Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan slams PM Modi for ‘glorifying’ RSS in Independence Day address

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has decried Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “name-checking and adulation” of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) during the latter’s address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day on Friday (August 15, 2025). 

In a strongly worded statement on Saturday (August 16, 2025), Mr. Vijayan said Mr. Modi had “belittled the Independence Day by attempting to gift the legacy of the freedom movement to the RSS, which was outlawed in the aftermath of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.”

Mr. Vijayan also spotlighted the Union Ministry of Petroleum’s controversial Independence Day poster, which, he stated, almost superimposed the image of V.D. Savarkar, an RSS ideologue who faced trial for plotting to assassinate Gandhi, over the image of the nation’s founding father. 

Mr. Vijayan said the Central government had belittled the Independence Day by attempting to lionise and fete the RSS, which he stated was “unabashedly servile to the colonial rulers and repeatedly betrayed the freedom movement.” 

Mr. Vijayan stated that the Central government has used the national platform to distort India’s history by attempting to “fraudulently claim the revered legacy of the freedom movement for the pro-colonialist RSS.”

He said the RSS had no role in the Independence struggle and was shamelessly deferential to colonial rulers. Mr. Vijayan also said the RSS’ “communally schismatic worldview furthered the colonial regime’s divide-and-rule strategy.”

Mr. Vijayan said the RSS feared the history of India’s freedom struggle. Hence, the RSS-controlled Central government has hatched a plot to recast the secular-democratic battle for freedom in the Sangh Parivar’s Hindu majoritarian image. 

The Chief Minister said the people had cast out caste, communal, linguistic and cultural differences and united as a nation to throw off the colonial yoke. He said the RSS was fundamentally opposed to the doctrine of Independence.

‘Indelible stigma’

It openly opposed the people’s aspiration for a secular-democratic polity. The RSS still bore the indelible stigma of having collaborated with the colonial oppressors, he added.

Mr. Vijayan stated that the Independence struggle centred around the humanist principle of unity in diversity. The RSS considered the freedom struggle’s creed an anathema and promoted the idea of a Hindu nation, an oppressively theocratic-fascist state aspiring to relegate Muslims, Christians and marginalised sections of society to the subaltern status of second-class citizens.

Mr. Vijayan said the RSS upheld the Manusmriti, an ancient text that assigned human merit and created oppressive social hierarchies based on caste, and frowned upon the Constituent Assembly’s attempt to forge a secular-democratic founding document. 

Mr. Vijayan said Savarkar, who led the Hindu Mahasabha, boycotted the first Independence Day celebrations held on August 15, 1947. “The Central government is attempting strenuously to recast Savarkar as a freedom fighter equal or above in stature to Gandhi”, he said. 

Mr. Vijayan said that the RSS-controlled Union government attempted enthusiastically to remove the martyrs of the Punnapra-Vayalar agrarian uprising against feudal land owners and the victims of the Wagon Tragedy (in 1921) from the list of freedom fighters.

“The Central government is fraudulently attempting to glorify the RSS as the true heirs of India’s freedom struggle”, Mr. Vijayan wrote. 

He urged the people to “resist the Centre’s attempt to draw a historical equivalency between humanist leaders such as Bhagawat Singh and Gandhi and the symbols of hate and division.”