Any assessment of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS) and its 100-year journey cannot possibly ignore its long term symbiotic links with other organisations that parallelly promoted the cause of the Hindutva ideology. A fascinating part of this story is that these prominent parallel organisations promoting Hindutva, such as the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, formed in Haridwar 1915, was seen to be at variance with RSS’s core thought process and strategy.There was always a distance between RSS and the Mahasabha. For instance, the RSS leadership did not see eye to eye with Vinayak Damaodar Savarkar who was head of the Mahasabha for many years in the 1930s and 1940s. Mahasabha was said to be far more aggressive and quasi-politically active in the cause of Hindutva.The RSS chief ‘Guru’ Golwalkar spent 6 months in jail after Gandhi’s assasination but was released in August 1948 upon giving specific assurances that he would eschew politics confining his organisation to only cultural activities while making it far more transparent in terms of its membership and workings.So while Golwalkar promised to keep the RSS away from politics and to develop it as a purely cultural organisation in August 1948, the Hindu Mahasabha actively and aggressively campaigned to illegally place the idol of Rama in the Babari Masjid premises in December 1949.These two events may seem apparently unconnected but they have a sort of subterranean link. On the face of it, the RSS has little to do with the placing of Ram’s idol in Babri Mosque.But with the benefit of hindsight, one can see how the RSS and Mahasabha as well as other assorted Hindutva outfits crossed paths in subsequent decades in ways which might establish a discernible pattern of a broader brotherhood.For one, Savarkar was the force behind the Hindu Mahasabha in the 1930s when the RSS was still in its formative years. Today Savarkar is elevated as a major icon by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Arun Shourie points out in his recent book on Savarkar ,”The New Icon- Savarkar And The Facts ” that the present government and more particularly Modi, has fully implemented Savarkar’s core ideology of cruelty and hate as instruments of mobilising the majority community and institutionalising them systematically.So one might well ask how Savarkar, who had strong disagreements with the leadership of the RSS before independence, has now been elevated to such position with the full endorsement of the Sangh? Or is it that their disagreement in the 1930s was only tactical in nature? They would have possibly known their ideas would converge and merge in the future? These are very relevant questions today.Similarly there is this talk in today’s political context that UP CM Adityanath is not from the RSS cadre and will never get support for a shot at Prime Ministership in the future. This theory has many adherents but the Gorakhnath mutt of Gorakhpur is another institution which has played a big role historically in the Sangh’s accumulation of power to promote the Hindutva agenda.Adityanath’s spiritual father, Mahant Avaidyanath was very active in the Ram Temple movement and worked closely with Vishwa Hindu Parishad. He became a member of Parliament on a Hindu Mahasabha ticket.I happened to interview Mahant Avaidyanath in 1989 when he was still talking about a solution to the Babri Masjid question which entailed both the structures being accomodated in on the same site via mutual negotiations . Obviously things changed when a strong section of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leadership felt that no compromise was possible and that the agitation must go on until the site was fully taken over for the temple.It must be noted that Mahant Avaidyanath was member of parliament in 1989 as a Hindu Mahasabha candidate but as he came close to the RSS and BJP following the Ram Temple agitation he seamlessly fought Lok Sabha elections from Gorakhpur on a BJP ticket in 1991 when the temple campaign had peaked.Here again, one is merely illustrating how different organisations in the longer run converge and merge with the RSS led project of strengthening Hindutva remaining in continuity.Again, it was Mahant Avaidyanath ‘s spritual guru, Mahant Digvijaynath who was instrumental in illegally placing Ram’s idol inside the Babri Mosque and was helped by the then Faizabad District Magistrate Kadangalathil Karunakaran Nair( later spelt as Nayar) to create a fictional narrative that the idol miraculously appeared on its own at night.He ensured that even the police FIR recorded this as a miracle! Nehru was very upset but even he could not persuade his home minister Gobind Vallabh Pant to remove the idol from the premises of the mosque. It had become a huge “law and order ” problem.K.K. Nair voluntarily retired in 1952 and later joined the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and got a ticket to fight Lok Sabha elections. He became an MP in in the mid 1960s.I am citing all these examples only to illustrate that the RSS has always sought and accumulated power via political institutions to achieve its broader, long term objectives. It claims that its leadership and cadres primarily want to work only to shape the cultural consciousness of society but it has parallelly and brutally used power acquired by other organisations to meet its long term objectives.The Ram Temple project is an ideal example of how the RSS and other assorted Hindu organisations come into it at different points of time as their objectives converge and merge.For instance, RSS and BJP can claim they jumped into the Ayodhya movement only in the late 1980s after the locks were opened by a court during the Congress’s tenure under Rajiv Gandhi. It was Hindu Mahasabha and its leaders like Digvijaynath and a supportive police and civil bureaucracy that accelerated the project by placing the idol inside the Masjid in December 1949.RSS was quiet then for obvious reasons as it was rebuilding its credibility in the years after Gandhi’s assassination. But whether it is the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha, Janasangh, BJP, Gorakhnath Temple or the VHP, they all become part of a relentless pattern where they diverge and converge in their objectives over 75 years to execute the Ram Temple project which has become RSS’s single biggest achievement of building a national Hindutva consciousness.The RSS may want people to believe that this cultural project has largely been achieved by persuasion. But the reality is it has been brought to fruition via calculated use of the levers of power. As an old Editor who has observed the RSS for decades told me, “RSS from its very inception was a sleeping partner of Power whether it is formally in power on not.”The Ram Temple projects’ relentless pursuit since 1949 is the best illustration of the exercise of shadow power. Any broader assessment of the RSS must necessarily take this into account.