The IRA fought Empire; the RSS served it: Rushdie got it wrong

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak* 

In a recent interview on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, broadcast on 4 September 2026, Salman Rushdie drew a parallel between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It is a comparison so historically hollow and ideologically jarring that one wonders whether it was a careless slip or a calculated provocation. 

Either way, the impression lingers that Rushdie—ever the fearless critic—has here curbed his own intellectual freedom to fit a peculiarly American liberal mould, one that trades historical nuance for shallow equivalence.

Let us begin with the facts. The IRA was forged in 1919 as a radical, anti-colonial force fighting British rule in Ireland. Its struggle was militant, secular, and rooted in a vision of national liberation. The RSS, founded just six years later in 1925, took no part in India’s anti-colonial movement. 

In fact, it maintained a collaborative stance toward British authorities while pursuing its own vision of a Hindu state. To equate a revolutionary organisation with one that remained on the sidelines of the freedom struggle—and later actively undermined the secular fabric of the republic—is to erase history itself.

Ideologically, the chasm is even wider. The IRA, though drawing many of its members from Catholic communities, adhered to secular and anti-sectarian principles, uniting diverse strands of Irish society against imperialism. Its post-independence legacy, however imperfect, contributed to the foundations of a modern Irish republic. 

The RSS, by contrast, is a sectarian organisation that openly rejects secularism and seeks to replace India’s constitutional framework with a Hindu Rashtra—a dispensation where religious minorities would be reduced to second-class citizens. Where the IRA celebrated diversity, the RSS promotes a homogenising trinity of Hindi, Hindutva, and Hindustan, erasing the pluralism that makes India what it is.

Rushdie is no stranger to the RSS’s intolerance. He has called its supporters, including Prime Minister Modi’s most fervent backers, “Modi toadies.” He knows full well that the RSS supported the domestic release of The Satanic Verses not out of solidarity with free expression, but to antagonise Muslim communities. It never championed Rushdie as a secular literary icon. 

Meanwhile, the great artist M.F. Husain was hounded into exile by Hindutva extremists—threats nurtured in the ideological soil of the RSS. Rushdie has written about this darkness. So why gift such an organisation the undeserved legitimacy of revolutionary lineage?

The liberal tendency to draw false equivalences—between oppressor and oppressed, reactionary and revolutionary—is not harmless. It creates a moral fog in which reactionary forces flourish under the cover of intellectual balance. By comparing the IRA to the RSS, Rushdie inadvertently lends dignity to a fascist organisation while diminishing a genuine anti-imperial struggle. That is not only an injustice to history; it is a betrayal of his own principled opposition to religious fundamentalism in all its forms.

As a student of history, Rushdie must know better. The IRA fought imperialism; the RSS collaborates with it. The IRA sought to unite; the RSS seeks to divide. The IRA was revolutionary; the RSS is reactionary. To conflate them is to do violence to the very secular, democratic values Rushdie has spent a lifetime defending.

If there is a lesson here, it is this: in the name of freedom, we must not become free to forget. False equivalences are not sophistication; they are sedatives. And in an age of rising majoritarianism, we can ill afford to sleep through history.

---

*Academic based in UK