Pramod Muthalik is the chief of the Rashtriya Hindu Sena, the parent organization of the Sri Ram Sena. He was born in 1963 to a Marathi family in Hukkeri in the Belgaum district of Karnataka, close to the border with Maharashtra. Aged 13, he joined the RSS in 1975. In 2004, he became the convenor for South India for the Bajrang Dal. During this time, he helped the BJP in the assembly polls, especially in north Karnataka which soon became the party’s stronghold. The BJP however chose not to defend the various criminal cases against his workers. He was soon sidelined in the Dal for his extreme views, and was later expelled. He joined the Shiv Sena on August 28, 2005. He was accompanied by the former district president of the Bajrang Dal for Belgaum, Vilas Pawar, and some 5,000 workers belonging to the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party. This marked the formation of the Shiv Sena in Karnataka. Muthalik quit the Sena in 2006 after the party revived its demand for the merger of the Marathi speaking areas like Belgaum with Maharashtra. He then formed the Rashtriya Hindu Sena. In September 2008, in Davanagere, Mutalik launched the Rashtra Raksha Sene, a Hindu extremist group trained to fight Islamic terror groups. He has claimed that as many as 700 people were being trained to carry out suicide attacks. Muthalik is an admirer of the Hindu radical Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. He regularly attends an annual function in Pune to mark the death anniversary of Godse. Muthalik runs a hotel in Satara in Maharashtra.
