedented influence for the organisation. He heads an organisation often caricatured in lurid terms, as an ideological monolith bent on erasing minorities.

Since its founding in 1925 by K.B. Hedgewar, the RSS has been routinely labelled by a global cabal of Indian and Western liberal academics, activists and journalists as “fascist,” “majoritarian” or “anti-Muslim.” These lazy epithets have been recycled with little regard for nuance, sometimes drawing lazy parallels with interwar Europe.

The RSS today sits at the heart of India’s political ecosystem. Its affiliates span education, labour unions, student bodies and religious outfits; its ideological heir, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), governs the country. Though the RSS does not contest elections, its reach makes its sarsanghchalak a figure whose words ripple far beyond the organization’s headquarters in Nagpur.

During the centenary address, Bhagwat offered a taxonomy of Hindu identity: those proud of it, those dimly aware of it, those who concealed it and those who denied it altogether. Yet even the last group, he maintained, could not escape belonging. “Even if you see the DNA, it is the same,” he told the audience, suggesting that shared ancestry trumped self-description. It was an appeal both to inclusion and to absorption. He was careful to stress that Hindu does not mean “Hindu versus all.” The term, he argued, is not geographical but civilisational, encompassing anyone who accepts the plurality of paths to the divine and a common devotion to the land.

Bhagwat’s interpretation reaches back to etymology. The word Hindu, he reminded his listeners, was first used by ancient Persians to describe the people beyond the Sindhu river. Over centuries it grew to signify a broader civilisational ethos rather than a single religious doctrine. That elasticity allows him to suggest that a Muslim or Christian who identifies as Bharatiya (Indian) or Sanatani (traditional) can, in essence, be regarded as Hindu. The inclusivity, however, rests on the condition that all must accept a shared lineage and civilisational bond.

Such arguments mirror the RSS’s long-standing project. Hedgewar’s founding aim was to unite a Hindu society he considered divided and vulnerable. Bhagwat now couches that mission in gentler terms. The Sangh, he explained, is not an organisation built to oppose anyone but a force to keep society in “good health.”

Ever since he became the RSS chief in 2009, Bhagwat has spoken in the register of civilisational identity rather than sectarian antagonism, thus providing the RSS with a vocabulary that is less combustible and more palatable. He has become the voice of the elder custodian, not the street fighter.

This does not mean he soft-pedals the RSS’s ideological core. However, his firmness has been cloaked in reason and moderation and it is this very maturity of Bhagwat’s stance that has unsettled his critics.

That maturity surfaced most clearly in fraught disputes over religious sites. On the Gyanvapi mosque case in Varanasi, for instance, he cautioned against a ruinous spiral of historical excavation when he remarked that Hindus should not go about searching for temples beneath every mosque. The comment was as much a rebuke to hard-line zeal as it was a call to focus on reconciliation rather than retribution. By combining ideological conviction with a refusal to indulge endless provocation, Bhagwat has recast the Sangh’s voice as one of responsibility.

A century on from Hedgewar’s founding of the RSS, the organisation shows no sign of retreat. If anything, its influence has deepened. Bhagwat’s words at the centenary celebrations were primarily a reminder that for the Sangh, the work of shaping India’s identity is still unfinished.