Oligarchy in Modi’s India more pronounced than during the Licence Raj: Christophe Jaffrelot

The French political scientist and sociologist, one of the world’s leading scholars on South Asian politics, discusses how the RSS has spent a century reshaping India’s society.

The RSS turned 100 last year, having grown from a small organisation in Nagpur into a vast network of shakhas and affiliated bodies spread across India. The scale of that expansion helps explain why Christophe Jaffrelot has long argued that the RSS’s central project lies deeper than electoral politics. Its ambition, in his reading, is to reshape Hindu society itself. The RSS reported more than 83,000 daily shakhas across over 51,000 locations in 2025, alongside a much larger network of weekly and monthly activities. As a political scientist and sociologist, Jaffrelot has studied that project for more than three decades, from the Hindu nationalist movement’s early electoral experiments to Gujarat in 2002 to the consolidation of Narendra Modi’s India. Excerpts from the interview:

The Hindu Nationalist Movementand Indian Politics, published by Penguin in 1996 but never reprinted after 2014, said (and I summarise) that the BJP was not in power, but the Sangh Parivar was “constantly strengthening the influence of the RSS combination. The trend, if sustained, will help the latter crystallise a Hindu identity which, in the long term, could challenge the durability of India’s multicultural society”—a prediction most people dismissed when I presented my thesis in seminars. That has always been my main argument: the RSS is primarily interested in conquering society by developing its network of shakhas and a nebula of subsidiaries. Power is not a priority, because the state is an artificial creation compared with the Hindu Samaj, which carries organicist qualities inherited from the characteristics of the caste system. The objective of the RSS is to transform the Hindu Samaj into the Hindu Rashtra by reshaping the psyche of this collective entity.