The Unsung Saviours of Democracy: the RSS and The Emergency

While liberal academics and Congress loyalists paint the RSS as reactionary, it was the Sangh’s disciplined underground network that quietly held the line against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

Exactly fifty years ago, on the midnight of June 25, 1975, India’s democracy was put into cold storage. Press freedom was suspended, political opponents jailed and civil liberties revoked by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The world’s largest democracy was reduced, in one stroke, to the whims of one woman. What followed over the next 19 months has been dissected endlessly by journalists, historians and public intellectuals. Yet in most mainstream accounts of the Emergency, a central actor has been curiously relegated to the margins: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

To acknowledge the Sangh’s contribution during the Emergency is to complicate the dominant narrative, one in which the RSS is painted as a regressive, sectarian force rather than a bulwark of resistance against authoritarianism. But the historical record, if examined impartially, tells a more textured story.

Even ‘The Economist,’ no friend of majoritarian nationalism, saw things clearly at the time. In its 12 December 1976 edition, the magazine wrote: “The underground campaign against Mrs Gandhi... might even be called right wing since it is dominated by the Hindu communalist party, Jan Sangh and its ‘cultural’ (some say paramilitary) affiliate the RSS. But its platform at the moment has only one non-ideological plank; to bring democracy back to India... Most of them are RSS regulars… The other underground parties... have effectively abandoned the field to Jan Sangh and RSS.”

Indeed, the RSS did not just participate in the resistance but constituted the spine of it.

Even before the Emergency was declared, Indira Gandhi and her advisors had been eyeing the RSS with suspicion. As early as January 1975, her confidante, then West Bengal Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray had drafted a ban proposal while sensing that it was the RSS, much more than any of the Congress’s political rivals that was providing the logistical and organisational depth to Jayaprakash Narayan’s anti-authoritarian movement in Bihar and Gujarat. The formal ban came post-midnight on June 26, 1975. The Sangh, already anticipating the crackdown, went underground almost overnight.

According to ‘The People Versus Emergency: A Saga of Struggle,’ 23,015 RSS members, including 77 women, were detained under the dreaded Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Another 44,965 swayamsevaks were arrested for participating in peaceful satyagraha protests. In comparison, just under 10,000 individuals from other parties offered satyagraha.

The RSS Chief at the time, Balasaheb Devras, was arrested at Nagpur railway station and jailed at Yerwada, Pune. The government assumed that with the head cut off, the organisation would wither. It didn’t. As Indira Gandhi would later admit: “We were not able to capture even 10 per cent of the RSS workers... They all have gone underground and the RSS did not disperse even after the ban.”

Quiet Resistance

The RSS was never structured like a conventional political party. Its decentralised network of daily shakhas and long-trained cadres made it unusually resilient. Its members knew how to go to ground, operate in four-man cells, print and smuggle leaflets, raise funds, and provide support to the families of imprisoned activists. It was, as The Economist noted, “organised down to the village level... once the ground is prepared... any spark can set off the revolutionary prairie fire.”

That spark did not come from the Left. While the CPI supported the Emergency, and other opposition parties like the Socialists struggled with fractured leadership or demoralisation, the RSS filled the vacuum. In a bitter irony, the organisation often caricatured as fascist became the most Gandhian in method. Its swayamsevaks offered peaceful satyagraha. They were jailed, beaten, and, in at least 87 documented cases, martyred.

An organised national satyagraha was launched by the RSS between November 14, 1975, and January 14, 1976. Over 1.5 lakh people participated at 5,349 locations; of these, 80,000 were RSS workers. The campaign demanded the lifting of the Emergency, the release of political prisoners, and the end of press censorship. Women participated too and as many as 2,424 of them were arrested. It was a tableau of protest more reminiscent of the Congress’ 1942 Quit India movement than of the RSS’s typical profile.

Gujarat’s Underground

Among the younger pracharaks then working underground was a man named Narendra Modi. Stationed in Gujarat, he helped coordinate the RSS’s clandestine efforts, from distributing banned literature to supporting families of those arrested. Modi would later recall in his Gujarati memoir Sangarshma Gujarat how he evaded arrest by assuming various disguises including that of a Sikh sadhu. He also worked alongside George Fernandes, the firebrand socialist and future defence minister. That such a camaraderie could exist between a Socialist and a Swayamsevak underscored how wide the anti-Emergency tent had become.

Yet even in that umbrella coalition, it was the RSS that supplied the foot soldiers and muscle. Dr Shivram Karanth, a noted Kannada writer and public intellectual, observed: “More than 80 per cent of the fighting cadres had been drawn from the RSS… They had nothing to eat, no place to rest, but their zeal remained unabated.”

M.C. Subramaniam, editor of Modern Review, echoed this view: “They constitute the nearest answer to Swami Vivekananda’s call for an army of sanyasins to take up social and political work… even their erstwhile opponents respected them.”

With Indian media muzzled by censorship, foreign correspondents became the chroniclers of the Emergency’s underbelly. The New York Times Magazine published a damning piece by J. Anthony Lukas titled India is as Indira Does (April 1976), which challenged the regime’s caricature of the RSS as a violent militia. “Pictures... show long wooden staves and wooden swords,” he wrote, questioning how such tools could threaten a million-man army backed by 750,000 policemen.

Even the Nepalese government, which had long sheltered Indian revolutionaries, refused to hand over RSS members fleeing arrest. A source close to Kathmandu’s embassy quipped: “The Gandhi regime will not get them.”

The RSS’s perceived ubiquity was noted even by Brahmananda Reddy, then Home Minister who noted that the RSS continued to be active all over India.

Democracy First

Perhaps the most compelling proof of the Sangh’s sincerity lies in what it chose not to do. When Indira Gandhi offered a conditional lifting of the ban on RSS in exchange for toning down its opposition, the Sangh said no. The lifting of Emergency, and not its own reinstatement, was the priority. That principled stand would eventually catalyse the formation of the Janata Party, a haphazard coalition that won the 1977 general elections and ended Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian interregnum.

Today, it has become fashionable in intellectual circles to dismiss the RSS as the fountainhead of majoritarianism or to see its rise as evidence of India’s democratic decay. This view is often ahistorical. The RSS of 1975 was not the behemoth of 2025. It was not in power, nor did it seek it directly. Its actions were rooted not in electoral ambition, but in a deep ideological conviction that India’s constitutional freedoms mattered.

At a moment when India’s future hung in the balance, it was the RSS, almost alone among mass organisations, that chose resistance over retreat.

The Emergency remains a dark blot on India’s democratic record. But it also lit up unexpected heroes. In that long night, the RSS was among the few who stayed awake.