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Great oaks from little acorns grow. What started as a tiny stream in an obscure corner of Nagpur in Maharashtra 68 years ago has now swollen into a mighty river engulfing the remotest villages of the country. That the number of Sangh Shakhas has crossed 25,000 is one indicator of the expanding reach of the Sangh.
It redounds to the foresight of Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940) that he anticipated the need for strengthening the foundations of the Hindu society and for preparing it for challenges on social, economic, cultural, religious, philosophical and political planes. A galaxy of savants such as Dayananda and Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Tilak, had sown the seeds of the most recent phase of national renaissance. What was needed was a sufficiently strong instrumentality for carrying that process onward. This instrumentality was created and bequeathed to the nation by Dr. Hedgewar in the form of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which he, after years of deliberate and patient preparation, founded at Nagpur on 27th September, Vijayadashami Day of 1925.
One of the hazards of organisation-building is allowing one's vision to be clouded with immediate concerns, resulting in dilution of perception of the ultimate goal. Dr. Hedgewar's especial strength was that he never allowed demands of the immediate present to veer him away from the ultimate mission he set to himself.
Keeping aflame the spirit of freedom and endeavouring simultaneously to strengthen the cultural roots of the nation marked the twin features of the character of the Sangh from the beginning; and that has to this day remained its main plank. Every passing day has confrmed the validity of this basic philosophy. Erosion of the nation's integrity in the name of secularism, economic and moral bankruptcy, incessant conversions from the Hindu fold through money-power, ever-increasing trends of secession, thought-patterns and education dissonant with the native character of the people, and State-sponsored denigration of anything that goes by the name of Hindu or Hindutwa: these pervasive tendencies provide ample proof of the soundness of the philosophical foundation of the Sangh as conceived by Dr. Hedgewar and its continued relevance for the survival and health of the Hindu society and of the nation as a whole. It is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh alone which has consistently been sounding the alarm against all these wrong tendencies in the body-politic of Bharat.
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