• Adv. Rajiv Sharma

On 20 July 2026, thousands of unarmed students marched from Jantar Mantar towards Parliament, demanding answers for the NEET paper leak, the CBSE marking scandal and the young Indians who had killed themselves over both.

They were answered with tear gas, batons and even pellet guns; while it was done, the internet around Parliament was switched off. The nearby hospitals filled with injured students. Those lathis, at least, belonged to the state. But moving alongside the state, here and in scores of episodes before it, is something the Republic never authorised: a private army that holds no appointment and answers to no officer, summoned by the ruling establishment whenever useful and disowned the moment it is noticed. Such an immoral arrangement is not an Indian invention. It was perfected by Mussolini and Hitler, studied on the spot by the men who built the RSS, and imported here deliberately.

The confession that exposed the system

We know these men exist because one of them could not stop boasting.

Swatantra Bhardwaj is not a policeman; he is twenty-one, a Patna activist who sells himself as a sanatani warrior. On the evening of 23 June, at that same Jantar Mantar, Sanjay Kumar, father of the Dalit student activist Nishu Azad, was filming the protest when, he says, he was surrounded and beaten badly.

Then Bhardwaj boasted of it on a podcast. “I cracked the skull of a man,” he said, and then asked, “Do you know which section this attracts? Section 307” — attempt to murder. He said that he owned Delhi Police kit, including a baton “issued by Delhi Police”, and that though he held no appointment, “I roam around like a Delhi policeman.” Finally he named his insurance: “Kapil Mishra is like my elder brother. Chirag Paswan is my elder brother, all of them. Tell me which leader you know? Modi ji is also my elder brother.”

Kapil Mishra is Delhi’s Minister of Law and Justice, Chirag Paswan a Union Minister, and the third, the Prime Minister of India. These are Bhardwaj’s own words, on a recording anyone can watch, never retracted. Chirag Paswan disowned him, and his party filed a police complaint; but it was an eyewash as no case was registered, and from the Prime Minister, nothing.

Bhardwaj went unarrested for seventy-three days; what forced the Delhi Police to act was not his confession but a question. On 4 September the Leader of the Opposition, Shri Rahul Gandhi, asked the Home Minister: “Amit Shah’s Delhi Police, on one hand, commits inhuman brutality against students. On the other hand, the criminal who smashed the head of a Dalit girl’s father is roaming freely in the open. Why does such a criminal have the protection of you and the people in your party?” To Nishu he wrote simply, “I am with you.” Within a day, Bhardwaj was in custody. The paralysis ended the moment one man refused to be quiet.

The powers Bhardwaj named have retreated into denial or silence, but that silence speaks volumes: here is a boy of twenty-one who treated the Prime Minister’s name as licence to attack and maim. Nobody is born with such certainty. It is taught, and here it has been taught for ninety-five years by an organisation that learnt it in Rome in 1931.

What Nagpur brought home from Rome

The RSS did not invent this arrangement; it imported it, and left behind a receipt. Even a glance at how the RSS works, and at the ideology it follows, shows both are borrowed wholesale from the fascist models of 1930s Europe. This is not an incidental resemblance but documented inheritance.

Mussolini did not take Italy through Parliament; he took it through the squadristi, murdering the opposition MP Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924, days after he exposed the regime’s theft of an election. ‘Vote chori’ is an old crime, and so is silencing the man who exposes it.

In January 1923, Mussolini gave those squads a uniform and a salary, turning them into a state-funded militia answerable to himself; Hitler did the same with the Brownshirts, deputised in1933 as “auxiliary police”. The design, in both countries, was private militia first, state licence afterwards. Its genius lay entirely in deniability. The party governed in a suit while its volunteers did the blood-work.

Which is why they are the Blackshirts of Bharat: a man with no appointment, carrying a baton he says Delhi Police issued him and calling the Prime Minister his elder brother, is the Roman original in Indian light.

The RSS copied fascist ideas and followed in their footsteps at every stage. That is documented fact: the Sangh’s own elders wrote it down. In March 1931 Dr B.S. Moonje, mentor to RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar, was received by Mussolini at the Palazzo Venezia and shown the Balilla and the Avanguardisti; he told the Duce: “Every aspiring and growing Nation needs such organisations”, and wanted them most for India’s military regeneration. He went home and built one: the Central Hindu Military Education Society in 1935, the Bhonsala Military School in 1937. The Balilla, transplanted.

In 1938, V.D. Savarkar held up Germany’s treatment of its Jews as the answer to India’s ‘Muslim problem’. A year later, in We or Our Nationhood Defined, M.S. Golwalkar, who led the RSS for the next thirty-three years, praised Germany’s “purging” of the Jews as “race pride at its highest”, calling it “a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by”. In the eighty-seven years since, no RSS Chief has withdrawn those words. Not one. Ask them why.

The deniability, a famous trait of the RSS, was also imported. For seventy-eight years, the RSS insisted Nathuram Godse was never one of theirs; in August 2026 that denial died in a Pune courtroom, when Satyaki Savarkar, grandnephew of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, told the court on oath that Godse and his brother Gopal were active RSS members. This is the fascist deniability playbook at work: the shakha trains the men, frontal organisations like the Bajrang Dal and gau rakshak squads deploy them, and the party has never heard of them. Repeated lying is another fascist principle the RSS has adopted.

The ledger of blood

This is what the imported design produces. On the night of 22–23 January 1999 the missionary Graham Staines and his sons, aged ten and six, were burned alive in their vehicle in Odisha; Dara Singh, a Bajrang Dal activist, was convicted. In May 2024, a Pune court gave two men life for murdering Narendra Dabholkar, shot in 2013 for opposing superstition. The CBI linked the murder to a conspiracy by Sanatan Sanstha, the same outfit the SIT named in Gauri Lankesh’s 2017 murder. Add Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi, both shot in 2015. Four rationalists, four unflinching critics of Hindutva. That is not a coincidence. That is a target list.

Then there is the lynching economy: • Mohammad Akhlaq — lynched at Dadri, 2015. • Pehlu Khan — lynched at Alwar, 2017; named his killers as he died, yet all were acquitted. • Nasir and Junaid — burnt alive at Bhiwani, 2023; a Bajrang Dal cow-vigilante leader named in the FIR. • JNU, January 2020 — a masked mob with iron rods stormed the hostels; the Hindu Raksha Dal claimed the attack as its own. • Delhi riots, February 2020 - fifty-three dead, most Muslim; a commission called it planned and targeted, with Kapil Mishra’s police ultimatum days earlier the most-cited trigger.

Six years on, the same name resurfaces in the Bhardwaj affair. Nothing here was meant to be learnt, because what was unfolding was the RSS’ imported ideology. Nor are these exceptions: NCRB’s count has risen from 54,192 crimes against Dalits and Adivasis in 2019 to 64,760 in 2024, nearly one every eight minutes. And there is nowhere to take the complaint. 3,07,355 cases lie pending under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. That backlog is the imported design working as intended. The shakha trains the attacker, the party disowns him, and the victim keeps waiting for justice.

Every Indian should fear this, not just Muslims or Dalits. A republic rests on one promise: force belongs to the state, and the state answers to the law. When a party volunteer carries a police baton and a phone call outranks an FIR, that promise is dead for everybody. Today the lathi falls on a Dalit; tomorrow a Muslim; the day after a shopkeeper who won’t donate. Mob power keeps no promises.

The choice before us

The BJP and the RSS govern with one hand and unleash with the other, asking us to believe the two hands are strangers. They are not strangers: the blueprint came from Rome, carried home by a doctor from Nagpur, and we know where it took the countries that built it.

So let us unite across faith, caste, language and region to defend the Constitution that B.R. Ambedkar gave us, to insist that the law bind a vigilante exactly as it binds a student, and to protect a country that was never meant to belong to whichever crowd carries the heaviest stick.

The Republic is not lost. But it is on trial, and we the people are its jury.

The author is Chief Spokesperson & General Secretary Chandigarh Congress