The Illusion of Tamil Nadu’s Immunity to Hindutva

Following the conclusion of the recent assembly elections in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, the BJP and its NDA alliance rule over 72% of India’s landscape and over 78% of its population. BJP’s unprecedented victory in the West Bengal election was the decisive outcome that led to this expansion of BJP’s control over the country. Power shifted from the hands of Mamata Banerjee-led AITC to the BJP after the latter won 207 out of the 294 seats in contention, capturing a significant majority. Only ten years ago, in the 2016 election in West Bengal, the BJP won only 3 of the 294 seats in contention.

“Fear not!” say the politicians and bourgeois intellectuals of Tamil Nadu. They proclaim that the BJP, and what it stands for — Hindutva, saffron-corporate fascism, and Sanatana Dharma — will never rule Tamil Nadu. “Tamil Nadu, after all, is Periyar’s land; therefore, it will never become a place where a fanatic religious ideology, especially the patriarchal and casteist Hindutva ideology, comes to rule. Although it is home to many temples and is considered a haven for Hindu devotees, it will not give way to religious fanaticism; neither the people nor the politicians of Tamil Nadu will forsake secularism and rational thought,” so we are told.

Those who believe these claims will point to the fact that the BJP declined from 4 seats in 2021 to only 1 seat in the 2026 election in Tamil Nadu. According to them, the fact that TVK, a so-called non-Dravidian party, displaced the DMK and AIADMK and became the ruling party, ending the exclusive power struggle between the Dravidian parties that had existed since 1967, is not a cause for concern about the possibility of Hindutva spreading in Tamil Nadu. After all, Joseph Vijay, TVK’s leader and the new Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, openly declared that his rule is a “new era of real, secular, and social justice.” In his campaigns, he also referred to the BJP as his “ideological enemy.” Therefore, his supporters, and even his political opponents, jointly declared that Tamil Nadu is safely guarded from the rising tide of saffron-corporate fascism and BJP rule. After the election results, the CPI, CPM, and VCK (a Dalitist party in Tamil Nadu) jointly proclaimed that “although our DMK alliance failed to win the majority mark, we succeeded in our goal, i.e., a goal to wipe out the BJP from Tamil Nadu.”

When almost everyone is self-complacent, or rather utterly ignorant, the RSS reads the mandate differently. An article published by the Organiser (the RSS’s mouthpiece), titled “Multidimensional Assessment of Electoral Outcomes,” observes BJP’s victory in West Bengal at the same time as what appear to be its defeats in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and asks, “If Bengal can grow from 3 to 200 seats in 10 years, why can’t Kerala and Tamil Nadu?” The people who passionately claim that Tamil Nadu is immune to BJP’s advances will no doubt scoff at this question. In truth, their confidence in Tamil Nadu’s immunity is completely unwarranted. It shows a complete lack of understanding of how Hindutva fascism has already taken root and is spreading across the country as well as Tamil Nadu, how the “Hindu Rashtra” is already emerging irrespective of election results, and how the BJP, if it wills, can override even basic democratic norms to secure electoral victories. In the specific case of bourgeois electoral parties and intellectuals in Tamil Nadu, who ceaselessly orate and convince the people that Hindutva ideology will never gain prominence in the state, it is not merely a misunderstanding that is on display, but a wilful dishonesty about the situation. Admitting the real nature of the problem would only expose them as complacent toward the rise of saffron-corporate fascism and fundamentally incapable of opposing it.

The BJP is nothing but the political branch of the broader Sangh Parivar, which consists of other large organizations like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), among others. These organizations themselves are subordinate to the RSS, which acts as a “mother organization” for these organizations as well as thousands of other formal and informal, secret and semi-secret organizations. The proper measure of the extent of Hindutva fascism’s prominence in different states, then, is not simply how many seats the BJP wins in those states, but the extent of the RSS’s presence, influence, and operations within them.

In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, while the BJP has won only 3 seats and 1 seat respectively in this year’s elections, the RSS has for a long time maintained a vast network of subordinate and proxy organizations and has routinely conducted programs to saffronize people into Hindutva extremism and mobilize them as a paramilitary force capable of using violent means to fulfill the Sangh’s needs. Any member of the RSS must be understood as a foot soldier of fascism; they are both ideologically and physically trained to help establish a Hindu Rashtra. The RSS growing in number must therefore be properly understood as the growth of “a fascist army.”

The RSS has used three strategies at the grassroots level to expand itself in Tamil Nadu. First, stoking religious polarization and instigating communal riots, where a section of the population is spontaneously mobilized to fight for Hindutva ideology. Second, conducting direct recruitment and indoctrination programs like “Shakhas.” Third, indirectly recruiting and indoctrinating people through its superficially secularized organizations like Bharatiya Kisan Sangh (farmers’ union), Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (labour union), and its social service programs like Seva Bharati. These are the strategies the RSS has used across the country, and in Tamil Nadu too, to strengthen its numbers.

In 2024, a dispute over Karthigai Dheepam in Thiruparankundram emerged. The Hindutva fascists argued that the Dheepam must be lit next to the Sikandar Dargah on the Thiruparankundram hill, instead of at the usually designated location. While the dispute is currently awaiting a ruling from the Supreme Court, past rulings have made it clear that the court will likely rule in favour of the fascists. Looking back at 2024, Udaiyar, the state deputy secretary of Hindu Makkal Katchi, stated that “the BJP can only grow in Tamil Nadu by instigating communal riots.” True to his word, Hindu Makkal Katchi and Hindu Munnani actively instigated several riots and communal clashes during the dispute. Along similar lines, H. Raja (a senior BJP leader) openly stated that Thiruparankundram would become “another Ayodhya.” Based on these statements, we can expect that the lamp-lighting issue will not be conducted peacefully, but will instead include attempts to demolish the Sikandar Dargah and stoke communal tensions. The events in Thiruparankundram and the discourse surrounding them are not new; the RSS has used the instigation of communal riots as a strategy to radicalize and recruit Hindus into its fold in Tamil Nadu ever since it first gained prominence in the state during the 1960s. The riots against Christians in Kanyakumari over the falsely proclaimed “Vivekananda Rock Memorial” in the 1960s, reconversion programs targeted against Christians and Muslims such as Ghar Wapsi that began after the Kanyakumari clashes and continue even today, the 1982 Mandaikadu riots, the 1998 Coimbatore riots, and the current Thiruparankundram dispute are only some of the numerous examples of riots consciously instigated by the RSS for the larger purpose of mobilizing the Hindu population against minorities and toward the establishment of a fascist Hindu Rashtra.

Even more significant as a means of mobilizing people for the cause of Hindu Rashtra is the direct and indirect recruitment that the RSS carries out in Tamil Nadu through its “Shakhas” and affiliate organizations. The RSS has now established over 4,000 Shakhas in Tamil Nadu, through which it conducts daily and weekly “religious classes.” These Shakhas, which attract both children and their parents and occur primarily on school campuses during after-school hours and on weekends, are intended to convert attendees into fully radicalized and mobilized Hindutva fascists.

The RSS successfully established the “Kanyakumari Model” in Tamil Nadu. Under the pretext of “Sunday classes” and “Samaya Vaguppukal” (religious classes), the RSS is conducting 1,150 classes in Kanyakumari district alone. When an attendee completes training in the school program, he is awarded the “Vidhya Jothi” title and compelled to declare that he is “prepared to serve, by any means possible, the ideology of Hindutva and remain loyal to his fellow Hindus,” who are imagined as the sole ethnic makeup of the fascist Hindu Rashtra. According to 2022 reports, in Kanyakumari alone, around 50,000–55,000 students attend these classes. RSS officials fondly refer to their success in Kanyakumari as the “Kanyakumari Model” and express their intent to implement this model across all districts of Tamil Nadu.

The RSS’s affiliate organizations essentially strive to obtain the “Vidhya Jothi” allegiance from their respective groups of members. The ABVP, which now operates in all 38 districts of Tamil Nadu and contains over 1 lakh members in the state, mobilizes the adult student population; Bharatiya Kisan Sangh mobilizes farmers; Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh mobilizes labourers; another affiliate mobilizes fishermen, and so on. As per the testimonies of RSS affiliates themselves, farmers are mobilized by having each farmers’ union branch organize celebrations and educational programs like Balaram Jayanthi, Gomatha Poojai, and Bharat Mata Poojai. Once a year, farmers’ unions organize 15-day programs meant to religiously radicalize their members, using propaganda events on topics like the sacredness of cows and indigenous agriculture to bring members into the RSS fold. While all electoral parties and organizations like trade unions engage in mass mobilization, the RSS uniquely mobilizes its members, regardless of which affiliate organization they belong to, toward religious and nationalist extremism and fascist ideology.

As stressed earlier, the real face of fascism, the one that grows in Tamil Nadu irrespective of electoral results, is the number of fascist foot soldiers that has consistently grown for decades. Historical data points out that the RSS’s grassroots successes are eventually followed by electoral victories for the BJP in various states. As such, the politicians and intellectuals of Tamil Nadu who claim that the BJP will never enter the state make two grave mistakes. First, insofar as they leave the RSS’s growth unchecked — and all of them invariably do — they do not possess sufficient empirical basis to claim that the BJP will not succeed electorally in Tamil Nadu. More importantly, while the RSS grows as it currently does in Tamil Nadu, the state is already succumbing to Hindutva fascism. In this context, even if Tamil Nadu’s electoral parties limit the BJP from making advances in the electoral sphere, real fascism still spreads through the state, unbothered by the theatrics of electoral parties. Even without the BJP sitting as the ruling government, the RSS and the Hindutva fascists can become — and indeed are becoming — the most powerful political force in Tamil Nadu.

Simply put, the so-called anti-fascist INDIA bloc cannot obstruct the RSS’s growth in Tamil Nadu, for this requires recognizing that the electoral path is useless and taking the struggle to the streets, which no electoral party is prepared to do. The solution, then, that genuine revolutionary, anti-fascist, and democratic forces ought to adopt is to brush away the unfounded belief in these hijacked, farcical elections and form anti-fascist fronts in every nook and corner of the country that are ideologically rooted. Such fronts must propagate among the people why the RSS and its proxies must be banned in order for democracy to prevail, while exposing every piece of propaganda put forward by the fascist clique. These fronts must be ideologically assured and ready to convey to the working and oppressed masses the anti-working-class nature of the RSS and its forthcoming “fascist terrorist dictatorship.” They must also be prepared to defend themselves against the fascists, for history — including recent ABVP attacks on anti-fascist student demonstrations — shows that fascists are prepared to win political battles through violence. Success in conveying anti-fascist and class-conscious politics to the masses should therefore be backed by the ability to defend those engaged in ideological struggle.