The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), after a decade of silence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dominance, is reasserting itself. By signaling support for renewed agitations on Kashi and Mathura, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has reminded the BJP leadership—and India at large—that Hindutva’s ideological engine is not content with the Ram Temple alone. This is not simply about two disputed shrines; it is about the RSS reclaiming ideological primacy from a government that has often preferred optics over organizational discipline.

The timing is critical. Modi, entering his 11th year in power, faces diminishing returns: economic slowdown, social unrest, and international criticism have tempered the aura of invincibility. For the RSS, this is an opportunity. By reviving the call for Kashi and Mathura, the Sangh signals that Hindutva’s cultural revolution is far from complete—and that the BJP’s current leadership cannot afford to rest on Ayodhya’s laurels. Bhagwat’s remarks serve as both an ideological prod and a political reminder: Modi may have mastered the theatrics of Hindutva, but the RSS owns its long-term project.

For years, the RSS tolerated Modi’s personality-driven politics. The Prime Minister projected himself as the Hindu Hruday Samrat, overshadowing the Sangh’s traditional stress on collective discipline. Bhagwat’s intervention suggests that the RSS now wants to rebalance the equation. Kashi and Mathura are not just religious sites; they represent unfinished business for the Hindutva imagination. By placing these issues back on the agenda, the RSS effectively sidelines the cult of one leader and recenters the narrative around the organization’s broader ideological mission.

While much commentary reduces the RSS’s move to an attempt to promote Yogi Adityanath, the reality is subtler. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh embodies the raw Hindutva instinct—direct, uncompromising, and rooted in the Hindi heartland. Unlike Shah, whose political identity is tethered to Modi, Adityanath has an independent base of legitimacy. But more importantly, his sanyasi persona aligns with the RSS’s cultural framing: Hindutva not just as politics, but as civilizational struggle. Whether or not the Sangh explicitly anoints him, its Kashi-Mathura call amplifies the kind of politics Adityanath thrives in.

For Modi, the RSS’s signal is a double-edged sword. If he embraces the Kashi-Mathura agitation, he risks inflaming communal tensions at a time when India’s international standing is already under scrutiny. If he resists, he risks appearing lukewarm to the very cause that propelled him to power in 2014. The RSS has, in effect, boxed Modi into a corner: either escalate the Hindutva agenda beyond Ayodhya or risk being outflanked by its own ideological fountainhead.

It would be reductive to see this only as an internal power game. The larger story is that the RSS is recalibrating Hindutva’s trajectory. Just as Mao’s cultural revolution in China sought to re-ignite revolutionary fervor when the state machinery became bureaucratic, Bhagwat’s remarks point toward an effort to re-energize the cadre base. The BJP’s electoral machinery has been powerful, but it has also depoliticized Hindutva by turning it into a series of spectacles—temple inaugurations, symbolic slogans, and carefully staged events. The Sangh, by contrast, wants to push grassroots mobilization: street agitations, pilgrim marches, and direct confrontation. In other words, the Kashi-Mathura signal is less about leadership succession and more about reactivating the movement character of Hindutva, which the Modi government’s centralization has muted.

The agitation could deepen religious polarization at a time when India needs consensus on economic and social crises. A resurgent RSS asserting ideological discipline could destabilize the Modi–Shah dominance, forcing internal realignments. The Hindi heartland, long the laboratory of Hindutva, could see renewed turbulence as communal flashpoints are revived. Just as Ayodhya drew global scrutiny, so too will renewed conflicts over Kashi and Mathura, testing India’s claims of being the world’s largest democracy.

Mohan Bhagwat’s green signal on Kashi and Mathura is less about two contested shrines and more about the unfinished cultural revolution of Hindutva. It is a reminder that the RSS, though muted during Modi’s decade of dominance, has neither forgotten its ideological agenda nor surrendered its role as the custodian of Hindutva.

For the BJP, this marks a turning point: the party must now navigate between a powerful Prime Minister who built his brand on Hindutva and an ideological parent demanding that the project be taken to its next stage. Whether this leads to Adityanath’s rise, Shah’s marginalization, or Modi’s recalibration, one thing is clear: the Sangh has re-entered the battlefield, and the politics of Hindutva is about to enter a new phase.