All watch in silence as a small saffron flag, limp in the late monsoon air, shimmies up a mast. Then the command comes. Every man holds his right arm stiff across his chest and then straight at his sides, stopping just short of raising it in salute.

With over 5m members, all male, the RSS is the biggest volunteer group in the world. It does charity work and teaches young men discipline, say its supporters. It is a bigoted paramilitary group that persecutes India’s minorities, say its detractors. Your correspondent went to Nagpur to talk to some of its members.

Like other clubs, the RSS is held together by shared experiences, rituals and garb. Young boys join as soon as they can walk and talk. They go to daily meetings and training camps. Many are sent by parents who want them to make friends, do some exercise and get out of the house. All learn the RSS prayer, chants and games. The uniform is so well-known that it made headlines in India when the group swapped its khaki shorts for full-length trousers a few years ago.

The biggest event on the RSS calendar is the Hindu festival of Dussehra, which coincides with the anniversary of the organisation’s founding. And this year’s celebrations in Nagpur kicked off its centenary year. Once the sea of uniformed men paraded into the playground, Mohan Bhagwat, a round-faced septuagenarian who is the sixth leader of the RSS, took the stage. He talked of the threats to India from Muslim-majority Pakistan, and from domestic enemies such as the “deep state”, “wokeism” and “cultural Marxists”. He urged the crowd to buy local and keep traditional dress and language alive. “The world worships the strong,” he said. “The weak are ignored.”

To be close to the RSS is to be close to power. A former head of India’s space agency was in the audience, as was at least one billionaire. And if Mr Bhagwat’s speech echoed themes beloved of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, this was perhaps because Mr Modi is one of the club. He joined the RSS when he was eight, and was a full-time RSS worker, or pracharak, until he entered politics in his 30s. (This meant renouncing material possessions and taking a vow of celibacy.) Since being elected prime minister in 2014, Mr Modi has filled his cabinet with RSS men.

I’m just mad about saffron

How did a group that advocates traditional values and modest living amass such influence? Its power lies in something simple and visceral: it gives its members “a tremendous sense of self-worth”, says Purushottam Agrawal, a writer who joined briefly as a child and is now a vocal critic. “The RSS makes young people, despite their young age, and older people, despite their limitations as family men, feel they are still contributing to the cause of the Hindu nation.”

Rewind 100 years. The RSS was set up in Nagpur in 1925 by a doctor and politician, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. He and his successors taught that India is a great, ancient civilisation crippled by humiliating invasions. In the 16th century it was the Mughals; in the 18th the British. Today, the RSS hints that the 15% of Indians who are Muslim are outsiders: descendants of the Mughals, a potential fifth column for Pakistan, and not to be trusted near a good Hindu’s cows or daughters. Hedgewar’s goal was to raise a cadre of disciplined patriots to remake India as a Hindu country.

Hedgewar wanted the RSS to be a cultural organisation, not a political one. But when India won independence in 1947 its members were aghast at what followed. They saw the subcontinent’s partition into India and Pakistan as a carve-up of sacred territory. They objected to India’s tricolour flag, preferring saffron. They loathed the new secular constitution.

In 1948 an ex-member of the RSS, Nathuram Godse, murdered Mahatma Gandhi, the pre-eminent leader of the independence movement. Godse had criticised Gandhi for the same reasons the RSS did: for taking a soft line on Muslims and promoting secular democracy. The group tried to distance itself from the assassin, but the government banned it for more than a year. Its leaders decided they had to get into politics. They set up a political wing, the forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the government today.

The RSS has spawned India’s biggest trade union, its biggest private school system, a women’s group, a student association and scores of other organisations. Overseas affiliates organise meetings in Britain, America and anywhere with a Hindu diaspora (though RSS leaders abroad are coy about their links with the parent group in India). The RSS says it is funded by donations, though its finances are opaque. Through its network, the RSS “family”, it has quietly gained influence in all corners of India.

Manohar Vinayak (pictured) joined when he was ten. He was weedy, awkward and illiterate. Other RSS boys bullied him, but his mother wouldn’t let him quit, and in time he made friends. He never finished school, but RSS elders helped him find on-the-job training. He became a tailor, then a teacher. Now 92, he still attends RSS meetings at dawn each day, wearing his old khaki shorts. “I wouldn’t be the man I am today if it wasn’t for the shakha,” he says.

There are over 73,000 shakhas, or RSS branches. They meet for an hour every day in parks, playgrounds or temple forecourts. First, the group does yoga. Then members play games, such as kabaddi, a traditional cross between wrestling and tag, or duel with big sticks. Sessions close with a lesson in history and philosophy. Group leaders can be strict, particularly with young boys who fail to follow instructions.

The shakha model adapts to stay relevant. During covid-19 lockdowns, when public gatherings were forbidden, meetings took place remotely via WhatsApp and Zoom. Around Bangalore, India’s tech capital, shakhas gather on Sunday mornings to suit busy professionals. And, though the RSS generally promotes Hindi and Sanskrit, the meetings are conducted in English to include people from all corners of India.

Avaneesh Harday, a 16-year-old acolyte in Nagpur, first went to a shakha with his grandfather, when he was eight. To begin with, it was the games that fired him up. Now it is the history lessons. He has learned about the mistreatment of Hindus by Mughal rulers and how Bangladesh and Pakistan were ripped away from India. A Christian friend suggested to him that the RSS stokes interreligious violence. “I told him to read Guruji’s books,” Harday says.

That is not the compelling rebuttal he thinks it is. M.S. Golwalkar, known as Guruji, who led the RSS through India’s independence, wrote about the supremacy of Hindus in India and praised the Nazis. “Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races,” Golwalkar wrote. “Race pride at its highest has been manifested here… a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”

Today, the most feared RSS affiliates are the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or World Hindu Organisation, and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal. Members are steeped in conspiracy theories: that Muslim men seduce Hindu women as part of a “love jihad”; that Christians win converts by trickery. Sometimes, they beat up Muslims or Christians they suspect of such transgressions. Videos of the attacks go viral and, explains Christophe Jaffrelot at King’s College London, send a message that minorities should “disappear from the public sphere”.

The worst anti-Muslim pogrom in recent decades took place in 2002 in Gujarat. Over 1,000 people were killed. Witnesses said the attackers wore khaki shorts and saffron scarves. Police reports accused local VHP chiefs of leading the mobs. A former regional boss of the Bajrang Dal was recorded telling an undercover reporter how he beat and burned Muslims; he boasted of slitting open a pregnant woman’s stomach. Mr Modi, who was chief minister of Gujarat at the time, was accused of presiding over a culture of impunity. However, India’s Supreme Court cleared him of complicity.

The RSS insists it is peaceful. Of late, its leaders have distanced themselves from predecessors who admired European fascists. They would rather talk about the RSS’s charitable work: some 52,500 projects in total, including 13,000 schools, as well as health clinics and shelters. Sunil Ambekar, a spokesman, says the RSS welcomes people of all faiths, though it doesn’t keep count of its non-Hindu members. Yes, the goal is to remake India as a Hindu nation, he explains, but the organisation defines Hindus as the people of “Hindustan”, the Hindi name for India, or “those who follow the Hindu way of life”.

To help unite Hindus, the group hopes to do away with divisions of caste. This is easier said than done, however. Bhanwar Meghwanshi, who grew up a dalit (the caste formerly known as “untouchable”) in the northern state of Rajasthan, was pleasantly surprised when he joined a local shakha and everyone addressed him as “ji”, or sir, as they did one another. But he noticed that leaders were all higher caste. And one time, when a meeting was held in his neighbourhood and he cooked for everyone, the leaders said they would pack up their meal and eat it on their travels. It was found strewn on the roadside—they did not want to eat food cooked in a dalit home. Mr Meghwanshi quit the RSS soon afterwards.

Mr Modi often talks of his time as a pracharak, sleeping in RSS offices and following a strict routine of early mornings, spartan meals and lots of yoga. He travelled across India, living out of a small shoulder bag and giving rousing speeches. That, says R. Balashankar, a former editor of the Organiser, an RSS newspaper, is where the prime minister developed his discipline and oratorical skills.

India is too vast, diverse and decentralised ever to become a theocracy like, say, Iran. But under Mr Modi the government has shown signs of what a biographer calls “Hindu triumphalism”. It has stripped Jammu and Kashmir, hitherto India’s only Muslim-majority state, of much of its autonomy. It has introduced citizenship rules that discriminate against Muslims. Several states have tightened the rules around cattle slaughter and religious conversion. And Mr Modi presided over the erection of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, on the site of a 16th-century mosque that was razed by a Hindu mob—causing massive bloodshed—in 1992.

Still, Mr Modi’s relationship with the RSS is not straightforward. It has always advised BJP governments on appointments and policy. But over Mr Modi’s first two terms, when the BJP had a thumping majority in parliament, his government felt confident enough not to need advice, even from the movement that spawned it. At the same time, it promoted a personality cult, plastering Mr Modi’s face on billboards, vaccine certificates and the bags of grain the state hands out to the poor. This irked many RSS officials, who frown on the idea that any man, even a prime minister, could be bigger than the organisation.

Capped crusaders

A very public tussle is now under way between the RSS and its most famous disciple. In an election in 2024 Mr Modi won a third term, but lost his parliamentary majority. This has crimped his power, making it harder for him to neglect his allies. Since the election Mr Bhagwat has obliquely criticised Mr Modi; and Mr Modi has made gestures of deference, such as beefing up Mr Bhagwat’s security detail and lifting a long-standing ban on civil servants being RSS members.

It is hard to say whether Mr Modi needs the RSS more than it needs him, or vice versa. Its millions of volunteers preach the BJP party line and help drum up votes. “That’s the BJP’s electoral trump card,” says Tanika Sarkar, a historian. “No other party has this cadre.” But without Mr Modi, whose charisma has given the BJP its longest-ever stint in power, the RSS might never have realised so much of its majoritarian vision. Some RSS bigwigs may resent the way he hogs the limelight, but the rank-and-file revere him.

Sreevallabha Washimkar, 13, started going to a shakha in Nagpur six years ago. He knows Mr Modi started as a foot soldier in the RSS, just like him. How does that make him feel? He looks up from the saffron flag he is diligently folding: “I feel proud.”