Lucknow University Protest Exposed India: The Radical RSS Takeover and the Death of Democracy

The recent events at Lucknow University are not just a local protest. They are a loud alarm bell for the world to see how India has traded education for extremism. When the head of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, entered the campus in February 2026, he did not come as a scholar. He came as the leader of a radical machine that is eating India’s democratic roots. The heavy police presence and the detention of students who shouted “Go Back” prove that in India today, ideology matters more than identity and dissent is treated like a crime.

1. The RSS Radical Machine by the Numbers

The RSS claims it is a social organization, but its own data reveals a massive paramilitary-style network designed to control every corner of Indian society.

1.1 A Daily Footprint of Extremism

In 2025, the RSS released official figures that show the terrifying scale of its reach. The organization currently runs 83,129 daily shakhas across 51,570 locations. When you add the 32,147 weekly meetings and 12,091 monthly gatherings, the total number of sessions reaches 127,367. This is not a club; it is a massive ideological factory operating every single day to brainwash the population.

1.2 Poisoning the Youth

The RSS is aggressively targeting the next generation to ensure its hardline stance lasts for decades. They have conducted 4,415 training camps with 222,962 attendees. Most shockingly, 163,000 of these recruits are young people aged between 14 and 25. They have also deployed 2,453 full-time workers specifically to expand this radical web. Since 2012, over 1,272,453 people have applied to join through their website, including more than 46,000 women.

2. The Explosion of State-Backed Hate Speech

The rise of the RSS is directly linked to a massive spike in violence and verbal attacks against minorities, specifically Muslims.

2.1 The Mathematical Rise of Hatred

Data from the India Hate Lab shows a clear and dangerous trend. In 2023, there were 668 recorded hate speech events. By 2024, this number jumped to 1,165, which is a 74.4% increase. By 2025, the situation worsened further with 1,318 events, averaging 4 hate speech incidents every single day. This represents a nearly 97% increase in hatred over just two years.

2.2 Political Protection for Radicals

This hatred is not random. In 2024, states ruled by the BJP or their allies accounted for 881 of these incidents. This is a 94.5% rise in those specific regions. Furthermore, 36% of these events included direct calls for violence against Muslims. India’s own government records show that in 2022, cases for “promoting enmity” rose by 31.25%, with over 1,500 official criminal cases registered.

3. Silencing Dissent Through Fear and Law

India uses the mask of democracy to hide a brutal crackdown on anyone who speaks the truth.

3.1 Weaponizing the UAPA

The Indian state uses the “Unlawful Activities Prevention Act” (UAPA) to jail activists and students without trial. The number of UAPA cases has climbed steadily from 796 in 2020 to 814 in 2021 and reached 1,005 in 2022. This law is a tool of pure terror used to silence journalists and minorities.

3.2 The Death of Academic Freedom

The protest at Lucknow University makes sense when you look at global rankings. In 2025, the Academic Freedom Index ranked India 156th out of 179 countries. India’s score crashed from 0.38 to a pathetic 0.16. Universities are no longer places for learning; they are recruitment centers for Hindutva.

4. Global Recognition of India’s Decline

The world is finally waking up to the fact that India is a democracy only in name.

4.1 From Democracy to Autocracy

The V-Dem Democracy Report 2024 officially labeled India an “electoral autocracy.” It ranked India 4th among the top 10 countries in the world that are moving toward dictatorship. Similarly, Freedom House dropped India’s score to 63/100 in 2025, marking it as only “Partly Free” due to the constant harassment of NGOs and critics.

4.2 Systematic Exclusion of Muslims

The numbers prove that Muslims are being erased from India’s political life. While Muslims make up 14.2% of the population, they held only 24 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha. This is only 4% representation. This gap is a deliberate strategy to keep 200 million people voiceless.

5. Controlling the Narrative and the Internet

To hide its crimes, the Indian government has become a world leader in censorship.

5.1 The Internet Shutdown Capital

India shuts down the internet more than any other country. In 2023, there were 116 shutdowns. In 2024, there were 84 shutdowns, with 41 specifically aimed at stopping protests and 23 linked to communal violence. If the government is doing nothing wrong, why is it so afraid of the internet?

5.2 Crushing the Press

The truth is being strangled in India. Reporters Without Borders ranked India 151st in the World Press Freedom Index for 2025. A country that ranks this low cannot claim to be a free society. It is a state where the media is either bought or bullied into silence.