Although it does not field candidates, the RSS wields enormous political influence, not least because its members act as field organizers for the BJP. Many prominent BJP politicians, like Modi, have deep backgrounds in the movement. Yet few institutions evoke more distrust among Indian liberals, many of whom view the RSS, with its forceful religious views and paramilitary aesthetic supposedly modeled on the imperial British army, as protofascist in nature. As it developed, the RSS pushed a militant vision of Hinduism, which stood in implicit opposition to the secular multiculturalism of
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