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When Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), declared that India should aspire not merely to superpower status but to become “Vishwaguru”– teacher of the world – he articulated a vision that demands serious critical scrutiny. This rhetoric, increasingly central to contemporary Indian nationalism, represents a peculiar form of supremacist discourse that claims for India a position of moral, spiritual, and civilisational superiority over other nations. What makes this formulation particularly striking is its divergence from the nationalist idioms of other major nations, which typically emphasise strength, prosperity, or influence rather than pedagogical authority over humanity itself.

This column examines the historical, sociological, and psychological roots of this “Vishwaguru complex,” argues that it emerges from specific caste-based epistemologies, and demonstrates how such hyperbolic rhetoric functions as deliberate mystification in an era of measurable national decline.

The rhetoric of “becoming a superpower” or “Vishwaguru” is close to unique to India. No other country speaks of its future greatness with this level of certainty and theatricality. Established powers don’t advertise their ascent: the United States doesn’t run on promises of becoming a superpower – it already behaves like one. China avoids the language of impending supremacy and instead invests steadily in technology, industry, and global influence. Russia talks of restoring lost stature. Even ambitious economies like Brazil, South Korea, or Turkey don’t turn national pride into a public campaign of inevitable world leadership. In this sense, India stands alone. Its political class has converted the idea of superpower status into a collective fantasy and a mass pedagogical project.

This boastfulness operates as a substitute for capability. Instead of proprietary technology, industrial depth, or strategic leverage, slogans perform the work of achievement. The fixation on future supremacy is less about aspiration than compensation: loud claims filling the vacuum left by institutional decay and developmental stagnation. Nations that genuinely shape the world rarely speak in this register; they demonstrate strength through action, not incantation. The countries that declare destiny most aggressively are usually the ones furthest from realising it.

The slogan “Vishwaguru” is even more distinctive. American exceptionalism invokes power; Chinese nationalism invokes rejuvenation; Russian nationalism invokes restoration; even religious states like Iran or Saudi Arabia define themselves by regional authority or theological guardianship. Only India frames itself as the world’s teacher, the bearer of knowledge the rest of humanity supposedly lacks. This is not the language of partnership or even leadership – it is hierarchical, didactic, and civilisationally patronising. It positions India as the enlightened instructor and the world as its classroom.

Such confidence does not arise in a vacuum. It draws from a social tradition built on knowledge monopoly and stratified authority: the Brahminical idea that wisdom flows downward from a self-appointed pinnacle. The modern claim to global tutelage is simply this logic scaled up. It is not confidence born of achievement but the inflation of a historical caste impulse onto the international stage.

In that sense, India’s boasts are not just loud – they are structurally unique. The rest of the world speaks of power. Only here do we speak of destiny, mastery, and the world awaiting our instruction.

The ideological substratum that informs the RSS and wider Hindutva emerges from a specifically Brahminical epistemology grounded in the premise of congenital hierarchy. Within this framework, human inequality is not merely social but ontological: Brahmins are positioned as inherently superior by virtue of birth, endowed with a putatively greater proximity to sacred knowledge and spiritual authority. The caste system thus operated not as a neutral division of labour but as a division of human worth, naturalised through doctrines of ritual purity, karma, and rebirth that framed hierarchy as cosmic order rather than historical construction.

Central to this structure was the consolidation of epistemic........

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