Youth Hostels, Blood Banks, Yoga: How One Far-Right Network Spread Across the World

Opinion|Youth Hostels, Blood Banks, Yoga: How One Far-Right Network Spread Across the World

An hour’s drive north of Mumbai, India, in the middle of a swath of low green hills and small farmhouses, a large arch marks the entrance to a complex known as Keshav Srushti — or, loosely, Keshav’s Creation. Next to the arch is a tall portrait of a man with a walrus mustache and an orange blazer: Keshav Baliram Hedgewar.

Dr. Hedgewar was the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization widely credited as the incubator of the Hindu far right. He started the group, better known as the R.S.S., in 1925 as a martial arts gymnasium for angry young men. The R.S.S.’s focus on Hindu man-making emerged out of an anxiety over a perceived Hindu disunity, and the organization spread rapidly in India in the 1930s and ’40s. He and his followers believed India’s Muslim minority posed a dire threat to the Hindu majority — a belief that, 100 years later, is alive and well in Hindu far-right circles.

Today the R.S.S. has grown into what is arguably the biggest and least understood far-right movement in the world, shrouded in secrecy and condemned for complicity in mass violence against India’s religious minorities, criticized for trying to rewrite Indian history by vilifying medieval Muslim rule and noted for its close relationship with the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which has governed India for more than a decade.

For the past six years, I have been part of a team that has mapped thousands of organizations in 40 countries with links to the R.S.S. Our research, published this month by The Caravan in India, shows that the R.S.S. sits at the center of an international web of schools, charities, temples and think tanks that have worked in concert to embed Hindu nationalism into the fabric of Indians’ daily life, society and politics, whether at home or in the diaspora.

This picture offers insight into the social forces that propelled the Hindu far right to dominance in India. It also helps explain how, as nativist parties are in ascendance globally, a far-right movement can infiltrate the institutions of daily life to achieve political power.

One key lesson is that far-right mobilization is not natural, inevitable or simply a consequence of far-right ideology appealing to the insecurity and precariousness of our times. In India we found it emerges from a top-down, intentionally cultivated civil society network — and not, contrary to the R.S.S.’s assertions, from a bottom-up spontaneous social movement.