Noorani’s warning on RSS: Menace to India, now global threat?

By Iftikhar Gilani

When eminent constitutional lawyer and author late A.G. Noorani called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh a “menace to India” seven years ago, his warning was directed primarily at the future of the Indian republic.

Today, that warning appears to have travelled well beyond India’s borders.

The issue is no longer simply whether the RSS threatens India’s secular and pluralistic constitutional order. Its rapidly expanding overseas network, its influence over India’s ruling establishment and the export of Hindutva politics into diaspora communities have turned the debate into a wider question about religious majoritarianism, minority rights and democratic citizenship.

That question has arrived this week in New York.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to address a “Universal Oneness Celebration” at the Infosys Theatre at Madison Square Garden on Saturday, Aug. 29.

Organizers present the gathering as an interfaith and multicultural event promoting harmony and the Hindu idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, or “the world is one family.”

But Bhagwat’s appearance must be viewed in the context of a very different conversation.

In 2019, Noorani published his monumental 547-page study, The RSS: A Menace to India.

Drawing heavily on RSS documents, speeches, constitutions and the writings of its own leaders, he sought to explain what the organization believes, how it operates and why its influence reaches far beyond the activities of an ordinary cultural organization.

Noorani died in August 2024. But the questions he posed have only become more urgent.

Noorani’s central argument was larger than communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims.

He described the RSS as “much more than a threat to communal amity.”

His case was that its ideological project challenged democratic governance and ultimately India’s conception of itself as a diverse republic based on equal citizenship.

At the book’s launch in New Delhi in April 2019, Noorani summarized the stakes in a few words.

“We have to save our composite culture,” he said, calling it “the soul of Indian nationalism.”

That was the core of his disagreement with Hindutva.

India, in Noorani’s understanding, was not created by one religious or ethnic community absorbing all others.

It emerged from centuries of interaction among peoples, languages, faiths and civilizations.

He dedicated the book to Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, C. Rajagopalachari and M.A. Ansari, figures who represented different political and religious traditions but shared an attachment to a composite India.

The dedication quoted Urdu poet Firaq Gorakhpuri’s famous description of the subcontinent as a land shaped by caravans arriving from across the world.

Noorani’s fear was that Hindutva sought to reverse that historical understanding.

BJP not another conservative party

A recurring error, particularly outside India, is to compare Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party with conventional conservative parties such as Britain’s Conservatives, Republicans in the U.S., or Germany’s Christian Democrats.

The comparison overlooks one crucial difference.

The BJP does not exist in isolation.

Behind it stands the RSS, an ideological and organizational network with roots extending into politics, education, labor, student organizations, religious mobilization, social work, tribal outreach and diaspora communities.

The RSS was founded in Nagpur in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar.

It later provided the organizational nucleus for the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded in 1951.

After the Jana Sangh merged into the Janata Party following India’s Emergency, its former members broke away and established the BJP in 1980.

Narendra Modi himself spent years as an RSS pracharak, or full-time organizer, before moving into BJP politics.

Noorani therefore rejected the suggestion that the RSS was merely an outside pressure group occasionally advising the BJP.

He saw the relationship as organic.

One of the most powerful posts inside the BJP, the national general secretary for organization, has traditionally been occupied by a functionary with an RSS background.

Senior RSS personnel have regularly been deputed to the party, while coordination meetings between the two organizations help align political and organizational priorities.

The BJP’s leaders may enjoy considerable freedom over everyday politics.

But Noorani argued that the ideological boundaries within which they operate have historically been shaped by the RSS.

When RSS disciplines BJP presidents

Noorani illustrated that control through the history of the Jana Sangh and BJP.

He examined episodes involving party leaders including Mauli Chandra Sharma, Balraj Madhok and, decades later, L.K. Advani to demonstrate that political prominence did not necessarily give a BJP leader independence from the ideological parent organization.

Advani’s case was especially revealing.

During a 2005 visit to Pakistan, Advani visited the mausoleum of Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Karachi and praised his Aug. 11, 1947, address to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly.

The gesture caused an uproar within the Sangh Parivar.

Advani subsequently stepped down as BJP president.

For Noorani, such episodes demonstrated why describing the BJP as an ordinary conservative party misses the point.

Its politics cannot be fully understood without understanding the RSS.

The RSS derives much of its staying power from something political parties generally do not possess: a permanent grassroots cadre.

Its smallest basic unit is the shakha.

Several shakhas can operate in a single city or town.

Members traditionally assemble in parks or community spaces for physical exercises, games, drills, yoga and discussions. The sessions also introduce volunteers to the organization’s interpretation of history, culture, nationalism and society.

When I lived and worked in Delhi, RSS shakhas were a familiar sight in neighborhood parks. The significance of a shakha is not the physical drill itself. It is the regularity.

Election campaigns come and go. Political leaders rise and fall. But shakhas continue recruiting, training and socializing volunteers.

The organization has grown enormously.

The RSS reported in March 2026 that 88,949 daily shakhas were operating at 55,683 locations across India. A year earlier, it reported 83,129 daily shakhas, meaning the network added thousands of regular gatherings in a single year.

That organizational depth helps explain why the RSS has survived for a century with comparatively few major internal splits.

Political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, reviewing Noorani’s book in The Indian Express in 2019, described the RSS’s organizational endurance and expansion as remarkable, particularly in a country where political and social organizations frequently succumb to factionalism.

Not organization, but ecosystem

The RSS’s real influence cannot be calculated simply by counting shakhas.

Around it stands the Sangh Parivar, a family of organizations active across nearly every sector of Indian society.

The BJP operates in electoral politics. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh organizes workers.

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad works among students. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad focuses on Hindu religious mobilization.

The Bajrang Dal functions as a militant youth organization. Other affiliates operate among farmers, teachers, lawyers, professionals, tribal communities, women and religious leaders.

There are also initiatives designed specifically to engage Muslims.

The Muslim Rashtriya Manch, established with RSS backing, has attempted to build support among sections of the Muslim community and promote the Sangh’s understanding of nationalism.

During elections in Jammu and Kashmir, such organizations have also attempted outreach among Muslim voters.

The importance of this structure is that the RSS need not formally become a political party.

It produces cadres. Those cadres then populate institutions operating in very different fields.

Discipline before politics

The RSS also differs from ordinary political organizations in the demands historically placed upon senior pracharaks.

Full-time organizers traditionally lead austere lives and remain free of ordinary family responsibilities so they can devote themselves entirely to organizational work.

Modi’s own RSS background has often been discussed in this context. He married Jashodaben as a young man but subsequently left home and lived separately from her for most of his adult life. He later became a full-time RSS organizer.

This tradition helped create a leadership culture centered on institutional loyalty rather than family, constituency or personal profession.

It is part of the reason the organization has been able to deploy senior personnel across states and institutions when required.

Bhagwat himself provided a glimpse of how the RSS views its organizational capacity during a speech in 2018.

Reports initially quoted him as saying that the RSS could prepare its volunteers within three days for a national emergency while the Army might require six or seven months to prepare ordinary citizens.

The remarks caused a controversy.

The RSS later said Bhagwat had not been comparing the organization’s volunteers with professional soldiers. His argument, it said, was that because swayamsevaks were already accustomed to discipline and training, they could be made ready more quickly than members of the general population.

The episode nevertheless illustrated the organization’s extraordinary confidence in its ability to mobilize and discipline cadres.

What Noorani found in ideology

Noorani’s most serious research concerned ideology rather than organizational structure.

He examined the writings of Hedgewar and particularly M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS’s second and most influential chief, who led the organization from 1940 until 1973.

His book contains chapters on the RSS’s origins, its 19th-century intellectual inheritance, its relations with European fascist movements, the writings of V.D. Savarkar and Golwalkar, India’s independence, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the subsequent ban on the RSS, the formation of the Jana Sangh, the Ram temple movement and the rise of Modi.

Noorani argued that the ideological foundation of the RSS was incompatible with India’s liberal constitutional order because it defined national identity primarily through Hindu civilization.

The Indian Constitution takes a different route. It does not make Hinduism, Islam, Christianity or any other faith the basis of citizenship.

A Hindu and a Muslim enter the constitutional order as equals. So do a Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, atheist or adherent of any other belief. Former Indian Vice President Hamid Ansari drew attention to precisely this contradiction while speaking at the launch of Noorani’s book.

He pointed to the RSS oath’s emphasis on Hindu religion, Hindu society and Hindu culture and asked what place that conception leaves for roughly one-fifth of India’s population that is not Hindu.

His question went to the heart of the constitutional problem: Can the religious identity of the majority become synonymous with the nationality of everybody?

Civic nationalism or cultural nationalism?

The distinction may sound academic. It is not. Under civic nationalism, a person’s nationality flows principally from citizenship.

A Muslim is Indian because he or she is an Indian citizen. There is no second test.

Cultural nationalism changes that equation. Citizens are implicitly asked to demonstrate their belonging through adherence to a dominant historical, cultural or religious narrative.

This is why critics of Hindutva argue that the ideology creates different levels of belonging even when everyone formally possesses the same passport.

Ansari warned that defining Indian nationalism through the faith of the religious majority risked converting civic nationalism into cultural nationalism and a liberal democracy into an ethnic one.

Noorani went further. He saw that transformation as the central RSS project.

RSS leader explains Muslims to me

My own interactions with senior RSS functionaries occasionally provided a revealing window into this worldview.

During one such conversation, I asked a top RSS leader what exactly his organization expected from Muslims, who had lived in India for centuries.

He told me the RSS had no complaint against Muslims provided they respected Hindu sentiments.

I asked what he meant by Hindu sentiments. He explained his position through religion.

Hindus, he said, accepted a vast number of gods and sacred figures. They could therefore respect Prophet Muhammad as well. The problem, in his view, was that Muslims would not reciprocate by accepting Hindu gods or placing their images in their homes and mosques.

He then pointed toward pictures of Sikh Gurus hanging on his office wall and statues associated with Buddhism and Jainism. Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains, he argued, had learned how to coexist within the broader Hindu cultural environment.

Muslims, he suggested, needed to do the same. The conversation was illuminating precisely because of what it left unanswered.

Why should constitutional equality require theological accommodation? A citizen does not need to believe another citizen’s religion is true.

Muslim delegation’s encounter with Sudarshan

A similar question arose after the horrific 2002 Gujarat riots.

A delegation of prominent Muslim intellectuals travelled to the RSS headquarters in Nagpur to meet its then chief, K.S. Sudarshan.

Their intention was to explore ways of reducing communal polarization and explain Muslim concerns to the RSS leadership.

One member of that delegation later recounted the meeting to me. The Muslim visitors asked Sudarshan why Hindus and Muslims could not end the climate of confrontation and establish a more cooperative relationship.

According to the delegation member, Sudarshan said reconciliation was possible, but attached a theological condition.

Muslims, he suggested, should stop asserting that Islam alone is the true religion and instead say Islam is also a true religion.

Again, the encounter revealed the fundamental contradiction.

In a constitutional democracy, the state cannot require religious communities to modify their theology as the price of national acceptance. A devout Muslim is entitled to believe Islam is true. An orthodox Hindu has an equal right to believe in his religious tradition.

The Constitution manages those disagreements not by eliminating them but by guaranteeing equal rights despite them.

From Nagpur to world

When my original article on Noorani’s book appeared in 2019, the international network of the RSS attracted comparatively little attention.

That is no longer possible. Outside India, organizations inspired by the RSS operate principally under the name Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS.

They conduct shakha-style programs, cultural activities, youth camps and community work among Hindu diaspora populations.

The network stretches across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The internationalization of Hindutva has important consequences. Indian political arguments increasingly travel with the diaspora.

Disputes involving caste, Islamophobia, religious nationalism, Kashmir, the demolition of the Babri Mosque and the treatment of Christians and Muslims now surface on American university campuses, in city councils, state legislatures and community organizations.

The controversy surrounding Bhagwat’s New York appearance is therefore not an imported curiosity. It reflects the emergence of Hindu nationalism as an international political issue.

That makes the title of Saturday’s New York program especially striking. “Universal Oneness” is an appealing idea.

Indeed, plural societies survive only when human beings recognize dignity beyond their own religious, racial or national communities.

But that principle also invites questions. Does oneness mean respecting difference? Or does it mean absorbing difference into the cultural framework of the majority?

That distinction runs through Noorani’s entire book. The New York organizers describe Bhagwat’s gathering as inclusive and interfaith.

Observers are asking how that message should be reconciled with the historical writings of RSS ideologues and contemporary allegations of discrimination and violence against minorities.

USCIRF says religious-freedom conditions in India have deteriorated and has cited violence and incitement targeting religious minorities. It has now asked Washington to consider sanctions against individuals it believes are implicated.

The RSS at 100

The scale of the transformation since Noorani published his book is difficult to ignore.

The RSS celebrated its centenary in 2025.

The political party rooted in its ideological tradition has governed India nationally since 2014.

A former RSS pracharak has served as India’s prime minister for more than 12 years.

Policies long associated with the Hindu nationalist movement have moved from the political margins to the center of state power.

Article 370, which provided Jammu and Kashmir a special constitutional position, was effectively nullified in 2019.

A grand Ram temple now stands in Ayodhya at the location where the Babri Mosque stood until Hindu nationalist activists demolished it in 1992.

India has enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act, providing a pathway to citizenship for specified non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

Anti-conversion laws operate in 12 of India’s 28 states, according to USCIRF.

The Indian government maintains that its policies do not discriminate against Muslims and says its welfare and development programs serve Indians regardless of religion.

Yet the direction of the debate itself demonstrates how far the RSS has travelled.

Ideas once discussed within ideological circles in Nagpur now influence policy debates affecting more than 1.4 billion people.

When The RSS: A Menace to India appeared in 2019, it could still be read primarily as a history of a controversial Indian organization.

That reading is no longer sufficient. It is a book about power.

It is about the method by which a disciplined ideological movement can work patiently across generations, establish organizations in multiple sectors of society, create political vehicles, train cadres, shape public vocabulary and eventually make its worldview appear synonymous with national identity.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta described Noorani’s work as a sweeping and sometimes polemical “case for the prosecution.” But he also recognized the deeper problem exposed by the book: the RSS understands the importance of democratic mobilization while possessing a profoundly majoritarian conception of the nation.

A movement does not have to abolish elections to transform democracy. It can win elections. It can build durable majorities. It can gradually change what society understands by nationality itself.

The danger begins when the majority ceases to regard minorities simply as fellow citizens and instead asks them to prove that they belong.

From menace to India to global challenge

Noorani titled his book The RSS: A Menace to India.

Were he alive today, perhaps even he would find the geographic boundary of that title too narrow.

The RSS remains fundamentally an Indian organization, and its political project is centered on India. But the larger ideology it represents raises questions that are universal.

Can democracy survive if electoral majorities acquire the power to redefine nationality around their own religious identity?

Can a constitution promise equality while political culture demands cultural conformity? Can pluralism survive when minorities are tolerated only on terms defined by the majority?

And what happens when such movements acquire transnational networks, financial support and political influence within diaspora communities? These questions are relevant not merely to Hindus and Muslims or to India.

That is why Noorani’s book deserves to be reopened as Mohan Bhagwat takes the stage in New York.

The most important question is not whether the RSS has a right to hold a meeting in Manhattan. In a democratic society, its supporters possess the same freedoms of speech and association as its opponents.

The larger question is what political idea is being taken to that stage. Bhagwat’s program promises “universal oneness.”

Noorani spent more than 500 pages asking whether the ideology of the organization Bhagwat leads can truly accommodate India’s extraordinary diversity without requiring minorities to reshape their identities around the cultural preferences of the majority.

Seven years after the book appeared, that question has crossed the oceans. And on the eve of Bhagwat’s New York address, it deserves an answer.