RSS's Three-Point Approach For The North-East

The Dimasa Kachharis of Northeast India are descendants of Ghatotkach, asserts Gouranga Roy, calm and confident. Ghatotkach, he explains, was the son of demoness Hidimba and Bhim, the burly Pandava sibling in the Mahabharata. When asked where the story comes from, he replies without hesitation, “It’s all in the Mahabharata. Bhim and Arjun both have northeastern connections.”

Roy is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) prant pracharak for Dakshin Assam, effectively the senior-most functionary of the organisation’s South Assam unit. His area of work spans the tribal district of Dima Hasao in central Assam, the three districts of the Barak Valley in lower Assam and neighbouring Mizoram.

The Dimasa Kachharis, a tribal community of Sino-Tibetan origin, live largely in Dima Hasao, with smaller populations spread out in Karbi Anglong, Nagaon and Cachar. Believed to be among the earliest settlers of the Brahmaputra valley in upper Assam, they moved southwards following Ahom attacks in the 13th century. The community’s migration trails from Dimapur in present-day Nagaland (13th-16th century) to Maibang in Dima Hasao (16th-18th century) and later to Khaspur near Silchar in the Barak Valley (18th-19th century).

During their rule from Dimapur, the royal family came under Hindu influence and several kings issued coins with images of, or in the name of, Hara-Gouri. It was around this time that the Dimasa dynasty began claiming Hidimba lineage and called their kingdom Hirimbapur or Heramba.

This is largely a local legend and a contestable one. According to northern Indian mythology, the native land of Hidimba and Ghatotkach lies in Manali, where the Devi Hidimba temple draws a large number of pilgrims.

But in the RSS ecosystem, the boundaries bet­ween history, myth and legend are often blurred. For several decades, they have picked up the local legend around Ghatotkach and popularised the narrative. In some cases, they have even facilitated Dimasa Kachharis’ pilgrimage to Manali’s Devi Hidimba temple to strengthen the Dimasa Kachhari people’s bond with ‘mainland India’.

In his early fifties, Roy speaks gently, but with resolve. With the ongoing RSS centenary celebrations, he has a tight schedule overseeing different preparations. Pracharaks are full-time, lifelong bachelors who dedicate their lives to the organisation. Roy became an RSS swayamsevak (volunteer) in 1992 and a pracharak in 1999. Over the past five years, he has served as the Dakshin Assam prant pracharak.

Dakshin Assam is an interesting organisational unit. Within its jurisdiction, Mizoram is an overwhelmingly Christian state, while Hailakandi, Karimganj and Nagaon in Assam are Muslim-majority districts. Cachar and Dima Hasao are Hindu-majority and tribal-majority districts, respectively.

RSS activities began in the Northeast in 1946, but growth was so slow that the entire region remained under a single unit until 1994. However, support increased significantly during the Ram Temple movement in the 1990s, especially among the Aryanised ethnic groups of the Assamese and the Bengalis. The organisation was then divided into Uttar and Dakshin Assam, with the former covering Arunachal and Meghalaya and the latter including Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura. Later, as their social work in the health, education and skill development sector grew, Arunachal, Manipur and Tripura became separate units and Nagaland was merged with Uttar Assam.

Sitting on a wooden bench on the third floor of Keshav Niketan, the RSS office in Silchar town in the Cachar district, Roy alleges that anti-national elements have, for many years, spread lies claiming that Northeast India was separate from so-called mainstream India and that tribals are not Hindus.

“During the time of Akhand Bharat, from Afghanistan to Myanmar, it was all part of the same culture,” Roy insists. He then cites how Krishna from the Mahabharata fought with King Bhismaka of present-day Arunachal Pradesh to marry Bhismaka’s daughter, Rukmini.

The saga of Rukmini, again a contested claim, drew attention in 2018, when Manipur’s BJP chief minister N. Biren Singh mentioned it at Gujarat’s Madhavpur Mela, where performers from Arunachal Pradesh dramatically enacted Rukmini’s abduction.

The main liaison between the Arunachal government and the Madhavpur fair authorities was Vijay Swami, who has worked with various RSS-affiliated and backed organisations such as the Vivekananda Kendra and the Research Institute of World’s Ancient Traditions, Cultures & Heritage (Riwatch) and the International Center for Cultural Studies. Sangh Parivar groups now claim Bhismaka ruled Bhismak Nagar in Arunachal, not Vidarbha.

For the RSS in the Northeast, history, sewa or voluntary service and indigenous faith revivalism have been its strongest tools for reaching local populations. Except for the Assamese and Bengalis, most of the region’s tribes hardly relate to Vedic-Aryan culture.

On October 5, Northeast Dialogue, a Hindu nationalist initiative, asked on their official Facebook page, “Did you know the Pandavas once stayed in Guwahati?” They answered, “The ancient Pandunath Temple in Pandu, Guwahati, is believed to be the place where the Pandavas and Draupadi prayed before visiting Kamakhya.” They described the temple as “one of Guwahati’s lesser-known heritage sites connected to the Mahabharata”.

In upper Assam, the RSS reinterpreted the Battle of Saraighat between the Ahom kingdom and the Mughals as one between Hindus and Muslims, even though the Ahoms fought many battles with Hindu kingdoms of Bengal too.

At the entrance of the RSS’ Silchar office, a display board explains the RSS concept of Akhand Bharat. Afghanistan was separated from India in 1876, Nepal in 1904, Bhutan in 1906, Tibet in 1914, Sri Lanka in 1935 and Myanmar in 1937, it says. But when asked if all these places together were part of India, local swayamsevaks insist: “Always, until enemies separated them.”

A few metres away stands the office of Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the RSS women’s wing, which operates here under the banner of Saraswati Smarak Samiti. Apart from daily shakhas held at different places in the evening, the Samiti organises weekend gatherings at the office where girls and women sing, pray and perform yoga. They discuss issues like love-jihad, a conspiracy theory claiming Muslim men entrap Hindu girls and women to convert them to Islam. Their discussions also touch on topics like the role of women in Indian traditions.

“The Samiti is engaged in character building, imparting moral and value education, physical training and social work,” says Joyashri Dey, an Assam University Silchar faculty member and Samiti organiser. “In the Northeast, women play a very significant role in socio-economic life. So, we try to be proactive,” says Dey, who in her student days was part of the Meherpur shakha of the Durga Vahini, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) girls and young women’s wing.

Tribal Revival

One of the Sangh Parivar’s biggest successes in the Northeast is the transformation of the anti-immigrant movement. While Assam’s ethnic nationalist movement had long sought the expulsion of all Bengali migrants—Hindus and Muslims—the Sangh Parivar managed to build a broader consensus that accepted Bengali Hindus while targeting only Bengali Muslims, marking a clear triumph of Hindu nationalism over Assamese ethnic politics.

“All Hindus, irrespective of where they came from, belong to India,” said Narendra Modi, an RSS pracharak-turned-BJP politician, in Assam’s Bengali Hindu-dominated Cachar ahead of the 2014 parliamentary elections. Over the next 11 years, the Sangh Parivar and the state’s BJP government solidified this narrative, steadily eroding the support base of Assamese ethnic politics.

“Convincing the Assamese people to accept Bengali Hindus as their brothers and sisters is one of the biggest victories of Hindu unity,” says a Guwahati-based RSS organiser who did not wish to be named.

Gaining support among the ‘Aryanised’ Assamese and Bengalis was easier than among the tribal population. For them, too, the RSS has taken up the ‘infiltrator’ issue in Manipur and Meghalaya, protesting against the “illegal influx of Bangladeshis (read Muslims)” through Jiribam in Manipur and the Khasi and Jaintia hills in Meghalaya. In Meghalaya, they work among the Khasi and Jaintia tribes to ‘protect’ their indigenous faith from the spread of Christianity and the infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims.

A larger exercise is underway around the Assam-Manipur-Nagaland border involving the Zeliangrong Nagas, one of the few Naga tribes that have not adopted Christianity. In January 2012, the 33rd Heraka Conference was held in Peren, Nagaland, with around 800 delegates from Nagaland, Assam and Manipur. Attendees included Zeliangrong Heraka Association (ZHA) president Ramkuiwangbe Jene and top RSS leaders. In July 2014, two months after Modi became prime minister, RSS veteran Padmanabha Balakrishna Acharya was appointed governor of Nagaland. During Modi’s December 2014 Hornbill festival visit, he met Acharya and the ZHA leadership, who submitted a memorandum requesting recognition for their leader Rani Gaidinliu (1915-1993), a freedom fighter and pioneer of the Heraka faith.

The ZHA delegation demanded that the government imprint Gaidinliu’s image on coins, set up a Rani Gaidinliu Central University with a department dedicated to the promotion of the “eternal religion and eternal culture of the Nagas”, and rename Nagaland’s only airport after her.

“Eternal religion” is a curious usage, as it is a literal English translation of Sanatan Dharma, the term the RSS uses to refer to Hinduism. According to political scientist Arkotong Longkumer, it would not be surprising if Governor Acharya—who had written a booklet on Gaidinliu—had influenced these demands.

In 2015, the Modi government celebrated Gaidinliu’s birth centenary. In 2023, ZHA chief Ramkuiwangbe Jene was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian award, becoming the first recipient from Dima Hasao district.

Tarun Gogoi, an assistant professor of political science at Assam’s Sankardeva Mahavidyalaya, notes that the RSS enters Christian-dominated areas not with religious banners, but through social work with NGOs, and socio-cultural organisations such as the ZHA and Arunachal Vikas Parishad (AVP). The AVP coordinates with tribal organisations which focus on reviving indigenous faith and resisting the Christianity footprint. He has seen RSS health and education projects benefiting people in remote areas where no government infrastructure exist.

According to Kham Khan Suan Hausing, professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad, the RSS aims to create a civilisational framework to appropriate the traditional indigenous religion and culture of Northeast India. The Sangh Parivar, he says, uses affiliates like the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, a wide network of formal and informal schooling, and associated organisations such as the ZHA as proxies to “Hinduise the indigenous society”.

Various Sangh affiliates offer scholarships and fellowships to students, which are used as tools for the political socialisation of Northeastern students. They are also provided accommodation in hostels and free education in major Indian cities. Through these measures, the RSS aims to create assets to build on in the future, he says.

There is also an ongoing parallel effort to highlight the non-Christian, non-Muslim past of the Northeast, he points out. “Since the time of S. K. Sinha as Assam governor, the government began a push to valorise or iconise local heroes, often by distorting facts and perspectives, to incorporate them into the national pantheon of iconography. The aim is the emotional integration of Northeastern people into Hindu cultural nationalism,” Hausing claims.

Political scientist Malini Bhattacharjee says the RSS has known since 1946 that Assam and the wider Northeast are highly diverse, making typical Hindutva appeals like Ram Mandir, cow protection and promotion of Hindi and Sanskrit less resonant.

“Therefore, the organisation and its affiliates have intelligently sought to adapt to the local cultural landscape, drawing upon regional symbols, myths and histories and reinterpreting them in ways compatible with Hindu nationalist ideology,” she says.

According to her, in states with large Christian populations, the RSS has aligned with local groups reviving indigenous religious traditions, such as Donyi-Polo in Arunachal Pradesh and the Seng Khasi movement in Meghalaya. She notes that neo-Vaishnavite traditions linked to Srimanta Sankardev and Sattra institutions have been reinterpreted to fit Hindutva themes, while the Sangh Parivar cultivates ties with educational institutions and “local notables” to expand its social base.

In August 2025, BJP and senior RSS leaders visited Riao L P School in Dima Hasao to coordinate with local educational institutions. They distributed sports and essential materials to students and teachers and held discussions on improving infrastructure and curriculum, which were described as “fruitful” by BJP leader Debolal Gorlosa, Chief Executive Member of Dima Hasao Autonomous Council.

A scaled up two-day seminar on ‘Sewa Tradition of India: A North East Perspective’ was also held at Manipur University in October 2025, organised by the RSS social work wing Seva Bharati and Indian Council of Social Science Research, discussing the region’s links to Sanatan Dharma.

Sewa as a Means

In her article, Building a 'Hindu Rashtra' through 'Seva', Bhattacharjee says many involved in Sangh Parivar’s seva activities believe their service contributes to building a better society and nation. Their humanitarian activities, both during disasters and during normal circumstances, “have helped Hindu nationalists come in touch with a sizable number of middle- and lower-middle-class sections,” she writes.

The beneficiaries of these seva activities, often those struggling to access public services, remain grateful to the Sangh. Bhattacharjee notes that the RSS began its Northeastern work with disaster relief, notably during the 1950 Assam earthquake under the Pahari Sewa Sangh. Over time, its affiliates expanded into tribal welfare, education and health. “They have established hostels for tribal children, often with the explicit goal of weaning them away from Christian influences,” she says.

Rajive Mohan Pant, vice-chancellor of Assam University , who has spent over a decade in the Northeast, notes some RSS veterans made many sacrifices, including their vegetarian habits, to bond with the largely non-vegetarian northeastern population, which shows their high adaptability for the cause of nation building.

“When in Arunachal, I saw a senior pracharak accepting one piece of meat during his meal with a local family. I know he did not relish it. But he later told me accepting their food was important for showing them that we are Indians above all identities,” Pant says.

Pant sees the RSS’ main focus as changing people’s mindset through long-term interventions. “There is a saying: if you want to plan for a year, sow paddy; plant a tree if you plan for ten years; but if you plan for a hundred years, enter the education sector. The RSS always plans for decades,” he says.

In Sewa Disha 2024, a Sangh-aligned publication focussed on the social welfare of marginalised communities in India, RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale claimed that their work in education and healthcare preserves northeastern tribal cultural practices while safeguarding their identity and dignity.

“Our service work has respected their original religious traditions without imposing any changes, unlike the actions of Christian missionaries. We have honoured all their customs, revitalised their faith, and respected their dignity. Efforts have been made to integrate these states with other regions, preserving their culture, traditions, and identity,” he was quoted as saying.

At Haflong in Dima Hasao, the VHP has run a hostel since 1972. What began with five students now includes separate boys’ and girls’ hostels and a school for 600. Tribal boarders follow, apart from some tribal customs, mostly Hindu rituals, begin the day praying to Saraswati, learn the Gayatri mantra (chant), and celebrate all major Hindu festivals.

The RSS insists tribals are Hindus; tribal groups say they are animists. Still, students raised in RSS schools and hostels appear to be emerging ‘Hinduised’—"assets to built on in the future", borrowing from Hausing's words.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist, author and researcher

This story appeared as 'One Hundred Years Of...Vicissitude' in the print edition of Outlook magazine’s October 21 issue titled Who is an Indian?, which offers a bird's-eye view of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), testimonies of exclusion and inclusion, organisational complexities, and regional challenges faced by the organisation.