The Many Faces of the World’s Biggest Neo-Fascist Network

Imagine a shadowy web of organizations, fronts and civil society groups that spans continents and governments and connects back to a major political party in the world’s largest democracy. Imagine that all of these entities — including those serving charitable or ostensibly benign purposes — serve as nodes in an integrated and transnational project to undermine that country’s democracy. 

You have just imagined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, commonly referred to as the Sangh, or the RSS, which exists to promote the Hindu-supremacist movement known as Hindutva. 

The RSS was founded in 1925 by a doctor, K.B. Hedgewar, who was opposed to the Indian National Congress’ vision of a pluralistic India. The Sangh is based on the ideology of Hindutva, which seeks to “regenerate” India by reasserting the hegemony of Hindus. While it makes some allowances for Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs, Hindutva has always singled out Muslims as an alien community and influence in Indian life. Its midcentury proponents studied and drew inspiration from European fascists, including the use of violence and persecution of minorities. (It was a member of the Sangh that assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.) While they claim to oppose caste discrimination, the Sangh whitewashes the tradition and seeks to preserve India’s stratified status quo. Today, members join local shakhas, or branches, where they hear lectures on the glories of an earlier Hindu Golden Age, exercise and train in martial arts. The largest fascist movement in the world, it is closely tied to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, whose leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was an RSS full-timer for many years.

The full scope of the organization is only now becoming known, thanks to the publication of new research by Felix Pal, a political scientist at the University of Western Australia. Pal has created the first map of the Sangh’s global network of partner organizations, fronts and fundraising sources, revealing a staggering project involving 2,500 different groups spread across multiple continents, including orphanages, schools, homeopathic dispensaries and hospitals. All represent different faces of a movement in service to the Indian government. “The BJP is an appendage of the RSS,” Pal said. “While not all BJP members and parliamentarians have RSS backgrounds, those who do occupy key positions of power.”

According to Pal, each organization plays a different role in the country in which it operates. 

“The main role of diaspora organizing is the remittance of funding back to the Indian Sangh, the creation of lobbying power to shape foreign governments’ attitudes and policies towards India, and to reshape the soft power of India and its diaspora into a Hindu-inflected one,” Pal said. This takes the shape of organizations like Sewa International, which received millions of dollars from Silicon Valley donors at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Others include Support a Child USA and the World Hindu Foundation of America, both located in southern Ohio. 

The Sangh’s politics extend into other countries in manifold ways. Tulsi Gabbard, formerly of the Democratic Party and the current director of U.S. national intelligence, received a great deal of money from Sangh affiliates for her presidential run in 2020. In the United States and elsewhere, legislators have paid growing attention to caste discrimination within the Indian diaspora. In response, the Sangh also activated networks in California to publicly defend caste discrimination as an expression of “individual rights.” Acknowledging the severity of caste discrimination would undermine the picture of a united Hindu India.

And yet, despite the webs charted by Pal, formally connecting these organizations to one another remains difficult. The Sangh doesn’t advertise that it controls 2,500 different organizations, and for good reason. “It is useful for the Sangh to create the image of a large number of unconnected organizations spontaneously working together in a cohesive upsurge in defense of the Hindu nation,” he said. “If the Sangh were seen to have its organizational fingers in each of its appendages, this suddenly seems a lot less organic!” For decades, this has allowed the Sangh to deny or obfuscate the actual extent of the organization.

To map the extent and scale of the Sangh, Pal and his collaborators have deployed a “multiplexity matrix”— a type of analytical tool used to measure relationships between individuals and entities. Their model uses 34 factors that would suggest or indicate ties to the Sangh, strongly weighting some of them — such as the organization admitting that it had been founded by the Sangh — while weakly weighting others, and scoring an entity on a scale from 0 to 1. What they found, apart from the sheer size of the RSS, was that it relies on mediating organizations that act as a bridge between the RSS and, say, leprosy clinics or homeopathic dispensaries. It grants them a degree of separation and plausible deniability, but also frees them from the burden of having to maintain them. 

For those concerned about the authoritarian turn in India, pushing back against the Sangh is critical. In North America and elsewhere, Pal has issued a call to action. “One of the most useful is to familiarize yourself with organizations working in your area and discourage your local, state or national representatives from collaborating with these organizations,” he said. In the United States, these organizations are the polite face of Hindutva and help to launder it. Exposing their connections and publicizing the ugly reality of what they do in India would stop the whitewashing of the Sangh while also drying up some of their foreign cash. The Sangh actively foments anti-Muslim riots by encouraging religious processions to march through Muslim neighborhoods, harass inhabitants and then respond to any resistance with mob violence. Sangh orphanages for Indigenous Adivasi children forcibly assimilate them and abandon their heritage. 

Pal believes the rise of the RSS holds lessons for other countries experiencing far-right resurgences. The Sangh, he notes, has flourished in no small part because of the withering of services provided by the Indian state; it created a point of entry for many ordinary Indians after the 1991 liberalization of the economy left the Indian social safety net in tatters. As this shredding has only accelerated under Modi, the RSS becomes a tool that can receive impoverished people, support them, and in so doing radicalize them. As the social safety net crumbles in the United States and elsewhere, the Sangh offers a model for other movements to follow.

The methodology used to map the RSS, Pal and his colleagues believe, could be adopted in the United States, Britain or elsewhere. As extremist groups in the United States face less scrutiny from the Department of Justice or FBI, they’re likely to try to expand their presence in the mainstream to bolster recruitment. Staying ahead of them will be part of keeping a light shining on them. The methodology can also be turned on far-right politicians, whose allegiances can be found, not just in financial disclosures and campaign donations, but in group memberships and social ties with front organizations of the type pioneered by the Sangh.