Why RSS always stands with the oppresser
- 17 hours ago
- 9 min read
It is a well recorded fact that RSS leaders like BS Moonje and Guru Golwalkar were open admirers of Mussolini and Hitler and the latter is even on record praising Hitler’s violent extermination campaigns against the Jews. Golwalkar took Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ as the RSS model in India.
By Aditya Nigam
Although the Indian government has officially dismissed allegations of the prime minister having “sang and danced” in Israel for US president Donald Trump as “trashy ruminations of a convicted criminal”, the External Affairs Ministry spokesperson confirmed that his visit to Israel in July 2017 was “an official visit”. These allegations were made in the Epstein files and the “convicted criminal” in the MEA’s statement refers to Jeffrey Epstein himself.
Aside from the metaphorical “singing and dancing”, it is the fact of his visit to Israel and the reported ‘connections’ to the pedophilic ring of this “convicted criminal”, that really concerns us here. This is all the more important because it is not just a private ring of pedophiles that we are talking of here, but one that is constituted by its deep connections with the imperial-colonial power nexus that rules the world today.
Though long suspected of being linked to Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, more concrete evidence has now emerged that not only was Epstein “trained by Mossad”, he also had “ties to the US and allied intelligence operations,” according to recently released FBI files.
According to a Novara Media report, “FBI documents show that Epstein funded organisations linked to the Israeli military, including financing the group Friends of Israel Defense Forces, which ‘raises funds for active duty Israel Defense Forces soldiers and veterans’, and the Jewish National Fund (JNF).”
As Al Jazeera reported, (Feb 2, 2026) citing email correspondence between Epstein and Anil Ambani, who was reportedly acting as the mediator,
“In another iMessage exchange two weeks later, on March 29, Epstein wrote to Ambani: ‘Discussions re israel strategy dominating modi dates (sic).’
Two days later, Ambani informed Epstein that Modi would visit Israel in July and asked the disgraced financier: ‘who do u know fir track 2’.”
This chain of email exchanges indicate that Epstein was crucial, via Anil Ambani, in establishing the Narendra Modi’s links with the Donald Trump camp as well as “facilitating” his visit to Israel as India’s prime minister.
This was the first time ever that an Indian prime minister visited Israel. Significantly, he also skipped visiting Palestine. And very interestingly, as the Al Jazeera report cited earlier underlines,
“That year New Delhi became the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, amounting to $715m worth of purchases. The defence partnership between the two countries has since continued despite Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.”
Shocking though this be, it is hardly surprising.
Notwithstanding all the decolonization-rhetoric back home, there is little doubt that if one maps the RSS and Hindutva's allegiances and alliances, they have always been with the colonizing powers and oppressors.
They have never stood with the oppressed.
It is only befitting then that in this case too, they stand with the settler colonialists who took over Palestine under the aegis of the very same colonial power that was ruling India in the years of the Balfour Declaration (1917) and the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948).
It is common knowledge that during the anticolonial struggle in India, the RSS not only stayed away from the freedom movement, but its leaders, on various occasions, also served as ally of British colonial power. Sangh leaders openly decried what they called the “anti-Britishism” of the freedom struggle, because that would embrace all fighters for freedom, obviously including Muslims, within the pale of nationalism.
And now they – and the prime minister – desperately want to be Trump's (and the USA's) blue-eyed boys. It is a different matter that Trump (and his MAGA base) is hardly interested either in Modi or the RSS, beyond immediate geopolitical and trade interests.
On the part of RSS, this is just one more attempt to strike an alliance with the biggest colonial power of our times, since the eclipse of the British empire.
Just to recall one more instance how the RSS always stands with the white supremacist colonizers, return to RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat’s Vijaya Dashami speeches over the last couple of years. His 2023 Vijaya Dashami speech in fact deployed two new terms to describe his enemies – “Cultural Marxism” and “wokeism”. These terms represented the RSS’ attempts to develop ties, beyond mere ideological affinity, with the Christian, white-supremacist Right in Europe.
The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as “Cultural Marxism” – the term is a New Right invention. It is actually a right-wing conspiracy theory that blames all the different claims being made today by such currents as feminism, critical race-theory and queer politics, as threatening to “traditional family values” (read patriarchy) and “traditional ways of living” of the Whites.
Their “traditional ways of living”, so it is claimed, are threatened by growing demands of equality and multiculturalism from various quarters.
“It was Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed over seventy people in a car bombing and mass shooting of children in 2011, who first brought the term ‘Cultural Marxism’ to the world’s attention in his thousand-some paged statement of belief, which focused almost entirely on the concept”, says Joan Braune, who has explored the history of this term.
As for the terms “woke” and “wokeism”, it is well known that they have their roots in Black politics in the US and were always used with positive connotations. The specific negative meaning that Mohan Bhagwat used the term in, comes once again, from the New Right’s appropriation of the word as a term of abuse.
And if these still do not make the RSS’s allegiances very clear, recall how certain rapists/murderers/mob-lynching accused have been publicly felicitated by supporters of the RSS and its political offshoot, the BJP. The release and public felicitation of the rapists of Bilqis Bano was only one incident in a whole string of such incidents that demonstrate this allegiance.
Recall the rape over days inside a temple – and eventual murder – of an eight-year old girl from a nomadic Muslim community in Kathua, Kashmir by a group of men in January 2018. The incident came to public notice outside the state when Hindutva linked groups rallied in support of the rapists and murderers.
“Outrage grew after two ministers from India's governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) attended a rally in support of the accused men, whose community was involved in a land dispute with the nomadic tribe the girl belonged to,” said a BBC report.
This was followed soon after by the rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit girl in Hathras district in 2020. The manner in which the whole incident was dealt with shocked people across the country. Police and the upper caste perpetrators ganged up in not allowing any one, including political leaders, from meeting the family of the girl.
(Al Jazeera reported,The family members of a Dalit (formerly known as “untouchable”) girl in India who died after she was gang raped have accused the authorities of forcefully cremating her body in the middle of the night without their consent.
The 19-year-old from a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district, 200km (124 miles) from the Indian capital New Delhi, was raped in a field near her house on September 14 by four suspects belonging to upper castes in the Hindu religion’s hierarchy.)
And who can forget the chilling video of two Manipuri women who were stripped, paraded naked and reportedly gang-raped about three years ago in Manipur? They were women from the Kuki-Zo indigenous tribal community.
The PM remained mum all through the violence in the state, with a BJP government in power in Imphal.
These are just three instances of the large number of such cases that have recently come to show how blatantly rape is used by the powerful over the women of oppressed communities. In all such cases, the government has maintained studied silence while in certain cases, the ruling party has stood with the rapists, openly and publicly. Just a listing of such cases can run into volumes so let these three instance suffice.
Indeed, the ruling party continues to protect the BJP bahubali, Brij Bhushan Singh, accused by our world champion women wrestlers, of sexual harassment. They led a protracted, peaceful movement, were beaten up by the police and detained, but nothing could move this BJP regime in Delhli.
Similarly, BJP activists or men allied with their Manuvadi ideology, have so often been reported for their violence and humiliation of Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis. The shameful reports like that of a man in Madhya Pradesh, allegedly linked to the ruling party, urinating on an Adivasi boy a couple of years ago or of four young Dalit men being flogged inside a police station in Una by Hindutva activists have now become normalized. This too is no accident.
The term “Manuvadi” refers to those who uphold Manusmriti – the Dharmashastra with which they want to replace the Indian Constitution. The RSS, from the very time of the adoption of the Constitution of India, has been opposed to it and has openly stated that Manusmriti is its “constitution”.
It is well-known that it is a text that sees women and lower castes as lesser beings and decrees brutal punishments not for the crime committed, but based on the caste-position of the criminal.
It is not for nothing that Dr B.R. Ambedkar consigned this text to flames on 25 December 1927. He rightly considered it the text that embodied the deep inequalities and oppressions of what came to be known as “Hinduism”.
Fundamentally, the RSS ideology is an amalgam of Brahmanical ideology embodied in texts like Manusmriti and the modern colonial logic of domination that is embodied in the idea of a muscular, imperialist nationalism and the nation-state. This ideology owes a huge debt to British colonialism as it enabled the invention of a Hindu tradition that reinforced the dominance of Brahmins (and upper castes) by the textualization of “tradition”, whereby “deviant” practices of the subaltern castes were brought under control or sought to be suppressed.
Brahminism, as Ambedkar underlined, is not the characteristic only of Brahmins; it permeates “all classes” and castes. In other words, it is an ideology that “recruits” agents from all castes but its central tenet is belief in varnashrama dharma – that is, in the hierarchy of the four varnas – the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Viashyas and the Sudras.
Interestingly, this typology does not mention the “fifth” (the avarna or non-varna) – or the panchama as it is called in Tamil Nadu. They have also been called the atisudras and they are the castes that today constitute the political identity of the Dalits. The panchama is crucial to the very existence of the varna order but its existence is never accepted in the texts.
If Brahminism provides the cultural moorings to the RSS ideology, it is the idea of a muscular and militaristic nationalism that provides it the political frame.
Lately, in the face of widespread criticisms that the Sangh’s ideology is an import from the West, Bhagwat tried to disown the term “nation” by claiming that their commitment is to “rashtra”, which is very different from the western idea of “nation”. He, of course, couldn't spell out how it was or is different. Simply replacing the word “nation” by “rashtra” makes no difference to the Sangh's imperialist fantasies of Akhand Bharat – which is essentially a colonizing fantasy.
Internally too, the Sangh's commitments tend to replicate the European model of homogeneity and erasure of difference, which is the model of nationalism that reached its apogee in Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. It is a well recorded fact that RSS leaders like BS Moonje and Guru Golwalkar were open admirers of Mussolini and Hitler and the latter is even on record praising Hitler’s violent extermination campaigns against the Jews. Golwalkar took Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ as the RSS model in India.
Mohan Bhagwat tries to mislead in typically RSS style by simply producing the vernacular term as a sign of its distinctiveness. For all its (and other modern Hindus’) claims to be a “religion of tolerance”, it is its pathetic mimicry of the European fascist model that the last 12 years of its rule in India stand testimony to.
Hate politics is thus the core of RSS’ ideology and its violent campaigns against Muslims and Christians is a reflection of that core.
Its suppression of dissent in contemporary India and its branding of every different opinion as “anti-national” reveal its fascist inclinations very clearly. All difference must be ruthlessly eliminated by branding it “antinational”.
Simply translating “nation” into Sanskrit won't help Mr Bhagwat because fascism is baked into RSS ideology. And yes, while we are at it, let us also state that the Sanskrit word rashtra traditionally refers to “state”, not nation – even of whatever Bhagwatian provenance. That is why in many Indian languages like Bangla or Malayalam, “rashtra” even today means state and politics (rashtreeyam in Malayalam).
Professor Aditya Nigam is a political theorist, formerly with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. Long associated with the Left movement, he has had an abiding interest in social and political movements and theoretical and philosophical questions related to social transformation. His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory. Nigam is one of the founder-members of the political blog, Kafila.online where he writes on contemporary issues.
He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011), Decolonizing Theory: Thinking Across Traditions (2020), Aasman aur Bhi Hain (in Hindi, Setu Prakashan, Delhi), Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism: Untimely Encounters (2023), Protyashar Ishtehar: Degrowth o Poonjibader Porer Jeebon (in Bengali, Gronthik, Dhaka, forthcoming).