The Evening Report of Phase 6: How organizational might makes all the difference in elections

In 1921, the total number of volunteers of Congress Seva Dal in the United Provinces (now mostly, Uttar Pradesh) was said to be around 90,000 spread across the then 36 districts. Congress mostly derived its electoral strength from this volunteer corps. By the time India had gained independence in 1947, the Seva Dal had lost all its sheen and virtually dissipated as an organization with less than 20,000 members who mostly never undertook any social work in the first place.

In 1947, there was another much stronger volunteer organization in UP known as the Muslim National Guards which had a strength of 37,000 and was keenly organizing the leftover Muslims after partition and polarising them against the Hindu populace. The core philosophy of Muslim National Guards was derived from Abu A’la Maududi, the Amir of Jamaat-e-Islami who used to propagate that “if just a few thousand Communists and Nazis could control Russia and Germany, why can’t 80 million Muslims control even a Hindu majority India?”. It is in this milieu that the RSS had begun to rise in UP in the 30’s and had grown by 1947 into the second largest volunteer organisation in the state with more than 31,000 swayam sevaks working for the Hindu socio-political interests.