EXCLUSIVE For the last three months, Ravi Tewari, a 22-year-old engineering student, has been waking up at 5am, putting on his white shirt and khaki shorts and rushing to a nearby park for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) morning shakha. His family is surprised. No one in the Tewari clan has ever been with RSS. So, they can’t quite figure what is driving Ravi to adopt this punishing morning drill.
“I believe in Hindutva,” says Ravi. “The country needs reforms. Who other than Narendra Modi can make it happen? The youth needs something to look forward to. They also need to take up more responsibilities to change things and the shakha is the best place to learn how to do it.”
Ravi speaks with a sense of purpose that only a new convert can have. He had never dabbled in politics before he joined ABVP, BJP’s student wing, a few months ago. And there are thousands like him, he says, neo-converts who have breathed new life into RSS after Modi was named the BJP’s PM candidate on September 13 last year.
Suddenly, the organization which was becoming moribund and seen to be out of tune with the times, is growing. In less than three months, more than 2,000 shakhas have sprouted across the country. By the end of 2013, there were 44,982 shakhas in India, of which 8,417 were in UP alone.
The numbers had peaked in 2004, when there were around 51,000 functioning shakhas. There were 51,000 RSS shakhas in 2004, but numbers dipped to 39,283 in 2010. By end 2013, after Modi was named BJP’s PM candidate, the number of shakhas surged to 44,982. Of these 8,417 were in UP alone.
Members of ABVP, BJP’s student wing, have joined RSS in large numbers in the past 6 months, say insiders No. of shakhas shrank during UPA tenure. The number of RSS shakhas had shrunk during the UPA tenure, hitting a low of 39,283 shakhas in 2010. But as scams broke out, and UPA 2 went from one low to another, there was again a renewed interest in shakhas, with a sudden burst in the Modi months.
Kripa Shanker, who heads the RSS publicity wing for UP and Uttarakhand, however, says that it is not a seasonal upsurge. He claims that the number shakhas did not decline after 2004. “It’s just that people are becoming more aware of our work.”
“More and more young people are coming forward and joining shakhas,” says Atul Singh, who heads a newly established shakha in Lucknow. What do the shakhas do? “They focus on character building, idealism, discipline and, of course, Hindutva. We are creating awareness among people to vote for a ‘suitable’ political candidate,” he said — ‘suitable’, of course, being shorthand for Modi.
“The surge clearly shows how the attraction of power is working for RSS,” says a Sangh activist who did not want to be named. “Students associated with ABVP have joined in large numbers over the past six months. Besides, people who were inactive in the past few years have become active again.”
“Shakhas are now much more organized,” says an ABVP leader. “Most shakhas now have a ‘gan nayak’ — a functionary who is supposed to wake up swayamsewaks in the morning and bring them to the park — and a ‘gan shikshak’ (group teacher), who trains the members. This was not the case some time ago. There was no one to wake up the volunteers.”
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