The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right (New edition)

About the Book

A COMPREHENSIVE PROFILING OF ALL THE MAJOR LEADERS OF THE INDIAN RIGHT-WING, NOW THE SINGLE BIGGEST FACTOR IN INDIAN POLITICS.
A fog of mystery surrounds the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—or RSS—the largest cadre-based organisation in the world. Veteran journalist and author of the bestseller Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay lays bare its fascinating, unique and perhaps startling world. He also chronicles the personal and political journeys of the most important men (and a woman) of the Hindu right wing, digging up little-known but revealing facts about them.
From Hegdewar, the founder of the RSS and its first sarsanghchalak, Savarkar, Golwalkar, Balasaheb Deoras, Syama Prasad Mukherjee and Deendayal Upadhyaya to Vijaya Raje Scindia, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, Ashok Singhal and Bal Thackeray, all the major leaders of the political right wing are reckoned with in this book. Through individual stories of the organisation’s tallest leaders, a bigger picture emerges: in spite of a three-time ban on the RSS in a multicultural and secular India—and despite the RSS’s insistence that it has no truck with electoral politics—the group is, and will continue to be, the hand that rocks the BJP’s cradle.