The RSS and the Coordination Problem:A Systems Critique of Homogenised Unity

 

Recently, the sarsang chalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, Dr. Mohan Bhagwat, made a comment that stirred up quite a storm. He spoke about roti-beti yavahar, the sharing of meals and the forging of inter-caste marriage alliances, as a method to achieve Hindu unity. He suggested that to truly unify society, we must encourage inter-caste marriages, citing that a significant percentage of such marriages already happen within the Sangh ecosystem.

​Now, on the surface, this sounds like a standard modern progressive statement, but it drew criticism from within the traditional folds of Hindu society itself. Why? Because for many, it felt like a top-down imposition, a social engineering project. It felt like an attempt to erase the unique identities of communities in favour of a homogenised, flat khichdi identity. It felt like the solution to disunity was being framed as the destruction of diversity. This controversy highlights a deep conundrum in our collective psyche. Political Hindus are obsessed with unity. They crave it. They lament its absence. But every time they try to fix it using modern political tools, they seem to break something fundamental in our social fabric.

​Why is that? Why is Hindu unity such a difficult nut to crack? To understand this, we need to rewind a bit. Human beings are parochial altruists. We are selfish as individuals, but we become selfless when we are part of a team. We are creatures of light and shadow. The magic glue that holds us together isn't just love or humanity. It is something biologists call shared intentionality. This is the cognitive ability to share a mental representation of a task. It's the ability to say, I will row the boat, and you steer the rudder, and together we will reach that island. We might hate each other personally, but we cooperate because we share a specific tangible goal. Abrahamic faiths have this shared intentionality built into their theology. Their goal is clear. Convert the non-believer. Save his soul. Dominate the planet. It is a clear in-group versus out-group dynamic. But Hindus? We don't have a single commandment. We don't have an overarching goal like global conversion. Our unity was never based on a single dogma. Historically, our unity, our groupishness was functional. It was based on jatis, on guilds, on ritual functions, on economics, on specific duties. When we try to manufacture political unity without a shared civilizational goal, we are chasing a mirage.

​So here we are today. We face a coordination problem. Hindus have a desperate desire to cooperate. We want to work together. And we want to do it at the maximum possible scale. The scale of the nation. But coordination is not a feeling. Coordination is a mechanism. To coordinate, you need a clearly defined in-group and a clearly defined out-group. You need to know who is on the team and who is not. And crucially, you need shared goals. If I think the goal is to build a temple and you think the goal is to build a casino, we cannot coordinate, no matter how much we scream Jai Shri Ram together. Over the last century, different leaders tried to solve this Hindu coordination problem. They saw the fractured state of our society and offered their own blueprints for unity.

​First, there was the Nehruvian vision, which was not just about Hindus, but all Indians. This was a vision of erasure. Nehru wanted to create a new national identity that superseded everything else. He wanted you to forget you were an Odia, a Brahmin, a Jat, a Muslim or a Hindu. He wanted you just to be an Indian. His method was to thrust secularism upon us. He believed that if we just stopped talking about our religion and our caste, we would magically become modern, rational, unified citizens. The goal was modernization. The method was amnesia.

​Then there was the Savarkarite vision. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar looked at the coordination problem and identified the out-group. He correctly pointed out that the divided loyalties of Christians and Muslims, who often looked to the West or the Middle East for their spiritual guidance, posed a problem for national cohesion. His definition of a Hindu was someone who viewed this land as both their fatherland and their holy land. His vision was primarily about excluding those conflicting ideologies to secure the nation. It was a defensive unity that, in many ways, mirrored the strategy of the other.

​And then we have the RSS vision. This is where Dr. Bhagwat s comments come from. The RSS vision is to solve the coordination problem by annihilation. They want to annihilate caste differences. They want to smooth out the rough edges of our diversity. They want to tackle the question of how to love your neighbour by demolishing the wall between your house and the neighbours. The roti beti statement is the ultimate expression of this. The logic is, if everyone marries each other, eventually everyone will be the same. If everyone is the same, there will be no conflict. In this Hindutva vision, we discuss who participates in nation building, i.e. who is a Hindu. But the definition of nation building itself is left vague. What are we building? If you look closely, you realise a terrifying irony. The Hindutva vision of India s future is almost a mirror image of the Nehruvian vision. Both want to modernise. Both want to reform. Both view our traditional structures as impediments to be overcome. One wears a suit, the other wears khakis. But both are marching towards a modern, homogenised nation state, where traditional identities are melted down.

​So, the question arises. Can we look at the Hindu unity project as just a matter of finding the right slogan? The right leader? No. The scale of the problem demands that we stop looking for simple slogans. It demands a serious engagement with complexity. It demands a systemic approach to problem solving. You see, a complex society like India cannot be managed by a single rule. You cannot run a civilisation that is thousands of years old, with thousands of jatis, sampradayas and languages, using the same logic you use to run a local unit. We need a better framework.

​Here, a concept called coherent pluralism is introduced. Coherent pluralism is a theoretical and practical framework that posits that multiple, diverse and even seemingly contradictory philosophical or methodological perspectives can be utilised simultaneously in a logically consistent manner. It is the key to unlocking the power of Hindu tradition to address existential problems of the present and future. Coherent pluralism is different from the strategies usually seen. Usually, we see isolationism. This is when you say, my way is the only way and I don't care about yours. Everyone stays in their silo. Conflicts multiply. Then we see imperialism. This is when you say my way is better than yours and I will force you to follow it. This is colonial rule. This is the imposition of a single truth. This is what the British did to India. And we see pragmatism. This is the Jugad approach. Just mix and match whatever works right now to get the job done with no underlying principles. It fixes the temporary symptom but ignores the disease. This is how democracies deal with cuts till they turn into festering wounds. This is how societies externalise negative outcomes and pass it on to their children and grandchildren.

​Coherent pluralism is different. It says that multiple, diverse, even contradictory perspectives can exist simultaneously, provided they operate within a disciplined meta-framework that holds them together. It differentiates between logical contradiction, where you and I disagree on facts, and contextual divergence, where you and I are playing different games and that's okay. A real world example to show how powerful this is can be seen in New Zealand. There was a massive conflict over the Wanganui river. The western government, operating on a secular, materialist worldview, saw the river as a resource. It was property. It was water flowing in a channel. The indigenous Maori people saw the river completely differently. To them, the river was an ancestor. It was a living being. It was an indivisible whole. Now an isolationist approach would have been to just ignore the Maori. An imperialist approach would have probably forced the Maori view to submit to the western view. A pragmatist view might have just cut a deal to stop the protests without solving the core issue. But they chose coherent pluralism. They passed the Te Awa Tupua Act. They granted the river legal personhood. This allowed the Maori worldview, which considers the river to be an ancestor, to coexist with the western legal system. They created a meta-framework that allowed two different realities to coexist without destroying each other.

​Coherent pluralism isn't just jargon. It emerged from real-world problem-solving. Complex problems like climate change or the unity of a civilization are too big for one single lens. Different paradigms are like different languages. They are incommensurable, meaning you cannot perfectly translate one into the other. If you try to force a poem into a spreadsheet, you lose the poetry. If you try to run a nuclear power plant using only poetry, you get a meltdown. So a revolutionary idea developed: the meta-framework. Coherent pluralism says we will use all the approaches, but we will not mash them together into a grey soup. We will respect their differences. We need a meta-methodology to police this traffic. We need a set of rules that tells us when to use which approach. This framework allows opposing ideas to sit in the same room without killing each other. It differentiates between logical contradiction where two facts clash and contextual divergence where two valid truths apply to different parts of the same elephant. It says your truth is valid in this context, my truth is valid in that context. And we have a higher law, the meta-framework that coordinates us so we do not crash.

​Now, bring this back to India. The Savarkarite approach to unity is isolationist. It tries to wall off the Hindu community from others based on loyalty. It does not care to explain how others will be integrated. The RSS approach increasingly has graduated from pragmatic to imperialist. By insisting that all Hindus must behave the same way, eat together, marry together, ignore caste, they are trying to force a single truth on a diverse population. They are now trying to denature the diverse traditions of Hinduism to fit into a nationalist mould.

​A clash that defines the crux of today's politics is not just from the secular left. The most devastating, intellectually rigorous critique actually came from the heart of Hindu tradition, from Dharmasamrath Swami Karpatri ji Maharaj. In his book, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or Hindu Dharma, Karpatri ji dismantled the entire operating system. He argued that the claim to save Hindu Dharma was actually stripping it of its soul. First, he attacked the sources of authority or pramana. Every civilization needs a source of truth. For a Sanatani, Karpatri ji argued, Dharma is Shastra. It can only be known through the scriptures, the Vedas and the Dharmashastras. But the Sangh elevated the Bhagavad Bhaj, the saffron flag, to the status of the Guru. Karpatri ji saw the danger in this immediately. He argued that a flag is just an inert symbol. It cannot talk, it cannot give you laws, it cannot tell you right from wrong. By replacing the living word of the Shastras with a silent flag, the RSS was engaging in imperialism. They were creating a vacuum of authority where Dharma could mean whatever the leader wanted it to mean on that day. It became arbitrary.

​Then, Karpatri ji exposed the hollowness of their nationalism. The RSS wanted to define a Hindu based on geography and love for the motherland. They argued that anyone who adopts Indian culture and heroes is a Hindu. But Karpatri ji called this practical deceit or kootjal. He argued, if a person adopts your dress but still rejects the Vedas and believes in his own theology, have you really united anything? No, you have just created a fake unity based on superficial appearances. He argued that you cannot mash distinct identities, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists into a single Hindu monolith just to get political numbers. If someone rejects the Vedas, dragging them under the label of the Hindu is an act of erasure. So it is imperialism. A true coherent pluralist would say, you are a Jain, I am a Vedic Hindu, we are different and that is okay, we can still cooperate without forcing you to become me.

​The deepest cut was his critique of culture or Sanskriti. The RSS loves to talk about cultural nationalism. Karpatri ji asked a fundamental question, where does culture come from? He argued that culture or Sanskriti is the fruit, but the roots are the shastric samskaras, the rituals. He critiqued the RSS for trying to separate culture from religion and caste or varna. He essentially said, you want the fruit of Hindu culture, but you want to cut the roots because they are inconvenient for modern politics. He warned that if you replace the yamas and the niyamas of the shastras with mere physical drills and political mobilisation, you aren't building spiritual character, you are just building a political militia. And finally, Karpatri ji saw that the RSS was trying to fight communism by becoming a mirror image of it. Communism is a materialist ideology. The RSS, by downplaying or rejecting the metaphysical truths of atman, karma and rebirth, and focusing only on national strength and organisation, was fighting one materialism with another kind of materialism.

​Karpatri ji was the ultimate defender of coherent pluralism. He was fighting against the imperialism that wanted to flatten the complex multi-layered reality of Vedic civilisation into a flat modern nationalist pancake. He wanted to preserve the distinctness, the adhikara and the diversity of our traditions. He understood that throwing out the Shastras in favour of a flag and a vague nationalism destroyed the only mechanism we ever had for coherent pluralism. You see, running a civilisation as vast and chaotic as India is not like running a local unit. You cannot just have a charismatic leader shouting orders. You need a robust operating system. You need a source code that everyone agrees on, even if they hate each other. For thousands of years, the dharmashastras were that source code. If you look at them through the lens of modern systems theory, they reveal themselves not as tools of oppression but as a superlative framework for managing complexity.

​The Shastras established a shared meta-framework of orthopraxy. They didn't obsess over what you believed in your head. They focused on what you did with your hands. Whether you worshipped Shiva, Vishnu, Devi or a formless Brahman, the grammar of your life remained the same. You followed the same samskaras, the same rites of passage. These were the shared protocols. This created a common legal ritual culture that bound the continent together. But the genius lies in the pluralism. Unlike the modern state or the RSS, which tries to force a single uniform civil code or a single lifestyle on everyone, the Dharmashastras built diversity into the law itself. They used legal principles like Sadachara, the custom of good people, Deshachara (regional custom), Kulachara (lineage custom), and Jatyachara (community custom). This meant that if a community in the south had a different marriage custom than a community in the north, the Shastra simply validated that difference as their Dharma. And how did they handle deep conflict? They used the principle of Adhikara, competence or eligibility. They recognized that a rule valid for a householder might not be valid for a renunciate. They segregated contradictory practices to specific practitioners. They didn't try to mash them into a soup. They allowed them to be distinct pillars supporting the same rule.

​This brings us back to the warning. When Karpatriji criticized the rejection of the Shastras, he was essentially saying the meta-framework was being destroyed. He saw that without the nuanced, context-sensitive laws of the Shastras, the system would inevitably slide into imperialism. It would try to manufacture unity by erasing difference. When calls for Roti-Beti-Vyavahar are made as the only path to unity, it acts as an imperialist move. It is trying to flatten the rich, complex ecosystem of Hindu lineages into a single homogenized mass. True unity is not about everyone becoming the same. True unity is functional coordination. It is different organs, heart, lungs, brain staying distinct, doing their unique jobs, but working together to keep the body alive. The Shastras provided the biological code for that body. They allowed the Jains, Buddhists and thousands of tribes and communities to maintain their unique flavor, while coordinating on the flourishing of the biosphere.

​So, when a lack of unity is lamented today, it is because the manual has been thrown away. We are trying to run a supercomputer using the instruction booklet of a toaster. We replaced the sophisticated, coherent pluralism of the Dharmashastras with a crude flattening hammer of European nationalism. If we want to flourish, we don't need to become more like our adversaries. We need to become more like ourselves. We need to recover the systemic wisdom that allowed us to navigate chaos for thousands of years.

​Political Hindus today lament the lack of unity on social media and at conferences. But they fail to unite because they do not understand their own tradition. They are trying to build unity using the tools of colonizers, the nation state, homogeneity, the erasure of difference. They are trying to build a Hindu unity by destroying the very structure that made Hinduism resilient for millennia. They are trying to replace the intricate pluralistic architecture of dharma with a flat concrete slab of nationalism. We don't need to go back to the past in every literal detail. We cannot follow every verse of the ancient texts literally in the modern age. We cannot go back to ancient professions in the age of modern industry. But we can incorporate principles like birth-based trusteeship to communities to preserve their family's heritage in a specific art form or vidya.

​We must adopt the framework of the Dharmashastras. We must adopt the principle of coherent pluralism. We need a meta-framework that allows different communities to maintain their distinct traditions, their kulachara, their unique ways of being, while cooperating on a shared platform of civilizational flourishing. This requires us to stop the guilt tripping. It requires us to stop the vilification and strawmanning of our own civilizational blueprints. Understand the Shastras as a system of management for a complex society. If we want to gain control over destiny, we must stop trying to be a bad copy of the West. We must stop trying to turn Hindus into a church or an ummah. We are a civilization of differences. We are a civilization of distinct parts working in harmony. We are an organism, not a machine. Real unity is not about everyone becoming the same. Real unity is about finding a way for us to be different together. That is the wisdom of the Shastras. That is the path of coherent pluralism. And until we embrace that, Hindu unity will remain a mirage.

@AshishDhar