Hindu-nationalist volunteer organisation in India, founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a doctor-turned-activist who talked of restoring India to greatness after centuries (as he saw it) of humiliation under Muslim and then British rule. The RSS claims to be the biggest volunteer group in the world, with more than 5m members—all male—who gather regularly in over 83,000 shakhas (branches) across the country to recite prayers, play games, perform martial drills and do charity. It runs some 150,000 charitable projects.
Hedgewar created a paramilitary-style volunteer corps. Some of the organisation's early leaders professed admiration for European fascists. Senior members have since distanced themselves from such rhetoric.
The RSS aspires to make India a rigidly Hindu country in which minorities, notably Muslims and Christians, should accept Hindu culture as pre-eminent. This philosophy, known as Hindutva, runs against India's secular constitution but underpins the RSS and its large family of affiliated organisations, which include student clubs, charities and a giant trade union.
India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the RSS's ideological offspring. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, is the group's most famous alumnus: he served as an RSS pracharak (worker) for many years before moving to the BJP. His cabinet contains several RSS men. The group's cadres sometimes act as campaign workers for the ruling party.
The RSS was banned in 1948, when a former member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. It was proscribed again in the 1970s, and then in the early 1990s.
The RSS turned 100 in 2025. Mohan Bhagwat, its leader, delivered a series of speeches recounting the organisation's history and defending its Hindu-first vision. In his centenary speeches Bhagwat warned darkly of threats to national unity. Organiser, the RSS publication, carries outlandish stories about supposed risks that Muslims and others pose to Hindu culture. The RSS is fuelled both by confidence and paranoia.
A degree of pragmatism has helped the organisation endure. Early leaders were wary of getting involved in politics; later ones saw it as a way to grow. Though the RSS claims to champion cottage industry and Indian self-reliance, it has largely accepted the BJP's embrace of global capital. In 2025 Bhagwat backed a popular call for India to carry out a caste census, even though the RSS—which likes to play down caste divisions among Hindus—had long opposed this.
He is now rising from affluence to poverty.