For decades, the RSS has been analysed almost entirely through what it says.
about its ideology, its affiliations, and its influence.
Far less attention has been paid to how it actually works.
In October 2025, the RSS completed one hundred years. Yet, the century-old organisation that shapes Indian politics and society, remains among the most opaque institutions in the country.
Formally, the RSS admits links with only a small number of organisations
Like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, or Sewa Bharati
Beyond this, it tends to project itself as a loose family of affiliates bound only by shared values.
And it’s careful to keep its distance with organisations it does not openly acknowledge.
That description has largely gone unquestioned. Until now.
Now, a six-year research project called Seeing the Sangh challenges it.
Led by Dr Felix Pal, a lecturer at the University of Western Australia, a team of researchers mapped the Sangh’s network across forty countries.
They cross-checked organisational links using publicly available documents.
The Caravan magazine then fact checked the dataset and finally published it as an interactive map.
What it revealed was a network of over 2,500 organisations tied to the RSS.
These organisations span beyond politics—they sit at the intersection of culture, education, health, and charity. They include feeder schools for military recruitment, media houses, youth hostels, and legal groups.
This is not simply a collection of like-minded bodies. The map shows material connections. Shared leadership, shared addresses, shared events, shared funding streams, including money from abroad.
The RSS’s distance from these organisations is not accidental. It is strategic.
This also means that for those on the outside, the Sangh can feel infinite and unknowable. But it is neither.
What are these organisations? How many are based in south India?
And how does seeing this network change the way we understand the Sangh?
Let me explain.
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Over the last century, The RSS has deliberately kept the full extent of its affiliate organisations vague.
‘Seeing the Sangh’ project set out to demystify this network.
This research has mapped over 2,500 organisations linked to the Sangh globally
2,240 of them are in India.
These include hostels, schools, unions, charities, cultural forums, and advocacy groups.
Outside India, the largest concentration is in the United States, about 107 organisations, followed by Australia with 34 and the UK with 26. A few of them are inactive now.
Within India, Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of these organisations, around 280. followed by Maharashtra with 259, and then Kerala at 212.
Apart from Kerala, Karnataka has 174 organisations while Tamil has 76. Andhra Pradesh follows with 56, and Telangana with 50. Most of these organisations work primarily on education, community outreach, labour rights, and media.
Under filters such as education and community outreach for instance—which would include hostels and schools—Karnataka alone shows at least 28 institutions on the data base. Many of these organisations work with tribal populations. Many of these appear to be clustered around Uttara Karnataka.
In the labour sector, there are 22 unions in Kerala covering estate workers, plantation labourers, toddy tappers, tailors, and motor engineering workers. There are 7 in Tamil Nadu. There are 2 in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana both, which include organisations advocating for fishery workers. There are also railway and factory unions such as the Railway Mazdoor Sangh, particularly active in Karnataka, which has two organisations the labour filer on the database as well.
The Sangh also has a media ecosystem. Other than its own publications, it’s linked to organisations like Hindu Post, Janmabhoomi, Janam TV, and Kurukshetra Publications.
The Sangh is publicly known for its work in charity and culture, but its presence extends into more sensitive areas such as those for military training or defence recruitment, security, labour, and political mobilisation.
There are at least 17 defence related organisations in India
Among the oldest of these is the Central Hindu Military Education Society, founded in 1935. This organisation oversees institutions such as the Bhonsala Military School in Nashik, started by RSS leader Balakrishna Shivram Moonje.
Individuals educated in these institutions have been interrogated in terror related cases, including in the Malegaon blast, for example RSS worker Prabhakar Balwant Kulkarni.
There are also feeder schools that channel students into military institutions.
The research also unearthed more than 400 hostels across India—many with residents from Adivasi communities. While these hostels do not always promote an explicit Hindutva agenda, residents are often encouraged to cultivate political and religious beliefs that eventually align.
Other than this- there are also at least 19 groups that are identified under the filter of “violence” and are linked to RSS. The larger ones in this list are the VHP and Bajrang Dal.
Then there are smaller groups like the Karni Sena. Remember they had vandalised theatres and threatened to chop off Deepika Padukone’s nose during the Padmavat protests?
Or Hindu Jagarana Vedike in Karnataka. Members of this group had attacked a home stay in mangaluru in 2012—assaulting many young men and women who had organised a birthday party.
And the Hindu Raksha Sena in Uttarakhand, which has openly called for ethnic cleansing of Muslims and was involved in the 2014 attack on the AAP office.
The database also lists about half a dozen legal organisations.
They work inside the courts to advance the Hindu right’s agenda.
Some file cases against marginalised communities or dissenting voices.
Others build influence within the legal elite, or defend people accused of religiously motivated crimes.
Put together, this network breaks the idea that the Sangh Parivar simply grew on its own, as a loose ideological movement.
It also shows that many of these organisations are not as independent or separate as they are made out to be.
Which means that the network is also not as vast as it is often imagined to be. The Sangh database shows us a structured social infrastructure that's designed to embed itself into everyday life
But remains formally decentralised and publicly opaque.
The opacity is strategic.
It helps the RSS avoid legal and financial scrutiny. It allows work to be outsourced while preserving plausible deniability.
And it enables the Sangh to convey different messages for different audiences, all at once.
These organisations function like a switchboard. Their links to the larger network can be turned on, turned down, or hidden when needed.
This quiet division of labour is central to how the RSS expands into society.
It helps the Sangh reach a wide variety of people, grow new constituencies, and move into new social spaces.
But the mystique around the Sangh serves another purpose as well. It inflates its image and makes its power seem larger and more organic than it really is.
It creates the impression that today’s Hindu Right is the natural outcome of a spontaneous, bottom up surge. What is being hidden is the fact that all these organisations are mostly supported by the RSS.
Let me take you through a few names
Yuva Zep Prathisthan, Youth Organisation, Giridhar Balasramam or Global village foundation
These names do not immediately seem connected to the Sangh—and the organisations all work in social sectors.
In many countries, the RSS has been operating through organisations that position themselves as the saviours of Hindus. Take a look at how they go about doing that.
In California, for instance, the Hindu American Foundation recently fought claiming that prosecuting caste crimes in the US would amount to violation of religious freedom. They lost.
The Hindu Council UK, which also finds a place in the map, is now at the forefront of opposing the UK's proposal to provide a comprehensive and explicit definition for “anti-Muslim hatred/Islamophobia”.
Now let’s look at why the RSS has been hard to map
It does not operate like a typical political actor and has typically resisted transparency.
It does not publish membership lists.
It does not release a public organisational chart.
It does not offer a clear account of how its many linked organisations relate to one another.
Sometimes it treats linked organisations as fully independent. Sometimes it allows relationships to remain vague. And sometimes it distances itself when controversies arise.
This creates a persistent uncertainty about where the Sangh begins and where it ends.
‘Seeing the Sangh’ approached this confusion with a simple question: what happens if we treat the Sangh as an organisational system rather than an ideology?
An organisation was included only if there was evidence of a material link. That could mean shared office bearers, shared addresses, joint events, financial transfers, or formal parent subsidiary ties.
As I said earlier, this process produced a dataset of over 2,500 organisations connected, in different degrees, to the RSS.
Not a metaphorical family, but a mapped network.
When you look at that network, one pattern stands out.
It is not mainly made up of political fronts or overtly ideological groups.
Medical camps. Disaster relief groups. Student unions. Publishing houses. Diaspora associations.
Yet they are the channels through which people join, legitimacy is built, money moves, and narratives are shaped.
By the time political language appears, the organisational relationship may already exist.
In a democracy, power that is visible can be debated and challenged. Power that is invisible often cannot.
The Sangh’s greatest strength has not been its ideology, but its structure.
That structure is now visible.
And that changes the conversation.
Produced by Megha Mukundan, Script by Pooja Prasanna, Edit by Nikhil Sekhar, Camera by Ajay R.
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