Mumbai: Last month, a day after Karnataka home minister Priyank Kharge wrote to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat to “register itself”, Bhagwat mounted his defence.

“There are so many unregistered things going on…the Hindu religion is not registered, many things are not registered,” he said at an event in Kerala the day after.

Turns out, Bhagwat was being economical with the truth.

The Wire, using data collated by ‘Seeing The Sangh’, the first-ever data set that maps the Sangh and its affiliates globally, has found a contradiction in Bhagwat’s statement. While the RSS has refused to register, it has silently got most of its global affiliates to do so. That means that while RSS affiliates have subjected themselves to the laws of many jurisdictions here and abroad, their parent body refuses to do so in India. There has been no explanation for why its standards for registration differ across national boundaries and organisations.

The dataset, housed by the CERI-Sciences Po in Paris and published and hosted by The Caravan magazine, found that the Sangh’s network spans 38 countries outside India, and includes 2,502 distinct organisations in these countries, all of whom bear allegiance to and were “tightly networked parts of one large entity” – the RSS.

But an analysis of the dataset by The Wire found that over two-thirds of the Sangh’s affiliates outside India are registered, adhering to foreign laws and policies around such outfits.

Of the total 2,502 RSS-affiliated outfits that the dataset mapped in India and abroad, only 747 were unregistered, which means that over 70% of the outfits chose to register themselves as per local laws.

But if India-based RSS affiliates were to be kept out, the number rises to over 79%. This, in effect, means that nearly eight out of 10 RSS global affiliates chose to register, and submit to regulations that govern their functioning, even though the RSS being the parent organisation refuses to submit itself to such rules.

All these Sangh affiliates are registered in various ways – some are private companies, a few are advocacy/lobbying outfits. Many of them are non-government organisations or non-profits.

The Wire sent two emails to RSS’s Akhil Bharatiya Prachar Pramukh Sunil Ambekar for his comments, but did not get a response.

Speaking from the Red Fort on Independence Day in 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had called the RSS “the world’s largest NGO, with a century-long history of devotion”. In 2010, it had about 40,000 shakhas across the country. By April 2014, just before Modi came to power, the number had inched up to 44,000 shakhas, in over 29,000 locations. By March this year, the RSS announced that it now had “doubled” that number, and over 88,000 shakhas were held in 55,000 locations across the country.

Yet, it faces none of the scrutiny that other NGOs in India are subject to – from auditing their accounts and maintaining detailed donor records, to strict rules on how they spend their funds.

Many who have tracked the RSS closely believe this reluctance comes from wanting to evade accountability.

“The RSS has always tried to control and dictate the flow and directions of programmes through affiliated organisations, but not on its own,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, journalist and author who has closely tracked the rise of the Hindu right-wing since the 1980s. He added the RSS’s belief in not making itself a formal entity was only strengthened after it was banned following its role in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination.

“The RSS’s gut feeling would have been to not be formally registered on paper, because if something like this happens again, then they would........

© The Wire