The Unfinished Subversion: How the BJP and RSS are Redrawing India’s Constitutional Order

 

 

India Special Report

The Unfinished Subversion

How the BJP and RSS are redrawing India’s constitutional order — and why the project may be closer to completion than its critics wish to believe

 

HYDERABAD — May 2026

 

FOR DECADES, the ideological blueprint was hiding in plain sight. In 1957 — barely a decade after independence — the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, forerunner of today’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), published an election manifesto that called linguistic states a fragmentation of Indian nationhood. The reorganisation of India’s map along language lines, carried out between 1953 and 1956, was denounced as a concession to “many nations” within a single country. The RSS, the Hindu-nationalist mothership from which the Jana Sangh sprang, had gone further still: its founding ideologue, M.S. Golwalkar, had argued that Muslims who did not pledge allegiance to Hindu culture should forfeit the rights of citizenship.

Those words spent the better part of seventy years confined to the margins of Indian public life. Today, in the assessment of Christophe Jaffrelot, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Hindu nationalism, they are being enacted. “This is not a new story,” says Professor Jaffrelot, speaking in a wide-ranging interview for Conversations with Nilanjan. “It is the end of a long journey that they may now be almost in a position to achieve.”

“Constantly the RSS has tried to reduce the domination of Narendra Modi over the Sangh Parivar — and failed.”

 

A Unitary State by Stealth

The BJP’s most recent run of state-election victories has brought that long journey measurably closer to its destination. The conquest of West Bengal — long the last major stronghold of the opposition — is described by analysts as a trophy of historic significance. Combined with growing proximity to the parliamentary supermajority required to amend the constitution, the party now commands a political landscape that would have been unrecognisable to the founders of independent India.

The goal, as articulated by Jaffrelot, is the gradual construction of a unitary state: centralising power in Delhi, eroding the autonomy of India’s linguistic and regional identities, and steadily narrowing the civic space available to minorities. Delimitation — the redrawing of parliamentary constituencies, expected in the coming years — would entrench the Hindi-belt heartland of BJP support as a near-permanent political majority. In Assam, gerrymandering of constituencies has already been documented on an unprecedented scale, engineered to minimise the influence of Muslim voters.

To observers schooled only in conventional electoral politics, the pace of change can seem gradual — even reversible. Jaffrelot disagrees. “We need to read what Hindu nationalists have said and written over 100 years,” he argues. The agenda has not shifted. Only the opportunity to execute it has arrived.

 

The Emperor and the Organisation

The relationship between Narendra Modi and the RSS is one of the more consequential power struggles in contemporary Indian politics — and one of the least visible. The RSS abhors the cult of personality. Its founding ideology, as expressed by Golwalkar, demanded the suppression of “angularities”: the individual subordinated entirely to the collective. Politicians were necessary instruments, not celebrated figures.

Mr Modi has systematically defied that logic. When the RSS withheld its canvassers in Gujarat ahead of the 2007 state elections, he built a parallel power structure of his own, relating directly to voters through media networks and rallies. In 2014, summoned to RSS headquarters in Nagpur before the general election, he declined to attend. His campaign was run from Ahmedabad. After his victory, the RSS attempted to block Amit Shah’s appointment as BJP president, and failed again.

The pattern, says Jaffrelot, is consistent: “Constantly the RSS has tried to reduce the domination of Narendra Modi over the Sangh Parivar — and failed.” The organisation has accommodated itself to his dominance because, on the substantive agenda — the treatment of Muslims, the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, the appointment of a high-powered committee to study alleged demographic ‘imbalances’ — Mr Modi delivers.

“The RSS wants to control society, not the state. The state is artificial. Society is where they have always done their work.”

The probable succession dynamic reinforces the point. Jaffrelot’s assessment is that the RSS will bide its time until Mr Modi leaves the scene, then reassert its role as kingmaker. Nitin Gadkari, a senior BJP figure with strong RSS roots, remains its preferred candidate for a future leadership contest. Whether he can attract sufficient votes from the general public — the essential commodity Mr Modi has provided in abundance — is another matter. The forthcoming Uttar Pradesh state elections in 2027 may clarify whether Yogi Adityanath, the state’s chief minister, can emerge as an independent electoral force.

 

The Deeper State

In the vocabulary of South Asian politics, the “deep state” is a Pakistani concept: the army acting through civilian facades to retain control over elected governments. India’s predicament, in Jaffrelot’s framing, is structurally different and, in some respects, more durable. He calls it the “deeper state” — a network of RSS-affiliated civil-society organisations, vigilante groups and ideological cadres that penetrates Indian society at every level, and which will not dissolve with any change of government.

The RSS has, over its century-long existence, established affiliated organisations covering lawyers, teachers, former military officers, students (through the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), and virtually every other professional and social group. In BJP-governed states, cow-protection vigilantes supplement and, in some respects, supplant the police — performing acts that are illegal but, in the eyes of their perpetrators and a substantial swathe of public opinion, divinely legitimate. “They want to crisscross society in order to control society,” says Jaffrelot. “The state is artificial. Society is where they have always done their work.”

This social infrastructure is precisely why Jaffrelot believes India’s trajectory differs from that of other electoral-autocratic regimes. In Hungary, Turkey or Poland, a change of government can produce a reasonably rapid normalisation. In India, the deeper state — the vigilante networks, the ideologically captured institutions, the RSS’s co-extensive presence in civil society — would outlast any electoral reversal.

 

The Erosion of Institutions

The institutional degradation that has accompanied the BJP’s ascent is, in Jaffrelot’s analysis, the product of three reinforcing mechanisms. The first is the post-retirement sinecure: judges, election commissioners and senior civil servants who conduct themselves to the government’s satisfaction can expect gubernatorial appointments, Rajya Sabha memberships and other emoluments. The second is the selection filter: individuals perceived as ideologically uncongenial are not appointed in the first place. The third — and perhaps most consequential in the long run — is the genuine spread of Hindu nationalist sentiment among the professional classes, rendering explicit quid pro quos increasingly unnecessary.

The Election Commission of India offers the sharpest illustration. Under T.N. Seshan in the 1990s, the commission was so assertive that it rescheduled elections the week before they were due, nullifying the expenditure of every candidate. Its current incarnation, critics argue, applies the Model Code of Conduct selectively: opposition leaders face show-cause notices for violations that BJP politicians commit with impunity.

The judiciary has undergone a comparable transformation. The collegium system, intended to insulate the Supreme Court from political interference, now produces appointees broadly congenial to the government. “The independence has gone,” says Jaffrelot — a conclusion that, however contested, is shared by a growing number of legal scholars inside India.

The 2024 Lok Sabha elections, in which the BJP fell short of a parliamentary majority and was obliged to rely on coalition partners, briefly appeared to presage a new competitive equilibrium. Jaffrelot’s reading is more sombre: the elections demonstrated that Mr Modi could lose, and the lesson he drew was to ensure that the conditions for loss were systematically removed. Subsequent state elections — Maharashtra, Haryana, West Bengal — have, in his assessment, been conducted on an increasingly uneven playing field, with voter rolls, delimitation and access to state machinery tilted against the opposition.

“We have entered a new era. We cannot look at these elections as fair — not only because of the press, not only because of money, but because of structural changes to the rules of the game itself.”

 

A Social Movement as the Last Resort

The question of whether anything can reverse this trajectory is where Jaffrelot’s analysis becomes most provisional — and, cautiously, most hopeful. Electoral competition, as presently constituted, he regards as a diminishing vehicle for change. Boycotts by the opposition are self-defeating: they legitimise the ruling party if they are partial, and require total coordination that is practically impossible to achieve. Neighbouring countries — Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka — have experienced political ruptures that came not through elections but through mass social movements, often driven by youth and economic grievance.

India’s economy, Jaffrelot argues, provides the fuel for such a movement. Even before the disruptions of the 2025-26 global commodity shock — oil prices, gas, fertilisers — chronic unemployment and inadequate investment had left the country’s economic model under strain. The young, in particular, have accumulated grievances that conventional political structures have so far failed to channel.

The signal he points to is telling: when the Chief Justice of India used the word “cockroach” to describe the victims of policy failure, the response was not shame but a social-media movement in which the marginalised claimed the epithet with defiant pride. “Who would have expected such a huge backlash?” asks Jaffrelot. “Social media amplifies and may help coordinate. We will see.”

But he is careful to distinguish a potential new movement from the Anna Hazare agitation of 2011-12 — which he regards as a largely fabricated political exercise, engineered at least partly by RSS-affiliated networks seeking to destabilise the Congress-led government. A genuine youth movement, he argues, would be structurally different: spontaneous, leaderless in its origins, and resistant to recuperation by established politicians. The challenge is precisely that it would need to produce its own leaders from within — a feat that has proved elusive at scale in the democratic backsliding episodes of other countries.

The RSS’s own incentive structure, he adds, may impose limits on how far the organisation can go in suppressing such a movement. An organisation that defines its mission as becoming co-extensive with Hindu society cannot indefinitely position itself against the rage of Hindu youth. Whether that internal contradiction will prove decisive is, by Jaffrelot’s own admission, unknowable. What is clear is that the architecture of authoritarian consolidation in India — patient, ideologically coherent, and a century in the making — is more advanced than most of its critics have been willing to acknowledge.

 

 

This report draws on an 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 (2021), among other works.