Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : A new book shows how the RSS consolidated its hold over politics in Rajasthan and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
In the final years of his life, Jai Bahadur Singh Shekhawat would venture onto the lawns of his residence on Jaipur’s Sardar Patel Marg using a walker to support himself. He lived just a few hundred metres away from the Rajasthan BJP headquarters and sat for hours receiving visitors – workers from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Sangh Parivar flocking to seek his blessings.
His nephew Pratap Singh, the prant adhyaksh of the Hindu Jagran Manch recalls how his uncle used to devote most of his time to the Sangh. Each morning, he would reach the RSS office by 6 am and cycle down to his own office at the state insurance department thereafter. One of the most important contributions of Jai Bahadur Singh Shekhawat has been the furthering of saffron ideology in Rajasthan and the building of Bharat Mata Mandir, where the VHP office is presently situated, just a few lanes behind his residence. Shekhawat went to jail during Emergency with other opposition leaders and dissenters under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) and also led a long campaign against cow slaughter, going on to become a well-known RSS leader. Although he distanced himself from mainstream electoral politics, his main priority remained spreading the values of the Sangh.
When his cousin, the stalwart leader Bhairon Singh Shekhawat offered him a ticket to contest elections from Danta Ramgarh in Sikar, he refused. He passed away in August 2020 at the age of 93, after seeing his dream of a Ram temple being built in Ayodhya fulfilled; the Supreme Court had ruled in its favour the previous year. This was a true triumph of his life’s efforts and marked the culmination of a long journey beginning with the very first state assembly elections in 1952, in which the BJS could win only eight seats. 61 years later, in 2013, its successor, the BJP, won 163 seats in the 200-member assembly in the state elections.
Just a few months after that, the BJP won all 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan in the 2014 general elections – an extraordinary success it repeated in the 2019 elections to ensure a second term for PM Narendra Modi. Overcoming the vast gap between eight and 163 seats over seven decades was not an easy task for the saffron party – a multi-pronged effort was required.
Over many decades, Bharti Bhawan – the Jaipur RSS headquarters – and the state BJP office on Sardar Patel Marg have nurtured and launched many leaders from all castes to challenge the Congress. The Sangh’s dedicated cadre on the ground has played a significant part in the electoral victory of Hindutva proponents.
The small room above the office of Pathey Kan, a popular fortnightly magazine affiliated with the RSS, housed its patron Manak Chand for many years before the octogenarian passed away in July 2025, the year the RSS turned 100. To describe this room as ‘austere’ would be an understatement. During his lifetime, apart from a few sets of dhoti kurta, there were only photographs adorning its walls – those of RSS founder KB Hedgewar, Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee, MS Golwalkar and Bharat Mata – and not much else. Chand was one of the oldest surviving RSS pracharaks in Rajasthan. Born in 1942 in a village in Nawan tehsil, Nagaur district, his life story mirrors the rise of the Sangh from the underdogs in the political arena to kingmakers. He was popularly known as Manak ji Bhaisahab in Sangh circles and was a bachelor like all RSS pracharaks, overseeing the publication of Pathey Kan for many years.
Chand belonged to the mercantile Maheshwari community and his father was a businessman in Shillong. As a child in 1954 – right after the first elections in 1952 and during Congress’s heyday – he went to Kuchaman, Nagaur district, for his studies, where a big shakha of the Sangh operated with the support of many big businessmen and government officials. Like most other children, Chand played kabaddi and took part in the daily drills. He recalled that his father had always been a staunch believer of Hindutva ideology and would drive away any Congress party member who came seeking votes. Contrary to other districts, such as Sikar and Jhunjhunu, where many big industrialists – such as Jamnalal Bajaj – were strong supporters of the Congress, Chand said that in the Marwar region, where his home district was located, most of the big industrialists were Hindutva supporters. One of Chand’s biggest influences was Hanuman Prasad Poddar – founding editor of Kalyan, a monthly Hindi magazine published by the Gorakhpur-based Gita Press – and Golwalkar, whom he first met during one of his visits to Deedwana.
Chand spent nearly 60 years in the service of the Sangh as an integral cog in its massive machinery, whose branches twisted and intertwined across all sections of society. With his behind-the-scenes work for the Sangh, Chand contributed to the slow but steady expansion of the influence of the RSS and Jan Sangh – its political wing and the BJP’s predecessor – during 1960–70, when these saffron outfits were the proverbial Davids against the Goliath that was the mighty Congress party in power at both the state and at the centre. Chand completed the Tritiya Varsh Sangh Shiksha Varg training at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, which is mandatory for all aspiring pracharaks. Thereafter, he was appointed the Tonk district pracharak for eleven years between 1966–77.
Chand was among the many Sangh leaders who were arrested during the Emergency under MISA. After he was released from jail, he became the district pracharak in Churu, and witnessed firsthand how the RSS capitalised on anti-Congress sentiments after the Emergency, the formation of the BJP in the 1980s and the party’s eventual rise to power in Rajasthan.
Manak Chand’s eyes would light up every time he spoke about his early days in the RSS, when the organisation did not have much of a foothold in newly independent India. A slight man with a friendly smile, Chand was always dressed in white.
Before I became a pracharak, I was the mukhya shikshak at the shakha at Jaipur’s Gangori Bazaar. I would oversee the training in the shakhas and my work also included regularly interacting with the residents in the area, visiting their homes and talking about the Sangh’s ideology. Back in those days, our aim was to bring maximum people into the Sangh fold. We would say har ek Hindu swayamsevak hai (every Hindu is a swayamsevak).
In those early days, the Congress had immense political capital owing to its role in spearheading the freedom movement. Senior RSS leaders like MS Golwalkar, who was the sarsanghchalak (chief ) at the time when Chand first became involved with the organisation, would regularly visit different areas of Rajasthan to oversee and inspect the work of the swayamsevaks.
The task of inducting new members into the RSS was not always easy. The outfit was banned after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination by Nathuram Godse in 1948. Even though the RSS had distanced itself from Godse and had always maintained that he had left the outfit long before the assassination, Chand recalled how even in the 1950s and ’60s, the general perception of the Sangh was largely unfavourable. As per his own account of an incident from Pilani in Jhunjhunu district, a group of university students belonging to the Jat community labelled RSS supporters or sympathisers among students as “Gandhi ke hatyaare (killers of Gandhi)”.
In fact, Jats, the numerically largest community in the state, have posed the biggest challenge to the RSS’s ambitions since the mid-20th century, especially in rural areas. While the mid-2000s saw the RSS steadily gain popularity among Rajasthan’s OBC communities, the organisation is yet to be headed by a sarsanghchalak belonging to this category, even as late as 2025. Thus far, of its six sarsanghchalaks, five have been Brahmins, while one has been a Kshatriya – a serious disadvantage for the outfit since this has hindered its efforts to woo the Jats, who have also been categorised under OBC since 1999. Stalwart Congress leaders from the Jat community, such as Nathu Ram Mirdha and Daulat Ram Saran, took special care to ensure that the Sangh did not find a foothold in their respective regions, according to Chand. Despite this, the RSS endured undeterred, dispatching its army of volunteers – such as Chand – to spread its ideology across villages. These efforts did yield fruit, as even Congress supporters in some areas joined forces with the RSS.
For example, in Tonk, Ramkumar Tikkiwal, the younger brother of former Congress MLA Ram Ratan Tikkiwal, was the district sanghchalak of the RSS. This was a silent testament to the groundwork laid by the RSS, which enabled it to venture into the electoral arena with its political wing, the Jan Sangh. When Manak Chand was first deputed to the district as its pracharak in 1966, the Jan Sangh was yet to register a victory from this assembly constituency. Tonk has a sizeable Muslim population and was once a princely state ruled by a Muslim nawab. The Sangh would staunchly side with Hindus in case of any confrontations with Muslims, recalled Chand, which would lead to polarisation of the electorate along religious lines and help consolidate Hindu votes. Hardworking swayamsevaks like Chand travelled to every village, spreading the ideology of Hindutva at the grassroots. His frequent visits to villages around Tonk earned him the moniker of “Sangh waale Manak ji (Mr Manak from the Sangh)”.
As the 1972 assembly elections rolled around, the religious fault lines started deepening. Chand recalled,
Swayamsevaks would go to every village before the elections to mobilize people. Balraj Madhok – the former Jan Sangh president – came to Tonk and declared, “Musalmano, yadi Hinduon ne tai kar liya ki hum sabhi vote Jan Sangh ko denge, toh tum kuch nahi kar sakte (Muslims, if the Hindus decide that all of us will vote for Jan Sangh, then you will have no power to do anything)” … aur wahi hua (and that is exactly what happened).
The Jan Sangh emerged victorious for the first time from the Tonk constituency in the 1972 assembly elections, with its candidate Ajit Singh winning the seat.
Three years later, after widespread arrests of Sangh functionaries, including Chand, who were held in Tonk and Jaipur jails during the Emergency, anti-Congress sentiments were on the rise. Congress was drubbed in both the 1977 Lok Sabha and assembly elections, with the Janata Party – a coalition of Jan Sangh, socialist and communist parties – forming governments across the country. There was no looking back.
By the time he passed away in July 2025, Chand had witnessed the state turn saffron; the mission he had dedicated his entire life to had succeeded. From RSS’s austere beginnings as a humble grassroots organisation – especially in comparison to the giant that had been the Congress – to a total role reversal wherein a former RSS pracharak was elected as the country’s prime minister, Chand had truly seen the world change. He had met Narendra Modi in the late 1980s, when the latter was a young pracharak. Figures like Manak Chand have been instrumental in transforming the Hindutva ideology of the Sangh from a fringe movement into a mainstream force. They were its driving forces through challenging times and it is to their loyalty that the RSS owes its success in Rajasthan. They enabled opportunities for unlikely alliances to surface and joined forces with every anti-Congress movement on the ground, while making overtures to caste groups which constituted the majority of Congress’s support base, steadily converting their loyalties to create a mass support base for Hindutva.
Excerpted with permission from From Dynasties to Democracy: Politics, Caste and Power Struggles in Rajasthan, Deep Mukherjee and Tabeenah Anjum, Pan Macmillan India.