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Lucknow/Sarojininagar —Dr. Rajeshwar Singh today paid tribute to the RSS’s hundred years of uninterrupted grassroots service, calling its scale and consistency unmatched by any organisation in India — regardless of one’s view of its politics.
Marking the centenary, Dr. Singh cited the numbers: nearly 89,000 daily shakhas across 55,000-plus locations, with over 4,000 new locations and 5,000-plus new shakhas added in the past two-three years alone. Beyond the shakhas, he pointed to 12,000-plus Vidya Bharati schools educating 3 million students, a lakh-plus Ekal Vidyalayas in hamlets with no government school, 5,000-plus Rashtriya Sewa Bharati health centres, seven decades of tribal-belt work by Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, and ABVP’s 7.5 million members — likely the largest student body on earth.
“Negative politics isn’t a strategy — it never has been,” Dr. Singh said. “You can oppose the ideology, and that debate is legitimate. But a century of grassroots work is a matter of record, not opinion. Kerala, where the RSS’s political wing wins almost nothing, has India’s second-highest shakha count. That’s not a vote machine — that’s structure, still compounding.” Over 60% of daily shakha attendees are students, he noted, a share that held even through COVID.
Dr. Singh contrasted this with the opposition’s record. He recalled that the volunteer-corps idea was Congress’s own first — the Hindustani Seva Dal, proposed at Kakinada in 1923 and recognised by Gandhi in 1931, predating the RSS’s founding by two years — an inheritance he said Congress has since abandoned, with the Seva Dal now “switching on for elections and off after.” He noted Kanshi Ram built BAMCEF and DS-4 as genuine cadre organisations in the 70s and 80s, but the BSP’s vote share collapsed once it became a purely electoral vehicle after 2007. Of the SP, he asked: “Name one social institution it runs outside government, self-funded, serving people who may never vote for it.”
“A school doesn’t have an off switch,” Dr. Singh concluded. “That’s the standard the RSS has held for a hundred years — and the standard everyone else in public life should be measured against.”