“RSS is India’s banyan tree of immortal culture and modernisation,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 30, 2025, when he visited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)’s headquarters in Nagpur. Mr. Modi, a former RSS pracharak (full-time volunteer), was the first sitting Prime Minister to visit the RSS’s premises. The RSS, which is the ideological fount of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is celebrating its centenary year .

The organisation, which wishes to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra, was founded by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a Maharashtrian Brahmin physician from Nagpur, on Vijaya Dashami in 1925. Since then, it has grown from one shakha (theological school with volunteers called swayamsevaks) to more than 1,27,367 shakhas spread across 51,570 places in India. The RSS

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