A century and one year after K.B. Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on Vijayadashami, 1925, Union Home Minister Amit Shah marked the organisation's foundation day on Tuesday, 20 October 2026 with a tribute calling its volunteers the living flame of national devotion.

Posting in Hindi on X, Shah extended 'heartfelt greetings' (hārdik shubhkāmnāen) to all RSS volunteers, describing their work as a 'Bhagirath kārya' — a Herculean, near-mythological effort — in nurturing the roots of Indian culture, igniting the spirit of patriotism across society, and connecting youth to the project of nation-building. The reference to the Bhagirath legend, the sage who laboured to bring the Ganga to earth, carries deliberate cultural weight: it frames the RSS's century-long mission not as politics but as civilisational service.

101 years of the RSS: from Nagpur to a national network

The RSS was established on Vijayadashami, 27 September 1925, in Nagpur by Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a physician turned organiser who believed India's freedom struggle needed a disciplined, values-driven volunteer corps as its social backbone. What began as a small shakha — a daily morning drill-and-discussion session in a local ground — has grown over a hundred years into one of the world's largest volunteer organisations, with a presence in every Indian state and a constellation of affiliated bodies spanning education, labour, tribal welfare and farmer outreach.

Shah's message highlighted three pillars that the RSS publicly claims as its mandate: sewa (service), sanskār (cultural formation), and rāshtrabh akti (patriotism). His closing lines cast this as an 'unbroken stream' that will 'kindle the immortal flame of love for one's homeland in the hearts of generations to come, for ages upon ages.'

BJP and RSS: an annual ritual with ideological roots

Senior BJP leaders issuing Vijayadashami greetings to the RSS is a long-established practice — part of the public vocabulary through which India's ruling party acknowledges the organisation widely regarded as its ideological parent. The BJP emerged from the Jana Sangh, itself founded by RSS pracharaks, and the two organisations have maintained a symbiotic, if formally separate, relationship ever since.

Shah's language — 'Rashtra-pratham' (nation-first), 'Maa Bharati ki seva' (service to Mother India), 'aatmanirbhar Bharat' (self-reliant India) — weaves the RSS's founding vocabulary together with the current government's flagship programme branding, a rhetorical continuity that underscores how deeply the ruling dispensation draws on the RSS ideological well.

As the RSS enters its second century, the question its admirers and critics alike will watch is whether its vast volunteer network translates cultural mission into measurable social outcomes — in education, disaster relief, and tribal development — or remains primarily a mobilisation engine for electoral politics. Shah's tribute, for its part, bets firmly on the former reading.