On August 29, 2026, Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is scheduled to address an estimated 5,000 Indian-Americans at Madison Square Garden in New York. The event, billed as part of the RSS centenary "Universal Oneness Celebrations," arrives with disturbing historical echoes. As researcher Pieter Friedrich has noted, it was in 1939 that Nazis filled the same arena (photo) under the banner of "Americanism." Now, the RSS—India's largest Hindu nationalist organization—will occupy the same space preaching unity, even as its own ideological archives tell a starkly different story.
The RSS's claim to represent "universal oneness" collapses under the weight of its own founding texts and historical record. For nearly a century, the organization has advanced a vision of India that is exclusionary, hierarchical, and fundamentally hostile to the democratic, secular, and egalitarian values it will purportedly celebrate in New York. Its record falls into three devastating categories: anti-humanity, anti-Hindu, and anti-democratic India.
The Ideology of Supremacy
The RSS's intellectual architects, V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar, laid the groundwork for a Hindu supremacist project in the early twentieth century that explicitly positioned "Hindus" as a racial and cultural vanguard destined to dominate. In his 1923 manifesto Hindutva, Savarkar warned that India's Hindu majority, "bound together by ties of common blood and common culture," would one day "dictate their terms to the whole world." Golwalkar, who led the RSS from 1940 to 1973 and whom Prime Minister Narendra Modi credits as his ideological mentor, echoed this belligerence in his 1939 tract We or Our Nationhood Defined. He envisioned "the might of the regenerated Hindu nation" striking down enemies, declaring that "the world shall see it and tremble with fear."
Most chilling is Golwalkar's explicit admiration for Nazi Germany's racial policies. He praised the Third Reich for "purging the country of the Semitic races—the Jews," calling it "race pride at its highest" and "a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by." For India's Muslims and Christians—whom Golwalkar classified as "foreign races"—he prescribed a stark choice: assimilate completely into Hindu culture and "lose their separate existence," or remain "wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen's rights."
This ideology has found disturbing contemporary expression. The RSS health wing, Arogya Bharati, has reportedly conducted trials through its Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project aimed at producing "fair" and "tall" babies through astrologically timed conception and "purification" protocols—a program its organizers openly compare to Nazi eugenics experiments. When an organization speaks of "universal oneness" while historically celebrating racial cleansing and promoting pseudo-scientific breeding programs, the contradiction is not merely rhetorical; it is existential.
Against the Majority It Claims to Protect
The RSS's project is not merely anti-minority; it is profoundly anti-Hindu in its assault on the majority community's most marginalized members. The organization has consistently demanded that India's democratic constitution be replaced by the Manusmriti, an ancient legal code notorious for codifying caste oppression and gender subjugation. When the Constituent Assembly finalized India's constitution in 1949, the RSS organ Organiser lamented that "Manu's Laws... excite the admiration of the world" yet found no place in the new republic.
Golwalkar made the RSS's caste ideology explicit, declaring that the caste system—where "Brahmin is the head, Kshatriya the hands, Vaishya the thighs and Shudra the feet"—was "the very core of our concept of 'nation.'" The Manusmriti prescribed brutal punishments for Dalits and women: cutting out tongues for "insulting" Brahmins, pouring hot oil into the mouths of those who "arrogantly teach" the twice-born, and mandating that women "must be kept in dependence by the males" throughout their lives. This is the legal framework the RSS has historically preferred to modern constitutional democracy.
The organization's misogyny extends beyond ancient texts. When the RSS established its women's wing in 1936, it deliberately named them Rashtr Sevika (maids for the nation) rather than swayamsevak (volunteers), the term used for male members. Bhagwat himself has described marriage as a "social contract" in which women must perform household chores and "satisfy" their husbands or risk being "disowned." The "universal oneness" celebrated in New York evidently does not include gender equality.
The RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, who broke with the Indian National Congress precisely because he opposed Gandhi's inclusive anti-colonial struggle and its commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity. From its inception, the organization has rejected the pluralistic vision of India in favor of a Hindu nation defined by "one flag, one leader, one ideology"—Golwalkar's explicit formulation of totalitarian aspiration.
The consequences of this ideology have been violent and persistent. During the 2002 Gujarat pogroms, which occurred under Modi's chief ministership, Muslims were subjected to mass murder, gang rape, and arson while authorities stood by. The RSS's foundational text for cadres, Bunch of Thoughts, classifies Indian Muslims as "Internal Threat" number one and Christians as threat number two, claiming that Muslims remained a "menace" even after Partition and accusing Christians of seeking "political domination."
The organization's refusal to recognize Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism as independent faiths—Golwalkar insisted all were merely "included in that one comprehensive word 'Hindu'"—reveals a homogenizing impulse that erases religious distinctiveness. When thousands of Sikhs were massacred in 1984, RSS ideologue Nana Deshmukh circulated a document justifying the genocide, arguing that Sikhs had "invited these attacks" and that the violence represented a "genuine feeling of anger among Hindus." The Modi government later awarded Deshmukh the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor.
The human cost of this ideology is documented not only by critics but by those who once served the Indian state. Julio Ribeiro, one of India's most decorated police officers and a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, wrote in 2015 that as a Christian, he suddenly felt "a stranger in my own country" under Modi's government. He described systematic targeting of Christians through "ghar wapsi" forced conversion campaigns, attacks on churches, and a pervasive "atmosphere of hate and distrust" that he warned would eventually turn toward Muslims with catastrophic consequences.
The New York Paradox
The RSS's international wing, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, organizes exclusively along religious lines, deliberately excluding non-Hindu members of the Indian diaspora and deepening communal fissures in communities abroad. Bhagwat's Madison Square Garden appearance, draped in the language of universalism, cannot obscure this divisive reality.
New Yorkers and Americans concerned with the global rise of ethno-nationalism should examine the record being brought to their city. An organization that has historically glorified racial purification, demanded the subordination of religious minorities, celebrated caste hierarchy, and undermined democratic inclusion does not preach "oneness." It preaches dominance. And when it does so from the same stage once occupied by American Nazis, the historical parallel is not incidental—it is a warning.
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*Author, activist, and former political science professor at the University of Delhi
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