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Any assessment of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) and its 100-year journey cannot possibly ignore its long term symbiotic links with other organisations that parallelly promoted the cause of the Hindutva ideology. A fascinating part of this story is that these prominent parallel organisations promoting Hindutva, such as the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, formed in Haridwar 1915, was seen to be at variance with RSS’s core thought process and strategy.

There was always a distance between RSS and the Mahasabha. For instance, the RSS leadership did not see eye to eye with Vinayak Damaodar Savarkar who was head of the Mahasabha for many years in the 1930s and 1940s. Mahasabha was said to be far more aggressive and quasi-politically active in the cause of Hindutva.

The RSS chief ‘Guru’ Golwalkar spent 6 months in jail after Gandhi’s assasination but was released in August 1948 upon giving specific assurances that he would eschew politics confining his organisation to only cultural activities while making it far more transparent in terms of its membership and workings.

So while Golwalkar promised to keep the RSS away from politics and to develop it as a purely cultural organisation in August 1948, the Hindu Mahasabha actively and aggressively campaigned to illegally place the idol of Rama in the Babari Masjid premises in December 1949.

These two events may seem apparently unconnected but they have a sort of subterranean link. On the face of it, the RSS has little to do with the placing of Ram’s idol in Babri Mosque.

But with the benefit of hindsight, one can see how the RSS and Mahasabha as well as other assorted Hindutva outfits crossed paths in subsequent decades in ways........

© The Wire