Deceived into appearing with RSS chief: US Christian, Muslim faith leaders

By A Representative 

Rev. Adriene Thorne, senior minister of Manhattan's Riverside Church, and Imam Shamsi Ali, director of the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens, have said they were deceived into taking part in events surrounding Mohan Bhagwat's August 29 appearance at Madison Square Garden, where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief addressed roughly 5,000 Hindu Americans and Indian expatriates under the banner "One World One Humanity."

Thorne said in a social media post that she received repeated invitations over six weeks from a group called The World Council of Religious Leaders, which described the gathering as an interfaith event and withheld the fact that Bhagwat would be its central figure. She said her appearance should not have happened and that she was misled, adding she worried photos from the gathering could be used to imply she or her church endorsed the RSS. 

Ali said he had been invited by Bawa Jain and Dileepji Kumar of Yoga International USA, and that neither the official invitation nor his conversations with organizers disclosed Bhagwat's role. He described his attendance as a serious error in judgment and said he felt "deceived and entrapped" by what he called organizers' lack of transparency, adding that Bhagwat's "rhetoric of peace" at the event was contradicted by discrimination and violence facing Muslims and other minorities in India. Ali has said he only realized who Bhagwat was after arriving at the hotel, when someone told him Bhagwat led the RSS — at which point he says he knew he was in the wrong place. He stayed for the interfaith portion but skipped the Madison Square Garden event that followed. 

A third figure has since voiced similar concerns. Rev. Winnie Varghese, dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, told reporters she believed organizers hadn't explained how the interfaith gathering connected to the larger event because they suspected she wouldn't have come otherwise, calling the omission deceptive. Rather than attend Madison Square Garden, she joined demonstrators outside. 

Bhagwat's visit had already drawn public opposition before the event itself: a coalition including Hindus for Human Rights, the Indian American Muslim Council, the Interfaith Center of New York, Riverside Church and the New York State Council of Churches held a City Hall press conference on August 25, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke out against the visit as well. Some Hindu American organizations, in turn, have accused Bhagwat's critics of using opposition to Hindu nationalism as cover for anti-Hindu bias.  

The RSS is described by critics as a century-old Hindu nationalist organization with a documented history of religious supremacy, anti-minority violence and attacks on India's pluralistic institutions, and it serves as the ideological parent of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has recommended targeted sanctions against the organization over religious-freedom violations. 

Reporting from Prism frames the Madison Square Garden appearance as the latest step in a broader influence campaign the RSS and allied groups have been running in the U.S. since last year. The New York Times has separately reported reviewing roughly a dozen emails organizers sent to invited faith leaders across July and August, none of which mentioned Bhagwat or the RSS by name.