Rain on the Sangh's Parade

The myth that Nehru invited the RSS to the 1963 Republic Day event / History

- DHIRENDRA K JHA

The much-hyped claim that India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, invited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to take part in the Republic Day parade of 1963 is nothing but an outright attempt to insert a lie in Indian history. Archival records refute this assertion. Instead, they suggest a completely different scenario: some members of the RSS, in their full uniform, entered that year's Republic Day event, which was more of a citizens' march than a military parade due to the national emergency caused by the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

This claim has routinely cropped up in the last few years and generated intense speculation. "Recognising the role that the RSS played in national emergencies, Pandit Nehru invited them for Republic Day parade in 1963," Ratan Sharda, a member of the RSS media team, wrote in his 2018 book, RSS 360. "A 3000 strong RSS contingent in uniform participated in the parade with just three days' notice." When the former president Pranab Mukherjee visited the Sangh's Nagpur headquarters, in June 2018, the RSS and its sympathisers used this claim to silence critics. Even in September 2022, when the governor of Kerala, Arif Mohammad Khan, was criticised for visiting an RSS leader's residence at Thrissur to meet the Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat, he invoked this very argument.