World · India Bureau
Regime-change protests risk serving political interests, warns RSS chief
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat cautioned on Tuesday that agitations seeking to overthrow governments often fail to resolve underlying problems and may instead become tools for advancing narrow political agendas while deepening social fractures.
LSN India ·
Addressing the annual Vijayadashami gathering in Nagpur, Bhagwat said that recent political upheavals across Bangladesh, Nepal, France, and Albania demonstrated how regime-change movements rarely delivered their promised outcomes. He contended that actors pursuing their own interests frequently use such agitations as vehicles for altering political circumstances, without achieving substantive results. "They claim that changing a regime will change the situation, but that has never really happened," Bhagwat said during the RSS's Vijayadashami Utsav, where he performed shastra puja, or weapon worship.
The RSS chief argued that a stronger India would prove more resistant to external attempts at destabilisation and division. He suggested that while certain global powers supported India's development, they did not wish to see the country become sufficiently powerful to challenge their international dominance, making it a potential target of weakening strategies.
The remarks reflect longstanding ideological concerns within RSS circles about the nature of mass protests and their potential to be instrumentalised for political purposes rather than addressing structural grievances in society.