The Deeper State

 

The Deeper State

India’s transformation goes far beyond elections. A century of RSS groundwork has built a parallel power structure so deeply embedded in society that no ballot box can easily dislodge it.

HYDERABAD — May 2026

WHEN ANALYSTS SPEAK of a “deep state,” they generally mean something visible and violent: generals who pull levers behind a civilian facade, as Pakistan’s military has done for most of that country’s history. India’s predicament is simultaneously more subtle and more permanent. Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Hindu nationalism, has coined a different term for it: the “deeper state.” It is not a structure imposed from the top down. It is one that has grown, root by root, from the bottom up — woven so tightly into the fabric of Indian society that the distinction between the Sangh Parivar and the nation it claims to represent is becoming genuinely difficult to draw.

The distinction between the two concepts is not merely academic. Pakistan’s deep state is fragile in the way that all top-down structures are fragile: remove the generals, and the architecture collapses. India’s deeper state is designed to be immune to exactly that vulnerability. It does not depend on who sits in South Block. It has already colonised the spaces between institutions — the neighbourhoods, the professional associations, the police beats, the university campuses — that governments in Delhi rarely reach.

“The RSS does not want to control the government. The state is artificial, coming from above. They want to crisscross society until the organisation and the social fabric become one.”

A Century of Groundwork

To understand how this came to be, one must accept a starting premise that India’s secular intelligentsia was slow to absorb: the RSS has been extraordinarily patient. Founded in 1925 by K.B. Hedgewar in Nagpur, the organisation never mistook the government for the prize. Its goal, articulated with remarkable consistency across a century of leadership, was to make the RSS co-extensive with Hindu society — not to win elections, but to become the air that Indian public life breathes.

Golwalkar, Hedgewar’s successor and the organisation’s most influential ideologue, set the template. He did not want charismatic leaders — what he called “angularities” — because individuals draw attention to themselves rather than to the collective. He wanted cadres: disciplined, ideologically saturated, and present in every social stratum. Over the following decades, the RSS constructed exactly that.

The RSS Network: A Society Within Society •  Education — Vidya Bharati runs thousands of schools; teachers’ unions operate in most states •  Legal — the Adhivakta Parishad organises lawyers; its reach extends to district courts •  Security — the Purva Sainik Sena networks former army and police officers •  Students — the ABVP dominates student-union elections at major universities •  Labour — the BMS is India’s largest trade-union federation by membership •  Health — the Arogya Bharati operates clinics and hospitals in rural areas •  Rural & slums — shakhas (daily drilling sessions) operate in villages and urban slums alike

Jaffrelot’s argument is that this network did the work that India’s secular parties neglected. While the Congress, and later the regional parties, focused on the upper tier of politics — elections, coalitions, patronage — the RSS was building a capillary system that reached every professional guild and every neighbourhood. “This is for me the main mistake of many of those sitting in Delhi,” says Jaffrelot, “ignoring what was going on in the countryside, in the slums, because the Sangh Parivar has been active in each and every sector of society.”

The Ayodhya movement of the late 1980s and 1990s was the hinge on which this long preparation turned into mass politics. The campaign to build a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Masjid was not merely a religious dispute; it was a national mobilisation that shifted the emotional centre of gravity of a vast swathe of Hindu public opinion. By the time the masjid was demolished in 1992, the RSS and its political arm, the BJP, had transformed from a fringe movement into a majoritarian force. The ground had been salted for decades. The Ayodhya fire merely made the growth visible.

The Vigilante Supplement

The deeper state does not operate only through registered organisations. Its most operationally significant component is harder to map: the network of vigilante groups that supplement — and in some contexts, supplant — the official apparatus of the state.

In BJP-governed states, cow-protection squads patrol national highways, stopping trucks suspected of carrying cattle to slaughter. When they find what they are looking for, the consequences can be lethal. Drivers — disproportionately Muslim — have been lynched. The actions are illegal. The men who perform them rarely face prosecution. The reason, in Jaffrelot’s analysis, is that illegality and illegitimacy are not the same thing: “What they do is legitimate to patrol the highway, to check the trucks, to arrest the truck, to lynch the driver — that’s illegal, but it’s in the name of protecting Hinduism, and therefore they get away with it.”

This is precisely what the concept of the deeper state is designed to capture. The official police lack the manpower, and in many cases the legal authority, to do what the vigilantes do. But the vigilantes can do it, and the state — tacitly or explicitly — approves. The result is a layered enforcement architecture in which official institutions set the broad parameters, and informal networks enforce the ideological content, often more efficiently than the state itself could manage.

“Their actions are illegal — but illegality is different from illegitimacy. Performed in the name of Hinduism, they are considered righteous by their supporters, and so they go unpunished.”

Hollowing Out the Referee

Independent institutions have historically served as the circuit-breakers of democratic backsliding: courts that overturn unlawful executive action, election commissions that enforce the rules of competition, a press that documents what the powerful prefer hidden. In India, all three have been systematically weakened over the past decade — not through single dramatic acts of abolition, but through the patient manipulation of appointments, incentives, and ideological culture.

Three interlocking mechanisms have done most of the work. The first is the retirement prize: judges, election commissioners and senior civil servants who conduct themselves to the government’s satisfaction can expect appointments as governors, Rajya Sabha members, or heads of regulatory bodies. The expectation is rarely articulated openly; it does not need to be. The second mechanism is the appointment filter: candidates perceived as ideologically congenial are selected in the first place, particularly as changes to the judicial collegium system have given the executive greater indirect influence over who reaches the bench.

The third mechanism is the most insidious, because it requires no transaction at all. Hindu nationalism has become, in Jaffrelot’s phrase, “all-pervasive” as a mindset among the elite and bureaucratic classes. Islamophobia is no longer a fringe sentiment that must be disguised for the sake of professional respectability; in many quarters, it is the unremarkable baseline. Officials who discriminate against minorities, or who look the other way when vigilantes act, may not be doing so for personal gain. They may simply believe it is right.

The Election Commission of India offers the most legible illustration of this decay. Under T.N. Seshan in the 1990s, the commission was so fiercely independent that it rescheduled elections the week before they were due, nullifying the expenditure of every candidate who had spent money in anticipation. His successor, J.M. Lyngdoh, presided over the 2002 Gujarat elections — held in the aftermath of the pogrom — with comparable rigour. The current commission is described by critics across the political spectrum as a shadow of that institution: show-cause notices for violating the Model Code of Conduct are issued routinely to opposition politicians and rarely to the ruling party. “Personalities matter,” says Jaffrelot. “If you don’t have the right people, no legal protection for independence will make any difference.”

Tilting the Field

The 2024 Lok Sabha elections produced the most significant jolt to this system in a decade. The BJP, for the first time since 2014, fell short of a parliamentary majority. It was forced to govern in coalition. For a brief moment, the structural vulnerabilities of one-party dominance were exposed.

Jaffrelot’s reading of what followed is sobering. The elections demonstrated that Mr Modi could lose. And if there is one inference he believes the ruling dispensation drew from that near-miss, it is that the ordinary rules of democratic competition could not be relied upon to produce the right result. The political playing field — already tilted by vastly unequal access to financial resources, by the capture of most national television, and by the systematic use of investigative agencies against opposition leaders — has been tilted further still.

How the Playing Field is Being Tilted •  Delimitation — the forthcoming redrawing of constituencies is expected to entrench northern BJP strongholds as a near-permanent majority in the Lok Sabha •  Gerrymandering — in Assam, the redrawing of assembly constituencies has already been documented as designed to minimise the influence of Muslim voters •  Disenfranchisement — a high-powered committee appointed to study alleged ‘demographic imbalances’ signals the direction of travel on citizenship rights •  Financial asymmetry — electoral bond disclosures confirmed that the BJP received the overwhelming majority of corporate political donations •  Media capture — the consolidation of national television ownership among conglomerates sympathetic to the ruling party has narrowed the space for adversarial journalism

The metaphor Jaffrelot reaches for is sport: “A hockey field that slopes so that it is easy to shoot into your opponent’s goal, but you cannot shoot because it is a very steep climb for you.” The question of whether elections conducted on such a field can any longer be called free and fair is one that India’s constitutional courts have been reluctant to answer.

Why This is Hard to Undo

What makes the deeper state conceptually distinct from ordinary authoritarianism — and practically more durable — is its resilience to electoral reversal. In Hungary, Turkey or Poland, a change of government has produced, or at least credibly threatens to produce, a meaningful normalisation. The institutions of the state, however damaged, remain recoverable in principle, because the networks that sustained the authoritarian project were primarily political and governmental.

In India, the RSS’s networks are social. They exist in the spaces between institutions — in the shakha on the street corner, in the professional association that controls bar-exam committees, in the retired police officer who trains young men in the ideology of Hindu protection. Those networks do not dissolve when a government changes. The vigilante who lynched a truck driver in 2018 is not made accountable by a Congress victory in 2029. The IAS officer whose sympathies lie with the Sangh does not become a disinterested servant of the state when a new minister arrives.

This is the grim logic of what Jaffrelot describes. India is not merely experiencing a government that is ideologically objectionable to some of its citizens. It is experiencing the embedding of an ideology so deeply into its social tissue that the question of reversibility is genuinely open. “In all the countries around India,” he notes, “it is not via electoral processes mostly that changes have occurred on the political scene.”

“The vigilante networks are deeply rooted in society. They will not go away when a government changes. That is the fundamental difference from every other case of democratic backsliding in the region.”

The Only Remaining Lever

If elections are insufficient, and boycotts self-defeating — a partial boycott legitimises the winner; a total boycott requires a unanimity of opposition that is practically inconceivable — what remains? Jaffrelot’s answer is cautious but not nihilistic: a spontaneous, youth-led social movement, triggered by economic crisis, is the one mechanism that the deeper state is not designed to absorb.

The economic conditions for such a movement are, by his assessment, already present. Chronic unemployment, particularly among the educated young, has become what he calls “all-pervasive.” The disruptions of the 2025-26 commodity shock — oil, gas, fertilisers — have amplified pre-existing structural failures. India’s growth story, for a significant portion of its population, has not produced the dignity or security that was promised. That gap between expectation and reality is the kindling of historical mass movements.

A signal of the potential was visible when the Chief Justice of India used the word “cockroach” in open court to describe the victims of policy failure. The response was not shame but defiance: a social-media movement in which the marginalised claimed the epithet with sardonic pride, demonstrating a capacity for rapid collective action that organised politics had not anticipated. Jaffrelot reads it as a harbinger. “Social media amplifies and may help coordinate,” he says. “We will see.”

The comparison he is careful to make is with the Anna Hazare anti-corruption agitation of 2011-13 — which he regards as, in significant part, a fabricated movement, with RSS-affiliated elements operating behind the scenes to destabilise the Congress-led government. The cases brought under its pressure — 2G, Coalgate and others — collapsed in court. A genuine youth movement, he argues, would be structurally different: spontaneous in its origins, resistant to recuperation by existing political parties, and compelled to generate its own leadership from within rather than borrowing credibility from established figures.

The final constraint is the RSS’s own internal logic. An organisation that defines its mission as being co-extensive with Hindu society cannot indefinitely position itself against a wave of rage among Hindu youth. If the movement is large enough — if the economic despair is widespread enough, if the sense of betrayal cuts deep enough — the RSS may find that it cannot suppress the movement without forfeiting the social legitimacy that is its most valuable asset. Whether that contradiction will prove decisive is the question that Jaffrelot, with characteristic scholarly caution, declines to answer. The conditions for asking it, he suggests, are being assembled.

This article draws on an extended interview with Christophe Jaffrelot, Senior Research Fellow at Sciences Po’s CERI and Professor at King’s College London, conducted by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay for Conversations with Nilanjan. Professor Jaffrelot is the author of The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (1996) and Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (Princeton, 2021).