Stop Turning Campuses into RSS Shakhas

The Social Democratic Party of India strongly condemns the growing attempts to convert public universities into platforms for the ideological expansion of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh under the guise of its centenary celebrations. The recent RSS-linked Yuva Kumbh programmes in Delhi University colleges and Jamia Millia Islamia are not harmless cultural events but deliberate efforts to normalize a divisive and majoritarian political agenda within secular educational institutions. Universities are meant to be spaces of learning, critical inquiry, and constitutional values, not centres for communal indoctrination or political infiltration.

The RSS has a long history of promoting an exclusionary vision of India that stands against the spirit of pluralism, equality, and secular democracy enshrined in the Constitution. Its ideological foundations, shaped by figures like M.S. Golwalkar, have repeatedly raised concerns about the place of minorities in the national imagination. Opposition from students is therefore not intolerance but a legitimate democratic resistance against saffronisation and institutional capture. In minority institutions like Jamia, such programmes create fear, alienation, and insecurity among students who already feel targeted by the politics of polarization and suspicion.

It is deeply alarming that university administrations impose restrictions on ordinary student activities while extending permission and protection to RSS-linked events with heavy police deployment. This selective approach exposes administrative bias and undermines trust in institutional neutrality. The SDPI stands firmly with students resisting this ideological aggression and demands that public campuses remain independent, inclusive, and free from all forms of communal and partisan domination.

Aatika Sajid
National Secretary
Social Democratic Party of India