-- SALAM (South Asian Left)
Mohan Bhagwat in New York City, the RSS's US network, and organizing against it
Outside the hall, that cover fell apart. More than 250 people, mobilized by SALAM (South Asian Left) and coalition partners— across left-wing, Dalit, Muslim, Sikh, anti-caste, ‘progressive’ Hindu, and Palestinian solidarity organizations—rallied at the front doors of Madison Square Garden against the event and the man headlining it.[iii] The RSS had used the language of multiculturalism to fill the room; several US faith leaders later said they were misled into appearing alongside Bhagwat, and would not have joined had they known what the RSS is.[iv] The protesters named Hindutva for what it is: a project of expropriation, occupation, and caste domination that misdirects the anger of the exploited away from power and towards other oppressed people.
Indian Americans are the highest-earning ethnic group in the United States.[v] A segment of this diaspora has built up a highly resourced and organized network across industry and community life that is directly affiliated with the RSS. The United States is the financial and diplomatic command centre of the RSS’s global wing, the Vishwa Vibhag.[vi] The RSS operates as an unregistered body with no membership register, letting an American hydra with tax-exempt trusts and societies carry out the work: recruitment, fundraising, political cover and lobbying, and the after-school and cultural programs that feed the rest. At the centre of its network is the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) which runs 267 shakhas across 33 states in the US, which is roughly one-sixth of all RSS branches outside India.[vii] Alongside it operates the American wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHPA).
They rely on front organisations like Ekal Vidyalaya and Sewa International, which channel money to the RSS under the guise of "tribal education" and "disaster relief." The profits of Indian-American tech professionals and physicians are routed through these channels to fund the infrastructure of pogroms. Money routed to Ekal builds single-teacher schools in central India designed to pull Adivasi youth from indigenous cultures and into a Brahminical Hindu fold, and to groom them as foot soldiers. Sewa funds the Bajrang Dal and VHP networks behind the lynchings of Muslims and Dalits, the burning of churches, and the bulldozing of working-class neighbourhoods.[viii] Diaspora dollars feed these swayamsevaks.
The American Sangh is invested in building power at the imperial core. Its network funds election campaigns for both Republicans and Democrats, lobbies officials from the municipal to the national level, and builds coalitions with liberal civil-society groups. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF)’s full influence operation has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying in Washington DC and acts as the BJP's diplomatic shield, while campus formations like Hindu Yuva groom the next generation of the diaspora elite.[ix] The network is coordinated by operatives like Saumitra Gokhale, who is listed in HSS filings as a "yoga instructor" earning $36,000 annually, but actually functions as the Global Coordinator of the RSS's Overseas Department, travelling the world to convene the Sangh's highest bodies.
Opposition to the Sangh also has a long history and spans the spectrum from liberal advocacy, research, and national lobbying efforts to anti-fascist base-building in neighbourhoods and cities. After Bhagwat’s rally in NYC, liberal NGOs lobbied 90 elected politicians to reject RSS-linked donations.[x] While exposing Sangh’s vast network is necessary and lobbying elected politicians can be useful, these tactics are grossly insufficient on their own. We face a behemoth that is heavily resourced, remarkably organized, and deeply embedded in diaspora life while also running the government of India. Defeating it requires dismantling its institutional cover and organizing against it in workplaces, community centres, and the everyday social life of the diaspora. For instance, working-class South Asian members of DRUM Beats, among others, organized this year to help defeat New York State Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, a New York state politician, in part over her Hindutva-aligned donors and advocacy.[xi]
The celebrated "Indian American success story" rests on wealth that is less a product of immigrant grit than the transfer of centuries of Brahminical land hoarding, educational monopoly, and the theft of oppressed-caste labour into global tech capital.[xii] The BAPS temple complex in Robbinsville, New Jersey, is a case in point. A national lawsuit in the US against this temple complex exposed the brutal trafficking of marginalized-caste stone workers from India. The workers were stripped of passports, confined to guarded compounds, and forced to labour over twelve hours a day for seven days a week, for $1.20 an hour, to build the largest modern Hindu temple outside India.[xiii] The same politics operates in law and in schools. When the HAF moved to defeat caste-discrimination protections (California's SB 403 and similar bills in other states) and to strip caste from school textbooks, it weaponized the language of "Hinduphobia."[xiv] This is a calculated manoeuvre to place dominant castes beyond legal reach, protecting their capacity to exploit marginalized labour and to enforce something akin to workplace apartheid in Silicon Valley.
Indian Americans are the highest-earning ethnic group in the United States.[v] A segment of this diaspora has built up a highly resourced and organized network across industry and community life that is directly affiliated with the RSS. The United States is the financial and diplomatic command centre of the RSS’s global wing, the Vishwa Vibhag.[vi] The RSS operates as an unregistered body with no membership register, letting an American hydra with tax-exempt trusts and societies carry out the work: recruitment, fundraising, political cover and lobbying, and the after-school and cultural programs that feed the rest. At the centre of its network is the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) which runs 267 shakhas across 33 states in the US, which is roughly one-sixth of all RSS branches outside India.[vii] Alongside it operates the American wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHPA).
They rely on front organisations like Ekal Vidyalaya and Sewa International, which channel money to the RSS under the guise of "tribal education" and "disaster relief." The profits of Indian-American tech professionals and physicians are routed through these channels to fund the infrastructure of pogroms. Money routed to Ekal builds single-teacher schools in central India designed to pull Adivasi youth from indigenous cultures and into a Brahminical Hindu fold, and to groom them as foot soldiers. Sewa funds the Bajrang Dal and VHP networks behind the lynchings of Muslims and Dalits, the burning of churches, and the bulldozing of working-class neighbourhoods.[viii] Diaspora dollars feed these swayamsevaks.
The American Sangh is invested in building power at the imperial core. Its network funds election campaigns for both Republicans and Democrats, lobbies officials from the municipal to the national level, and builds coalitions with liberal civil-society groups. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF)’s full influence operation has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying in Washington DC and acts as the BJP's diplomatic shield, while campus formations like Hindu Yuva groom the next generation of the diaspora elite.[ix] The network is coordinated by operatives like Saumitra Gokhale, who is listed in HSS filings as a "yoga instructor" earning $36,000 annually, but actually functions as the Global Coordinator of the RSS's Overseas Department, travelling the world to convene the Sangh's highest bodies.
Opposition to the Sangh also has a long history and spans the spectrum from liberal advocacy, research, and national lobbying efforts to anti-fascist base-building in neighbourhoods and cities. After Bhagwat’s rally in NYC, liberal NGOs lobbied 90 elected politicians to reject RSS-linked donations.[x] While exposing Sangh’s vast network is necessary and lobbying elected politicians can be useful, these tactics are grossly insufficient on their own. We face a behemoth that is heavily resourced, remarkably organized, and deeply embedded in diaspora life while also running the government of India. Defeating it requires dismantling its institutional cover and organizing against it in workplaces, community centres, and the everyday social life of the diaspora. For instance, working-class South Asian members of DRUM Beats, among others, organized this year to help defeat New York State Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, a New York state politician, in part over her Hindutva-aligned donors and advocacy.[xi]
The celebrated "Indian American success story" rests on wealth that is less a product of immigrant grit than the transfer of centuries of Brahminical land hoarding, educational monopoly, and the theft of oppressed-caste labour into global tech capital.[xii] The BAPS temple complex in Robbinsville, New Jersey, is a case in point. A national lawsuit in the US against this temple complex exposed the brutal trafficking of marginalized-caste stone workers from India. The workers were stripped of passports, confined to guarded compounds, and forced to labour over twelve hours a day for seven days a week, for $1.20 an hour, to build the largest modern Hindu temple outside India.[xiii] The same politics operates in law and in schools. When the HAF moved to defeat caste-discrimination protections (California's SB 403 and similar bills in other states) and to strip caste from school textbooks, it weaponized the language of "Hinduphobia."[xiv] This is a calculated manoeuvre to place dominant castes beyond legal reach, protecting their capacity to exploit marginalized labour and to enforce something akin to workplace apartheid in Silicon Valley.
The Palestinian organizers standing with South Asian groups outside Madison Square Garden were not performing solidarity in the abstract; they were exposing a real relationship that is at once ideological and material. Hindutva and Zionism share a lineage that began as ideological imagination and hardened into a material alliance. India is the single largest customer of Israel's arms industry, and Indian and Israeli firms increasingly co-produce those weapons on Indian soil.[xv] Scholars have documented how the Indian state has studied and imported Israel's architecture of occupation to Kashmir.[xvi] The US-based Hindutva lobby built itself by studying and partnering with the pro-Israel lobby. The US-India Political Action Committee (2002) adopted the organizational model of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the American Jewish Committee outright. The Republican Hindu Coalition, launched in 2015 with Steve Bannon as honorary co-chair, billed itself as "modeled after the highly successful Republican Jewish Coalition." As early as 1993, an Indian American political action group hired a serving AIPAC legislative liaison to help it navigate Washington DC.[xvii]
Diasporic anti-imperialist formations are increasingly connecting the fight against Hindutva to the mobilization against Zionism. SALAM's "Tata Bye Bye" campaign,[xviii] launched in New York in October 2024 and endorsed by more than twenty organisations, demands that the Tata Group be dropped as sponsor of the New York City Marathon (TCS is the title sponsor) for propping up Israel's war machine through arms production (Tata Advanced Systems), armoured vehicles (Jaguar Land Rover), and IT and cloud services to the Israeli military (TCS). Such campaigns insist that confronting fascism means organizing against its supply chain: the capital that props it up (Tata), the ‘social service’ network that underpins it (RSS), and the geopolitics that sustain it (the India-Israel alliance).
Mohan Bhagwat did not come to New York to introduce the RSS to America. He came to survey and consolidate territory it has already claimed. But outside Madison Square Garden, something else became visible: a working-class, anti-imperialist, anti-caste South Asian diaspora that refuses to hand the "community" over. Our task is not only to tear the mask off "Universal Oneness," so that bulldozed homes, caste violence, and stolen land are not quietly buried beneath diaspora-elite platitudes. Our task in the imperial core thus also requires a politics of material confrontation and organizing neighbourhood to neighbourhood, city to city.
Notes:
(i) https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/february-20/americans-hold-nazi-rally-in-madison-square-garden
(ii) https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hindutva-globalised-inside-nyc-event-celebrating-indias-hindu-nationalist-paramilitary-leader
(iii) https://www.instagram.com/p/Dctb7SPnEPX/
(iv) https://thewire.in/politics/us-faith-leaders-say-they-were-misled-deceived-into-appearing-with-mohan-bhagwat-at-rss-event-in-new-york
(v) https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/
(vi) https://www.wearesavera.org/resources/reports/fibs-fronts-fixers/
(vii) https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/decoding-hindutvas-us-operations/
(viii) https://sabrangindia.in/the-global-financing-of-hindu-supremacism-how-corporations-and-diaspora-networks-fuel-hindutvas-rise/
(ix) https://politicalresearch.org/2024/10/16/haf-way-supremacy
(x) https://thewire.in/communalism/90-us-political-leaders-pledge-to-reject-rss-linked-political-donations
(xi) https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/06/new-wfp-ad-attacks-rajkumar-modis-best-friend-queens/414298/
(xii) https://politicalresearch.org/2024/10/30/hindu-supremacy-and-multiracial-us-far-right
(xiii) https://www.behindbaps.com/
(xiv) https://politicalresearch.org/2024/10/15/haf-way-supremacy
(xv) https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/fs_2603_at_2025.pdf
(xvi) https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/india-implementing-israel-model-kashmir-how
(xvii) https://jacobin.com/2023/03/india-modi-hindutva-lobby-nationalism-bjp
(xviii) https://www.indiaisrael.org/report
(ii) https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hindutva-globalised-inside-nyc-event-celebrating-indias-hindu-nationalist-paramilitary-leader
(iii) https://www.instagram.com/p/Dctb7SPnEPX/
(iv) https://thewire.in/politics/us-faith-leaders-say-they-were-misled-deceived-into-appearing-with-mohan-bhagwat-at-rss-event-in-new-york
(v) https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/fact-sheet/asian-americans-indians-in-the-u-s/
(vi) https://www.wearesavera.org/resources/reports/fibs-fronts-fixers/
(vii) https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/decoding-hindutvas-us-operations/
(viii) https://sabrangindia.in/the-global-financing-of-hindu-supremacism-how-corporations-and-diaspora-networks-fuel-hindutvas-rise/
(ix) https://politicalresearch.org/2024/10/16/haf-way-supremacy
(x) https://thewire.in/communalism/90-us-political-leaders-pledge-to-reject-rss-linked-political-donations
(xi) https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/06/new-wfp-ad-attacks-rajkumar-modis-best-friend-queens/414298/
(xii) https://politicalresearch.org/2024/10/30/hindu-supremacy-and-multiracial-us-far-right
(xiii) https://www.behindbaps.com/
(xiv) https://politicalresearch.org/2024/10/15/haf-way-supremacy
(xv) https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/fs_2603_at_2025.pdf
(xvi) https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/india-implementing-israel-model-kashmir-how
(xvii) https://jacobin.com/2023/03/india-modi-hindutva-lobby-nationalism-bjp
(xviii) https://www.indiaisrael.org/report
