Born Together, Ending Apart: A Century of the Left and the RSS

In 1925, two organisations were founded in India that would go on to shape its political and moral life for the next hundred years. One spoke in the language of equality, redistribution, and international solidarity. The other spoke in the language of culture, discipline, and civilisational grievance. Both emerged from the anxieties of colonial rule. Only one would succeed in remaking the Indian state in its own image.

The centenaries of the organised Indian Left and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are not parallel anniversaries. They mark the point at which one idea of India was defeated, and another became dominant. Modern India is not a compromise between these traditions. It is the outcome of their conflict.

The Same Anxiety, Two Diagnoses

Colonial India in the 1920s was fractured by inequality, caste hierarchy, and political subordination. The Left diagnosed this condition as material. Poverty and domination, it argued, were produced by colonial capitalism and sustained by indigenous elites. Political freedom without economic transformation would merely reproduce injustice.

The RSS offered a radically different diagnosis. India’s weakness, it claimed, was civilisational. Hindu society had been broken—first by centuries of Muslim rule, then by British colonialism, and finally by secular nationalism. History was recast as a long narrative of Hindu humiliation at the hands of Abrahamic outsiders.

This framing was not descriptive but strategic. By presenting Muslims and Christians as historical invaders and perpetual outsiders, the RSS created a unifying enemy capable of binding together a deeply stratified Hindu society. Caste differences could be deferred. Economic inequality could be subordinated. Resentment could do the work that justice could not. The Left sought to abolish hierarchy. The RSS sought to reorganise it—under a Hindu civilisational umbrella.

Cadres, Discipline, and the Manufacture of the Enemy

Both movements believed in cadres over crowds. Both distrusted spontaneity. But they produced very different political subjects. The Left trained its cadre to analyse society—to identify exploitation, organise labour, and challenge power. Ideology was explicit and debated. Even when doctrinaire, the Left remained a project of explanation.

The RSS trained its cadre to defend the nation from an internal enemy. The daily shakha was not merely physical training; it was psychological conditioning. Uniforms erased internal difference. Drill produced obedience. Stories of Muslim domination, temple destruction, and betrayal were repeated until grievance became inheritance. Muslims were not incidental to this training; they were central. The RSS’s conception of national unity required an antagonist. By positioning Muslims as loyal elsewhere, culturally incompatible, and historically oppressive, the organisation offered Hindus a shared identity forged in opposition. This enemy-making project succeeded where class solidarity did not.

Culture as Struggle, Culture as Weapon

The Left treated culture as a site of struggle. Literature, theatre, cinema, and poetry were tools to expose exploitation and communalism. Culture was political precisely because it could be challenged and transformed.

The RSS treated culture as weaponised memory. History was flattened into a morality tale: Hindus as perennial victims, Muslims as aggressors, secularism as betrayal. Medieval India was collapsed into a single story of domination. Complexity was unnecessary; affect was the goal.

This narrative was enacted repeatedly through violence, which served both punitive and pedagogical functions.

Pogroms as Political Technology

From Partition-era massacres to Jabalpur, Moradabad, Nellie, Bhagalpur, Bombay, Gujarat, Muzaffarnagar, and countless lesser-known episodes, mass violence against Muslims has been a recurring feature of the RSS ecosystem.

These were not spontaneous riots. They followed a pattern:

• sustained demonisation and rumour

• mobilisation through religious symbolism

• targeted attacks on Muslim neighbourhoods

• administrative complicity or paralysis

• post-facto denial and impunity

Each episode reinforced a core lesson: Muslims could be attacked with minimal consequence. Violence functioned as a technology of consolidation, producing Hindu unity through fear and spectacle.

The Left, committed to secularism, never developed a comparable emotional mechanism. It attempted persuasion where the RSS deployed terror and normalisation.

Power, Patience, and the Long March to the State

For decades, the RSS remained outside formal power, focusing instead on social penetration. Schools, charities, student organisations, unions, religious bodies, and neighbourhood associations formed a dense ideological ecosystem. The BJP was merely one political arm of this broader project.

The Left, by contrast, oscillated between agitation and governance. Where it ruled, it implemented land reform, welfare, and public education—but governance blunted its radical edge. Procedure replaced mobilisation. Administration replaced politics.

The RSS understood something the Left did not: the state could be captured only after society had been prepared.

Modi as the Culmination of the RSS Project

Narendra Modi’s ascent was not an accident of charisma or electoral arithmetic. It was the culmination of a century-long project. Modi was not merely an RSS-trained politician; he was its most successful product.

As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi presided over the 2002 pogrom, after which the RSS ecosystem closed ranks around him. The violence was reframed as reaction. Accountability was deferred indefinitely. The lesson was clear: mass violence against Muslims was not a political liability if it could be narrativised as cultural defence.

As Prime Minister, Modi completed the RSS’s transition from influence to dominance. The distinction between party, state, and ideological organisation blurred. Policies and symbols aligned with long-standing RSS goals: the abrogation of Article 370, the construction of the Ram temple on the ruins of the Babri Masjid, the Citizenship Amendment Act, the delegitimization of dissent as anti-national. This was not governance alone; it was a civilisational assertion backed by state power.

India as a De Facto Hindu Rashtra

For all practical purposes, India today functions as a Hindu Rashtra—not formally declared, but substantively enacted. Citizenship is increasingly graded by religious identity. Law enforcement operates with differential urgency. Cultural symbols of the Hindu majority are normalised as national symbols, while minority practices are treated as suspect. Violence against Muslims is often rationalised, delayed, or ignored.

This transformation did not require the suspension of elections. It required the steady hollowing out of secularism as a lived principle. The Left warned against majoritarianism but failed to stop it. The RSS promised unity and delivered dominance.

Why the Left Lost

The Left did not lose because its critique of inequality was wrong. It lost because it underestimated the power of identity as a political force. It spoke in the language of justice at a moment when millions were seeking belonging. Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis were often mobilised but rarely protected. When pogroms occurred, the Left protested but could not prevent them, nor could it offer a counter-narrative strong enough to compete with fear. The RSS understood that in an unequal society, hatred organises faster than hope—and built its politics accordingly.

An Unfinished Reckoning

A century after their birth, the RSS and the Indian Left represent two irreconcilable visions of India. One asked how equality could be built. The other asked who must be excluded. India chose the second question—and institutionalised its answer.

The tragedy is not merely that the Left was defeated. It is that the republic absorbed a politics of belonging built on grievance and violence, without resolving the injustice the Left identified.