Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh - History

History

RSS was founded in 1925 by Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, who was a doctor in the central Indian city of Nagpur. Hedgewar as a medical student in Kolkata had been a part of the revolutionary activities of the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar striving to free India from British rule. He had been charged with sedition in 1921 by the British Administration and was imprisoned for one year.

Hedgewar was educated by his elder brother. After matriculating, he decided to go to Kolkata to study medicine. He was sent to Kolkata by Dr. B. S. Moonje in 1910 to pursue his medical studies. There he lived with Shyam Sundar Chakravarthy and learned the techniques of fighting from the secret revolutionary organisations like the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal. He is said to have joined Anushilan Samiti and had contacts with revolutionaries like Ram Prasad Bismil.

Previously he was involved in such type of revolutionary activities, This fact has been disclosed by so many writers viz. C.P.Bhishikar, M.S. Golwalkar, K.S.Sudarshan and Rakesh Sinha previously. He came to believe that although the revolutionaries had immense determination, in a country of continental proportions it was impossible to instigate an armed insurrection.

After completing his graduation, he returned to Nagpur, disillusioned with the armed movement. In his memoirs, the third chief of RSS, Balasahab Deoras narrates an incident when Hedgewar saved him and others from following the path of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. Later he left the revolutionary organisations in the year 1925 and formed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Since Hedgewar was primarily associated with the Hindustan Republican Association so he adopted the full constitution of erstwhile HRA and implemented it forcibly in his newly established organisation RSS later on. The RSS first met in 1925 just after two months of Kakori train robbery in a small ground of Nagpur with 5-6 persons on Vijaya Dashami. After the formation of the RSS, Hedgewar kept the organization away from having any direct affiliation to any of the political organisations then fighting British rule. But Hedgewar and his team of volunteers, took part in the Indian National Congress, led movements against the British rule. Hedgewar was arrested in the Jungle Satyagraha agitation in 1931 and served a second term in prison

During WWII the RSS' members openly admired Adolf Hitler. Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who became the supreme leader of the RSS after Hedgewar, drew inspiration from Adolf Hitler's ideology of racial purity.He had said in his book - 'We, or Our Nationhood Defined' :

To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by"

— M. S. Golwalkar