RSS’s selective morality and the silence of Dharmasthala

 As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) celebrates its centenary, a flood of glossy tributes paints it as the great protector of the Hindu nation. But beneath the orchestrated spectacle lies a darker, inconvenient truth: the RSS’s concern for Hindu women is deeply selective, loud when Muslims or Christians are accused, but eerily mute when perpetrators are powerful Hindus or Jains.

The hypocrisy is glaring. In recent decades, the Sangh Parivar has mobilised massive campaigns against so-called “love jihad,” inflamed passions over conversion, and turned isolated crimes by Muslims into narratives of civilizational war. Yet, when Hindu women have been brutalised by their own — whether by upper-caste landlords, feudal families, or Swamijis exposed in sex scandals — the same RSS looks away. For an organisation that swears by dharma and discipline, this is nothing short of moral bankruptcy.

Take Dharmasthala in Karnataka, the self-styled seat of dharma. Behind the façade of temples, rituals, and charity, lies a blood-soaked history already documented in public domain through RTI records and testimonies: hundreds of women raped, silenced, and killed, their cases buried by the weight of feudal power and political collusion. The Patel family that presides over this empire is untouchable — not because truth is lacking, but because the machinery of law bends before money, caste, and influence.

Where was the RSS when Vedavalli and Padmalath, young women, of Dharmasthala were raped and murdered in 1979  and 1986 —  cases that still festers in public memory? Where is it today, when the RTI documents point to a horrifying pattern hundreds of women raped and killed  spanning decades? The truth is simple: had the accused been Muslims or Christians, the RSS would have unleashed a storm of street protests, propaganda, and vigilante fury. Because the accused are Hindu elites, the Sangh prefers silence. Silence is its shield, complicity its crime.

This is not an isolated failing. When Dalit women are raped and killed by upper-caste Hindus, the Sangh rarely mobilises. When Swamijis in Karnataka and elsewhere (recently one such in Delhi) are caught in serial scandals involving minors and women, RSS affiliates maintain decorous silence. But the same network screams itself hoarse about protecting Hindu daughters from interfaith marriages. This is not protection. It is weaponisation of women’s bodies for communal politics.

To condone this is to accept that a Hindu woman’s life matters only if her attacker is a religious “other.” That is not dharma. That is a betrayal of dharma. It exposes the Sangh as an organisation not of principle, but of opportunism — quick to exploit women’s suffering for communal gain, unwilling to confront the rot within its own camp.

As the RSS turns 100, it asks the nation to celebrate its service. But service that refuses to protect the most vulnerable, that abandons Hindu women when they are violated by Hindu of Jain men, is no service at all. It is cowardice dressed as nationalism, silence disguised as discipline. And in Dharmasthala, that silence has been written in blood.