What If the RSS's Wooden Rod Met an Iron Rod, Would We All Then Crave the Constitution?

The steelman first

“When all other means have failed, it is righteous to draw the sword.” That is Guru Gobind Singh's Zafarnama, written to Aurangzeb around 1705. Gandhi, yes, Gandhi, wrote in Young India on 11 August 1920 that “where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.” Locke grounded politics itself in the right of self-preservation. Just war theory from Aquinas to Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars (1977) accepts defensive force. And Indian law agrees: the right of private defence, once IPC ss.96–106, now Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, ss.34–44, says plainly that nothing is an offence which is done in its lawful exercise.

So this article does not begin by mocking the lathi. Self-defense is philosophically respectable across Sikh, Gandhian, liberal, and statutory traditions. It begins by taking the lathi's defenders completely seriously, and then asking them to pass one test. Hand your exact logic to someone else, and watch what happens.

The lathi's logic, at full strength

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded in Nagpur on 27 September 1925 by K. B. Hedgewar. Its stated rationale has been consistent for a century: discipline, physical fitness, character-building, self-defense. The scale is real. Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle, the most careful outside chroniclers of the organization, report roughly 57,000 daily shakhas across 36,293 locations, with 1.5–2 million regular participants (2016 figures, in The RSS: A View to the Inside, 2018). Their 1987 study The Brotherhood in Saffron opens with men in khaki before saffron flags, taught “to think of themselves as a family, a brotherhood.”

The psychology behind the drill is also real, and it works. Wiltermuth and Heath (2009) showed across three experiments that people who move in synchrony cooperate more afterwards, even at personal cost. Durkheim called the emotional charge of collective ritual “collective effervescence”; Jackson et al. (2020) documented its trade-off: the same synchrony that bonds insiders raises the wall against outsiders. Weapons add their own charge: Berkowitz and LePage (1967) found the mere presence of a weapon increased aggressive responses, though the definitive meta-analysis, Benjamin, Kepes and Bushman (2018), with 78 studies and 7,668 participants, concludes the behavioral effect is “inconclusive for now.” Scholars who sat in shakhas, like Arafaat Valiani in Cultural Anthropology (2010), describe lathi maneuvers as both ethical self-fashioning and preparation “to confront perceived threats,” with Jaffrelot and Hansen documenting how the drill builds a masculinity defined partly against an imagined other.

And here is the quiet legal fact that makes the whole model work: the Arms Act, 1959, s.2(1)(c) defines “arms” but expressly excludes “articles designed solely for domestic or agricultural uses such as a lathi or an ordinary walking stick.” The lathi is lawful not because drilling with weapons is lawful, but because Parliament decided a lathi is not a weapon. Hold that thought.

The blueprint: Samata Loha Dal (a thought experiment)

Now run the Mirror Test. Imagine a counter-organization. Call it the Samata Loha Dal, the “Equality Iron Corps.” It is hypothetical, and it stays hypothetical; its purpose is to be looked at, not built. It copies the model element for element, with one change: the wooden rod becomes an iron one. Its founders can even cite precedent: Ambedkar himself founded the Samata Sainik Dal in 1927 as a disciplined Dalit self-defense corps; the Congress ran the uniformed Seva Dal from 1923–24; Badshah Khan drilled roughly 100,000 uniformed Khudai Khidmatgars from 1929. Disciplined volunteer corps are an Indian tradition, not an RSS monopoly.

Look at the table's fifth row, because the experiment dies there, and the death is the finding. The mirror group hits a wall on day one: an iron rod adapted as a weapon has no lathi exemption. It is “arms” under the Arms Act, and drilling a standing formation with it is unlawful before the first march. Nor does self-defense law rescue it: BNS ss.34–44 attach to moments: imminent threat, necessity, proportionality, and the right ends when the threat ends. The law licenses a defended instant, never a standing army. So the mirror group discovers, before recruiting a single volunteer, that its only lawful forms are (a) a clone of the very organization it set out to balance, (b) a disarmed Khudai Khidmatgar, or (c) a petition. Its founding meeting is, unavoidably, a constitutional debate.

The rough path, in numbers

Suppose it marches anyway. Political science has a name for what happens next: the security dilemma. John Herz (1950) and Robert Jervis (1978) showed that steps one side takes purely for its own security read as threats to the other side, which arms in response, which confirms the first side's fears. It is a spiral in which everyone is “defending” and everyone ends up less safe.

Weimar Germany ran this experiment with real bodies. The SPD founded the Reichsbanner on 22 February 1924 to defend the republic; the Communists answered with the Rotfrontkämpferbund, which grew from about 40,450 members in April 1925 to roughly 127,000 by 1927; the Nazis drilled the SA. Every one of them claimed self-defense. Richard Evans documents the street war that followed. On “Altona Bloody Sunday,” 17 July 1932, a single afternoon left 18 dead. Within a year, one militia had absorbed the state and banned the rest. Democracy did not survive the symmetry.

India ran it too. By February 1947 the colonial government counted 118,152 members in the Muslim League National Guard, a figure the historian Ian Talbot considers an undercount, while an intelligence report cited in Ayesha Jalal's Self and Sovereignty recorded instruction “in the art of knife and acid throwing, and in the use of fire-arms.” The RSS and the Khaksars drilled opposite them. On 24 January 1946 Bengal declared both the Muslim National Guard and the RSS unlawful; the state could no longer tell the “defensive” formations apart. Seven months later came Direct Action Day, and after it, Partition's dead, for which estimates run from several hundred thousand to two million. Modern data says this is the rule, not the exception: Carey and Mitchell's review (2017) of the pro-government-militia literature finds that outsourcing force away from the accountable state predictably increases rights violations. The spiral is not a metaphor. It is a dataset.

The craving

Here is the part of the story the fence-sitter usually hasn't heard. In February 1948, after Gandhi's assassination by a former swayamsevak, the Government of India banned the RSS. Patel's notification spoke of members who had “indulged in acts of violence” and “collected illicit arms.” The organization's response was not an armed one. It negotiated. And the ban was lifted in July 1949 on one condition: that the RSS adopt a written constitution. Read that again. When the full weight of the state arrived, the organization most associated with the lathi survived by doing the most constitutional thing imaginable: it wrote itself a constitution. The craving this article predicts for the mirror group is not speculative. Its original has already felt it, once, in 1949.

Ambedkar had named the principle two years earlier. In his final speech to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949, he called for abandoning the “grammar of anarchy”: where constitutional methods are open, “there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods.” And on 4 November 1948 he warned that constitutional morality “is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.” Cultivated, like a drill. The daily shakha proves Indians will show up every morning for discipline. The only question is what the discipline serves.

The verdict of the mirror

Run the whole experiment start to finish and it produces exactly three outcomes, in this order:

1. The reason works for everyone. If “we carry rods to defend ourselves” is a good reason for one group, it is an equally good reason for every other group. Locke, the Gita, the Zafarnama and the BNS hand the right of self-defense to all people, not to one flag.

2. When everyone uses the reason, everyone loses. Each group arms to feel safe, the other side sees a threat and arms back, and both end up less safe than when they started (Herz 1950; Jervis 1978). The numbers are the proof: 127,000 Rotfront fighters facing the SA in Germany, 18 dead in one Altona afternoon, and democracy gone within a year; 118,152 Muslim National Guards facing the RSS and Khaksars in India by February 1947, and Partition's dead counted in the hundreds of thousands to two million.

3. Everyone eventually runs to the Constitution. When the spiral peaks, the state steps in, and groups choose law over rods, because law is the only place the spiral cannot follow them (Weber, 1919). The RSS itself proved this: banned in 1948, it did not fight back with lathis. It wrote itself a written constitution to become legal again in 1949. The iron-rod group would reach the same door. It would just arrive bruised, banned, and later.

In one line: the experiment starts with a rod and ends with a rulebook, every single time. The only choice any group has is how much it pays on the way.

So the next time someone defends the wooden rod, don't argue. Offer the iron one, hypothetically, and wait. The discomfort they feel is the argument. If a symmetric corps drilling for “self-defense” across the street feels dangerous, then the honest conclusion is Ambedkar's, and the strongest case for the constitution turns out to be written in the mirror. Read the primary sources linked above, and join the discussion at UTL's Ambedkar Hub.