The letter that Priyank Kharge, the newly sworn-in Home Minister of the Congress government in Karnataka, wrote to the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, on June 13, 2026, was well crafted. It was more a lawyer’s draft than that of a politician or even an ideologue.

The letter presented facts seemingly collected from the RSS’ own publicity posts and brochures, which ensured that charges of misrepresentation could not be easily flung. It did not slip into any kind of ramble or rhetoric and did not wrap itself in sophistry. It arrived with clean logic at its central purpose, which was to seek information on the legal status of the RSS and to unwrap its mysterious century-old covenant with Indian society, and its apparent extra-constitutional flourish in the decades after India became a republic.

An operational part of the letter read: “We therefore request the RSS to depute its authorised office bearers to explain the legal grounds on which an organisation of such magnitude continues to function with anonymity and without being formally registered as a legal entity.” The letter did not make any direct and familiar accusations against the RSS but cleverly implied, and resonated with, a whole lot of things that have been part of a narrative that has developed against it over a long period of time.

The letter also took care to reflect on the jurisdictional limits of the Minister, so that the letter-writer’s locus standi would not come into challenge at any point. It had the unmistakable tone and structure of a legal notice. The political expediency of the letter was not so much revealed in its content but by the fact that it was put out on social media as soon as it was signed, before it had reached its intended recipient. That was perhaps meant to not just provoke but also take credit for an act of political bravery.

Even 10 days after Kharge had written the letter, he was pursuing its contents in the media. On June 23, he seemed to go a step ahead to set an informal deadline: “We have waited for 100 years for these documents. Can’t we wait for a month?”

There was a sort of precursor to this epistolary confrontation in October-November 2025, when Kharge was still the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister in the Congress government led by Siddaramaiah. The RSS wanted to take out a centenary route march at Chittapur in Kalaburgi district, also Kharge’s Assembly constituency, but the local administration denied permission. Permission was finally granted after the RSS approached the High Court.

A project of Priyank Kharge alone?

So far, the epistolary confrontation appears to be a project of Kharge alone. There has been very little vocal support from his colleagues in the Karnataka Cabinet or party. Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, Deputy Chief Minister G. Parameshwar, and former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah have contributed little or nothing to his chase of the RSS’ legal status. Karnataka Congress president B.K. Hariprasad did make some stray comments but stopped at that. In short, there has been no collective Congress push of significance to take up the issue.

This makes one wonder if this is a private project of Kharge to set himself on a distinctive career path and emerge out of the shadow of his father and the Congress national president, Mallikarjun Kharge. It is known that all through his 50 years in public life, the senior Kharge has carefully eschewed paths of confrontation to handle the delicate balance of societal structures and political power. His game is marked by caution and conservativeness. He did not after all carve out his space in politics through a Dalit movement and is not known for aggressively pushing the community’s demands for social justice. In fact, he was catapulted to a high perch through the talent hunt of former Chief Minister D. Devraj Urs in the 1970s; he never took any risks to jeopardise that call of destiny.

However, the junior Kharge has charted out a different path for himself. His confidence has bordered on brashness, and there have been whispered disapprovals in the party of his “entitled behaviour”. His adoption of a vocal and empowered stand is seen as coming from a struggle-free political inheritance.

The letter to the RSS reads like an Ambedkarite or Dalit challenge to what is largely perceived as an upper-caste organisation. Given the crossroads that Indian politics is at today, where Dalits are looking for new anchorage, the letter comes across as a shrewd move. It is about using the Constitution, the ownership of which has been vociferously claimed by Dalits, to address an unquestioned privilege that the RSS has enjoyed for a long time. Priyank Kharge’s letter buttresses this point as it ends: “We therefore call upon the RSS to use the occasion of its centenary not merely for celebration but for constitutional introspection.”

The letter may be imagined as a legal challenge to the RSS, but what is of greater consequence is the political ripples that it may generate or has already generated. In this department, Priyank Kharge is not a pioneer. He has borrowed Rahul Gandhi’s penchant for creating a clear ideological line for the party. Gandhi has hoped for nearly a decade that his ideological clarity will distinguish him, and the Congress party, from the BJP and its ideological parent, the RSS. He hopes that in the long run this will return electoral dividends. So far, however, the aspect of Enlightenment rationality that he has brought to political discourse has not been able to dismantle the robust cultural and civilisational narrative that the BJP has built. The Congress does not have an equal cultural narrative to offer and it has not understood the importance of such a narrative to counter the BJP-RSS combine.

The Congress approach to culture has, at best, been one employed to assess an artefact, external to oneself. However, for the BJP and RSS, it is an integral part of their living and thinking. They have meticulously infused a certain cultural model into Indian polity and, at the same time, have harnessed what already existed as civilisational memory. While the Congress gropes in the dark with its deracinated self, the political skies have acquired a Hindutva air cover that makes it difficult for the grand old party to function under its majoritarian shadow. Culture versus Constitution may eventually become an unsustainable political binary for the Congress.

Kharge, like Rahul Gandhi, has, in the absence of a cultural strategy, invoked constitutional morality to question the RSS. What if the legal challenge fails? What if the courts interpret the law in a way that the RSS’ existence becomes legitimised without the documents that Kharge is seeking? This would ensure that the Congress problem comes back to square one.

How closely is the BJP bound to the RSS?

There is one other serious concern. If Priyank Kharge thinks that raising questions about the RSS will affect the BJP and the Prime Minister, he may be presuming a kind of seamlessness and monolithic structure that does not actually exist. Both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi, the two Prime Ministers who have come from the RSS stables, have asserted their autonomy and independence in different ways. They have tried to draw a complicated line of separation between the government, the party, and the RSS.

Notwithstanding the suspicion with which a “liberal” and “progressive” mind may view this separation line, it is an enigmatic political variable that deserves to be measured and monitored carefully. For instance, right in the middle of the 2024 general election, the then BJP president, J.P. Nadda, had said: “In the beginning, we [BJP] would have been less capable, smaller, and needed the RSS, but now we have grown and the party is capable of running its own affairs.” As a result of this one statement, all 240 seats the BJP won became by default the achievement of brand Modi. What triggered this statement remains a mystery. What if Modi prefers a legacy that is not dwarfed by claims and counter claims from the RSS? 

Amit Shah, too, in an interview in 2014, had pointed to the independence of the BJP. Shortly before Modi was declared prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general election, he was seen resisting the RSS’ top functionary, Sanjay Joshi. As early as in 1973, the Jana Sangh (the earlier avatar of the BJP) president, Balraj Madhok, in a letter to TheStatesman wrote: “I have opposed the Sangh being run as a front organisation of the RSS. I wanted it to function as an independent political party and, therefore, wanted the posts of organising secretaries to be abolished.”

There is a lot of history, too, of the Congress party’s dalliance, especially of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, with the RSS, which has been documented in great detail by A.G. Noorani in his book on the RSS (The RSS A Menace to India, LeftWord Books, 2020.) The legal status of the RSS never troubled these two Congress Prime Ministers. Instead of raising technical questions, they recognised its large presence and influence and utilised it pragmatically. Indira Gandhi became so adept in the game that Vajpayee, ironically, complained in an interview to The New York Times: “Mrs Gandhi is playing a very dangerous game. The long-term interests of the country are being sacrificed to short-term gains. But encouraging Hindu chauvinism is not going to pay. As the majority community, the Hindus must be above parochial politics.”

Apart from all this, Priyank Kharge’s assumption of a position of constitutional correctness and political courage on the RSS issue may receive a setback if allegations of land grab against the Siddharta Vihara Trust, run by the Kharge family, blow up. The trust returned five acres in 2024 when its eligibility for such a government allocation in an aerospace park was called into question. There is a Damocles’ sword hanging there. What if the personal and the ideological come into dangerous confrontation to unsettle the Kharge family’s political status quo built over decades?

Sugata Srinivasaraju is a senior journalist and author. His latest book is The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship (Penguin, 2025). 

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