Excluded minorities, a reduced space for criticism, communal violence against human rights defenders, and a lack of transparency and accountability are what the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the rule of Modi’s government have established as the current reality of India.
Founded in 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was built in direct opposition to Gandhi’s vision of a united, multi-religious and secular India. The RSS frames their exclusionary project as a form of equality, a Hindu India for all Hindus, equal in their shared identity and opposed to those deemed foreign to it.
This was the focus of the most recent #DemocracyDrinks The Hague edition.
Key Insights
- With minorities stripped of citizenship, activists behind bars, and global institutions failing to act, India’s democratic decline has become one of the starkest tests of whether the international human rights system is operating effectively within India.
- The RSS’s consolidation of power works through institutional capture by, reshaping courts, universities, and media into instruments of Hindutva ideology. By embedding itself within these structures, its influence becomes less visible and far more difficult to challenge than direct forms of repression.
- Resistance lives in protest movements, constitutional reclamation, and acts of countermemory, but those who carry it do so at great personal risk, relying on collective solidarity to ensure no single person bears the cost alone.
The Architecture of Hindutva
There is a singularity of ideology in Modi’s India but not unity in diversity – Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie
The RSS is, at its core, a political ideology built around the concept of Hindutva. As Dr. Sruti Bala explained, this means belonging is defined not by citizenship, but by sacred origin to the land: “other religions are second class citizens because they do not belong in the holy land of India.”
What makes this particularly striking is that despite rejecting anything foreign, the RSS replicates the organisational model of European fascist movements. Over a century, this ideology has been embedded into schools, philanthropic organisations, and cultural institutions, quietly shaping everyday life. Everything indigenous but non-Hindu has been violently assimilated into this framework.
The result, as Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie put it, is not unity but a monoculture: “There is a singularity of ideology in Modi’s India but not unity in diversity.” This is not a fringe movement operating at the margins. It is an entrenched infrastructure, and understanding it as such is the first step to seeing how deep the roots go. Hindutva is the identification of three existential “threats”, as Sruti Bala noted, to Hindu civilization: Muslims, Christians, and Communists. The elimination of these identities has remained the RSS’s defining mission across generations.
The Erosion of Democratic Space Under Modi’s government
India today is, in the words of Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie, is “a country where I see the universal human rights system failing the most.” Under Modi’s government and the growing influence of the RSS, democratic space has been systematically dismantled not through a single rupture, but through slow, structural transformation. The Supreme Court and other public institutions have been reshaped to serve Hindutva interests and to target opponents.
Despite their apparent prosperity (meaning that the media has grown), the media has fallen into the hands of external interests: companies controlled by groups linked to the RSS are spreading disinformation, inciting hatred and propagating fascist rhetoric. In universities, budgets have stagnated while commercialisation has opened the door to deeper RSS entrenchment.This is accompanied by surveillance of students and staff, the removal of minority quotas, the rewriting of history books, and the promotion of pseudoscience framed as decolonial practice, Sruti Bala added. Dissent is not tolerated: “many students are behind bars, witch-hunted, and censored.”
For minorities, the stakes are even higher due to specific legislation erasing Muslim identity and citizenship, with targeted attacks on homes and businesses following a calculated, diffuse narrative. This is not a backslide, it is a deliberate and ongoing construction of a new reality.
Resistance, Risk, and the Limits of International Solidarity
The cycle of remembering is challenging because Human Rights violations keep happening – Dr. Sruti Bala
Despite the pressure, resistance in India is alive and stubborn. Movements across the country are reclaiming the constitution — its preamble in particular — as a tool to reject monoculture and reassert a pluralist vision of India. Informal public education initiatives, workers’ movements, and documentation efforts are working to record what is happening and keep countermemory alive.
But as Dr. Bala noted, “the cycle of remembering is challenging because violations keep happening” and those who do this work do so under enormous personal risk. Sruti herself described navigating this carefully: “I use my social and intellectual capital to work collectively, so nobody is more at risk than they already are.”
Meanwhile, the international community has largely looked away. The RSS operates through at least four linked organisations in the Netherlands alone, misrecognised as minority or cultural organisations and protected under diversity policies, a profound failure of recognition.
Dr. Sruti Bala drew a parallel: India is going through a process of “Israelisation,” and if Europe has not acted on Israel, there is little reason to hope it will act on India. The question is no longer whether democracy is eroding, it is whether solidarity, inside and outside India, can move faster than the erosion.
Why does this matter?
The discussion made clear that what is happening in India is not a distant or isolated crisis. Disinformation, institutional capture, and the systematic erosion of civic space are not phenomena contained by borders but collective threats that affect us all.
As the International City of Peace and Justice, The Hague plays an important role in creating space for exactly these conversations: connecting practitioners, activists, and communities across contexts, and strengthening the dialogue needed to defend democratic governance and civic space.
The Humanity Hub’s Democracy and Rule of Law Collective, which brings together professionals and organisations to exchange ideas, share insights, and explore opportunities for collaboration. Because understanding what is happening in India — and why it matters here — is precisely the kind of work that cannot wait.
About Democracy Drinks The Hague
Democracy Drinks The Hague is a regular event series that brings together professionals, researchers, policymakers, and civil society actors to discuss pressing issues related to democracy and the rule of law.
The series is coordinated by the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD), the Netherlands Helsinki Committee (NHC), and The Hague Humanity Hub, and regularly partners with organisations across the peace, justice, and democracy ecosystem.
Do you want to take action to defend democracy at home and abroad? Host a #DemocracyDrinks edition! Learn more about the Democracy and Rule of Law Collective