“Akhand Bharat or Empty Slogan? Why RSS Cannot Defend Civilization”
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has mastered the art of respectability but not the science of power. Its cadres are disciplined, upright, and sincere. They are volunteers who sweep streets, staff relief camps, and donate their time with a quiet devotion that would humble most professional politicians. But this is precisely the problem: history does not reward devotion. It rewards the ability to translate devotion into ruthless political leverage. For all its grand talk of Akhand Bharat, the RSS remains soft, sentimental, and strategically barren. It has never produced a Hindu Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader willing to withstand criticism, embrace dialectical struggle, and defend his people with militant clarity.
The reason is structural. The shakhas of the RSS are rehearsals of conformity. A young recruit learns posture, drill, and prayer — but not questioning. The very words that form the marrow of modern intellectual battle — dialectics, logical empiricism, falsifiability, critique — are alien to the RSS vocabulary. To ask uncomfortable questions is to disturb the choreography of uniformity. Thus the RSS produces volunteers, not statesmen; saints, not strategists. Its men know how to salute a flag but not how to dismantle an argument.
Contrast this with Netanyahu. Whatever one thinks of his politics, he embodies militant rationality. He may not quote Marx or Popper, but he instinctively understands dialectics: that leadership means being attacked daily, answering criticism relentlessly, and never allowing the enemy’s narrative to go unchallenged. Netanyahu thrives on confrontation; the RSS recoils from it. He treats criticism as a sparring partner; the RSS treats it as blasphemy. That is why Israel has a Netanyahu, and India, despite its billion Hindus, does not.
The result is paralysis disguised as patience. The RSS is proud of its centenary legacy, but a century of marching and chanting has not produced a serious intellectual arsenal. Its rhetoric is inflated, its methods archaic. It confuses ceremony with sovereignty, culture with politics. It dreams of unity while refusing to build the intellectual and institutional machinery necessary for unity. This is why Lenin’s remark fits so cruelly: one step forward, two steps back. The RSS advances in spectacle, retreats in substance.No civilization is defended by rituals alone. Rituals inspire, but they do not legislate, educate, or adjudicate. They do not deconstruct political theology. They do not train cadres to argue in court, on television, or in classrooms. If the RSS truly seeks a united India, it must abandon its fear of questioning and embrace the merciless logic of dialectics. Otherwise, Akhand Bharat will remain a slogan shouted by disciplined men while the real battles of mind and state are lost to more ruthless forces.
Benjamin Netanyahu is not a philosopher. He is not a logician, nor a Marxist, nor a Popperian empiricist. Yet he embodies something the RSS and BJP have never understood: the dialectical spirit. He knows that politics is permanent struggle, that leadership is defined not by ceremonial approval but by the ability to withstand fire. He fights in parliaments, in media studios, in hostile world forums. He answers criticism with arguments, counters, reframes, and when necessary, brutal defiance. That is why his people see him as a defender, not a decoration.
The RSS, by contrast, produces leaders who wilt at the first sign of questioning. Its shakhas do not train men to argue, they train men to obey. They recite, they salute, they march. They absorb discipline, but they do not absorb dialectics. In a shakha, you do not ask whether the mantras make sense, whether the claims can be verified, whether the grand project of Akhand Bharat has any concrete plan beyond rhetoric. You simply nod. That is the structural disease: a culture of obedience where there should be a culture of critique.
Civilizational conflicts are not won by obedience. They are won by reason. What India faces is not merely a dispute with its neighbors, but a centuries-long conflict with political theology — the claim that revealed texts and clerical intermediaries should define law, sovereignty, and social order. Political theology is ruthless because it offers absolute answers and brooks no questioning. It thrives where its enemies are too polite to fight with equal ferocity. Against such absolutism, chanting hymns and performing drills is comic relief, not strategy.
The modern state cannot survive clerical absolutism. It requires reason as public law, evidence as policy, and institutions that treat citizens as stakeholders rather than sectarian subjects. Dialectical materialism shows why: every idea, every theology, every “absolute truth” is born of material conditions and social relations. Change those conditions — through education, opportunity, institutional reform — and you expose the scaffolding of theology as brittle. Logical empiricism completes the task: it demands that every claim be tested. If a revelation cannot be verified, it collapses under scrutiny. Together, dialectics and empiricism are the twin hammers that break the idols of political theology.
But the Sangh has never picked up these weapons. It prefers incense to argument, uniformity to analysis. Its leaders panic when confronted with sharp questions on television. They are comfortable in auditoriums filled with friendly cadres, but uncomfortable in debates where their assertions are cross-examined. Netanyahu thrives in such arenas. He does not fear dialectics because he instinctively practices it. He relishes confrontation because he knows that confrontation is how political legitimacy is forged. The Sangh, by contrast, treats confrontation as an embarrassment.
This explains why Hindu nationalism, despite its demographic majority, remains intellectually defensive. It lacks the courage to dismantle Islam as political theology with the tools of reason. It lacks the confidence to show Pakistanis and Indian Muslims that their languages, their foodways, their music, their very DNA, are Indic — that Islam, as an imperial imposition, came later. A Hindu Netanyahu would do this without apology, calmly, rationally, mercilessly. He would not fear offense. He would fear only failure.
The truth is simple: without dialectics, there is no defense. Without logical empiricism, there is no strategy. Without militant rationalism, there is no Akhand Bharat. Until the Sangh learns this lesson, it will remain a disciplined choir singing patriotic hymns while its enemies write the future.
If India truly seeks unity, it must abandon the RSS fantasy that songs and salutes will dissolve centuries of fracture. Unity is not built by rituals; it is built by conquest of the mind. And the weapons of that conquest are reason, evidence, and compassion. The first task is to export Hindu civilization not as relics but as institutions. Temples and mantras do not travel well; schools and universities do. India must seed across the subcontinent a network of institutions that teach critical thinking, science, and history stripped of clerical distortion. When young minds in Pakistan are exposed to logic rather than dogma, when they learn their own mother tongues are modified Sanskritic languages, when they discover their DNA is shared with their Hindu neighbors, the spell of imported political theology begins to break.
Alongside this export of culture as education must come the export of philosophy as method. Dialectical materialism and logical empiricism should not remain cloistered in dusty libraries. They should be taught as living weapons. Dialectics exposes how ideologies emerge from material deprivation and political manipulation. Logical empiricism crushes unverified claims under the weight of evidence. Together they form a relentless arsenal. If Pakistanis and Indian Muslims are to be free of clerical absolutism, they must be armed not with new rituals but with new methods of thinking. Only then will they realize that Islam, in its political form, is not their essence but an imperial overlay.
But reason without compassion is cruelty, and cruelty cannot unite. Here the Buddhist heritage of the subcontinent offers the necessary corrective. Compassion does not mean indulgence; it means building institutions that deliver dignity. It means rehabilitating those seduced by extremism, offering jobs, education, and community reintegration. It means punishing violence without dehumanizing the violent. Compassion insists that every citizen be given a stake in the republic, so that allegiance to clerics is replaced by allegiance to institutions that work.
This is the civilizational formula: ruthless in reason, disciplined in compassion, uncompromising in nationalism. Israel’s Netanyahu embodies the first two; he is dialectical and militant, though not always compassionate. India must go further. A Hindu Netanyahu must be more than a general; he must be a builder. He must answer clerical absolutism with empirical governance, answer grievance with opportunity, answer propaganda with evidence. He must welcome criticism, thrive in dialectics, and laugh at the fragility of those who cannot defend their claims.
The RSS cannot produce such a leader as long as it forbids questioning. Its shakhas must be reimagined not as temples of obedience but as arenas of argument. Every recruit should be drilled in logic, in falsifiability, in dialectical contestation. Every meeting should allow for merciless critique, not just rehearsed slogans. Only then will the Sangh produce men who can stand on the world stage and defend India with the intellectual ferocity the moment demands.
Until that transformation comes, all talk of Akhand Bharat is intoxication. A united India will not emerge from incense smoke and patriotic hymns. It will emerge when reason is wielded like a sword, when compassion is disciplined like an army, and when the Sangh learns that rituals inspire but dialectics wins. That is the merciless truth. Chanting will not save the subcontinent. Relentless pursuit of reason will.
Citations
- Lenin, V. I. “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” (1904). In Collected Works, Vol. 7. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961.
- Netanyahu, Benjamin. A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations. New York: Warner Books, 2000.
- Cornforth, Maurice. Dialectical Materialism. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1950.
- Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz, 1936.
- Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson, 1959.
- Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.
- Pfleiderer, Otto. The Development of Theology in Germany Since Kant. London: Williams & Norgate, 1890.
- Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
- Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
- Armstrong, Karen. The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New York: Ballantine Books, 2000.
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