The RSS

About the Book

A COMPREHENSIVE PROFILING OF ALL THE MAJOR LEADERS OF THE INDIAN RIGHT-WING, NOW THE SINGLE BIGGEST FACTOR IN INDIAN POLITICS.

A fog of mystery surrounds the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-or RSS-the largest cadre-based organisation in the world. Veteran journalist and author of the bestseller Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay lays bare its fascinating, unique and perhaps startling world. He also chronicles the personal and political journeys of the most important men (and a woman) of the Hindu right wing, digging up little-known but revealing facts about them.

From Hegdewar, the founder of the RSS and its first sarsanghchalak, Savarkar, Golwalkar, Balasaheb Deoras, Syama Prasad Mukherjee and Deendayal Upadhyaya to Vijaya Raje Scindia, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, Ashok Singhal and Bal Thackeray, all the major leaders of the political right wing are reckoned with in this book. Through individual stories of the organisation's tallest leaders, a bigger picture emerges: in spite of a three-time ban on the RSS in a multicultural and secular India-and despite the RSS's insistence that it has no truck with electoral politics-the group is, and will continue to be, the hand that rocks the BJP's cradle.

About the Author

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay embarked on a career in journalism in the early 1980s and is best known for his reportage and analysis of the rise and growth of Hindu organisations, their politics and agitations. He was among the first journalists to track the emergence of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid conflict from the late 1980s. He has followed, and written about, the political and electoral emergence of the BJP and its allies from that period.

He is the author of The Demolition: India at the Crossroads (1994), one of the first books on the Ayodhya discord and the rise of Hindutva. He is also the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times (2013), Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 (2015), The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right (2019) and The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India (2021). He is a regular columnist in, and contributor to, several leading newspapers and web portals, and a well-known commentator and host on Indian television news and video channels.