One Place News
(RNS) — On Aug. 29, the chief of the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Mohan Bhagwat, headlined the stage at Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a “Universal Oneness Celebration.”
The RSS was founded in India in 1925 with the mission of creating a Hindu nation. Since then, the organization has promoted a militant form of Hindu nationalism that ties Hinduness to Indian identity.
Bhagwat’s tour stop in New York exposed the RSS’s public relations attempt to present itself and its Hindu nationalist ideology in a way that would impress donors and followers in the Indian diaspora and also be palatable for Western (especially interfaith) audiences. Now a growing number of American political leaders and civil society groups are distancing themselves from the movement Bhagwat leads and rejecting the cynical and hypocritical instrumentalization of interfaith collaboration he attempted.
Before the event, a broad coalition argued that the RSS did not deserve the benefit of the doubt, given the organization’s record on violence against minorities. This begins with some of its founding members who drew inspiration from Nazi Germany’s repression of minorities. M.S. Golwalkar, an early RSS leader, praised aspects of Nazi Germany’s treatment of minorities and articulated an exclusionary, Hindu-first Indian state in his 1939 book, “We, or Our Nationhood Defined.”
The RSS’s ideology bred a century of violence against Muslims, Sikhs and Christians in India by its cadres and affiliates. International human rights groups documented the involvement of the RSS and its affiliates in the 2002 Gujarat pogroms that killed over 1,000 people, the majority Muslims. The RSS’s record surrounding the 1984 anti-Sikh massacres is equally troubling. Survivors have accused RSS members of helping organize and facilitate the violence, while a senior RSS ideologue defended the carnage in its aftermath. In its 2026 annual report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom named the RSS directly, recommending targeted sanctions, asset freezes and entry restrictions against some of its officials for their “responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom.” In August, USCIRF separately called for Bhagwat’s U.S. visa to be revoked.
None of that record was addressed at Madison Square Garden (as a Christian leader demanded it should be). Instead, attendees heard Bhagwat speak in broad, milquetoast platitudes at odds with the RSS’s past and present records.
Moreover, the organization of this event should alarm anyone who cares about the integrity of interfaith work. In the days since, three interfaith leaders who attended the event have come forward with public statements explaining they were misled into appearing on that stage. They describe a pattern of omission and deception: At least a dozen email invitations were extended not by the RSS or its well-known affiliates but by innocuous-sounding entities like the “World Council of Religious Leaders” and the “Center for Responsible Leadership.” These invites reportedly left blank a section on the program that listed a “Guest of Honour” and repeatedly urged invitees to wear their “traditional attire” to the gathering — all pointing to the fact that the RSS was primarily out for a photo-op to confer interfaith legitimacy on themselves without confronting their own record against pluralism.
This cynical approach is precisely why the opposition to Bhagwat’s visit mattered, and why it should not be mistaken for the reflexive or tangentially related activism of any single aggrieved community. The coalition that convened to oppose the RSS visit in the lead-up was not improvised for the occasion: It was built over years of relationship-building and shared action across communities that do not always agree on everything but have worked to show up for one another. That is a truer expression of pluralism than anything spoken from the stage inside.
The RSS and its affiliates can speak in as many Janus faces as ever, mount all the deceptions that their funding can sponsor and float all the front organizations they desire. But because they have no real interest in the fundamental tenets of pluralism and interfaith work, they will never grasp a basic truth: Oneness is not a word you say, but a record you build. An organization cannot claim the mantle of universal brotherhood while its cadres have been accused of organizing pogroms, while its American wings fan hate speech and while its political influence in India through the ruling BJP presides over the destruction of churches and impunity for anti-Muslim violence across India.
The aftermath has been swift, and it has not been confined to activists and clergy. In the days following the rally, at least 90 elected officials and candidates across the United States publicly pledged to reject campaign donations tied to the RSS. This is a signal that the RSS’s American political project, built over decades through affiliated organizations that shape how U.S. institutions engage with South Asia, is colliding with people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds. The RSS came to Madison Square Garden to project strength and legitimacy on American soil. By doing so in a typically insidious but ham-fisted manner, it is instead leaving behind a widening circle of American political and religious leaders whose openness to engagement was misused, and who are now publicly explaining why they want nothing to do with it.
The State Department’s own history offers the clearest benchmark for what should come next. In 2005, it revoked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visa for nine years, holding him responsible, as Gujarat’s chief minister, for the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in the state. Modi, like Bhagwat, spent years as a full-time RSS organizer. The same scrutiny that was once applied to Modi should now be applied to Bhagwat — and to the broader network of American organizations that lent the RSS chief’s tour its interfaith cover and conjured its air of legitimacy by hook and by crook.
In 1939, Madison Square Garden hosted a rally organized by the pro-Nazi German American Bund, drawing thousands under a banner of racial supremacy. Eighty-seven years later, the same arena hosted the leader of a movement whose own founding drew on that same ideology.
The difference this time is that the deception used to dress the event in the language of unity did not survive contact with public scrutiny. The work to fight Hindu supremacy, build real interfaith ties and strengthen a multi-racial democracy does not end with Bhagwat’s departure: It demands continued due diligence, not the deference and whitewashing his tour was designed to manufacture.
(Harman Singh is the executive director of the Sikh Coalition and Sunita Viswanath is the executive director of Hindus for Human Rights. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
