(RNS) — Mohan Bhagwat, head of one of India’s most influential Hindu nationalist organizations, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is coming to New York City on Saturday (Aug. 29). His visit might have been a diaspora gathering. Instead, it has become a test of how the U.S. will respond to an organization with an opaque network of affiliates that human rights groups accuse of fomenting religious discrimination and violence.
The upcoming “Universal Oneness Celebration” is hosted by American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue, a nonprofit with links to the U.S. wing of the RSS and founded in 2025. The event is expected to draw 5,000 Hindu Americans along with more than 100 groups, from temple associations to yoga and cultural groups.
Founded in 1925, the RSS is one of India’s most influential social and ideological organizations. Through tens of thousands of local branches and a vast network spanning education, labor, student groups and social services, the RSS has helped spread Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, ideas across Indian society and has faced criticism for its treatment of Muslims and Christians, often cast as less Indian than Hindus.
The RSS promotes and informs the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s most controversial policies and rhetoric, including cow protection that has encouraged vigilante violence against Muslims, anti-conversion laws that have led to mob attacks on churches, a citizenship amendment that favors non-Muslim migration and restrictions on foreign funding to religious organizations, disproportionately choking Christian and Muslim NGOs, which provide essential services to Indians in education and other social sectors.
In 2025, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent, bipartisan federal commission created by Congress to monitor religious freedom abroad and make recommendations to the U.S. government, has recommended that the government designate India as a “country of particular concern.” USCIRF also recommended targeted sanctions against individuals and entities, including the RSS, including freezing their assets and restricting their entry into the country. Most recently, USCIRF officials warned against extending high-level meetings and diplomatic courtesies to Bhagwat and other RSS leaders. Several human rights and advocacy organizations have also called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deny or revoke Bhagwat’s U.S. visa.
The Indian government and various Hindutva groups have pushed back hard in defense, claiming that their critics are simply anti-Hindu.
For the first time, in 2002 following the Gujarat riots, when Narendra Modi was the state’s chief minister, USCIRF recommended that India be designated a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC). It made the same recommendation again in 2004 but did not recommend CPC status for India again until 2020. Since then, it has made the recommendation every year.
Last year, in his Independence Day speech from the Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the organization as the world’s biggest NGO as it marked its centenary year. This characterization has revived an important institutional question: If the RSS is one of the country’s largest voluntary organizations, under what legal framework does it operate in India, and should an organization of such scale be subject to the same standards of registration and transparency as other organizations operating in the public interest?
Further, if the RSS is an organization with such a vast network and global presence, why are programs and events for its members and supporters organized by separate organizations, both in India and abroad? What is the nature of the relationship between the RSS and these organizations, and how transparent is that relationship?
One possible explanation is a desire to avoid greater transparency and potential tax scrutiny. These concerns have been highlighted recently by Karnataka Home Minister Priyank Kharge of the Indian National Congress, who has questioned the RSS’s legal status, sources of funding (particularly voluntary contributions), tax compliance and the scale of its public activities, including the thousands of daily branches operating in the state and even in government buildings. He demands that the RSS register in accordance with the law or face a ban.
His remarks drew a strong response from the RSS and the BJP. Bhagwat called the demand politically motivated, saying the organization has openly functioned as a voluntary cultural body for nearly a century and so does not need formal registration. BJP Member of Parliament Ramesh Jigajinagi questioned why a dalit (low caste) leader like Kharge should be concerned about the RSS, sparking further debate.
To understand the true scale of the RSS’s institutional reach, it is necessary to look beyond the RSS itself. Indian magazine “The Caravan” recently launched “Seeing the Sangh,” an ongoing research project developed over six years in collaboration with researchers. The project attempts to map the vast organizational network surrounding the RSS. Drawing on publicly available sources, including RSS publications, academic research, financial records and government documents, it has so far identified more than 2,500 organizations associated with the wider RSS ecosystem across the globe. While the database is still evolving, the sheer scale of the network offers a revealing picture of how the RSS umbrella has expanded its presence across different areas of public life and raises further questions about the nature, structure and transparency of these institutional relationships.
As of now, the project’s map identifies 113 affiliated organizations operating under different names across the U.S. alone.
While many of the RSS-associated organizations are separately registered, the RSS itself has maintained that it functions as a voluntary cultural movement rather than as an organization requiring formal registration. This limits public transparency regarding its structure, finances and accountability.
In 2025, the RSS quietly hired one of Washington’s major lobbying firms — not directly but through intermediaries, so that on paper, the RSS’s name barely showed up. The stated purpose, per the filings, was to introduce the RSS to the U.S. Senate and House. It took reporters actually digging through the disclosures to figure out who the real client was. That’s not an oversight; it’s the same move the RSS makes at home — stay just outside the frame that would force disclosure.
This raises a straightforward question: If the RSS is, by its own repeated insistence, just an unregistered cultural body confined to India, why exactly does it need $330,000 worth of Capitol Hill access and a team of congressional staffers whispering in Senators’ ears? Purely cultural organizations do not typically require such lobbying.
In the end, the central question remains: Should an organization with such extensive influence be allowed to remain institutionally opaque?
(Mohd Arshid is a senior research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi working on the political economy of religion. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)