This month, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, India's powerful, male-only Hindu nationalist outfit, finally played a card it has long held in its hand. It announced an intensive conversion program to recover its "lost property" in India, feeding the dream of its cadre and allied organizations of an India that is nothing less than "100 per cent Hindu."
The RSS has visibly grown in power and ambition in the seven months since the arrival of a new government — unsurprisingly, as it counts among its past members the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, as well as many old and new chief ministers in the states. With this carefully calculated provocation under a regime sympathetic to its ideology, the nongovernmental organization is seeking victories in many arenas.
In the realm of law, the RSS wants the passage of a stringent nationwide bill that would ban religious conversions. In the public sphere, it has arrogated the right to pronounce not just on the future of minorities in India but that of India's Hindu majority as well.