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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASAThe rise of majoritarian politics globally, combined with a shifting geopolitical calculus around India, has created openings for the RSS that did not exist a decade ago.
On March 4 this year, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan, independent U.S. federal body, recommended for the first time that the State Department impose targeted sanctions on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist organization that serves as the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The commission cited the RSS’ “responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom,” and urged asset freezes and entry bans.
On April 23, RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale sat in a fireside chat at the Hudson Institute in Washington, hosted by the think tank’s fellow Walter Russell Mead. No one on stage raised the USCIRF recommendation, the documented record of anti-minority violence, or the RSS’s century-long ideological project. Before the Hudson appearance, Hosabale spoke at the THRIVE 2026 summit at Stanford alongside former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.
Hosabale’s swing through the U.S. in April was widely seen as an RSS effort at damage control. Facing arguably the most significant international rebuke in its history, the RSS launched its most ambitious Western outreach in its centenary year.
The Centenary Tour
Hosabale also toured the United Kingdom from April 10-15. In London, he addressed a Chatham House session billed as the “RSS View of the World,” attended a cross-party parliamentary dinner with Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parliamentarians, and held an academic roundtable with faculty from Oxford, UCL, SOAS, and other leading universities. He went on to visit Berlin on April 28, where he held discussions with German policy institutions.
Hosabale was candid about the purpose of his visits. He told reporters the RSS had “expanded its outreach to thinking and influencing sections, particularly the Western countries,” framing the tour as an effort to correct “misunderstandings” and “a lack of communication on the part of people from India.” It was an unusually frank admission from the organization’s second-in-command that the centenary tour was a coordinated bid to reshape how Western elites perceive the Sangh.
Rebranding Abroad
At the core of the RSS’s international messaging is a rebranding of the organization, which espouses a narrow Hindu supremacist ideology, to a benign civilizational movement rooted in ancient tradition. At Hudson, Hosabale rejected comparisons to the White supremacist Ku Klux Klan and insisted Hindu identity was “a civilizational identity, not a religious one.”
That framing sits uneasily against the RSS’s own domestic messaging. Months before the Western tour, Hosabale told a centenary gathering in Indore that “Hindutva, Hindu, and Hindu Rashtra collectively form the identity of Bharat.” In a centenary interview, when asked what the RSS had achieved over a hundred years, Hosabale said its impact had been Hindu nationalism and the cultivation of pride in India’s culture and civilizational values.
Audrey Truschke, professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, told The Diplomat that the gap between the two messages is deliberate. “The RSS is a paramilitary organization dedicated to advancing Hindutva, a far-right political ideology,” she said. “Its mission and structure have not fundamentally changed during the duration of the group’s existence, roughly a century. What has changed is that the RSS now enjoys far-reaching influence in India… and so they are now seeking to misrepresent themselves as benign to Western audiences.”
Dr. Edward Anderson, a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies and assistant professor at Northumbria University, who coined the term “neo-Hindutva” in his book “Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora,” said Hosabale’s tour showed “the Sangh borrowing the language and methods of neo-Hindutva groups, entering spaces and adopting a register more familiar to NGOs and multicultural civil-society organizations.”
Describing the RSS outreach as “pragmatic,” Anderson told The Diplomat that “the Hindu nationalist movement more broadly has always prioritized whatever approach maximizes its reach across society.”
Why Doors Opened
If the rebranding explains how the RSS presented itself, the question remains why Western institutions were receptive. The conventional answer is geopolitical: two decades of deepening strategic ties with India, driven by the shared imperative of countering China, have made Western governments reluctant to press New Delhi on democratic backsliding and minority rights.
But that does not fully explain why an American think tank would go out of its way to host the RSS leadership.
The Hudson event featured Ram Madhav, president and co-founder of the India Foundation, an RSS-aligned think tank. The two institutions have collaborated since at least 2023, and Mead has traveled to India on Foundation-hosted trips and was personally hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October 2025.
Ashutosh Varshney, the Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, argued that the deeper driver is ideological. “Politics in America has become anti-minority and pro-majority, whether the majority is defined racially, religiously, or linguistically,” he told The Diplomat. “Hindu nationalism and Trump’s majoritarianism are ideological cousins. Hudson, which has several pro-Trump elements, would like to understand what drives the RSS.”
On strategic dependence, Varshney was skeptical that it played a major role. “Trump does not need India. Indeed, he regularly puts India down. Concerns about minorities are far from Trump’s mind. MAGA believes it is the majority that has been discriminated against, just as Hindu nationalists believe that about India.”
That ideological alignment of MAGA and the Hindu nationalists was already on display at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference in Washington, where Madhav, who also appeared at the Hudson conference, spoke alongside Stephen Miller and then-Senator J.D. Vance. Referring to the critics of Hindu nationalism, Madhav told the audience: “Remember, the same people call you white supremacists and racists,” in an attempt to build solidarity between Hindu nationalists and the Western right.
Rohit Chopra, a professor at Santa Clara University and advisory board member of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, told The Diplomat that conservative think tanks operate according to their ideological leanings, and the policy world routinely engages governments with poor rights records when strategic interests are at stake. But Chopra stressed that the RSS’ earlier approach to Western institutions, which relied on “blunt intimidation, aggression, and threats” against scholars and academics, had largely backfired. “Knowledge about them is much, much more widespread now than it was 20 years ago,” he said.
The centenary tour reflects a pivot: the RSS wants “a more mainstream role” and “a seat at the table.”
Lobbying and Its Limits
The RSS also moved to formalize its influence in Washington. In January 2025, the organization hired Squire Patton Boggs, registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act rather than the stricter Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Senate records show the firm received $330,000 to lobby Congress on “U.S.-India bilateral relations.” Legal experts told Prism, a U.S.-based nonprofit investigative newsroom, that the arrangement should have fallen under FARA. The contract was later terminated after investigative reporting revealed the payment and the failure to register as a foreign agent, as stated above. Subsequently, the RSS denied having hired lobbyists.
Pieter Friedrich, an investigative journalist who has tracked the Western operations of the RSS for over a decade, called the broader campaign “a reputation laundering operation” in which “the think tanks are not being duped, they’re being recruited.” Friedrich confronted Mead after the Hudson event with nine questions about why the institute platformed an organization recommended for U.S. sanctions. “He said ‘no comment’ to every single one,” Friedrich told The Diplomat.
Contested Ground
For all the high-profile appearances, the tour also exposed the limits of the RSS reach. Bethany Poulos Morrison, the sitting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, was originally listed as a panelist at the Hudson conference but withdrew before the event. Hudson subsequently removed her name from its public page. Congressman Ro Khanna, whose recorded video message was played at the event, publicly distanced himself from the RSS days later, saying he had not been aware of the guest list. A coalition of over two dozen civil-society organizations, led by the Indian American Muslim Council, condemned Hudson.
Varshney described the outreach as opportunistic rather than strategic. The RSS, he noted, “historically never cared for external legitimation. If anything, it distrusted foreigners.” But with Hindu nationalists now governing from Delhi and 21 of India’s 28 states under its rule, the calculus has shifted. “It believes it will do it no harm to court external visibility and support.”
Anderson cautioned against reading the tour as a breakthrough. “The Sangh’s tangible influence on political institutions in the West is probably quite limited. It is also up against a dynamic and diverse range of diasporic groups who have actively resisted Hindutva’s influence.”
The centenary tour did not transform the standing of the RSS in the West. What it revealed is how the rise of majoritarian politics on both sides of the Atlantic, combined with a shifting geopolitical calculus around India, created openings that did not exist a decade ago. Whether those openings widen or close will depend less on RSS messaging and more on the choices Western institutions make about who they are willing to platform.
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