Mohan Bhagwat insists the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) isn’t changing — it’s just “evolving” and “unfolding” like a cosmic banyan seed that refuses to be pinned down, no matter how out of step its actions look with its century-old self.

That was basically his takeaway on Sunday at the song-album launch for the forthcoming Shatak, a film celebrating 100 years of the Sangh’s self-portrait. Singer Sukhwinder Singh and various RSS dignitaries nodded along.

According to Bhagwat’s tree metaphor, if you see the Sangh’s modern ideological zig-zags as a change, it’s only because you’re looking at the form — not the “fundamental essence” seeded by founder Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar.

Hedgewar, a boy orphaned by plague at 11 who never “let his nature waver”, gets elevated not just to ideological progenitor, but a psychological archetype worthy of academic inquiry. Never mind that his core vision — Hindutva as a social and political organising principle........

© National Herald