In a startling revelation, Yashwant Shinde, a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has alleged that senior leaders of the RSS, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal planned and executed deadly bomb blasts across India between 2004 and 2008.
According to a report published by Dawn, citing an interview Shinde gave to The Wire, the former RSS member claimed the conspiracy was a carefully orchestrated plan to incite large-scale communal violence and kill thousands of people solely for the sake of securing political power. “It was a conspiracy of certain people from the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and BJP, whose minds were extremely malicious and corrupt. All of this was done merely to gain power. They wanted to set the country on fire so that power would always remain in their hands,” he alleged.
Shinde further stated that after being politically marginalised, these groups used the Ayodhya issue in 1989 to secure 82–84 seats in parliament. Buoyed by this success, they later exploited the Kashmir conflict to repeatedly make Atal Bihari Vajpayee the Prime Minister of India.
According to Shinde, Hindu-Muslim riots, attacks in Pakistan, and incidents in Kashmir were all part of a coordinated political strategy to gain power. He accused senior RSS leader Indresh Kumar of heading the plan, alleging that around the year 2000, Kumar introduced him to a group in Nanded that later received weapons training from the army. The plan, he said, was to send them to Pakistan to carry out attacks on civilians.
Shinde claimed the group was trained in making time bombs and was instructed to target public gatherings, such as Muslim wedding ceremonies, which they later attacked. He recalled that in 2006, while preparing a bomb in Nanded, one device accidentally exploded, killing an RSS member.
He further alleged that Rakesh Dhawde and Ravi Dev were also involved in the conspiracy, adding that individuals such as Pragya and Purohit were merely “pawns” who could be sacrificed to protect the real masterminds.
Shinde, who joined the RSS in 1994, said he tried to thwart the plot from within but could not openly oppose it due to threats to his life. He decided to speak publicly only after India’s Supreme Court rejected his request for a fresh investigation into the matter.
