During the past hundred years, Hindu nationalists have amassed what is arguably the largest Right-ward apparatus to inflict the idea and architecture of an ultranationalist, majoritarian state on India.Routed through society and culture, kinship, difference, revisionist history, ideology, morality, political economy and national identity, Hindu nationalism has built a massive cadre via the approbation of caste, religionisation, securitisation of borders and minoritisation.Manoeuvring social control through marginalisation, mobilisation and exclusion, the onset of majoritarianism in the decades when Hindu nationalists were not in elected office was bolstered by political conflict and iniquitous governance. This led to the eventual consolidation of state power by the Hindu Right in 2014, officiated by Narendra Modi.Hindu nationalism’s history predates South Asia’s decolonisation from British rule and India’s inception as a nation-state in 1947. In 1915, the Akhil Bharatiya (All India) Hindu Mahasabha (great assembly) was formed to integrate Hindus differentiated by place, history, language and culture, and generate antipathy to the Muslim League, as well as the Indian National Congress.The conceptual, doctrinal and devotional premise of Hindu nationalism was to configure “Hinduness,” or Hindutva (Hindu Tatva or principles), defined in 1923 by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a founding figure of the Hindu Mahasabha. In a pamphlet entitled “Hindutva,” Savarkar stated: “Hindutva is not a word but a history”.To administer Hinduness, an array of organisations emerged in the past hundred years, known as the Sangh Parivar, that comprise the Hindu nationalist “family.” By the 1940s, the Sangh Parivar exploded across what became “India,” operationalising centres and community induction via its ideology and practices, including in conflict areas such as Assam and in the neo/colonial administration of Kashmir.Principal organisations of the Sangh Parivar maintain offices nationwide, each totalling between a few dozen and hundreds of branches. Supreme among them is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers Association), of which Modi is a flagbearer.The RSS, founded in Nagpur in 1925, is Hindutva’s ideological and cultural core, together with the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), instituted in Mumbai in 1964. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the parliamentary fulcrum, was formally created in 1980.The cadre of the Sangh Parivar reportedly numbers between 50 and 70 million persons at present. Its workers and volunteers are affiliated with one or more of its organisations. Extensive recruitment and training of youth and members take place in vast swathes of the country encompassing rural and urban areas and peri-urban zones. Members who are inducted into special units receive training in leadership, grassroots mobilisation and violent agitation and armed action.The RSSThe RSS is a leading architect of the Sangh Parivar and Hindu nationalism. The organisation is reportedly not registered as a charity and functions as “a body of individuals” while it is exempt from taxes. Volunteers and members associated with the organisation have reportedly been instrumental to operationalising everyday and spectacular violence, their imprint purportedly evinced in every organised event of political violence against religious minority communities since 1947.M.S. Golwalkar, an early RSS ideologue, professed admiration for Nazis: “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic [sic] Races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.” He continued, “the non-Hindu…may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges… not even citizen’s rights.”The arc of RSS subjecthood spans the “soft” nationalists who enact its temperate values to the extremists who exemplify its most despotic principles. Collectively, they prey upon inequity, dissension, brokenness and the trauma of partitions past, weaponising the fault lines of religion and belonging to divide and brutalise communities, neighbours and kin.Today, members of the RSS are students, tech-workers, educators, engineers, bankers, politicians, farmers, entrepreneurs, medical professionals, lawmakers, home makers, daily wage labourers and scientists.The RSS grassroots cadre are trained in action and activism that supports Hindutva’s ideology and mandate to command and reimagine government, bureaucracy, education, state forces, legislation and the judicature. In side-stepping accountability to massified violence and pogroms, the RSS has reportedly claimed that it does not preserve a roster of cadres. In contrast, Hindu nationalists have alleged their affiliation with the RSS, broadcasting such association as a rallying cry.The RSS allegedly concentrated on the development of paramilitary activities and those that advanced cultural homogeneity. They also initiated a cooperative relation with the British and set themselves apart from the anti-colonial movement. As early as 1946, three workers arrived in the Assam province to originate RSS chapters. In 1983, a pogrom in Nellie, Assam, targeted Bangla-descent Muslims. By 2016, the RSS reportedly had 830 centres across 672 locations in Assam.A member of the RSS, Nathuram Godse, assassinated M.K. Gandhi in January 1948. While Godse had stated after that he had left the RSS, records reportedly indicated to the contrary.The Government of India proscribed the RSS in 1948, arresting 20,000 members. The ban was lifted in 1949. The RSS was banned again during the national emergency imposed by the Indira Gandhi government between 1975 and 1977. The Janata Party coalition, formed in 1977, secured the elections and halted the emergency that year while it also rescinded the ban on the RSS.Led by the RSS, the Hindu Right regimented their role in the development of national culture, seeking to distort the constitutional separation of religion and state. The organisation fomented nationalist fervour to sustain the premise and purpose of majoritarianism and the majoritarian state.The RSS framed Hinduisation as a counter to the de-Hinduisation forced by the British. It made Hindus analogous to “India,” normalising the religionisation of violence as a necessary instrument to deliver and sanctify Hindu-Indian identity. Casteism, segregation and repression encoded the Sangh Parivar’s treatment of Adivasis, Dalits and religious “Others,” who were denied employment and entry into educational institutions, temples and social events.By 1984, the VHP led a movement to consecrate a temple to Ram, a Hindu male deity, by displacing and destroying the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Also in 1984, the alleged militant faction of Hindu nationalism, the Bajrang Dal, was formed.In October of 1984, in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Sikh communities in Delhi were targeted by Hindu nationalist mobs, resulting in widespread sexual violence against women, the demolition of private property and the killing more than 2,733 Sikhs.These horrific events were followed by further mass violence by the Sangh Parivar. During 1992-1993, an estimated 200,000 Hindutva activists targeted and razed the Babri Masjid, provoking nationwide violence against Muslims. In 1998-1999, anti-Christian violence precipitated in Gujarat and elsewhere.Gujarat, Odisha, MuzaffarnagarIn March 2002, while the Modi-led BJP government ruled Gujarat, Hindu pilgrims were killed in a train fire in Godhra town. In the massive political violence that followed, Hindu nationalist armed mobs attacked Muslims across Gujarat, targeting people, attacking property, stealing, assaulting, raping and gang raping, torching, lynching, and killing people individually and in groups, shattering Muslim communities, neighbourhoods and worlds. Investigations later confirmed that the pogrom of 2002 was planned over time.By 2003, the Sangh Parivar rallied to remake Orissa (since renamed Odisha) into the “next Gujarat.” In October 2002, a Shiv Sena unit in Balasore district reportedly pronounced that it had constructed the first Hindu “suicide squad” for training youth. By 2009, the RSS reportedly ran 6,000 centres in Odisha with a 175,000-strong cadre.By 2006, Sangh Parivar groups, including the RSS, were operational in 25 of 30 districts in Odisha.In February 2006, the VHP announced a 13-point charter – forewarning of things that have since come to pass, demanding India declare itself to be a Hindu state and expand its borders to encircle “undivided India.” The VHP campaigned for national laws prohibiting cow slaughter and against conversions to Christianity, the “infiltration” by Muslims from Bangladesh and the abolition of Article 370 in Kashmir.In 2007 and 2008, mass violence against Dalit and Adivasi Christians in Kandhamal, Odisha, witnessed the participation of middle-class and middle-caste Hindus, including through rape, disfigurement, looting and killing. Between 2014 and 2024, there was a 500% reported increase in violence against the Christian community in India.By 2013, Ekal Vidyalayas (one-teacher schools) were reportedly operational in 52,000 villages in India’s tribal areas. Massified violence by Sangh activists erupted in 2013 in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in the union with a population of 38 million Muslims. The violence targeted Muslims, leading to deaths, sexualised violence and displacement.Onward, 2014 and afterIn a landslide win in 2014, the BJP was re-elected to national government, led by Modi, and they won again in 2019 and 2024. Following the 2014 elections, the RSS evidenced its greatest enlargement since 1925, with 56,859 shakhas (branches) reportedly operationalised by 2016. In 2018, RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat claimed that the RSS was positioned to mount an army in three days.In Uttar Pradesh, after chief minister and prominent Hindu nationalist leader, Yogi Adityanath, took office in 2017, the state government commenced a process to withdraw 131 criminal cases against alleged perpetrators from Muzaffarnagar-2013, in which the accused were of Hindu descent.Adityanath has supported various political and extra-legal campaigns to override the rights of Muslims. This has emboldened far-right organisations such as the RSS, which reportedly operated 8,000 branches in UP in 2017. As many as 23,612 events of organised/violence were reported in the state during 2017-2019.Impelled by Hindu nationalists, the current suspension of the rule of law in Kashmir since 2019 is compounded by the removal of legal barriers to permanent residency of Indians. This potentially stands to reconstitute the demographic makeup to render Kashmiri Muslims a minority, signalling new modalities of erasure and dispossession.In Assam, in the Northeast, the BJP-led implementation of the citizenship amendment law in 2019, akin to the Nuremberg Laws instituted in September 1935 in Nazi Germany, is championed by the RSS as a vehicle to reposition the dominant majority community as indigenous and under siege.In West Bengal, in eastern India, where the Hindu nationalist party won the state elections for the first time in 2026, nine million voter names were removed from the electoral rolls prior to the elections, reportedly over 34% among them of Muslim descent. The deletion of legitimate voters is a step in commandeering the electoral process itself. These actions were reportedly supported by the RSS and other Hindu nationalist groups.A deeper stateThe current Modi-led state has structured durable correlations between Hindu Right cadres and militias, governments and state forces. During this time, Hindu nationalist leaders in India have established beneficial relations with money and power centres of the diaspora in the United States and United Kingdom.Fascism-forward nationalism, held patriotic by Hindutva, portends the imaginary of India as a Hindu Nation, posited as a fait accompli. Decrees, speech-acts, crony capitalism, economic manipulations, dispossession and unceasing violence have assembled a “deeper state” with crime zones and controlled anarchy. Its combat is carried out via malevolent operations that polarise and religionise the body politic, through “bulldozer justice,” “love jihad” and anti-conversion campaigns, prejudicial citizenship experiments that privilege Hindus, the promulgation of Islamomisia and the racialisation of Muslims.The Indian state and the Hindu Right are the foremost executors of violence today. Hindu nationalists deploy hate speech and toxic masculinity to provoke grassroots proponents and fence-sitters. They use hostile messaging to diminish opponents and the vulnerable, political violence to overwhelm them and call for genocidal aggression. The relentless churning of social-mediatised misinformation and its promotion in a compromised media environment furthers fear and malice, fomenting mistreatment and chaos.The resistance of those under threat and of social movements, including the present and prolific student and youth-led dissent that may energise the silent and vast majority to protest the conditions of unfreedom, offers a lifeline to hope.The human connections that hold India together are frail. Experiments in plurality, diversity and democracy are being disfigured with rapidity. The purposive politicisation of religion by the Hindu Right aids in the effacement of minoritised communities, thrust into the shadows by overwhelm, displacement, invisibility and systemic forces that forbode annihilation.Angana P. Chatterji (@ChatterjiAngana) is Chair of the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative, Centre for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. Her recent publications include: BREAKING WORLDS: Religion, Law and Nationalism in Majoritarian India; The Story of Assam; and Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India.