The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan.

The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisation also doubled after 2014.

The latest real estate expenditure of the organisation is about INR 150 crore, the amount spent on its new headquarters complex in Delhi, which was inaugurated in Feb 2025. The complex is situated on 16,000 square metres and consists of three huge towers which house offices, residences, a library, a hospital, and conference halls.

The paradox is that the RSS cannot own property legally; yet it has more property in the country than any other “cultural” organisation (as it calls itself). It is not allowed to collect tax-deductible donations; but it does all the time. Interestingly, the RSS does not even have official members. There is no register maintained to store membership details. Yet it has some six million members. It can dissociate itself from any member as it did with the Mahatma’s assassin Godse.

The RSS may be more like Opus Dei of the Catholic Church (remember Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code?) than the more sinister Freemasons (Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol) and Illuminati (Again, Brown’s Angels & Demons). What I mean to suggest is that the RSS is a secret society and The Caravan suggests the same. The magazine goes on to quote no less illustrious a member than Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras that the organisation’s objective is “to seize power on receipt of an order from our Leader.”

Maybe, the RSS won’t seize power the way the Taliban did in Afghanistan or ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But, hasn’t it already seized power the way it wanted: surreptitiously. Too many of the high positions in the country are already occupied by former RSS men, including the PM’s chair. What more power do they want? Their will is being implemented all over the country one way or the other, with more scheming cunningness than the Krishna of Kurukshetra.

The Caravan quotes an anonymous observer: “The RSS is a ghost. It can do anything. We know nothing about it.”

The organisation has untold wealth. Where does all that money come from? No one knows. Except a few sources like the Modi government giving it INR 20 lakh in 2017 and double that the next year in order to rewrite the country’s history. The Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana [ABISY] is doing precisely that job in one of the buildings in the new Delhi headquarters mentioned above. Their mission is to create a new history of the country based on the epics, Vedas, and Upanishads. A part of the new history is already introduced in the NCERT school textbooks.

The RSS is India’s most powerful organisation, says The Caravan, with Z+ security given with the taxpayers’ money. Yet the citizens are not allowed to know how this organisation functions, let alone enter the gates of the headquarters. This organisation which exercises the maximum influence on the Modi government does not exist legally on any paper. Intriguing, right?