The cabinet of the first prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru banned the Hindutva ideology-based RSS and arrested more than 200,000 RSS volunteers , after Nathuram Vinayak Godse – a former volunteer of RSS , assassinated Mahatma Gandhi . Nehru also appointed government commissions to investigate the assassination and related circumstances . The series of investigations by these government commissions , states the Political Science scholar Nandini Deo , later found the RSS leadership and " the RSS innocent of a role in the assassination " . The mass arrested RSS volunteers were released by the Indian courts , and the RSS has ever since used this as evidence of " being falsely accused and condemned " . According to the historian Robert Frykenberg specializing in South Asian Studies , the RSS membership enormously expanded in independent India . In this period , while RSS remained " discretely out of politics " , Jan Sangh – another Hindutva-ideology based organization entered the political arena . The Jan Sangh had limited success in the Indian general elections between 1952 and 1971 . This was , in part , because of Jan Sangh 's poor oragnization and leadership , its focus on the Hindutva sentiment did not appeal to the voters , and its campaign lacked adequate social and economic themes . This was also , in part , because Congress party leaders such Indira Gandhi had co-opted some of the key Hindutva ideology themes and fused it with socialist policies and her father 's Jawaharlal Nehru Soviet-style centrally controlled economic model . The Hindutva-inspired RSS continued its grassroots operations between 1947 and early 1970s , and its volunteers provided humanitarian assistance to Hindu and Sikh refugees from the partition of British India , victims of war and violence , and helped disaster victims to resettle economically
assassinated Mahatma Gandhi
Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
Hindutva