Hundreds protest Hindu nationalist paramilitary leader Mohan Bhagwat's visit to New York
Activists rallied outside of Madison Square Garden in New York in protest of an event featuring Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of India's Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The “Universal Oneness” event, organised by American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue, brought some 5,000 attendees from over 200 Hindu and Indian partner organisations across the country to receive the RSS leader in New York.
Saturday’s protest was organised by a range of local New York and national organisations, including South Asian Left (SALAM), Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) and Anti Imperialist South Asian Alliance Philadelphia (AISA Philly).
Safa Ahmed, board member of the Indian American Muslim Council, told Middle East Eye that she was protesting “because the RSS has spent the last 100 years normalising the fascist ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu supremacy, which declares that people like me, Indian Muslims, 200 million of us, do not deserve to be called Indians and that we deserve to be wiped out of India”.
Formed in 1925, the RSS has more than five million members across the world, and over 250 affiliated chapters in the US. It promotes the vision of India as Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu ethnostate, and is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
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Early RSS thinkers explicitly drew inspiration from Nazism and European fascism, and also sought to establish India as a homogenous Hindu ethnostate that resembled the realisation of Zionism in Palestine.
In his book We or Our Nationhood Defined, RSS ideologue M S Golwalkar compares the group's project of a Hindu Rashtra with Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism by enforcing total assimilation or ethnic subjugation for minorities.
“To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races—the Jews," the former RSS leader wrote in his book. "Germany has also shown how well-neigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”
The RSS has been blamed for the assassination of Gandhi, India's founding father, and on its website, opposes the "oppressive Muslim-majority character" of Kashmir, which it calls a "thorn in the flesh".
Wanting bloodshed
IAMC's Safa Ahmed told MEE: “Not only does the RSS and its support base not care about minorities in India, but they're also fine with the wanted bloodshed of Indian minorities and Kashmiris."
Regarding their politics in the US, she said: "They're also comfortable with normalising the far right in the United States.”
On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim and Indian-American, described the RSS’s vision as "exclusionary".
“I don't support the rally, but I don't know if the city has any jurisdiction on cancelling a private event,” the Mayor stated.
Shree Baphna, a member of Salam, a South Asian political organisation based in New York, underscored the significance of the event’s location: “Madison Square Garden represents a world stage; fascism has no place on a world stage like this.”
“This is not just a one-off event; this is a symptom of a much larger systemic ideology and destructive thought process that exists here in our diaspora. So the fact that it's here and so visible means that we have to show up out here in numbers and do our part,” Baphna added.
A group of protesters representing the pro-Khalistan movement were also present next to the coalition demonstration against the Mohan Bhagwat event, although they were separately organised and attended.
The demonstration, organised by Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), decried the RSS leader’s visit and advanced calls for a referendum on Khalistan, a sovereign Sikh state in what is now the Indian state of Punjab.
Last week, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom called on the US government to sanction the RSS for its role in “violent attacks against religious minorities, including Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs”, and also pushed for Bhagwat’s visa to be revoked.
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