On Caravan's RSS Project, the political economy of parallel infrastructure, and why the fight against Hindutva is inseparable from the fight for a working welfare state

There is a four-hectare plot in the Amphalla neighbourhood of Jammu city called Ved Mandir. The original land grant dates to 1916, when Dogra ruler Pratap Singh gave it to a religious leader named Champa Nath. Today, if you were to visit and ask who runs the place, you would get a complicated answer.

Ved Mandir houses an orphanage for boys. Also one for girls. A school. A vocational training centre. A charitable hospital called Swami Vivekananda Medical Mission. The Jammu and Kashmir office of Sewa Bharati. A cow shelter. An NGO for Kargil War veterans. An organization for army veterans more broadly. The local chapter of Bharat Vikas Parishad. A wing of Vidya Bharati. And roughly ten more organizations I haven't listed.

Twenty-one organizations. One address. Run, in large part, by overlapping sets of the same people. A man named Gautam Mengi, for instance, serves as the RSS sanghchalak for Jammu, presides over the boys' orphanage, and attends the RSS's highest decision-making body. The Ved Mandir complex represents nearly half of the Sangh's documented organizational presence in all of Jammu and Kashmir.

I learned this from the RSS Project, an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism published by The Caravan in December 2025, during the RSS's centenary year. The project is led by Dr. Felix Pal of the University of Western Australia, working with Christophe Jaffrelot at Sciences Po's Centre de recherches internationales. Over six years, they built a dataset of more than 2,500 organizations with traceable material ties to the RSS.

The methodology matters. Pal and Jaffrelot weren't coding organizations based on ideology or vibes. They used a 34-point criteria matrix—personnel overlaps, shared addresses, documented funding flows, joint events, RSS publications naming affiliates—to assign confidence scores. A score of 1.0 means definite RSS affiliation. They drew primarily from the RSS's own publications, triangulated against academic literature, financial filings, and government documents.

What emerges is not a conspiracy theory. It's an org chart.

I am a development economist. I study why some places have functioning states and others don't, why some populations get schools and clinics and others get promises, why the gap between policy and implementation is where political dreams go to die. So when I look at a map showing 2,500+ organizations radiating outward from a single ideological core, I don't primarily see a political threat. I see an institutional achievement that demands explanation.

Why this organizational form? What problem does it solve?

The answer, I think, lies in the RSS's founding diagnosis—and in the failures of the secular Indian state to offer a competing solution.

Keshav Baliram Hedgewar founded the RSS on September 27, 1925, in Nagpur, with somewhere between 15 and 17 people present. He was a doctor who had been involved in the independence movement but had grown convinced that political freedom was insufficient. The problem, as Hedgewar saw it, was sangathan—or rather, the lack of it. Hindu society was fragmented by caste, language, region, and practice. It could not act as a collective.

This was not an original observation. Plenty of reformers in the 1920s were worried about Hindu disunity. What distinguished Hedgewar was his proposed solution: not theological reform, not caste abolition, not political mobilization, but organization. Build a disciplined cadre. Train them in shared rituals and shared purpose. Deploy them systematically. Let the organization itself become the vehicle for creating the unified Hindu identity that did not yet exist.

The RSS has been running this playbook for a hundred years now. And the playbook works.

But here's the thing about organization as ideology: it requires something to organize around. The RSS's answer has evolved over time, but one thread has been remarkably consistent since the early 1950s: service delivery.

The Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram was founded on December 26, 1952, in Jashpur, in what is now Chhattisgarh. Its founder, Balasaheb Deshpande, was appointed by the state government to work in tribal-dominated areas. The organization's own literature is explicit about why it exists. I'll quote from an RSS publication called Widening Horizons:

"The systematic alienation of the tribals…who form an inseparable part of the Hindu society through proselytization was another grave challenge... [tribals] had all along been a most exploited lot and an easy prey for unscrupulous conversion by Christian missionaries. It is to counter this twin menace of British legacy, that the Bharateeya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram was founded."

This is the origin story the Sangh tells about itself. Not development for development's sake. Development as a weapon against conversion. Schools, hostels, healthcare—the whole apparatus of what the development literature calls "last-mile service delivery"—repurposed as infrastructure for ideological consolidation.

Today, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram operates in 323 districts across more than 52,000 villages.

Christian missionaries understood this logic long before the Sangh did, of course. The history of missionary education and healthcare in India is immense. The first Christian institution of higher learning opened in Kerala in 1818. Clara Swain Hospital in Bareilly, founded in 1874, was the first hospital for women in all of Asia. By the 1940s, missionaries ran over 70 percent of India's leprosy hospitals. Today, there are roughly 55,000 Christian schools in India educating some 25 million students.

The RSS's organizational response was, in effect, to invert the missionary model. If schools create Christians, schools can also create Hindus. If hospitals build loyalty to the church, hospitals can build loyalty to the Sangh. The "rice bag" slur—accusing converts of trading faith for material benefit—is the rhetorical version of an institutional insight: identity formation happens through service provision.

This is why the Ved Mandir complex matters. It's not just an address. It's a demonstration of a theory of change.

The organizational typology that Pal and Jaffrelot develop is worth understanding. They identify several categories:

Cadre organizations are the core—the RSS itself, the ABVP for students, the BMS for labour. Coordinating organizations like Vidya Bharati and Sewa Bharati manage vast networks of schools and service centres. Campaign organizations emerge around specific causes; front organizations provide deniable distance from the core. There are covert organizations that don't acknowledge RSS ties, training organizations that produce ideological cadres, and knowledge production organizations that generate sympathetic scholarship and media.

And then there are what I'd call showpiece organizations—entities created to address specific political crises in the Sangh's public image.

The Samajik Samrasta Manch was founded on April 14, 1983, on Ambedkar Jayanti. It was a direct response to the Meenakshipuram conversions of February 1981, when roughly 180 Dalit families in Tamil Nadu converted to Islam to escape caste oppression. The Sangh's answer to untouchability wasn't to abolish caste but to rebrand: samrasta means harmony. Acknowledge the problem. Contain it organizationally. Move on.

The Muslim Rashtriya Manch was founded on December 24, 2002—nine months after the Gujarat riots. It held its inaugural meeting at a journalist's house in Delhi, with the RSS sarsanghchalak in attendance. The message was clear: we are not anti-Muslim. Look, we have a Muslim organization.

These showpiece organizations are not large. They don't need to be. Their purpose is communicative, not operational.

But the operational organizations—the 12,000+ Vidya Bharati schools, the thousands of Sewa Bharati service centres, the health clinics and hostels and vocational training programmes—these are very real. And here's where I have to be honest about something uncomfortable.

They work.

Not ideologically. I mean functionally. They show up in places where the state does not. They provide services that the government has promised but failed to deliver. They are often the only school, the only clinic, the only functional institution in remote Adivasi villages or border districts or urban slums.

This is the substitution question that haunts development economics. When non-state actors provide public goods, do they complement state capacity or crowd it out? Does the presence of a Vidya Bharati school make it more or less likely that the government will build one? Does a Sewa Bharati health camp substitute for the primary health centre that exists on paper but whose doctor shows up 55 percent of the time?

The empirical answers are contested. But the political economy is not. Every service user becomes a potential constituency. Every school alumnus has a relationship with the organization that educated them. The Sangh is not building a voter base. It's building something deeper: a network of reciprocal obligation that exists prior to and independent of electoral politics.

Where does the money come from?

Some of it is domestic—membership dues, donations, event revenues. But the transnational flows are significant and well-documented.

The India Development and Relief Fund was founded in Maryland in 1989. A report called "The Foreign Exchange of Hate," published in 2002, documented that over 80 percent of IDRF-designated funds went to Sangh Parivar organizations between 1994 and 2000. Roughly $3.2 million flowed directly to entities including the RSS, VHP, and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. Corporate matching programs from Cisco, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems amplified individual donations until media coverage shut some of them down.

Sewa International USA, registered in Texas in 2003, has a board that overlaps heavily with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS's American affiliate). In May 2021, Jack Dorsey donated $2.5 million to Sewa International as part of COVID-19 relief efforts. The donation was immediately controversial. There was a Change.org petition. An activist went on hunger strike.

The Indian National Congress demanded a judicial inquiry.

The Bhutada family of Houston is instructive. Ramesh Bhutada founded Star Pipe Products in 1979; it now employs over 1,400 people. He serves as national vice president of HSS-USA and chairs the board of Sewa International. His son Rishi sits on the board of the Hindu American Foundation. IRS Form 990 filings show the Bhutada Family Foundation donated over $1.7 million to Sangh-affiliated organizations between 2006 and 2018.

This is not secret. It's in the tax filings. The RSS has built a transnational funding loop in which diaspora prosperity flows back to support organizational expansion in India.

On August 15, 2025, from the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said something remarkable:

"Today, I would like to proudly mention that 100 years ago, an organisation was born – Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. 100 years of service to the nation is a proud, golden chapter... In a way, RSS is the biggest NGO of the world."

Set aside whether this is true. (India has 3.1 million registered NGOs; defining "biggest" is non-trivial.) Focus instead on what the claim reveals. The Prime Minister of India is proud to describe the ideological movement that trained him as a service organization. Not a political party. Not a cultural movement. An NGO.

This is the tell. The RSS has understood something that its critics have been slow to grasp: in a country where the state does not deliver, whoever delivers becomes the state.

Here is the argument I've been building toward:

The Sangh's organizational infrastructure is not an aberration. It's a response—to missionary competition, yes, but more fundamentally to the failures of the Nehruvian compact.

The promise of independent India was material citizenship. The state would educate your children, heal your sick, redistribute land from zamindars to tillers, generate employment, build the infrastructure for a dignified life. This was the social contract. Vote for us; we will develop you.

But land reform failed in most states. (Not in Kerala or West Bengal, where left-wing governments actually implemented it. In Bihar, where Bhumihars comprising 2.8 percent of the population still own 39 percent of the land, the first Zamindari Abolition Act was passed in 1947 and accomplished approximately nothing.) Public schools exist on paper; ASER 2024 reports that only 23.4 percent of Standard III students can read at Standard II level. Primary health centres are staffed by doctors who don't show up—government data shows 8 percent of PHCs have no medical staff at all. Community Health Centres are supposed to have four specialists each; 83 percent lack a surgeon.

The Indian state made promises it could not keep. And into that gap—that vast, yawning gap between policy and implementation—walked the RSS.

Not because they cared about development. Because they understood that service delivery is how you build a mass organization in a poor country. The schools teach ideology, yes. But they also teach. The clinics propagate Hindutva, yes. But they also provide healthcare. The ideological payload travels inside a functional service delivery mechanism.

This is what makes the Sangh so difficult to oppose.

If you are, like me, someone who believes in a secular, plural India—someone who worries about what kind of country your children will inherit—the RSS Project presents an uncomfortable challenge. You cannot dismantle 12,000 schools without leaving a vacuum. You cannot wish away an organization that is, for many Indians, the only institution that has ever showed up.

The path dependency problem is severe. Every year that a child attends a Vidya Bharati school creates another alumnus with a relationship to the organization. Every patient treated at a Sewa Bharati health camp experiences a moment of gratitude that is not ideological in the first instance but may become so. The Sangh is patient. It operates on generational timescales. It is not trying to win the next election; it is trying to reshape common sense.

Civil society, in large parts of India, increasingly is the Sangh. This is the Gramscian nightmare: hegemony achieved not through coercion but through the capillary penetration of everyday life. Who runs the school? Who organizes the festival? Who comes when there's a flood? If the answer is often "the local Sangh affiliate," then secularism as a lived practice—not as a constitutional principle but as a social reality—is already losing.

The transnational funding loop makes this worse. The Indian diaspora in America includes many people who are not ideologically Hindutva but who donate to organizations that seem to be doing good work. The tax-deductible donation to Sewa International feels like charity. It supports schools in Jharkhand.

What's the problem? The problem is that those schools are nodes in a network whose ultimate purpose is not education but ideological reproduction.

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So what is to be done?

I don't have a ten-point policy agenda. But I have a conviction.

The fight against Hindutva is inseparable from the fight for a working welfare state.

If the critique of the Sangh is purely ideological—they are communal, they are fascist, they threaten minorities—you will convince people who already agree with you and no one else. Because for the parent in a village in Chhattisgarh whose child attends a Vidya Bharati school because the government school is a ruin, the ideological critique is abstract and the school is concrete.

The counter to Sangh infrastructure is not secular rhetoric. It is secular infrastructure that actually works.

This means primary health centres with doctors who show up. Schools where children learn to read. Land reform that is implemented, not just legislated. Employment guarantees that function. An administrative state that is present in the lives of citizens as something other than a predator or an absence.

This is, admittedly, a harder political program than denouncing communalism. It requires state capacity, which takes decades to build. It requires fiscal resources, which means fighting the battles over taxation and redistribution that Indian liberals have largely avoided. It requires a theory of political economy, not just a theory of secularism.

But I don't see another way.

The RSS understood a hundred years ago that organization precedes ideology—that you cannot reshape a society without first building the institutional capacity to reach that society. The secular Indian state understood this too, once. The great Nehruvian project was not just about dams and steel plants; it was about schools and panchayats and cooperative societies. It was an attempt to build the infrastructure of democratic citizenship.

That project is unfinished. In many places, it has been abandoned.

And so the development state that actually shows up, in village after village, is the one with saffron flags.

I think about this when I think about my children, about the India they will grow up in. The question is not whether they will encounter Hindutva as an ideology. Of course they will. The question is whether they will also encounter a functioning public education system, a healthcare infrastructure that works, a state that is present in their lives as a provider of services and not just a collector of taxes.

If yes, then secularism has a material basis. Citizenship means something. The social contract holds.

If no—if the state continues to retreat and the Sangh continues to expand into the vacuum—then we are asking people to choose an abstract principle over a concrete institution. We are asking them to be secular in theory while being served by Hindutva in practice.

That is not a bet I would take.

The RSS Project is available on The Caravan's website. I'd encourage anyone interested in these questions to explore the interactive database and read Felix Pal's methodology piece. Whatever your politics, the empirical work is important.