Hindutva boss Mohan Bagwat with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, his party’s most senior and notorious member.

On August 29, more than 5,000 Indian Americans will fill Madison Square Garden for an event called “Universal Oneness Celebrations.” The keynote speaker is Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS as Indians call it. It is the Hindu nationalist organization that has shaped Indian politics for a century. The framing on offer, timed to Raksha Bandhan and pitched around “unity, civic responsibility, and global harmony,” is the softest language the RSS has ever used to introduce itself to an American audience. It is worth asking, before the applause starts, what exactly is being celebrated.

Hindutva is not Hinduism

The first thing America should know is that the RSS does not speak for Hinduism. It speaks for Hindutva, a term Vinayak Damodar Savarkar coined in 1923 specifically to distinguish a political and ethnic identity from Hindu Dharma, the faith practiced by well over a billion people. Hindutva is a nationalist project: it asks who counts as authentically Indian, and it has never had a comfortable answer for the country’s Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and other minorities. Conflating Hindutva with Hinduism does real harm to Hindus themselves, most of whom practice a religion of extraordinary diversity that the RSS’s political militant program does not represent. When Bhagwat takes the stage as a religious unifier, reporters should describe him accurately: as the head of a nationalist organization, not a religious one.

It is also worth naming what that organization is the parent of. The RSS is the ideological wellspring of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling party. Its most prominent member, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a member of RSS, was himself denied entry to the United States for nearly a decade: in 2005 the State Department revoked his visa under a law barring officials responsible for severe violations of religious freedom, a decision tied directly to the 2002 Gujarat massacre of Muslims carried out on his watch as chief minister. Washington only reversed course in 2014, once Modi became prime minister and diplomatic necessity outweighed the record. The organization now sending its chief to Madison Square Garden as a symbol of unity is the same one that produced a prime minister the United States itself once judged too dangerous to admit.

The rebrand

The RSS has gotten better at packaging its record for American audiences. Under BJP state governments built from the RSS’s own cadre, mosques and madrasas have been bulldozed as “illegal encroachments,” most recently in Haldwani in 2024. Human rights trackers recorded at least 44 Muslims killed in India in anti-Muslim hate incidents in just the first seven months of 2026. Bhagwat himself has said Hindu society has been “at war” for a thousand years and told Muslims they must abandon what he called their “boisterous rhetoric of supremacy,” a line the opposition called a call to violence against a religious minority. This is the same organization whose second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, wrote in 1939 that Nazi Germany’s purge of Jews was “a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” A softer press release does not undo that inheritance. It dresses it for a Manhattan stage.

A unity tour, or a whitewash tour

Bhagwat’s stop in New York is one leg of a centenary-year outreach that will also take him to Canada and the United Kingdom, part of what the RSS has framed as a dialogue with the diaspora and, in its own words, an effort to “address misconceptions” about the organization. Framing matters. A unity tour implies there is a shared record to unite around. What the RSS is actually offering American audiences is a curated selection: cultural performances, talk of pluralism, careful silence on demolished mosques and burned madrasas back home.

Will he sit down with his critics?

If Mohan Bhagwat wants to be received in America as a genuine voice for unity rather than a movement managing its image, he should be willing to do more than address a friendly crowd of 5,000. He should sit down, on the record, with the Indian American Muslim Council, which has spent more than two decades documenting the human cost of Hindutva politics for India’s Muslims, and with Hindus for Human Rights, a Hindu American organization that has called the RSS “the world’s longest-running fascist movement.” He should also sit with Equality Labs, the largest Dalit civil rights organization in the United States, whose founder Thenmozhi Soundararajan has spent years documenting how caste hierarchy travels with the diaspora and how Hindutva-aligned groups have fought, seat by seat and statehouse by statehouse, against laws that would simply recognize caste discrimination as real. And he should sit with Sikh American organizations, because the RSS’s own account of Indian unity has long included the claim that Sikhs are, at bottom, Hindus, a claim Sikhs themselves, through their highest religious authority, the Akal Takht, have explicitly and repeatedly rejected.

Lipstick on a pig: despite vague references to unity, the far-right ultranatiionalist Mohan leads the world’s largest fascist movement.

A seat should also be held open for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the bipartisan federal body that has recommended for seven consecutive years that India be designated a “country of particular concern.” In its 2026 annual report, USCIRF went further than in any prior year, naming the RSS itself, alongside India’s intelligence service, as an entity that should face targeted sanctions for its role in severe violations of religious freedom. That is not an activist group’s assessment. It is the conclusion of a body created by Congress specifically to make this kind of judgment, and it deserves a direct answer from the man now touring America under the banner of unity.

And a seat belongs to the Federation of Indian American Christian Organizations in North America, which documented over 1,500 attacks on Christians in India in a single year and has joined hundreds of American church leaders in petitioning the State Department over church burnings, beaten pastors, and anti-conversion laws used to harass Christian communities. Indian Christians are as much a part of this story as Muslims, Dalits, and Sikhs, and a unity tour that has no room for them is not describing unity at all.

That list is the actual measure of what “unity” has meant under Hindutva. It is not a project that has brought Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and Sikhs into a broader Indian solidarity. It is a project that has tried to absorb or subordinate each of them into a single sanctioned identity, and has met resistance from every one of them for exactly that reason. A stage that features only well-wishers is not evidence of unity achieved. It is evidence of everyone who disagrees being kept off it.

Religion reporters covering this visit have an obligation the event organizers do not: to ask whether an organization can rebrand its way out of a documented history, and out of the findings of its own government’s watchdog, simply by adding a rainbow, and a nod to Dalits, and a claim on Sikh solidarity, to its vocabulary. Lipstick changes how a thing looks. It does not change what it is.

Related

Hindutva in the USA: Understanding the Promotion of Ethnic and Religious Conflict

Hindutva’s Final Solution: Calls for Genocide of Indian Muslims

Rutgers, Audrey Truschke and the Encounter with Hindutva Fascism