The latest ruling on the Kamal Maula mosque in Dhar should trouble anyone still invested
in India’s claim to secular democracy. A medieval mosque has now been declared a temple by the Madhya Pradesh High Court, with Muslim worshippers told, in effect, to seek space elsewhere. Saffron flags, and police presence followed.
Even as such disputes multiply at home, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is working to soften its image abroad. Its leaders have been meeting academics, policymakers and business figures in the United States, Germany and Britain, insisting that the RSS is misunderstood, that it is not a paramilitary organisation, that it does not promote Hindu supremacy, and that minorities in India have not been reduced to second-class citizens. That claim is now difficult to square with the record.
The RSS is not an obscure cultural club unfairly maligned by foreign critics. It is the ideological parent of the ruling BJP and the most powerful organisational force behind India’s Hindu nationalist turn. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was shaped by it. Its cadres have long supplied muscle to the political project that now governs India. Its ambitions have also been visible in policy: the Ram temple in Ayodhya, the downgrading of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, the pressure for uniformity in personal law, and the steady attempt to recast India as a civilisational Hindu state.
Since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the idea that Muslim monuments can be reopened, reinterpreted and eventually repurposed has moved from the fringe to the courtroom. The Places of Worship Act was meant to prevent precisely this as it froze the religious character of places of worship as they stood at independence. Yet the spirit of that law is being hollowed out by litigation, surveys, political pressure and a public mood in which faith claims are often made to outrank settled rights.
The consequences are not confined to mosques. Anti-minority hate speech has surged. Muslim homes and businesses have been demolished in the name of municipal action. Anti-conversion laws have created fear among Christians and Muslims. The citizenship debate has repeatedly treated Muslim belonging as conditional. In West Bengal, the deletion of millions of names from electoral rolls before a state election has raised grave concerns about who gets to remain visible as a citizen.
This is the real context of the RSS’s foreign outreach. The problem is not that the organisation wants to explain itself. The problem is that it seeks respectability abroad while the politics it helped normalise narrows the civic and religious space of minorities at home.
India’s friends have often preferred the comfort of market size, strategic convergence and diaspora diplomacy. That convenience is becoming harder to defend. At the end of day, no public relations tour can erase what is happening in Kashmir and beyond. *