A certificate of registration gives an organisation a recognised legal form. Its absence does not make the organisation unlawful. Nor does it make it invisible to the law.

This elementary distinction has been lost in the controversy over Karnataka Home Minister Priyank Kharge’s letter to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. Dated June 13, 2026, it asked the RSS to disclose its legal status, finances, office-bearers, assets, tax record, and the permissions obtained for its public events. It also called on the organisation to register, and to send authorised office-bearers to explain how it functions without registration.

The immediate legal question is narrower than the political quarrel: can the RSS refuse?

On the law as it stands, it can. India has no general statute that compels every voluntary association to register as a society, trust or company. The Karnataka Societies Registration Act of 1960 is enabling, not mandatory. It says that societies formed for certain purposes “may be registered”. It does not say that every group pursuing those purposes must. The RSS may therefore remain an unregistered voluntary association.

It may also decline to answer. Described in some quarters as a notice, the document is in law an open letter. It cites no statutory provision, names no investigating authority, fixes no deadline, alleges no specific contravention, and prescribes no consequence for silence. The authority of a Minister does not, by itself, turn a letter into compulsory legal process. The executive may demand documents only where a valid law confers that power on a named authority and lays down the procedure for its use. The RSS can ignore Kharge without committing any offence. A properly issued income-tax notice, police direction, or court summons would be a different matter.

That is where the inquiry begins, not where it ends. Registration, taxation, legal personality, disclosure and permission for a procession are distinct questions, not one.

The freedom to associate, and its limitations

The strongest basis for the RSS’s position is Article 19(1)(c), which guarantees the right to form associations. That right is not confined to bodies the government admires or statutes recognise. It protects citizens who associate informally for social, cultural, religious, or political ends. To insist that every reading circle or neighbourhood collective first obtain official recognition would make a fundamental freedom turn on executive permission.

The Supreme Court has guarded the freedom. In State of Madras v. V.G. Row (1952), it struck down a provision that let the executive brand an association unlawful without adequate safeguards or judicial scrutiny. In Damyanti Naranga v. Union of India (1971), it held that the right includes keeping an association in the composition its members chose. The State cannot reconstitute a body by statute and call it regulation.

But Article 19(1)(c) does not create an enclave immune from law. In All India Bank Employees’ Association v. National Industrial Tribunal (1961), the court drew the line that decides this controversy. The right to form an association, it held, does not carry a further guarantee that the association may achieve every object by any means. Its activities remain subject to laws otherwise within legislative competence. The RSS has a right to exist and associate. That does not, by itself, give it a right to own property in its own name, claim tax relief, receive regulated funds, employ people outside labour law, or withhold information when a competent authority lawfully demands it.

Registration is often treated as a licence to exist. It does something else. It confers a recognised form and identifies who answers for an organisation’s affairs. An unregistered association is, in law, a body of individuals bound by common purpose. It usually has no personality separate from its members. It cannot, as such, hold property, contract or litigate in its own name. Its property is held instead by named trustees or affiliated entities, and claims by or against it proceed through representatives, including by representative suit under the Code of Civil Procedure.

Ram Madhav, a member of the RSS, has argued that while the apex RSS stays informal, its properties, schools and associated institutions operate through registered trusts and societies. That arrangement is not unlawful. Indian law allows one body to remain informal while registered affiliates carry out organised activity. But it does not end scrutiny. It relocates it. The questions become concrete: which trust owns a property, which society receives a donation, who keeps the accounts, and which entity bears liability for an event. A blanket demand that the RSS must register may have no basis in law. A transaction-specific demand on the trust, society or individual actually receiving funds or organising an event may be entirely valid.

What “body of individuals” really means

Both sides invoke the expressions “body of individuals” and “association of persons”. Both misread them. These are assessable categories under the Income Tax Act, not forms of incorporation. Section 2(31) defines a “person” to include an association of persons or body of individuals, “whether incorporated or not”. The purpose is to stop collective activity from escaping tax merely because no company or society was formed. A group is assessed as an association of persons because of what it does, not because it holds a certificate saying so. To call the RSS an association of persons answers a tax-classification question. It supplies no separate legal personality, and amounts to no registration.

It follows that staying unregistered does not place a body beyond income tax. The RSS does not, in fact, claim exemption from non-registration. It claims mutuality: sums pooled by members for a shared, non-commercial purpose are not taxable income. Here it leans on the Patna High Court’s 1994 ruling in Commissioner of Income-Tax v. Rastriya Swayam Sevak Sangh. Its reach has been overstated. The case concerned the assessment years 1967-68 to 1975-76, in which the RSS was assessed as an association of persons. The disputed receipts were guru dakshina from members. They were held exempt on mutuality, on the strength of a Central Board of Direct Taxes communication of December 1978.

The judgment granted no permanent exemption to the organisation or its affiliates. It did not hold that money from non-members, interest or rent would satisfy mutuality. Mutuality is a question of fact, settled year by year. A favourable ruling for years ending in 1975-76 does not bar scrutiny of later years. One reason the apex shows little assessable income is its own 1972 constitutional amendment, which made each shakha the assessable recipient of guru dakshina.

Kharge’s converse claim, that non-registration itself signals tax evasion, is equally untenable. Liability turns on the nature of receipts, not on a registration certificate. These are questions for the Income Tax Department under the Income Tax Act. A State Home Minister cannot substitute an open letter for the Union’s statutory assessment process.

Where non-registration does bite is foreign funding. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act of 2010 makes registration or prior permission a precondition for receiving any foreign contribution. The Home Ministry’s own criteria require an applicant to be registered under one of the enabling statutes before it will even consider the application. An unincorporated apex is disqualified at the outset. It cannot lawfully receive foreign money in its own name. With questions now being raised about overseas funds and lobbying, this is the concrete edge of the registration debate, and it cannot be answered by reciting Article 19(1)(c).

Kharge has tied his demand to the scale of RSS mobilisation, including its route marches. Here the State’s authority is clearer, but it is the authority to regulate public order, not to compel registration. The Karnataka Police Act lets the Commissioner and District Magistrate regulate the route, timing and conduct of processions, and impose prohibitory orders to preserve peace.

The police may insist that organisers identify themselves, accept conditions and answer for breaches. The applicant need not be a nationally registered entity. Equally, permission cannot be refused merely because the parent body is unregistered. A licensing power meant to manage streets cannot become a backdoor registration law. The Supreme Court made the point in the Tamil Nadu route-march litigation, dismissing the State’s appeal in April 2023: restrictions on RSS marches must rest on objective grounds, not on a general distaste for the organisation.

The Hinduism analogy, and the limits of scale

Bhagwat has asked why the RSS should register when Hinduism is not registered. A religion is a body of faith and practice. It is not an organisation with an address, a constitution, office-bearers and a treasury capable of registering. The institutions that administer religious life, temples, trusts, mutts, and endowments are registered and regulated under the laws that apply to them. The RSS describes itself as an organised association with a written constitution, office-bearers, territorial units and daily shakhas. It is, in principle, capable of regulation as an association. The analogy with Hinduism does not establish its legal position. The right to associate, absent any law that compels registration, does.

Influence alone creates no duty to register. A large association and a small one stand equally under Article 19(1)(c). But scale is a legitimate basis for a general law: legislatures routinely impose heavier disclosure duties on larger entities, because their activities carry wider consequences.

Karnataka has the competence to legislate here. Entry 32 of the State List covers unincorporated literary, scientific, religious and other societies and associations. The State could require defined categories of associations operating within Karnataka to register or file disclosures, using neutral thresholds. But such a law would have to be enacted, not improvised through ministerial correspondence. It would have to satisfy Article 14: a measure aimed by name at the RSS alone would fail, where one keyed to size or financial activity might survive. It would have to respect Article 19(1)(c).

Transparency is not among the grounds Article 19(4) permits for restricting association; those are the sovereignty and integrity of India, public order and morality. Compelled publication of ordinary members’ identities would chill the freedom; disclosure of office-bearers, fund-handlers, and event organisers is easier to defend. And, as V.G. Row insists, any power to penalise or dissolve an association would need notice, reasons and judicial review.

The bottom line

The debate has been framed as a choice between compulsory registration and freedom from all scrutiny. That is a false binary. Law reaches collective activity through many doors other than registration. A legislature could add one more: a light disclosure regime for large unincorporated bodies, short of forcing them to incorporate.

On the present law, the RSS can decline to register, and may leave Kharge’s letter unanswered. What it cannot claim is that an unregistered apex sits beyond income tax, foreign-funding law, police regulation or the duties borne by its registered affiliates. Any compulsion to change that must come from a statute that is general, precise, and respectful of Articles 14 and 19, not from a Minister’s letter. The freedom to remain an informal association is a constitutional right. It is not a charter of legal invisibility.

The writer is Contributing Editor at Supreme Court Observer. The views are his own.

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