Today, I stood outside the New York Times building on 41st Street and asked them to cover it RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat’s upcoming New York City appearance.

In February 1939, twenty-two thousand people filled Madison Square Garden for a Nazi rally — swastikas on the stage, a thirty-foot portrait of George Washington hanging between them, uniformed men working the aisles. The organizers called it a Pro-American Rally. The Times put it on the front page the next morning: “22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in Garden.”

That same year, in India, the man the RSS still calls its guru published his manifesto, praising the Nazis for purging Germany of Jews and calling it a model to follow.

On August 29, the chief of the RSS takes the stage at Madison Square Garden. They’re calling it the “Universal Oneness Celebration.” Five thousand people are expected.

In March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended sanctioning the RSS and barring its people from entering this country. On August 19, the commission’s chairman raised the alarm about Bhagwat’s scheduled visit.

No American newspaper has covered it.

The video lays out the record — the RSS founder who met Mussolini in 1931, the British intelligence warning, what Gandhi said about them, what Nehru wrote seven weeks before he was shot, and what India’s first Home Minister put in the order that outlawed them.

Sign the petition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

Mayor Mamdani —

On August 29, the leader of the RSS speaks at Madison Square Garden.

The RSS. The paramilitary that tore through the streets of Gujarat 24 years ago — your father’s Gujarat — dousing families in kerosene and burning them alive inside their own homes, gang-raping Muslim women in the road, hacking children apart with swords. They came with printed lists, names and addresses identifying which houses were Muslim so that they could hunt them down from door to door.

And in one of those houses they tore a three-year-old girl out of her mother’s arms and crushed her skull against the ground. Her mother was five months pregnant, and they stripped her and gang-raped her and massacred fourteen of her family in front of her and then left her naked in a field to bleed out among the dead. She woke up hours later, alone, still lying there with the corpses.

Two thousand butchered in three days.

And the man speaking at the Garden was second-in-command of that organization while it happened.

You already know what this movement is.

In 2024, when you were still in the Assembly, you told journalist Pieter Friedrich that this was personal — that your father’s people are Gujarati Muslims, that your very existence is something this movement would love to deny, and that when you tell people what you are they are shocked, because after what was done in Gujarat they don’t believe there are Gujarati Muslims anymore.

That’s what they did in Gujarat. They didn’t just slaughter people. They turned Gujarati Muslims into a rumor.

Six years ago you stood in Times Square and called it a vile spectacle of fascism, and you have ratcheted it up every year since — that the man who runs India is a war criminal, that Hindu fascists are puppeteering politicians in this country, that what is being done to Muslims there is an attempt to strip them of their citizenship and erase them from the country they were born in.

And you told Friedrich what sits underneath all of it: that for these people India’s Muslims aren’t just an obstacle to what they want but are anathema to their definition of the nation, that they use violence against whole communities, often Muslim, sometimes Christian, as a tool to mobilize their base, and that what they are building toward is an India purged of its Muslim heritage.

Purged. That was your word.

The man the RSS still calls its guru wrote their founding text, and he wrote it about people like you.

He said Indian Muslims and Christians are foreign races and internal threats living inside the body of the nation, and that they get two choices — dissolve into the Hindu “race” and surrender their religion and their culture and their separate existence entirely, or knuckle under, relinquish every privilege down to the rights of citizens, and accept quitting the country at the “sweet will” of the national race.

Then he told his uniformed units what to do to the minorities who stayed: set their teeth in grim determination and wipe them out. And he pointed at Nazi Germany, praised its purging the country of the Jews as race pride manifest at its highest, and called it a model to follow.

The RSS’s guru gave three choices to India’s minorities: stop existing, become exiles, or get wiped out.

The man speaking at the Garden this month is the torchbearer of that supremacist tradition. He gives his speeches standing under a garlanded photo of the guru who praised Nazi racial policies.

They seized the country on the back of his ideology.

They have been at this for eighty years, rampaging through neighborhoods with swords, burning families alive in their houses, torching churches, hacking Christians apart in the road, slaughtering Muslims by the thousands. More than a dozen pogroms.

Six million men in uniform who answer to nobody, follow Mohan Bhagwat as their Supreme Leader, keep no rolls and no bank accounts, and now they own the government of India. The Prime Minister was handed to them at eight years old and made a full-time worker by that same Nazi-adoring guru. His Home Minister was similarly spawned, and now he stands on stages calling Muslim men and women and children infiltrators and termites while the crowds cheer him.

Termites. That’s the word from the RSS-trained, second most powerful man in India, and that word gets worked — men dragged from their homes at night, boys picked up off the streets and beaten for hours, people handed over to the mobs who came for them.

And the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ranks India fourth in the world for where the next mass killing starts. Fourth, out of a hundred and sixty-eight countries.

On the twenty-ninth of August, that organization takes Madison Square Garden.

They’re calling it the Universal Oneness Celebration. Five thousand people. Mohan Bhagwat on the stage. People bussed in from four states.

Five months ago, a United States federal commission recommended sanctioning the RSS and barring it from this country — entry bans on its people, its leaders, on Mohan Bhagwat.

The last time Bhagwat came to America, five elected officials pulled their names off the event he was speaking at, including a sitting member of Congress who had agreed to chair it.

Three weeks ago, forty organizations in Canada wrote their government demanding that Mohan Bhagwat be turned away at the borders.

But nobody here in the United States has said anything yet. Not one elected official in the largest city in America has made a peep.

So here is what we are asking you to do.

One. Say something. On the record, before the twenty-ninth.

Two. Call on Madison Square Garden to cancel it. A foreign paramilitary that took its inspiration from the Nazis should not get to occupy the most famous stage in America.

Three. Remind them that the permit that lets that building stand where it stands comes back to this city in 2028, and that the last Council gave them the shortest one in the building’s history.

You once said you were waiting to see whether the mayor would put his thumb on the scale of bigotry or his thumb on the scale of inclusion. You said you still had no answer.

You’re the mayor now. Stop the RSS from poisoning the Big Apple.

SOURCES:

USCIRF 2026 Annual Report, 4 March 2026 — https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2026-03/USCIRF_2026_AR_3326_NEW.pdf

Early Warning Project, US Holocaust Memorial Museum — https://earlywarningproject.ushmm.org/countries/india

“Cultural Malware: The Rise of India’s RSS,” The Polis Project — https://thepolisproject.com/read/cultural-malware-the-rise-of-indias-rss/

Maktoob Media interview with Zohran Mamdani, August 2024 — https://maktoobmedia.com/features/why-a-float-at-indian-independence-day-celebration-in-new-york-city-whipped-up-a-whirlwind-of-protest/

Part three of three. Read part one, Representing Them, and part two, The Vacancy.

Shri Thanedar will end his tenure in U.S. Congress with one solitary, signature achievement — and an unfinished one at that. On June 30, in a Rayburn House Office Building hallway outside the fifth annual advocacy day of the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA), I asked him whether he had written House Resolution 69 or whether CoHNA had written it for him.

Without hesitation, he declared: “No, I wrote it.”

Five weeks later he lost the seat when Donavan McKinney, a state representative from Detroit, beat him in the August 4 Democratic primary for Michigan’s 13th District by roughly 4,200 votes out of 112,000 cast. Thanedar will depart Congress in January.

The resolution won’t leave with him, but even as it continued to gather cosponsors throughout July, with its author no longer available to champion it, it will likely fall prey to Thanedar’s failed congressional career.

He filed it twice — first as House Resolution 1131 in April 2024, then as House Resolution 69 in January 2025 — and neither version defines Hinduphobia. Asked to define it himself, in the same hallway on the same afternoon, he said nothing.

He wrote the text, but appendages of the Hindu nationalist movement raised the demand four weeks before he filed it, at a briefing where he told them a resolution was already being worked on. The demand needed a sponsor in Congress, and Thanedar rose to the occasion and pushed it for four years while his own district took to calling him an absentee, and it appears to have cost him the seat.

What He Authored

On March 13, 2024, Thanedar spoke at a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill hosted by HinduACTion.

He was introduced by Jay Kansara, who was the Hindu American Foundation’s (HAF) longtime director of government relations until he left to work with Americans4Hindus, the political action committee run by California physician Romesh Japra. Both are part of the American Hindu nationalist network that Political Research Associates traces to India’s RSS, the paramilitary organization the US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended sanctioning in March 2026. At the close, HinduACTion and the Namaste-Shalom Multifaith Alliance presented a joint declaration urging Congress to recognize anti-Hindu hatred through a formal resolution.

Twenty-eight days later, Thanedar introduced House Resolution 1131.

Three days later he went on HinduLounge, a HinduPACT program that airs live on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America’s YouTube channel. He was hosted by Tejal Shah (then VHPA’s joint general secretary and, since January 2025, its president), who opened by reminding viewers that HinduPACT is an initiative of VHPA. Her co-host was Sudha Jagannathan, CoHNA’s director of government relations. The episode was devoted to the resolution.

Then, on April 15, HinduACTion hosted a press conference at the National Press Club so that Thanedar could announce the resolution he had introduced five days earlier.

Lunch was served.

Although HinduACTion is independently incorporated, its executive director, Utsav Chakrabarti, also heads HinduPACT and has served as VHPA’s director of advocacy and public relations.

Chakrabarti’s outfit issued the demand in March and staged the rollout in April.

After H.Res. 1131 floundered, gaining only 23 cosponsors and never coming up for a committee hearing, Thanedar filed nearly the same text again on January 24, 2025. H.Res. 69 has fared marginally better, garnering 34 cosponsors with seven of them — including Rep. Ro Khanna of California — signing on in 2026. Yet it also has not come up for a hearing in over a year and a half.

Neither resolution defines Hinduphobia, nor does a simple House resolution bind anyone, fund anything, or change any law. It does, however, record a statement of sentiment: that Hinduphobia is bad, without saying what Hinduphobia is.

The movement has never had trouble supplying a definition when it wanted one. In March 2023, CoHNA won a symbolic resolution from the Forsyth County delegation in Georgia that defined the word, and then used it to push Senate Bill 375, which would have written the same definition into the state’s criminal code. That bill died without a hearing, a sister measure in the Georgia House died with it, and nearly identical resolutions in Minnesota also died at adjournment in May.

Every version carrying a definition is dead. Yet the one still gathering names carries none, which is arguably its value to the Hindutva movement, as the absence of a definition makes it easier to digest while the license to append a meaning remains with the people who raised the demand.

The Word He Left Undefined

Anti-Hindu hate in America is real. Stop AAPI Hate found anti-South Asian slurs — many targeted at Hindus — in extremist online spaces roughly doubled between 2023 and 2024, and a few Hindu temples across the country have been vandalized.

A resolution condemning any of it would be unremarkable. However, since Thanedar’s resolution does not say what it is condemning, the meaning of “Hinduphobia” will be applied by the people who demanded and are promoting it.

In July the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) examined 242 items the three groups pushing the resolution had themselves filed under Hinduphobia. Most were persecution-abroad reports, temple-attack coverage, and legislative proclamations, naming no one. Eighty-seven named a target. One target drew the most, with 22 accusations: campaigns against caste discrimination. The rest fell on a Rutgers report, an academic conference, members of Congress, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, and diaspora critics including Hindus for Human Rights. The people most frequently accused, IAMC concluded, are academics, journalists, Dalit activists, human rights advocates, elected officials, and civil society organizations, not perpetrators of anti-Hindu violence.

Not one category was anti-Hindu violence. Jewish Currents reached the same conclusion a year earlier, auditing HAF’s own list of incidents and finding that three in four failed the foundation’s own definition.

Thanedar himself had already extended the “Hinduphobia” label to anti-caste activism. Explaining at the March 2024 briefing why he had formed a Hindu caucus in Congress, he told the room: “We see California SB403, and that’s just the beginning.”

SB 403 was California’s bill to ban caste discrimination.

What Was Supplied

A resolution does not gather cosponsors on its own.

Normally, the party and the constituency guide a member’s agenda, and both can vote him out. Thanedar’s came from a movement scattered across the country, one that had become his party without ever needing to participate at the ballot box. He did not have to invent an agenda because the movement was writing it for him.

The Hindu nationalist movement’s work went beyond guiding his agenda.

CoHNA, for instance, worked the resolution. At its 2024 advocacy day, by the organization’s own count, more than 40 volunteers went through Capitol Hill to press for H.Res. 1131, visiting over 115 congressional offices. This year, at the fifth advocacy day, delegates held more than 50 meetings with congressional staff and visited over 120 offices to push H.Res. 69.

New cosponsors arrived on that schedule. Rep. Sanford Bishop of Georgia signed on July 14, 2025, a week before CoHNA’s fourth advocacy day. Four more names arrived the following April, while Ro Khanna added his on June 2 (four weeks before the fifth) and a final two joined this July.

When Khanna joined, HAF claimed the win. Thanking Khanna and Thanedar for championing the resolution, they said they had sent more than 3,000 letters to Congress, claiming: “This is what grassroots advocacy looks like.”

The money ran alongside the labor.

Rajeev Menon, CoHNA’s co-founder and vice president, started Hindus of Georgia PAC in August 2020, and CoHNA’s general secretary, Shobha Swamy, sits on its board. Seven members of Congress appeared at that June 30 advocacy day, and the PAC has written checks to six of them — Sanford Bishop, Buddy Carter, Rich McCormick, Brian Jack, Suhas Subramanyam, and Thanedar himself, who pocketed $5,000.

Where He Was

“I want people to know about Shri,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, whose Michigan district adjoins his, shortly before the primary. “Shri moved into Detroit to run for office. He’s a millionaire. He is someone that doesn’t show up.”

Claiming that her office fields “endless” calls from Thanedar’s constituents who find his office is unreachable, Tlaib added, “Constituent services is like an afterthought to him.”

In 2023, he announced a Hindu caucus from the stage of Romesh Japra, whose PAC paid Thanedar’s campaign $5,000 the next day, and escorted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi into the Capitol. He turned up at CoHNA’s advocacy day as the only Indian American lawmaker there, then jetted to Delhi with a congressional delegation. In September, he launched the caucus at a press conference which Organiser, the RSS publication in India, covered as news.

On January 10, 2024, he spoke at the Capitol at a HinduACTion event called “Ramayana Across Asia and Beyond.” Thanedar condemned attacks on Hindu temples, said he was pressing colleagues on the Homeland Security Committee to “provide them the funds and resources they need,” and, asked about the opening of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, told ANI: “It’s historic and it’s a pride for every Indian to see that temple built.” That the temple stands where a mob demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992 apparently did not come up.

Then came the five weeks that produced the resolution: the briefing, the filing, the interview, the press conference. Everything after was work on that.

In March 2025 he stayed back after votes to headline the launch party of a South Asian newspaper in Tysons Corner, Virginia, telling the room that he usually gets the hell out of Washington the moment the votes are done, but that he had made an exception. He spoke at a second HinduACTion congressional briefing that May, and in July he headlined CoHNA’s fourth advocacy day, where volunteers were working the Hill for his resolution.

Then came Summer 2026 and, with it, the final fateful and fatal six weeks in his race for reelection to a third term.

On June 23, 2026, he addressed a diaspora advocacy event on Capitol Hill. A week later he headlined CoHNA’s fifth advocacy day at the Rayburn building, where I caught him in the hallway afterward. On July 25 he spoke at an evening gala at DAR Constitution Hall, organized by a consortium of more than forty groups that included HAF. That was ten days before the primary.

Thanedar described this whirlwind of activity as a sideline. “I spend a lot of my time, majority of my time I spend serving my constituents,” he told HinduLounge in 2024. “So while I’m doing all of that, I have a little bit of time I can spare in terms of helping the Hindu community.”

Yet, in Michigan, the complaints had been piling up for years.

In 2023, Tlaib called him an absentee congressman in a statement to the Detroit News: “While he is busy posting memes, his residents are calling my office asking for my assistance because he is absent from doing his job.” In 2024, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan told reporters, “He’s not a bad person; he’s just not helping.”

After the August 2026 primary, a Detroit voter told Bridge Michigan, “Every time that there is a public forum, Shri either doesn’t show up or isn’t responding to the issues that his constituents have.” CBS Detroit reported that “opponents and colleagues criticize his lack of Detroit roots and his identity as a wealthy businessman who has spent millions on his campaign while representing Michigan’s poorest district.”

Thanedar, meanwhile, countered that his was “world class constituent communication, including a record 11 in-person town halls.” He claimed his was “one of the best offices” in Congress for constituent services, and his concession statement cited 4,300 constituent cases and $45 million secured for the district. Two weeks before the vote, he told Axios that any colleague was “more than welcome to walk around my district with me and see firsthand the love my constituents have for me, and the love I have for them.”

He is apparently one of very few people in Detroit who felt the love.

Every congressional office does, and is expected to do, casework. He built the caucus, the briefings, the advocacy days, and, above all, the resolution, and none of it was in Detroit, and neither was he.

Nothing in the district had a hold on him, because nothing in the district had put him there. The people who did lived in Sugar Land and Fremont and Marietta, and held their events in Washington, while he largely filled his campaign coffers with personal loans from his own pocket.

He did not neglect a constituency. He tirelessly attended to the only one he really had.

That constituency wanted the resolution most, so the resolution got the most of him — the briefings, the advocacy days, the years. It is the achievement he claimed as his own in a Rayburn hallway five weeks before he lost the seat, and it is the clearest measure of what he did with the office instead of representing Detroit.

Once results were in, Raju Rajagopal, a co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, put it plainly: “The Man Friday of Hindutva groups and a Modi loyalist bites the dust.”

Detroit Answered

Thanedar entered the primary with every possible political advantage. Two terms in office, the endorsements of Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Pete Aguilar — the top three House Democrats — near-universal name recognition in the district, and roughly $5 million in cash on hand heading into election night against Donavan McKinney’s $142,853.

But McKinney had something else: he grew up in Detroit, served part of the city in the state legislature, and, above all, was present and reachable throughout, which he ran on. “This is the Blackest and poorest major city in all of America,” he told Punchbowl News, “and it’s time to number one, get our representation back, but number two, take our seat back.”

On August 4, McKinney won 51.9 percent to 48.1 — about 4,200 votes out of 112,000. In 2022, Thanedar took the seat with just 28 percent amidst a field of Black candidates who divided the rest between them, ending nearly seventy years of Black representation in a majority-Black district. The vote was not divided this time.

“The poorest district in the state can come together to defeat the richest lobbies and multimillionaires,” McKinney said after the results came in.

What He Leaves Behind

Nobody in the 13th District voted on House Resolution 69, but they voted on a congressman who was not there.

Being Hindu nationalism’s main man in Washington was a full-time job — four advocacy days, two congressional briefings, a caucus, a Capitol event with India’s ambassador, a newspaper launch, a gala ten days before the primary. It was not the job the 13th District hired him for. Tlaib was doing that one.

The movement lost its main man on August 4.

H.Res. 69 has sat in the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform since the day he filed it, gathering names and going nowhere, and when this Congress ends in January it dies on the calendar with or without him.

That has happened before. H.Res. 1131 died with the last Congress, and Thanedar refiled it as H.Res. 69 three weeks into the new one. Nothing about January requires that the next sponsor be him. Suhas Subramanyam, who took the PAC’s money and stood beside him in Rayburn on June 30, will still be in Congress. CoHNA will hold a sixth advocacy day.

The movement had become Thanedar’s party. Now he’s on his way out, partly — probably even largely — for it. Yet parties replace their members, and they refile their resolutions.

He wrote the text.

They wrote everything else.

This is the final installment of a three-part series. Part one, Representing Them: How Shri Thanedar Became Hindu Nationalism’s Main Man in Congress, documents his four-year alignment with the movement. Part two, The Vacancy: How Hindu Nationalism Became Shri Thanedar’s Party, follows the money.

Tulsi Gabbard ran American intelligence for a year and a half. Before that, she was a nobody running for Congress out of Hawaii — and the money that built her career came from more than a hundred officers and members of the American wings of the RSS, India's Hindu-nationalist paramilitary organization.

In January 2025, before her confirmation hearing, I sat down in the offices of the senators who would vote on her and handed them a dossier laying out the whole record. One staffer told me her intimacy with Hindutva ought to be examined from a counterintelligence perspective. The Senate confirmed her anyway, 52-48, and across the entire hearing not one senator from either party asked who built her career or who she answers to.

This film lays out that record. The donors, named — Bharat Barai, now a registered foreign agent of India; Ramesh Bhutada, national vice president of the HSS, the American branch of the RSS; Mihir Meghani, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation. Ram Madhav, a national spokesman for the RSS, flying to Hawaii in 2015 to speak at her wedding and hand her a gift from Narendra Modi. Her appearance at a New Jersey temple three weeks after being named to run American intelligence, standing between India's registered foreign agent and the executive director of HAF.

And it covers what the Washington Post found in June 2026 — 25,000 pages of memos, from 2011 through 2017, that scripted her: what bills to introduce, what to say on television, even her tweets. The Post found one hand on her, out of the world of the guru she was raised under. My reporting found the other. Both trace back to the same man.

The RSS has been banned three times in India. In March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended the United States sanction it.

Gabbard resigned as Director of National Intelligence in May 2026, effective June 30. None of this was ever examined.

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The Paradox

Shri Thanedar has never needed anyone’s money. He put five million dollars of his own into his first run for Congress before a single donor gave him a dime, and he has put in nearly fourteen million more since. What he needed was everything money does not buy, and the movement that gave him that asked for very little in return.

On June 14, 2023, Thanedar took a stage on Capitol Hill and announced that he would form a Hindu caucus in Congress. The summit had been convened by Romesh Japra, a California physician who runs a political action committee called Americans4Hindus, which Political Research Associates, a research group that tracks the American right, describes as Hindu nationalist. The next day Japra wrote Thanedar’s campaign a personal check for $3,300, and Americans4Hindus wrote another for $5,000. Thirteen days after that, six days after Thanedar escorted Narendra Modi down the aisle of the House to the rostrum of a joint session — the same Indian prime minister the United States had once barred from the country over a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat — Japra wrote a second personal check for $3,300.

Federal law capped what one person could give a candidate that cycle at $3,300 per election. Japra had given the ceiling twice, once for the primary and once for the general.

He was not alone, and the people who joined him came from a single world. The RSS is not only an ideology, it is an institution — the one the US Commission on International Religious Freedom asked Washington to sanction last year — and it keeps a working apparatus in the United States: a branch of its own, an arm of its religious wing, a foundation that funds its schools back in India. Around that apparatus sits a second layer, of advocacy groups and political action committees founded and run by people who came up inside it, speaking the language of American civil rights. Shri Thanedar’s donors come from both.

The largest of them is Bharat Barai, an oncologist in Indiana who organized Modi’s 2014 rally at Madison Square Garden and has hosted him personally. Barai has given Thanedar $12,800 across nine contributions, more than any other individual in the network, and unlike the rest he has given steadily rather than in bursts.

Mihir Meghani, who co-founded the Hindu American Foundation, the advocacy group Political Research Associates credits with recasting Hindu nationalism as a matter of American minority rights, gave the maximum in June 2023 and the maximum again in July 2025, and his wife gave the maximum in between.

On a single day in May 2024, three more gave from the same Houston suburb. Ramesh Bhutada, for years the vice president of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS’s American branch, gave $6,600, the ceiling for the primary and the general paid at once. His wife Kiran, who helped found the youth camp run by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, the American arm of the RSS’s religious wing, gave $6,600 the same day. And Subhash Gupta, president of the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation, which funds the movement’s schools across India’s tribal belt, gave $2,000.

Narsimha Koppula, a joint president of the same organization Bhutada helps run, gave $6,600 from Virginia.

Americans4Hindus, Japra’s PAC, has given $5,000 three times. The Hindu American Political Action Committee, run by the Hindu American Foundation’s leadership, gave $5,000. Hindus of Georgia PAC, founded by the vice president of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, gave $5,000.

Altogether the organizations and officers of the American Hindu nationalist network have given Shri Thanedar $77,800, against the $21.6 million his committee has raised. It is a third of one percent. Had none of it ever arrived, nothing about any of his campaigns would have been different, and everyone who wrote those checks knew it. They gave to the ceiling anyway, on the days that mattered, because the money was never the transaction. It was the signature on one.

The Ledger

The rest of the ledger is almost entirely Thanedar himself.

Of the $21.6 million his committee reports, $18.8 million came from the candidate — eighty-seven percent of it, arriving in tranches of one and two and five million dollars. Most of that was not a gift. He lent it, and the campaign owes it back, so that by the end of 2025 it carried $11.5 million in debt to him personally, a figure first reported by The Intercept.

Of the money that came from anyone else, and setting aside what arrived through fundraising platforms that report their own address rather than the donor’s, fewer than one dollar in six is traceably from Michigan.

Strip out his own money and what remains is a congressman from Detroit whose donors are in Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, California, and Texas, and only marginally in the city he represents. Roughly one dollar in seventy of Shri Thanedar’s campaign money has come from the people who elected him.

He arrived in Congress with nothing else, either.

He won the 2022 primary with twenty-eight percent of the vote, outspending a field of Black candidates who divided the rest between them, and in doing so ended nearly seventy years of Black representation in a majority-Black district. He did it on nearly $5.2 million of his own. Beyond that, Crain’s Detroit reported at the time, he had taken exactly two contributions: $5,000 from the Indian American Impact Fund and $300 from a family member.

That is a man who won a seat in the United States Congress without a single meaningful donor.

The Metro Detroit chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which he had joined on entering politics, voted 144 to 15 to expel him fifteen months later. The city’s political infrastructure was not his, and never had been.

What that adds up to is not a profile. It is a vacancy — a seat in Congress held by a man with no party behind him, no donor base beneath him, and no organization in his district that answered to him or that he answered to.

His money had solved exactly one of his problems. It bought the office and left him alone inside it.

What the Money Cannot Explain

Campaign finance is worth reading because it tells you who a candidate could not have won without. That is the ordinary shape of the thing, and Thanedar’s ledger has no such person in it. He could have won without every one of these donors, and without all of them together several times over, and the men and women who wrote those checks were not confused on the point. They know what a congressional race costs. They know what he had already spent.

What he actually got was everything a self-funded man cannot buy, and everything he did not have.

The Only Offer on the Table

It is tempting to explain this by heritage, and the movement would prefer that you did. A Hindu congressman, a Hindu organization, a natural constituency finding its natural champion — the story tells itself, and it is the story these groups tell about every politician they touch. It is also wrong. Most Hindu Americans have no relationship to the RSS or its American arms, and the diaspora’s largest political organizations are not Sangh organizations at all.

What made the Sangh’s network the natural home for Shri Thanedar was not that he is Hindu. It was that nobody else was offering.

Consider what he was in 2023. A freshman with no party behind him, expelled from the only political organization he had ever joined, holding a seat the establishment had wanted for someone else, in a city whose political machinery had never been his. He had money and nothing else — no field program, no volunteers, no press that cared, no bloc of colleagues, no cause with a constituency attached.

Whatever he was going to become, somebody was going to have to furnish him with it.

The Sangh’s American network was, at that moment, the best-organized and most national political apparatus available to an unaffiliated Indian American in Congress. It had chapters across the country, a fundraising base running into the tens of millions, political action committees, a friendly press, and a legislative agenda already drafted and waiting for a sponsor. It had spent two decades building the machinery a man in Thanedar’s position needed, and what it wanted in return was the one thing he had, which was a seat.

He did not drift into it, either. He told an interviewer for Jewish Currents that he had approached the Hindu groups himself, sat down with their policy people, and come away resolved to represent them as strongly as he could in Congress. The vacancy was structural. Filling it was a decision.

What a Party Does

A political party, stripped to its function, supplies three things to the people who belong to it. A constituency. Coverage. And colleagues, so that no one has to stand alone on anything. Thanedar had none of the three, and within two years of the caucus announcement he had all of them.

The constituency came first, and it had a quality Detroit could never have offered him, which is that it was somewhere else. A congressman’s base is normally the thing that constrains him, because it sits in his district and can take the seat back. Thanedar’s new constituency was in Sugar Land and Fremont and Marietta and Munster, motivated by events in another country, and structurally incapable of holding him to account for anything he did or failed to do at home. That is the pattern the money describes: Barai gives from Indiana, Meghani and Japra from California, the Bhutadas and Gupta from Texas, Hindus of Georgia PAC from a suburb of Atlanta.

When the Metro Detroit chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America threw him out over Modi in September 2023, it cost him nothing, because the people who mattered to him now had never been in Metro Detroit.

Then the coverage. The diaspora press — indica, New India Abroad, NRI Pulse, Diya TV, the wire copy that runs in a dozen papers on two continents — reported his resolution as a milestone for Hindu Americans and went on reporting him that way through everything that followed, and his own congressional website reposts that coverage under the heading In the News.

The relationship runs both directions. In March 2025 he flew to Tysons Corner, Virginia, to headline the launch party of a South Asian newspaper, telling the room that he usually gets the hell out of Washington the moment the votes are done but had made an exception. It is a communications operation of a kind money cannot buy, because what it sells is not advertising. It is the appearance of a man beloved by a community, printed in the community’s own newspapers.

And last, the colleagues. When Thanedar first introduced his Hinduphobia resolution in April 2024 it drew twenty-three cosponsors. When he reintroduced it as H.Res. 69 on January 24, 2025, sixteen members signed on the same day — Republicans and Democrats, from Texas and Pennsylvania and California and New York — and by June of this year it carried thirty-two.

On the thirtieth of that month he stood in the Rayburn House Office Building at the Coalition of Hindus of North America’s fifth advocacy day alongside six other members of Congress, three of them from Georgia, Republicans beside Democrats. The freshman who could not hold the confidence of a Detroit socialist chapter now appeared, in photographs distributed by press release, as the convener of a bipartisan coalition.

None of that appears in a campaign finance report. All of it is worth more than $77,800.

The Vacancy Fills More Than Once

If this were a story about Hindu nationalism alone, it would end there. It does not, because the same thing has happened to Shri Thanedar twice.

In the Michigan legislature he co-sponsored a resolution describing Israel as an apartheid state and calling for its aid to be cut off. Then he went on a trip underwritten by an affiliate of the pro-Israel lobby, and came back one of the firmest defenders of Israel in the chamber. The political action committee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has since given his campaign $169,147 across a hundred and fifty-three contributions, more than double everything the entire Hindu nationalist network has given him, and by The Intercept’s accounting two-thirds of the money he raised in the last quarter of 2025 came through AIPAC’s bundling operation, with fewer than a quarter of those donors living in Michigan.

That is the same arrangement, running twice, and its repetition is what makes it legible. A man with a conviction acquires allies. A man with a vacancy acquires whoever arrives, and he will keep acquiring them, because the condition that made him available in 2023 has not changed and cannot be changed by money he already has. He remains a congressman with no party, no local base, and no organization of his own, holding a seat that two national movements now furnish between them.

What the Sangh’s network understood, and understood early, is that this was not a man who needed persuading.

He needed occupying.

The Party He Found

They did not buy a congressman. Nobody bought Shri Thanedar, and the record is unambiguous on the point — he arrived with more money than any of them could have given him and he has spent it freely since.

What they did was fill a hole.

He had a seat and nothing to do with it. They had a program and nobody to carry it. Out of that arrangement came a caucus, a resolution, an escort down the aisle of the House for a prime minister his own government had once barred from the country, and a national constituency that will still be there when Detroit is done with him.

The $77,800 was never the price of any of that. It was the paperwork.

Which leaves the question of what, exactly, the movement got in return, and the answer is sitting in the Congressional Record under the number H.Res. 69 — a resolution that Thanedar says he wrote himself.

Read part one: Representing Them: How Shri Thanedar Became Hindu Nationalism’s Main Man in Congress.

Shri Thanedar tells his story often, and it is a good one. He left India with little, built a fortune in America, and entered politics in Detroit as a progressive Democrat, an immigrant who calls his adopted country a nation of immigrants and its diversity a strength. What the story leaves out is the movement he has spent four years serving from his seat in Congress, a Hindu nationalist project that, in the country he left, builds its power on the fear and the killing of Muslims.

On June 22, 2023, Thanedar walked Narendra Modi down the aisle of the United States House of Representatives toward the rostrum of a joint session of Congress. Two days earlier he had welcomed the visit at a press conference on the Capitol steps, and that evening he took his place at the state dinner held in Modi’s honor.

He called escorting Modi a “distinct pleasure.”

The man he walked to the rostrum is the only person ever denied entry to the United States under the clause of American immigration law that bars foreign officials responsible for “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” The visa was refused in 2005, over Modi’s record as chief minister of Gujarat, where, by Human Rights Watch’s count, the communal violence of 2002 killed at least 2,000 Muslims.

In the four years since, Thanedar flew to Delhi with a congressional delegation to hear Modi speak, announced a Hindu caucus from the stage of a Hindu nationalist summit, backed India’s airstrikes on Pakistan, and addressed, by video, a convention of Modi’s party on American soil.

He is the movement’s man in Washington, and he has said so himself.

The Movement He Represents

Modi came up through the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist organization founded in 1925. The Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, calls him a self-avowed Hindu nationalist and a lifelong member of it.

In the spring of 2002, while he governed Gujarat, mobs moved through Muslim neighborhoods for weeks as his government stood accused of holding the police back. Three years later the United States shut its door to him, denying him a diplomatic visa and revoking the tourist visa he already held, under the religious-freedom clause of a 1998 law. No one else, before or since, has been barred from the country under it.

The bar did not survive his rise. Modi became prime minister in 2014, protocol swept it aside, and by 2023 he was addressing Congress a second time with Thanedar at his elbow. But the record that produced the bar did not go anywhere, and neither did the movement that produced Modi.

In March 2026, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended, for the first time in its history, that the American government sanction the RSS itself.

That movement runs a set of organizations in the United States, and the researchers who study it treat them as branches of one tree. The Overseas Friends of the BJP is the American wing of Modi’s party, registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America is the US arm of the VHP, which the Congressional Research Service lists among the groups implicated in the 2002 violence, and it runs the advocacy shops that press Congress on the BJP’s behalf. The Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA), placed by Political Research Associates in the same network, has fought American bills that would outlaw caste discrimination.

Different names, one project. These are the groups whose stages Thanedar has stood on, and whose priorities he has carried into Congress.

A Relationship, Not a Moment

The escort, taken alone, could pass for a courtesy. Thanedar’s website framed the role as one “requested by United States Congressional leadership,” the passive phrasing of a man describing an assignment rather than a choice. But a member of Congress takes no one’s orders, and the honor of walking a visiting head of government to the rostrum is sought, not assigned.

Thanedar sought it. He called his own press conference to welcome the visit two days early, and told a reporter it was a “great honour” to escort Modi to his “historic” address.

The beginning came earlier that same month. On June 14, 2023, eight days before the escort, Thanedar took the stage of the Americans for Hindus summit on Capitol Hill and announced that he would form a Hindu caucus in Congress. The summit was convened by Romesh Japra, whose political action committee Political Research Associates describes as Hindu nationalist, and the delegates who rose to applaud him included the co-founders of the Hindu American Foundation and the president of the VHP of America.

He launched the caucus that September.

In August, weeks after the escort, he flew to India with a bipartisan congressional delegation for Modi’s Independence Day address, meeting ministers and executives in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and New Delhi. In the two years that followed, the pattern held and thickened. He sat for interviews with the movement’s advocacy groups, headlined the Coalition of Hindus of North America’s advocacy day on Capitol Hill, and lent his weight to its fight against caste-discrimination bans.

When a Hindu nationalist political action committee run by the leadership of the Hindu American Foundation endorsed him, its own citation credited him with “engaging in discussions with PM Modi” on medicine, energy, and supply chains.

The alignment did not stay ceremonial. In May 2025, when India launched airstrikes into Pakistan after a massacre of tourists in Kashmir, Thanedar declared them justified. “India has the right to defend itself after what happened in Pahalgam,” he said. “Terrorists were targeting Hindus.”

A month later he sent a video message to the national convention of the Overseas Friends of the BJP. “Events like this,” he told the delegates, “strengthen the cultural and political bridge between India and the United States.”

Then a reporter for Jewish Currents asked him how his signature legislation, a resolution condemning what it called “Hinduphobia,” had come to be. He had approached the Hindu groups himself, he said, had “a very meaningful discussion with their policy people,” and came away resolved “to represent them as strongly as I can in the US Congress.”

The pluralist from Detroit had named his constituency.

The Break

The people around Thanedar understood what the escort meant before he would name it himself, and the first to act were his own.

On September 17, 2023, the Metro Detroit chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the group he had joined on entering politics, voted 144 to 15 to expel him. The expulsion, a chapter spokesperson said, was “due to his support of the far right, violent, Islamophobic Modi regime in India.” His views, the spokesperson added, “are not—and have never been—representative of Detroit DSA.”

His own political home had thrown him out for escorting Modi.

He was not the only one who noticed. When he launched his caucus, a coalition of South Asian groups — Hindus for Human Rights, the Sikh Coalition, Emgage, the Indian American Muslim Council — warned that it spoke for a narrow slice of the community while claiming to represent all of it. Rashida Tlaib, whose district borders his, boycotted Modi’s address. Pramila Jayapal and Chris Van Hollen led a letter urging President Biden to press Modi on his human rights record, the very questions Thanedar would not raise.

In Detroit, a Muslim businessman named Quaid Saifee, who had given a thousand dollars to Thanedar’s re-election, asked for the money back once he learned the congressman was a champion of Modi.

Then came the tell. On October 11, 2023, Thanedar announced he was leaving the DSA — not over Modi, which he did not mention, but over the group’s response to the October 7 Hamas attack. It was a clean story, and it was not the true one: the chapter had expelled him three weeks earlier, over Modi, and had called his renunciation a “selfish distraction.”

The subject changed. The maneuver did not.

The Method

Thanedar’s liberalism at home and his service to Hindu nationalism abroad are not a contradiction. They are two halves of one strategy, and the scholars who study Hindutva have described it for years. Hindutva — the ideology of Hindu supremacy that drives Modi’s politics — advances in the United States by borrowing the American language of pluralism and minority rights, presenting a movement that persecutes minorities in India as a threatened minority in need of protection in America.

Political Research Associates traces the move to the Hindu American Foundation’s own co-founder, Mihir Meghani, who placed Hindutva inside the frame of American multiculturalism and recast it as a matter of Hindu civil rights. The “Hinduphobia” resolution is that strategy written into federal language.

When Jewish Currents audited the foundation’s own list of 161 “Hinduphobia” incidents, it found that three out of four did not meet the foundation’s own definition, and that some were nothing more than criticism of Hindu nationalism. The term itself, Hindus for Human Rights notes, was popularized by Hindu nationalist groups to blur that very line, so that opposing Modi becomes indistinguishable from hating Hindus.

That Thanedar would carry such a measure is not, on his record, a matter of conviction. His own Michigan colleagues, and reporting in HuffPost, describe a politician whose beliefs move when moving is useful. In the state legislature he co-sponsored a resolution branding Israel an apartheid state and calling to cut off its aid, then, after a trip paid for by an affiliate of the pro-Israel lobby, remade himself into one of the chamber’s firmest defenders of Israel.

The conversion runs on the same track twice.

None of this requires that Thanedar dislike Muslims, and he does not appear to. In March 2026 he moved to censure Representative Andy Ogles for saying that “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” calling the words un-American and a danger that would “incite hatred against millions of Muslim Americans.”

He tells the story of the immigrant who arrived with almost nothing, defends birthright citizenship as personal, and calls America a country of immigrants made strong by its diversity. Every word of that record is real.

It is also the cover. The credentials of the pluralist are what let the movement’s man work in the open.

Which Muslims

Ogles cost him nothing.

Censuring a backbencher for open bigotry is free, and it burnishes the brand. The Muslims of Gujarat and Kashmir, of the lynching videos and the citizenship law that can leave them stateless, would cost him a great deal, because defending them would mean saying something about Modi. About them, not a word.

What he does instead is invert the frame, over and over. Graffiti reading “Modi is a terrorist” on California temples, a fire set by Sikh separatists at the Indian consulate in San Francisco, a man tearing an Indian flag outside a Texas city hall — each, in Thanedar’s telling, is proof of anti-Hindu or anti-Indian hate, an attack on the Indian state or on Modi recast as an attack on a people. Hindutva’s central move, that to oppose Hindu nationalism is to hate Hindus, he performs on American soil in his own voice.

The graffiti Thanedar held up was the same kind the Jewish Currents audit had taken apart. Temple walls sprayed with “Modi is a terrorist” beside calls for a Sikh homeland, the audit found, belonged to Sikh separatists’ quarrel with the Indian state, not to any hatred of a religion.

His proof of Hinduphobia was the audit’s example of what Hinduphobia was not.

In December 2023, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment alleging that an Indian government official had directed a plot to murder a Sikh American, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on United States soil. Thanedar was one of five Indian American lawmakers briefed on the case. Their joint statement called the allegations “deeply concerning,” then welcomed the Indian government’s announcement of its own committee of enquiry into the plot its own official stood accused of directing, and stressed the importance of not damaging a “very consequential” partnership.

Two of the signers have long records of pressing Modi’s government. Thanedar has none.

Asked whether the accused could be trusted to investigate itself, he raised no objection.

The Silence

For all he has said in praise of Modi, in defense of the Hindu community, and against the enemies he says it faces, there is a subject on which Thanedar has never been heard. He has said nothing about the 2002 killings in Gujarat, the RSS the American religious-freedom commission now wants sanctioned, the citizenship law that sorts Indians by faith, or the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy.

He found his voice over graffiti on a temple wall and has kept it, without a single exception, on the persecution that graffiti was answering.

On June 30, in a corridor of the Rayburn House Office Building outside CoHNA’s national advocacy day, Thanedar was asked on camera whether he had written House Resolution 69. Yes, he said.

Asked whether he had written it or CoHNA had written it for him, he said, “No, I wrote it.”

Asked to define Hinduphobia, the word at the heart of his own bill, in his own words, he said nothing.

Asked where he stood on the RSS and its violence against religious minorities, he turned and walked.

By the elevators, as he left, he was asked again. Why would he not answer questions about the RSS? What was his tie to Modi? How did he feel about Modi’s violence against India’s minorities?

He kept walking.

He built a caucus and wrote a law to shield the Hindu right from criticism, and he did it as the representative of a district where the people that movement targets are his own constituents. Where the money came from, and how the law was written, are what follow.

Congressman Shri Thanedar walks away from questions about his association with Modi and the RSS. June 30, 2026. Rayburn House Office Building.

On June 30, 2026, the Coalition of Hindus of North America held its fifth annual advocacy day inside the Rayburn House Office Building. I went to document it. What follows is what I said, standing in the hallway outside their event — and what they did to me a few minutes later.

The video is above. The record is below.

I was surrounded, grabbed, accused of terrorizing children — for asking to sit in a chair. The president and the vice president of CoHNA, the group running this whole thing, personally ran me out of the room. I offered to shake their hands. I asked calmly to stay and listen. They said no, and called police to eject me.

That’s the entire story in one hallway. They get a table in the People’s Congress. The journalist gets grabbed and thrown out. Everything I’ve shown you this week, they just did it to me on camera, with their own hands. So ask yourself: if a movement does that to a reporter for trying to listen, what do you think it does to its religious minority victims in India?

Read the full investigation into House Resolution 69 and the network behind it: The Hinduphobia Hoax.

In 2021, a formal definition was written for a word that had been floating around for years: “Hinduphobia.” Since then, it has traveled from conference papers to state resolutions to the floor of the U.S. Congress, where House Resolution 69 now asks lawmakers to condemn it — without ever defining what it means.

This series traces where the word came from, who built it, and what it’s for. Because the word does a specific job. It reframes scrutiny of a political movement as bigotry against a faith, so that the people documenting that movement — scholars, journalists, advocates — can be recast as bigots. It is a shield. And the thing it shields is a movement the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has recommended the United States sanction.

Five parts:

Taken together, the five parts describe one thing: a shield for a movement that doesn’t want to be watched.

On June 1, 2026, Ro Khanna put his name on House Resolution 69, which condemns “Hinduphobia” without ever defining it — a word that shields India’s Hindu nationalist movement by recasting criticism of it as bigotry. In 2019, the same congressman publicly rejected that movement, Hindutva. For years his private messages with me showed how clearly he understood the danger. Now he’s advancing its agenda. This is an open letter to him about how that happened, drawn entirely from his own record.

An Open Letter to Congressman Ro Khanna

Ro, what are you so afraid of?

Congressman,

In 2022 you sent me a message you marked off the record, and it is still the most revealing thing you have ever told me. “One of the biggest obstacles I face to one day having a shot in national politics,” you wrote, “is the Hindu right.” You said they were trying to discredit you, that “the Hindu right wants to sabotage me.” You laughed it off, you typed “Hahaha,” but you meant it. And in the years since, I have watched you organize your public life around that one private fear.

So I am going to ask you the question that fear raises, and I will not dress it up. What are you so afraid of, Ro?

Because the fear does not hold up, and you of all people know it.

Let me go back to how we started, because it tells the whole story. You reached out in 2019, after I wrote about Hindu nationalism’s reach into American politics, the same year you declared in public that it was “the duty of every American politician of Hindu faith to stand for pluralism, reject Hindutva.” You messaged me privately, word for word: “How we navigate the issue of right wing nationalism is the challenge of our time.” The next year, when I told you I did not share your domestic politics but respected you, you wrote back: “No harm to it. And much to gain. I think you should really own your position.” You were telling me to own mine.

We met for lunch in your district in 2022, off the record, to “get a sense of each other,” and for the next two years we stayed in regular contact. I watched you take real heat and hold your ground. When you spoke out against the expulsion of Rahul Gandhi, India’s most prominent opposition politician, from the country’s parliament, and the trolls came after your grandfather, who had gone to prison in the struggle for India’s independence, I defended you in public and told you in private, “I trust your principles. So far, for a politician.” You wrote back, “don’t forget for a politician part. But ultimately I want a world of peace and pluralism.” You knew the caveat. You accepted it. I believed you.

And across those two years, you named the thing yourself, again and again. You called the official courtship of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, what it was, “pandering to right wing Hindu,” and told me there was a “powerful financial/lobbying base” behind it. You reminded me you had already faced “two challenges from a Hindu right candidate,” with a third coming, “at real political cost.” When the Hindu American PAC announced that I “should be ignored, not engaged” and you answered me anyway, you wrote: “I am getting attacked for replying to you hahahaha. But it helps me ironically. Shows I am my own person.” When one of their loudest voices smeared you, you wrote: “This is almost an attempt for election interference, trying to sabotage me.” You saw them clearly. You named them precisely. And you were proud, then, of being your own man.

Then, in July 2023, I drafted a piece that named what you had been telling me in private, and you reversed in real time. “But I genuinely am not concerned on the right wing Hindu,” you wrote across several messages, “my actions much more influenced by our national security interest.” When I put it to you plainly, that you were concerned about Hindutva opposition as an obstacle to your national ambitions, you answered, “No I am just describing it as fact. Not that I care... Genuinely not concerned of clout of far right.” The fear was real enough to confess when it stayed between us. It became “simply not true” the instant it might reach print. You wanted it both ways even then.

So in May 2024, I gave you the cleanest chance to settle it. I wrote to you, on the record, for an article on Shri Thanedar’s “Hinduphobia” resolution. You had not cosponsored it, and I asked whether you would, and why or why not. You had answered me on everything for years. You did not answer that. The silence was its own reply.

Then watch where the fear took you. This April, the Hudson Institute hosted Dattatreya Hosabale, the general secretary of the RSS, for a fireside chat in Washington. The RSS is the Hindu-nationalist paramilitary at the root of Modi’s movement, and it is the outfit that sat out the very freedom struggle your grandfather went to prison for. And your face was in that room. Not in person. On video. Hudson played a message you recorded and sent them. When the criticism came, you wrote: “I did not appear. Hudson, a think tank, asked for a 1-minute video which we provided. Have no idea on their guest list and certainly do not support RSS in anyway.” I had published a piece on that exact event two days before it happened, with the RSS headliner named in the first paragraph. “I did not appear” is true the way a magician’s patter is true. You appeared. You just arranged not to be standing there when you did.

Then, six weeks later, you cosponsored House Resolution 69, that same “Hinduphobia” resolution, and announced you were “proud” to do it. That resolution did not come from nowhere. CoHNA, the VHP of America, and the Hindu American Foundation pushed it, and they are the American arms of the same movement the RSS leads. When you signed on, HAF celebrated, thanking Thanedar for “championing” the resolution and calling the campaign “grassroots advocacy.” This is the tell. You disavow the RSS, and then you put your name on the resolution its American affiliates drove, the one that turns a manufactured word, “Hinduphobia,” on scholars, journalists, and anyone who criticizes Modi. You do not support the RSS, you tell us. You just support its initiative in America. It cannot be both.

I am not the only one who reads you this way, and I am not reading you any way you did not first read yourself. When I spent nearly an hour and a half walking with you around the Capitol the day after Modi addressed a joint session of Congress, and I said a lot of people think you are straddling the fence, you answered — paraphrasing — “Exactly.” Raju Rajagopal of Hindus for Human Rights told Middle East Eye that your reluctance to speak against the Modi government came from “citing the clout of Hindu nationalist groups in the US.” Mohamad Junaid, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, told Al Jazeera you know exactly what you are doing, that you “want to run with the hare and hunt with the hound.”

So back to the question. What are you so afraid of? Because I went looking for something that would justify it, and there is nothing there.

It is not the money. I have read your FEC filings, every itemized contribution since 2011, some forty-four million dollars of it, and the donors tied to Hindu nationalist groups are a rounding error. Bharat Barai and his wife, donors tied to the VHP of America whom The Nation named in 2023, gave you thirty-seven thousand dollars across twelve years, under a tenth of one percent of what you have raised. And here is how little they fear exposure, and how little you need them: nine days after The Nation named Barai, he wrote you another thousand-dollar check. Your money is Silicon Valley money. You could send back every dollar Barai ever gave and never feel it.

And it is not the votes. The Hindu-right activists who could not stomach your 2019 tweet recruited a candidate to end you, Ritesh Tandon, backed by Romesh Japra and the super PAC he registered for the job, Americans for Hindus, and you beat him 65 to 24. He ran again in 2022 and lost again, did not survive the 2024 primary, and when he scraped into this year’s general he managed 14.8 percent. You told me yourself that Tandon was “high on your docket.” He was never a threat, and you knew it.

And look one district over, at what their money actually buys. This year, in the seat next to yours, the network ran a candidate of its own, Rakhi Israni, who built her campaign around “dharma,” sat on the board of the Hindu American PAC, and drew $351,954 from families tied to the HSS, the RSS’s American wing, and the Hindu American Foundation, more than a third of her outside money. She raised over two million dollars, more than a million of it her own loan, and outraised the rest of the field combined. Then the voters met her. A Republican who spent about twenty-six thousand dollars edged her into fourth, by 323 votes, in one of the bluest districts in California. That is what the Hindu right delivers at a ballot box even when it empties its wallet. These are the people you are afraid of.

So the fear is unfounded where it should bite. They cannot defund you and they cannot unseat you. And even if they could, even if their money mattered and their votes could touch you, a man of principle pays the price for his convictions. That was the standard you set in 2019, when you took their fire and did not flinch, and it is the one you bragged about to me when you said replying to me “shows I am my own person.” Which leaves only what you admitted in 2022: you accommodate them anyway, not because they fund you, and not because they can defeat you, but because you decided their hostility is the one thing that could cost you a national future. So you placate the very people you once called your saboteurs. That is not strategy. It is a bet that the road to the presidency runs through them.

And it is an insult to the rest of us. When you tell us the video and the resolution are about national security and pluralism, you are asking us to be stupid. You think you can send your face to a Hudson event headlining the RSS’s general secretary, then your name to their resolution, and trust the rest of us not to notice it is the same man doing both. That is the disturbing part, not that you are afraid, but that you assume we will not see it. You are treating an entire community as a monolith of Hindutva-first voters you have to appease, as if every Indian American in your district thinks like the RSS, which is no more true than assuming every white voter is a Christian nationalist. We are not toddlers, Ro. We can see exactly what this is.

At least your colleagues Raja Krishnamoorthi and Shri Thanedar are consistent. They picked a lane and they stand in it. You are the one trying to have it every way at once: the pluralist tweet and the RSS video, the human rights speeches and the Hinduphobia resolution, the private confession and the public denial, the man who told me to “own your position” and the man who would not answer a single on-record question about his own.

And you have it backwards. You think the national future you want depends on not crossing them, when the reverse is true. No one is written into history for the fence. The names that last belong to the people who took the harder side of a defining question and held it when it cost them.

You reach for one of those names yourself, over and over. When Rahul Gandhi was expelled, you called it “not what my grandfather sacrificed years in jail for,” and you were right. Your grandfather went to jail beside Gandhi in the Quit India movement and gave years of his freedom for what he believed, and that is why his name still means something, to you and to the country he helped free. Your own congressional biography says why he was there: he spent those years in prison, it reads, “for promoting human rights.” So hold yourself beside him. He went to prison for human rights. You will not risk a bad headline to defend them, out of fear of a movement that has never come within forty points of your seat. By the standard you reached for when you were criticizing Modi, a video sent to the RSS and a name on its resolution are not what your grandfather sacrificed years in jail for either. The man who chose a cell over silence has a grandson who chooses silence to keep his prospects. He earned the kind of legacy you say you want by refusing the very bargain you keep making. The stand you keep avoiding is not the threat to that legacy. It is the only thing that would build it. The straddle is how you get forgotten, and worse, it is how you spend down a name that deserved better.

So which one of you is real? The man who told me in 2019 that confronting right-wing nationalism was the challenge of our time, the man who was once proud to be his own, or the man who in 2026 lent his face to that movement’s general secretary and his name to its weapon, out of fear of people who cannot touch his money or his seat? Pick one. Tell us plainly. And if you can square it, square it on the record this time, not in a message you will later wish you had marked off.

I am still listening. I always have been.

— Pieter Friedrich

No one calls it an attack on Christianity to report that the Family Research Council lobbies Congress, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State describes the FRC as a Christian nationalist political lobby rather than a house of worship. Americans know the difference between a faith and a political movement that claims to speak for it.

Christian nationalism is not Christianity, and reporting on a Christian nationalist organization is not bigotry against Christians.

I know that distinction holds, because this week Kavita Sekhsaria, a board member of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), published two thousand words concluding that there is little difference between me and a white Christian nationalist.

My offense was reporting on Rakhi Israni, a Democrat running for the open congressional seat in California’s fourteenth district that Eric Swalwell vacated this spring, along with the network that funds her campaign. Sekhsaria disputed not one figure in that reporting, and she named not one of the organizations in it.

She titled her essay “Pride Is Not Supremacy,” and she conceded that the people I wrote about are all connected, and that she grew up hearing Islamophobic things in her own community. Then she aimed her readers not at the movement that produces that bigotry, but at the reporter who writes about it.

She demanded evidence, and asked me to quote them and to document the conduct.

So here is the movement, here is its name, and here is what it is.

The Movement She Would Not Name

Israni’s campaign cash traces to the American network of an Indian movement called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the root of a large family. The political party that now governs India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong RSS man, grew out of it, as did the street groups that enforce its agenda there and the web of American nonprofits that advance its interests and defend its name here. Different names, one movement.

You do not have to take this reporter’s word for what the RSS is, because India’s own government has banned it three times. The first ban came in 1948, after a man who had belonged to it assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the second in 1975, when the national government suspended democratic rule, and the third in 1992, after a mob from the movement tore down the centuries-old Babri mosque.

India’s first home minister, Sardar Patel, ordered that first ban to root out “the forces of hate and violence,” and he wrote that its members had carried out arson, robbery, and murder.

Its founders wrote down what they believed. In 1923, the man who coined the movement’s creed, V.D. Savarkar, defined a Hindu as someone whose holy land lies inside India, which by design read Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands sit in Mecca and Jerusalem, out of the nation.

The historian Christophe Jaffrelot, the leading scholar of the movement, records what came next, when the RSS’s second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, looked at Nazi Germany exterminating its Jews and, in his 1939 book, called it “race pride at its highest.”

She titled her essay “Pride Is Not Supremacy.” The man who wrote her movement’s first systematic statement of itself looked at the purging of the Jews and called it pride.

This is not history sealed under glass. Last December the RSS’s current chief, Mohan Bhagwat, declared that India is a Hindu nation and needs no constitutional approval to be called one, and days earlier he had drawn the very line this article opens with — between a faith and a political creed that claims to speak for it. The movement, he said, is “called Hindutva, not Hinduism.”

Murder and Pogrom

The bigotry is not theoretical, either. In 1999, a mob of the Bajrang Dal burned an Australian missionary named Graham Staines alive in his car, along with his two sleeping sons, aged ten and six, and Human Rights Watch documented it at the time.

The Bajrang Dal is the militant arm of the same Vishwa Hindu Parishad whose American branch’s officers are among Israni’s donors, and a decade later the same network’s activists drove the Kandhamal pogrom in Odisha, which left more than a hundred people dead, three hundred churches burned, and tens of thousands of Christians driven from their homes.

In its report covering 2025, released this March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that the United States impose targeted sanctions on the RSS for severe violations of religious freedom, and its commissioners are appointed by the president and the congressional leadership of both parties. That is the evidence HAF’s writer said does not exist.

More Than a Third

The network is not in India. It is here, on Israni’s own filing, where more than a third of the outside money her campaign raised, $351,954, came from donors affiliated with the American Sangh, the RSS’s family of organizations in the United States. These are its officers and the families that built it here.

HAF presents itself as a civil-rights group for Hindu Americans, but its own history says otherwise.

That characterization is not mine. A report by Political Research Associates calls HAF “a key node in the global Hindu supremacist movement,” bound to the RSS’s American branches by money, organization, and people, and it is language that Congress’s own research service later relayed and that a Rutgers law school study independently confirmed.

Its co-founder, Mihir Meghani, came up through the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), and he wrote a manifesto, “Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology,” that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP; India’s ruling party and the political wing of the RSS) later published as its own. It celebrated the mob destruction of the Babri mosque as the release of “thousands of years of anger and shame,” and it told India’s Muslims that their place in the nation depended on their submission to that Hindu nationalist order.

Andrew Cockburn, writing in Harper’s, found HAF “closely connected in word and spirit to the RSS and its spin-offs.”

HAF has gone after its critics in court, and when the historian Audrey Truschke and four others publicly tied it to Hindu supremacist groups, HAF sued them for defamation, and a federal judge threw the case out.

Her Father in Uniform

The woman who called me a bigot wrote movingly about her father and her relatives as ordinary people who served their community, and she is right that they served it.

She left out what they served it as.

Kavita Sekhsaria — born Kavita Pallod — is the daughter of Vijay Pallod. Her father sat on the governing council of the VHPA. In December 2010, he and Ramesh Bhutada (the husband of Vijay’s first cousin) traveled to Pune, India, for a summit of the RSS’s overseas wing, where they were photographed in the movement’s uniform, posing with the man who founded that wing.

Four years later, Pallod flew to India with a team of thirty to campaign for Narendra Modi’s election, telling me, “Only because of Narendra Modi, I went to campaign in India.”

Bhutada is the national vice president of that overseas wing, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, and Houston’s first chapter of it began in his own house, with one of its offices still running out of a warehouse his company owns.

While Pallod was in India that year, Bhutada stayed in Houston and ran a phone bank of seven hundred volunteers calling voters in India to put Modi in power. He later wrote, in the Houston Chronicle, that Modi won because of his “RSS training,” and that Americans uneasy about the man ought to reconsider the RSS that shaped him.

These are not Hindus who happen to know one another. They are the officers of a movement, and she is one of them.

That is why her essay never once said the three letters R-S-S. She conceded the connection because she could not deny it, and she demanded that I document the conduct because she assumed I could not. The conduct is documented, though, and most of it not by me, coming from Harper’s, The Caravan, Human Rights Watch, a federal commission, and Golwalkar’s own books.

What she would not do, in an essay written to humanize the very men who run the RSS’s American structure, was admit what they run. The silence was the answer.

The Plot, and the Punchline

That silence has a pattern. In 2025, California’s legislature passed a bill to train police to recognize transnational repression, the precise crime an agent of a foreign government was then being prosecuted for committing against an American citizen on American soil. HAF lobbied to kill it, and when the governor vetoed the bill, HAF’s managing director, Samir Kalra, called the veto a victory for the civil rights of all Californians.

Months later, Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to that very plot, the murder-for-hire of a United States citizen in New York directed by an Indian intelligence officer, and Kalra then went on HAF’s own show and mocked the plot for being botched. “If you’re gonna do a job,” he said, “fucking do it right.”

Sikh and Hindu rights groups condemned the segment, noting that Kalra seemed to concede India had ordered the killing.

This is the organization that calls reporting on it bigotry: the one that lobbied against protecting Americans from foreign transnational repression, and then laughed when India’s assassination plot failed.

From the Movement to the Ballot

Rakhi Israni was the movement’s lawyer.

She was no bystander to any of it: she was the first elected president of a VHPA student project, served as legal counsel on the VHPA’s executive board, then as legal director of its political arm, and she testified before the California Senate against the bill that would have made the state the first in the country to ban caste discrimination.

The network that built her now funds her run for a seat in Congress, the body that funds the religious-freedom commission and can act on its recommendation to sanction the RSS.

The body that would judge the movement is the body she wants to join. The voters who will judge in the fourteenth district will do so on June 2.

A Guest in the Living Room

Reporting on the RSS’s American network is no more bigotry against Hindus than reporting on the Family Research Council is bigotry against Christians, because the Hindu supremacist movement is not Hinduism, and on that one point this reporter and the head of the RSS agree. It was Bhagwat, after all, who drew the line.

Meanwhile, the essayist’s own family has been close enough to the RSS to host its supreme chief: her father told me, in 2019, that Ramesh Bhutada — the relative beside him in the Pune uniform photograph, now also a donor to Israni's campaign — had welcomed Mohan Bhagwat into his Houston home. So the man who demands a Hindu nation has been a guest in the living room of the candidate's donor, and yet the essayist called me a Christian nationalist for naming the movement he leads.

The Doll and the Senator

Her essay reaches, near its end, for a witness to her own conscience, when she writes of tearfully giving a state official a knit Bernie Sanders doll, and of how the two of them admired “his moral clarity and the values he represents,” an odd scene, she suggests, for anyone cast as a puppet of the BJP.

It is worth examining where Bernie Sanders aimed that clarity because, in 2019 in Houston (her family’s own city), he stood before the Islamic Society of North America and called India's BJP government's revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy, its crackdown on dissent, and its communications blackout unacceptable, demanding that the United States speak out for the Kashmiri people.

As Trump and Modi staged the Howdy Modi rally in that same city weeks later, Sanders wrote in the Houston Chronicle that the celebration would meet a human-rights crisis with “a deafening silence.” When anti-Muslim mobs — incited by BJP leaders — killed dozens in Delhi the next year, he called it “a failure of leadership on human rights.”

The Howdy Modi celebration was not staged by strangers to either the essayist or the candidate. Its committee chair was Jugal Malani, its patrons included Ramesh Bhutada, its honorary committee carried Vijay Pallod, the essayist’s own father, and its honorary co-chairs included Rishi Bhutada, who sits on HAF’s board, alongside the candidate’s own parents, Hakumat and Radha Israni.

The rally Sanders condemned was built by the network that now funds Israni’s campaign.

That is the moral clarity the essayist says she admires, and it was aimed against exactly what her own family built, at the Modi her father flew to India to help elect, whose rise her relative Ramesh Bhutada credited to RSS training in that same Houston Chronicle.

aIn her family’s city, Sanders named what was being done to Kashmiris and to India’s Muslims, plainly and in public. She asks for equal rights for every community in America, and yet her essay never reaches the question of whether she wants the same for Muslims, Christians, and Kashmiris in India, the people the movement she defends exists to keep beneath them.

One of us rejected a religious nationalist ideology, in public and by name. The other serves one, and wrote two thousand words to keep from saying its name.

The Captive Candidate — PART I: THE INHERITANCE

From 1986, a group of families in Houston built the Hindu Heritage Youth Camp under the banner of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America — part of the American network of India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the paramilitary behind Hindutva (or Hindu supremacy) and the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The founding families: Dr. Haku Israni. Ramesh and Kiran Bhutada. Jugal Malani. Vijay and Sushma Pallod.

They didn’t just share an ideology — most of them shared actual family.

Ramesh and Vijay Pallod are cousin-in-laws; Ramesh and Jugal Malani are brothers-in-law — Kiran Bhutada is Jugal’s sister. She was already Kiran Bhutada when she helped plan the first overnight camp in 1986. The family bonds preceded the movement, and the movement was built on top of them.

Sushma Pallod ran the camp kitchen. A commemorative booklet published for the camp’s 25th anniversary quotes her: “This has become our family project.” In fact, it soon became everyone’s multigenerational family project.

The children of these families became the camp’s second generation of directors and counselors — Rakhi Israni, Rishi Bhutada, Maneesh Mehra, Kavita and Bharat Pallod, Nikita and Sapna Malani. In her own essay for the 2009 booklet, Rakhi wrote that she had been “a camper, counselor, and camp director for more than 18 years,” and that she “wanted everyone to know how lucky he or she was to be a part of the greatest culture in the world.”

Jugal wrote in the booket: “I personally have known many of these kids as they have grown up from elementary school to become doctors, lawyers, and business leaders.” Or politicians — like Rakhi, who is now running for Congress in California’s 14th district, which includes Fremont, where she has lived for over two decades.

On March 7, 2026, her campaign held a fundraiser in Houston. The sponsors: Haku Israni. Vijay Pallod. Rishi Bhutada. Ashish Agrawal. Darshan Wadhwa. Hindu American PAC. Jugal Malani — who chaired the organizing committee for Howdy Modi, the 2019 Houston rally at which Modi and President Trump appeared before 50,000 people — also donated. Hakumat and Radha Israni had served as Honorary Committee Co-Chairs of that same rally.

The families who built the network from 1986 sponsored the fundraiser in 2026. Forty years on, the same names, same relationships, different stakes.

Analysis of Israni’s Q1 2026 Federal Election Commission filing reveals that 111 of her 424 individual donors — more than one in four — hold leadership positions in or documented affiliations with RSS-linked organizations in America. Combined with $10,000 from two network-affiliated PACs (Hindu American PAC and Hindus of Georgia PAC), those donors gave $351,954, representing 38.3% of her outside contributions.

Full annotated Hindutva donor list (PDF)

The geography proves it isn’t coincidence. Of her 424 individual donors, 100 came from Texas, 56 from Georgia, and 30 from Florida — not the states where Israni lives or campaigns, but the states where the network’s founding families and their organizations are concentrated.

When the Press Democrat asked Israni how she’d connected with so many out-of-state donors, she said her campaign had become a “national movement.”

She’s right — but not in the way she means. Her campaign is inseparable from the national Hindutva movement. The paper trail going back four decades, documented in her federal filings, traces not a candidate who attracted a broad coalition but rather a network deploying one.

The Captive Candidate — PART II: THE LEDGER OF DEPLOYMENT

The network that funded her campaign is known as the American Sangh — RSS’s family of organizations in the United States, built over five decades by a tight-knit community whose families organized together, sat on the same boards, and raised their children in the same camps. It is multigenerational, interconnected, and small: the same surnames appear at the top of every organization. Their top officers are all in Israni’s filing.

Vinod Ambastha, the sitting president of HSS USA (the RSS’s American wing), gave $2,000. Srikanth Gundavarapu, the sitting president of Sewa International USA (the network’s service and disaster relief arm), gave $14,000 combined with his wife Jyothirmayi, each at the maximum. Both are in the filing — not former officials writing nostalgic checks but the people currently running the organizations.

Ramesh Bhutada — HSS national vice president, and the man who built the camp alongside Haku Israni four decades ago — gave $7,000. His son Rishi, who sits on the board of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF, considered the network’s primary advocacy and lobbying arm), gave another $7,000. Suresh Jain, who chairs Sewa International’s national board, gave $3,500, and HAF co-founders Mihir Meghani and Aseem Shukla gave $3,500 each.

Rajeev Menon, who co-founded and serves as vice president of the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA, a political advocacy organization that has collaborated with HAF in lobbying against caste discrimination protections and transnational repression legislation), gave $1,000.

Gitesh Desai served as Sewa Houston president before becoming Sewa Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) president and was a spokesperson for the Howdy Modi rally ($2,001). Madhav Durbha led Sewa Atlanta through 2024-2025 ($2,008). Anurag Mairal runs Sewa International’s Bay Area chapter and holds a professorship at Stanford ($2,508). Three chapter presidents, three cities, all in the same filing.

The pattern holds at every node of the network.

HSS, HAF, Sewa, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), CoHNA, and the Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP, a registered foreign agent of India’s ruling party) — each represented not by rank-and-file members but by its officers: national coordinators, vice presidents, program directors, governing council members spanning California, Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Ohio.

Five donors with documented ties to the BJP’s overseas networks are also in Israni’s filing, among them Bharat Barai, who registered personally as a foreign agent of the Indian government in 2023. Also in the filing: a donor named in lobbying disclosures as having contributed to and supervised the RSS’s first-ever congressional lobbying campaign — a $330,000 operation that was terminated after a November 2025 investigation exposed it, with the RSS’s name subsequently scrubbed from the filings. Three months later, he maxed out to Israni.

The network funding pattern runs deeper than organizational affiliation. The pattern sharpens when one looks at the families.

The Bhutadas gave $28,000 across four donors. The Deshpandes (led by Pawan Deshpande, HAF National Leadership Council member and son of Deshpande Foundation founder Gururaj Deshpande) gave $42,000 across six donors. The Pallods gave $16,000 across four. The Meghanis gave $9,008 across five. The Isranis — Rakhi’s own family — gave $42,000 across six donors. Five families: $137,008.

The federal contribution limit is $3,500 per election, or $7,000 total across primary and general. When four, five, or six members of the same household each write a check (in several cases at the maximum), that’s a bundling operation, not a grassroots surge.

These five network families didn’t just donate. They organized internally. Yet these families are not merely network-affiliated donors — they hold the organizational titles.

Ramesh Bhutada is HSS national vice president, while Rishi Bhutada sits on HAF’s board. Pawan Deshpande sits on HAF’s National Leadership Council. Kavita Pallod (Sekhsaria) joined HAF’s board in May 2024. Mihir Meghani co-founded HAF.

After spending decades building a multi-generational network of organization, these families mobilized as the core donor base when one of them produced a congressional candidate. Between five family units, they produced 14.9% of her total funding — and nearly 40 percent of what came from the network itself.

Furthermore, Israni’s campaign tells donors it takes no corporate PAC money — technically accurate and precisely misleading. Hindu American PAC, which gave $5,000, is chaired by HAF co-founder Mihir Meghani alongside other HAF senior leadership. Israni herself sat on its board before launching her campaign.

Hindus of Georgia PAC gave another $5,000.

Neither is a corporate PAC. One is an organization whose board she recently left. The combined $10,000 brings the total flagged contributions to $351,954, representing 38.3% of her outside funding.

“Grassroots” is not the word for the financial success of Israni’s campaign. It is astroturfed. And “captive candidate” is the accurate descriptor for Rakhi Israni, who is propped up by one of the most unique special interest groups in America: the national Hindutva movement.

The Captive Candidate — PART III: THE OFFICER

So who and what are the donors funding in Rakhi Israni and her candidacy for CA-14?

Rakhi Israni didn’t arrive at this campaign from outside the network — she was built inside it, title by title, role by role, over three decades. The Hindu Students Council, where she became the first elected president, is a VHPA project listed on the organization’s own website as part of its advocacy infrastructure.

From there: Legal Counsel on VHPA’s executive board, then Executive Director of Legal Affairs for HinduPACT (the political advocacy arm VHPA launched in 2020 and spun off as an independent organization in 2025), then Vice President of Government Relations for Sewa Bay Area and Director of Public Relations for Sewa International USA at the national level, and finally board member of the Hindu American PAC, the committee that just wrote her campaign a $5,000 check.

Six titled roles across four organizations in a single network, and her legal training runs through all of them. She was not a cultural ambassador or a community volunteer but the network’s legal infrastructure: the person who drafted the arguments, filed the briefs, testified in the hearings, and articulated the movement’s positions in the terminology of American law.

In April 2023, Israni appeared before the California Senate Judiciary Committee to testify against SB 403 — legislation, introduced by State Senator Aisha Wahab, that would have made California the first state to ban caste discrimination. Testifying in her capacity as HinduPACT’s legal director, she argued the bill was “an unconstitutional denial of my community’s rights to fairness and equal protection under the law.” The bill passed both legislative chambers, and Governor Newsom vetoed it.

Israni’s own campaign now features the SB 403 testimony as a credential, describing her as the only CA-14 candidate with “a proven record of defending the Indian American community.” Wahab is now one of her opponents in the same congressional primary.

Caste protections were not the only target.

Two years later, HinduPACT and CoHNA coordinated opposition against SB 509, a California bill that would have required law enforcement training on recognizing foreign government intimidation of diaspora communities. The bill passed both chambers without a single opposing vote. CoHNA and HinduPACT argued it would harm California’s relationship with India. Newsom vetoed it.

The network Israni served secured the veto of a bill designed to protect diaspora communities from foreign government intimidation, and yet HAF called the veto “a victory for the civil rights of all Californians.”

In 2025, the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights identified HAF — along with HinduPACT, VHPA, CoHNA, and HSS — as nodes in the Hindutva lobbying network and recommended that groups acting as proxies for India’s RSS be required to register under FARA. Political Research Associates found that observers on Capitol Hill “often remarked that they find the boundaries between HAF and an actor like the Indian Embassy to be difficult to ascertain.” A November 2024 Congressional Research Service report stated that HAF had for two decades “sought to influence” the presidency, Congress, and state governments “by some accounts directly on behalf of the New Delhi government.” A congressional staffer, speaking to Al Jazeera in 2022, was direct: “It became clear to me that the Hindu American Foundation was acting on behalf of the Indian government.”

Those accusations reached Israni’s own city.

In 2025, the Fremont Gurdwara Sahib — serving 5,000 worshippers a week — filed a formal complaint with then-Attorney General Pam Bondi asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate whether HAF should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), alleging it facilitated meetings between foreign officials and US lawmakers and maintained a “fiduciary” relationship with the Indian Embassy in Washington.

Israni ran the legal operations of organizations a 2025 Rutgers University report recommended be required to register under FARA when acting as proxies for India’s RSS. She testified against legislation designed to protect the communities her donors have been accused of targeting.

She is not a candidate who happens to have ties to the Hindutva movement, but rather the movement’s officer — and now its candidate.

The Captive Candidate — PART IV: THE STAKES

In February 2026, Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire — arranging the assassination of an American citizen on American soil. Under oath, he admitted: “I agreed with another person to have another individual to murder a person in the United States.” The target was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh activist in New York. Federal prosecutors allege Gupta acted at the direction of Vikash Yadav, a former officer in India’s Research and Analysis Wing. This is not allegation. This is a guilty plea in a federal court.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) responded in 2026 by recommending targeted sanctions against the RSS — the paramilitary whose American proxy network funded 38.3% of Israni’s campaign.

The stakes reach directly into Congress. USCIRF is a bipartisan legislative branch agency whose nine commissioners are appointed by the President and the leadership of both parties in the Senate and House of Representatives. Four of those nine seats are filled by congressional party leadership — the same body Israni is seeking to join. A congresswoman whose campaign was funded by the RSS’s American proxy network would sit in the body that appoints the commissioners, funds the agency, and determines whether its sanctions recommendation against the RSS ever reaches the Secretary of State.

The network’s legislative agenda is documented and specific. H.Res. 69 — the “Hinduphobia” resolution drafted with HAF and CoHNA as acknowledged partners — would establish a category critics argue is designed to silence scrutiny of Hindu nationalist ideology in American political discourse, conflating criticism of Hindutva with anti-Hindu bigotry. Her network has lobbied to defeat caste protections and transnational repression legislation. It has worked systematically to shield Modi’s government from human rights scrutiny in Washington. For Israni, that shielding is not an abstraction: her parents organized the honorary committee for the largest diaspora reception ever held for an Indian prime minister on American soil. A Sacramento Bee investigation documented the network conducting law enforcement trainings across California framing Sikh community leaders as terrorism suspects, the kind of operation a sympathetic member of Congress makes significantly easier to sustain.

CA-14’s Sikh, Dalit, Muslim, and progressive Hindu communities are being asked to send the movement’s officer to Congress to represent them.

In 1986, Sushma Pallod ran the VHPA’s youth camp kitchen. Forty years later, the multigenerational project the camp's 25th anniversary booklet records her calling "our family project" has a congressional candidate, a federal filing, and a guilty plea in a Manhattan courtroom — all in the same year. The same network. The same families. The same surnames.

A captive candidate doesn’t represent a district. She serves the network that made her. The question the DOJ has been asked to answer about the organizations she ran is whether they should register as foreign agents. The more relevant question is whether she needs to do so herself.

Methodology: The full annotated donor list — 111 individuals with documented leadership positions in or affiliations with RSS-linked organizations, cross-referenced against organizational records, FEC filings, and public sources — is available as a PDF. FEC contribution data sourced from Israni’s Q1 2026 filing. Organizational affiliations sourced from HSS, VHPA, HAF, Sewa International, CoHNA, OFBJP, HinduPACT, and HAPAC websites, Wayback Machine records, conference programs, and public records. Family relationships sourced from people-search databases, organizational biographies, and the 2009 Hindu Heritage Youth Camp 25th anniversary booklet.

On May 7, 2026, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom held its first India hearing in years. For the first time ever, the federal commission recommended sanctioning the RSS — the paramilitary Hindu nationalist organization at the heart of religious persecution against India’s Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs.

Fifty days earlier, USCIRF had released its 2026 Annual Report with that recommendation. Two weeks before this hearing, RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale toured Washington and told a Hudson Institute audience that the RSS is not the Indian version of the KKK.

I was in the room for the hearing. After it ended, I sat down on the record with both USCIRF Vice Chair Asif Mahmood and Commissioner Mohamed Elsanousi. This report combines those exclusive interviews with witness testimony from former US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice Stephen Rapp, UC Berkeley anthropologist Angana Chatterji, Center for the Study of Organized Hate Executive Director Raqib Naik, Georgetown Law professor Arjun Sethi, and former USCIRF Commissioner David Curry.

Full hearing footage is available at uscirf.gov. For continued reporting on Hindutva influence operations in the United States, subscribe.

Since mid-March, I’ve published five investigative pieces across three outlets. Here’s what I’ve been working on.

“Israel’s Transnational Repression Export: How the Pegasus State Armed India’s Assassination Machine” — Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

• Two allied governments are running parallel transnational repression operations in Canada. The tools, the tradecraft, and the chain of command.

“Modi’s Silence: How India Submits to Washington Taking Everything” — Antiwar.com

• The U.S. sank India’s guest’s warship, bombed India’s own port investment, and imposed 50 percent tariffs. India said nothing.

“The War Nobody’s Watching: Pakistan’s Three-Front Conflict” — Antiwar.com

• Pakistan is simultaneously fighting Afghanistan, containing a Balochistan insurgency, and managing sectarian fallout from the Iran war. Nobody is paying attention.

“Bangladesh’s Oslo: The Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Erasure of an Indigenous People” — Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

• Bangladesh signed a peace accord with its indigenous people in 1997. Twenty-eight years later, not one provision implemented. Now the new government threatens to erase indigenous recognition entirely.

“From the Library to the Legislature: What VHPA’s and CoHNA’s Own Records Reveal” — New India Abroad

• A response to a CoHNA-affiliated columnist who attacked me by name — sourced entirely from the organizations’ own documents, filings, and publications.

More coming. If you find this work valuable, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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A foreign ethno-nationalist movement from India is moving aggressively into U.S. politics. American discourse fixates on Chinese Communist Party interference and Russian disinformation. Hindutva — the supremacist Hindu nationalist movement that powers India’s ruling government — barely registers in the conversation. Three of its collaborators sit in U.S. Congress.

Capitol Hill’s Hindutva Squad — Suhas Subramanyam, Shri Thanedar, and Raja Krishnamoorthi — have spent years making common cause with the American arms of this movement. VHP America and CoHNA pushed H.Res. 69, the so-called “Hinduphobia” resolution. Thanedar authored it. Subramanyam and Krishnamoorthi cosponsored. The same network has funded all three of their campaigns and worked to kill state-level legislation built to protect Americans from transnational repression. Krishnamoorthi has shared stages with senior leadership of India’s ruling Hindu nationalist movement on multiple occasions between 2018 and 2023. Thanedar escorted Narendra Modi — banned from the U.S. for over a decade for orchestrating the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom — to his June 2023 joint address to Congress.

Then in February 2026, the middleman in India’s plot to kill an American citizen on American soil pled guilty in a New York court. One month later, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended Washington sanction India’s RSS — the paramilitary force at the heart of that government — for egregious violations of religious freedom. These three keep cozying up anyway. The full record is in the video.

On April 28, I approached Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich at a candidate open house in Chevy Chase, where he was circulating the room as a candidate for County Council At-Large, and asked him about his office’s partnership with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. The conversation lasted six minutes. At one point, he threatened to have me removed. It ended with him telling me to get out of my face.

Two weeks earlier, Montgomery County Public Libraries had cancelled an event at the Germantown Library after a coalition of civil rights organizations — led in part by Hindus for Human Rights — exposed that the event was backed by VHPA, the self-described “sister organization” of India’s Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The VHP is the religious wing of the Hindu nationalist network centered around the RSS, the paramilitary that the US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended for sanctions in March 2026 for “egregious violations of religious freedom.” Elrich had agreed to keynote the library event. In 2024, he issued a county commendation at a VHPA event at Gaithersburg High School celebrating the construction of a temple on the ruins of the Babri Masjid — a 500-year-old mosque that VHP helped demolish with a mob in 1992.

I asked Elrich who in his office approved the VHPA partnership. “It was no big deal,” he said. “They made a proposal of bringing books to a library. They’re donating a few thousand dollars worth of books.” He defended the donated titles as “good kids’ books” that “were not political books.”

A review of the donated collection by the coalition identified four books by three authors with documented ties to Hindu supremacist organizations — including one whose other works are a recruitment manual for the RSS and a book extolling an ancient legal code that deems women and lower castes subhuman, and another whose book was personally launched by India’s Home Minister and who calls Muslims “murderers” on social media. “Nobody’s actually shown me a book that does that,” Elrich said.

I asked about the commendation. “I didn’t know about that until after I was there,” he said.

I asked if he was aware that VHPA is connected to VHP in India. “I am now,” he said, and then added: “But I don’t think — I just don’t see them as the same organization.” When I pointed out that VHPA’s own website calls itself a sister organization of the VHP and that the organization was founded by operatives dispatched from the VHP in India, he responded: “I don’t know what to do when people here act like everybody else does here, and behave like everybody else does here, to kind of persecute them for what happens in India.” Holding VHPA accountable for its documented ties to its violent parent organization is, in Elrich’s framing, persecution.

Until the library controversy, the VHPA DMV Chapter — the same local chapter that donated the books and organized the Germantown event — used as its Facebook profile picture a graphic celebrating the anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition, posted on December 7, 2025, the day after the 33rd anniversary of the demolition. The image shows the mob carrying bricks from the destroyed mosque, stamped with the VHPA logo and the words: “Shaurya Diwas - Dec 6. A day of reclamation. NO REGRETS. NO REPENTANCE. NO SORROW. NO GRIEF.” It remained their profile picture for four months — the same four months in which they were planning the Germantown Library event. These are not people who “act like everybody else does here,” and this is not something that only “happens in India.”

I asked if he was aware that VHPA has routinely toured speakers from India across American cities who promote genocide against Muslims. “Never seen that,” he said.

I asked if he would continue to participate in VHPA events. “Yes,” he said.

I asked if his campaign had financial ties to people involved with VHPA. “I don’t think so,” he said. I asked if it would concern him if it did. “Not overly,” he said. “They’ve never asked me to do anything that supported what VHP is accused of doing.”

I asked if he would keynote a white nationalist event. “No,” he said.

I asked why he would keynote a Hindu nationalist event but not a white nationalist one. “If it was hosted with other people and other Indians,” he said. “White nationalists would not get hosted by anybody else here that I would stand with.”

I told him that the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had recommended sanctions on the RSS — the network that sits above both the VHP and VHPA — just fifty days earlier. “I’m not aware of any of that,” he said.

Elrich looked at me and said, “Do I need to get someone to remove you?” His campaign manager, off camera, informed him that I was recording. He turned back.

I asked if it would concern him that VHPA sends money to support its parent in India. “I don’t know what they do,” he said.

I asked if he would rescind the commendation he issued to VHPA. “No,” he said. I asked why not. “Because it’s pointless,” he said. I told him it was symbolic. “It’s not symbolic,” he said.

It is not pointless. Five days after the library event was cancelled, the VHPA DMV Chapter replaced the Shaurya Diwas graphic — the celebration of a demolished mosque — with Elrich’s commendation as their new Facebook profile picture. His signature, his seal, his words — “your outstanding service to the Hindu community” — are now the public face of the organization, used as proof of legitimacy at the exact moment they were being questioned. The commendation he refuses to rescind is functioning as their shield.

I pressed him on how a commendation to an organization celebrating the destruction of a mosque by a mob should be allowed to stand. “I don’t support what they did in India,” he said. I told him he could rescind it.

“We’re done,” he said. “Get out of my face.”

The same VHPA DMV Chapter is now advertising a Hindu Retreat Youth Camp for children age 10 and up, scheduled for July 27 through August 2 at 5110 Meadowside Lane in Rockville — a Montgomery County Parks facility. The library event was cancelled. The next county facility is already booked.

The commendation stands.

← Part 1: Defying US Sanctions Call, Hudson Institute Hosts RSS Leaders in DC

← Part 2: How Hudson’s Star Fellow Spent Seven Years Laundering India’s RSS in the WSJ

On April 23, 2026, Hudson Institute hosted Dattatreya Hosabale — General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — at its Washington offices for a solo fireside chat with the institute’s Distinguished Fellow, Walter Russell Mead. Hudson seated Ram Madhav, the India Foundation’s president, on a panel scheduled to include a sitting US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. It seated Vijay Chauthaiwale, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s sitting Head of Foreign Affairs, alongside a former Biden-era Deputy Secretary of State.

The conference convened fifty days after the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended the RSS for US sanctions.

Hudson Institute and the India Foundation have collaborated for nearly three years. The April 23 conference was the most consequential operational event in that partnership to date.

The India Foundation is the institutional bridge between Hudson and the RSS.

It was founded by Shaurya Doval — son of Ajit Doval, India’s National Security Adviser since 2014. Its president is Ram Madhav, a lifelong RSS pracharak (full-time RSS organizer) since 1981 and a current member of the RSS National Executive. At various points, its board has included sitting Indian government ministers — Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha, and Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar.

Shaurya Doval, asked on camera in a 2017 The Wire investigation to describe the India Foundation’s work, said the organization “works very closely with the BJP and the government in terms of many aspects of our policy formulation.” Asked to disclose the Foundation’s funding sources, Doval offered only the phrase “Conferences, Advertisement, Journal” — declining to name donors, amounts, or commercial partners. Similarly, The Caravan, profiling the Doval network the same year, reported that “a former official of the ministry of external affairs who is familiar with the foundation told me it is opaque about its finances.” Even earlier, in 2015, senior Indian bureaucrats quoted by the Economic Times described the India Foundation as “Modi Sarkar’s quasi-NAC” — a shadow policy body operating outside formal government structure. By 2021, ThePrint described the Foundation’s “grip” over the Modi government’s policy thinking using the same characterization.

In the academic literature, Anuradha Sajjanhar’s 2023 Journal of Political Ideologies study classifies BJP-aligned think tanks like the India Foundation as instruments of “soft Hindutva” — organizations that “avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda nevertheless.”

In his own public biography, Madhav describes himself as “at the centre of curating many Track 1.5 and Track 2 initiatives placing the India story on global stage.”

Track 1.5 and Track 2 are terms of art. Track 1 is formal diplomacy by credentialed officials. Track 2 is the parallel channel conducted by academics and think tanks. Governments use Track 2 for activity they want off the record — activity that Track 1 cannot conduct without producing diplomatic records, press coverage, and congressional oversight. Track 1.5 is the hybrid zone, where sitting officials participate under the cover of nongovernmental convenings.

Hudson Institute is its American partner.

The partnership’s operational record is on Hudson’s own pages.

The founding event, on September 29, 2023, was “India’s Role in a New Pacific Order” — and it put a sitting Cabinet minister, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, on Hudson’s stage with the India Foundation’s own board chairman. Hudson’s own event page described the September 2023 co-host billing without euphemism:

Join Hudson Institute and the India Foundation for an invitation-only event focused on the role Washington and the American business community can play in strengthening bilateral economic and strategic relationships between the US and India.

Between that founding event and April 23, 2026, both institutions kept the partnership active. Mead, for instance, filed four additional Wall Street Journal columns on India, including one filed from Tawang, a restricted military zone on the Chinese-disputed border, during a Hudson-India Foundation delegation trip in November 2024. By Mead’s own admission in that Journal column, “Our local host was the India Foundation, which has close relations with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Thanks to the foundation, a small delegation organized by the Hudson Institute (my think tank base in Washington) had been cleared to visit this sensitive border region.”

Most recently, on October 7, 2025, Narendra Modi personally hosted Mead at his residence in New Delhi, photographed the meeting, and posted the image on his own X account, identifying Mead by his Hudson Institute title.

This is the partnership infrastructure: a Washington 501(c)(3) repeatedly hosting a New Delhi think tank founded by the Indian National Security Adviser’s son, run by an RSS National Executive member, and openly self-described as a Track 1.5 diplomacy vehicle.

What Hudson scheduled, and what did not happen, is documented.

On April 14, 2026, Hudson Institute’s published event page named Bethany Poulos Morrison — the sitting US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs — as a Featured Speaker on Panel III: “New Paths Forward for U.S.-India Relations.” Morrison was scheduled to share that panel with Ram Madhav. The New India Abroadreport on April 14, nine days before the conference, confirmed all three panelists: Madhav, Kurt Campbell, and Morrison.

Meanwhile, the USCIRF sanctions recommendation against the RSS had been on the books since March 4. Parts 1 and 2 of this series, naming Morrison’s scheduled appearance with Madhav as central evidence of the partnership question, were published April 20 and 21. On April 21, a 25-organization coalition led by the Indian American Muslim Council publicly condemned Hudson’s hosting of RSS leaders.

Morrison did not appear on Panel III on April 23. Post-event coverage from Indian press outlets — The Tribune, IndiaWest, IANS, Prokerala — covered Panel III in detail and named only three participants: Madhav, Campbell, and Stimson Center senior fellow Elizabeth Threlkeld.

After the event, Hudson removed Morrison from the published Featured Speakers list on its event page. Threlkeld was substituted in. The April 9, 2026 Internet Archive snapshot of Hudson’s event page preserves the original billing with Morrison’s name on the Featured Speakers list.

A 501(c)(3) Washington think tank scheduled a sitting US federal official to share a stage with the RSS’s National Executive member fifty days after USCIRF’s sanctions recommendation. Following weeks of public accountability pressure, the federal official did not appear. After the event, Hudson rewrote its own public record to remove her.

The withdrawal does not undo the scheduling. The scrub does not undo Hudson’s institutional decision.

What Hudson’s stage produced, a federal employee who attended described to me as an effort to launder the RSS.

Hosabale told the Hudson audience that the RSS is not an “Indian version of the Ku Klux Klan,” is not a supremacist organization, and is not properly understood as a religious movement at all. Hindu identity, as the RSS understands it, is “a civilisational identity, not a religious one… based on world view, human relation with nature and historic facts.” The fears that Indian religious minorities have expressed are misconceptions to be clarified through “continuous and comprehensive dialogue.” The RSS’s relationship to Modi’s government is alignment, not direction. Hosabale said the RSS “has expanded its outreach to thinking and influencing sections… particularly the Western countries.”

Each of these moves did the same work. They denied the RSS’s documented record — three Indian government bans, decades of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian violence, USCIRF’s March 4 sanctions recommendation — by reclassifying the organization as a benign civilizational project misunderstood by its critics. Mead did not press on any of it. Jairam Ramesh, the Indian National Congress’s general secretary for communications, posted on X the same day that the RSS “derived inspiration from European fascist movements,” citing “abundant evidence.” Yet Ramesh was not the one on the Hudson stage.

This was the General Secretary of an organization the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended for sanctions, on stage in Washington fifty days later, defining his organization in the language he wanted American policy elites to internalize. Nothing in the room challenged him.

Meanwhile, on Madhav’s panel, a different kind of failure unfolded.

Madhav made factually incorrect claims about his own government’s foreign policy. He told the Hudson audience: “India agreed to stop buying oil from Iran. We agreed to stop buying oil from Russia despite so much criticism from our opposition. India agreed to a 50% tariff without saying too much.” Within hours, Madhav publicly retracted:

“What I said was wrong. India didn’t agree to stopping import of oil from Russia anytime. Also it vigorously protested 50 per cent tariff imposition. I was trying to make a limited counterpoint to the other panellist, but it was factually incorrect. My apologies.”

The president of Hudson’s institutional partner, at Hudson’s own conference, made false statements about Indian foreign policy and had to retract them publicly. Hudson’s programming did not produce scholarly dialogue. It produced messaging that could not survive contact with the public record.

This is what Hudson Institute platformed.

What April 23 produced, at its close, was the image that makes the partnership unmistakable.

Ram Madhav walked out of the Hudson venue accompanied by two men. The first was Vijay Chauthaiwale, the BJP’s Head of Department of Foreign Affairs and a featured panelist at the same conference. The second was Adapa Prasad — National President of Overseas Friends of BJP-USA.

On the sidewalk, I asked Madhav directly about the RSS’s documented record — the violence against Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs the organization is implicated in. Madhav did not answer. He got into a waiting car with Chauthaiwale and Prasad, and the three of them drove off together.

Overseas Friends of BJP-USA has been registered with the US Department of Justice since August 27, 2020, as a foreign agent of the Bharatiya Janata Party under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Its FARA filings describe it as operating “on behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party” in the United States.

That was the partnership in motion.

What Hudson did on April 23, 2026, was hand the leadership of a US-sanctions-recommended foreign paramilitary a Washington policy stage.

What that leadership did with the platform is now in the public record. Hosabale used it to soften the RSS’s image for American audiences. Madhav used it to make claims about Indian foreign policy that he had to retract. Madhav, the BJP’s Head of Department of Foreign Affairs, and the BJP’s FARA-registered American lobbying operation departed Hudson together.

This was not research. It was a reputation laundering operation conducted on a tax-exempt American policy stage four blocks from the White House.

Therefore, the question is no longer whether Hudson has been reckless. The question is whether anyone with the authority and the standing to examine what Hudson did will choose to do so.

Hudson’s board of trustees has the institutional record; the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have jurisdiction to examine the foreign-influence questions Hudson’s programming raises; the American press has the facts.

Finally, the Internal Revenue Service has authority to examine Hudson’s foreign-funding disclosures. Hudson has a documented history of receiving foreign-government-adjacent funding without disclosure. In 2020, The American Prospect reported that Hudson had received more than $100,000 in 2018 from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) — Taiwan’s de facto embassy in the United States. None of Hudson’s researchers disclosed the funding in their published work favoring closer US-Taiwan ties. Moreover, Hudson has also received funding from the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), a Japanese government-related trade promotion body.

Whether the India Foundation or its BJP-aligned principals have made financial contributions to Hudson since September 2023 is not publicly known. Hudson has not disclosed the financial arrangements of the November 2024 Tawang delegation either — which side bore which costs, and whether any Indian government entity provided support. These are facts Hudson is required to disclose on its Form 990 filings.

USCIRF did its job on March 4.

The April 23 conference is the test of whether anyone else will do theirs.

Pieter Friedrich is an investigative journalist covering ethnonationalism, transnational repression, and South Asian geopolitics. Part 1 of this series, on Hudson Institute’s hosting of the RSS’s General Secretary fifty days after USCIRF called for sanctions, is here. Part 2, on Walter Russell Mead’s seven-year record laundering the RSS for Wall Street Journal readers, is here.

Sources and Further Reading

USCIRF Sanctions Recommendation

• US Commission on International Religious Freedom, “2026 Annual Report” (March 4, 2026; full report including India recommendations and the call for targeted sanctions on the RSS)

The Hudson-India Foundation Partnership

• Hudson Institute, “India’s Role in a New Pacific Order” (September 29, 2023; Hudson’s own event page, explicit co-host branding with the India Foundation, and full panelist list including Shekhar Sinha as Chairman of the India Foundation Board of Trustees and Jayant Sinha as BJP Member of Parliament)

• Hudson Institute, “The New India Conference” (April 23, 2026; current Hudson event page, post-event)

• Internet Archive snapshot, April 9, 2026 (preserves the original Hudson event page billing, including Bethany Poulos Morrison among the Featured Speakers)

• Pranavi Sharma, “Hudson Institute to host New India conference April 23” (New India Abroad, April 14, 2026; explicit pre-event panel composition naming Madhav, Campbell, and Morrison on Panel III)

• USNI News, “U.S., India Expand Trade, Security Cooperation, Says Official” (October 2, 2023; contemporaneous press coverage of the Jaishankar event and the follow-up panel with Shekhar Sinha)

• Walter Russell Mead, “U.S.-India Relations From 15,000 Feet” (Wall Street Journal via Hudson Institute, November 25, 2024; Mead’s own documentation of the India Foundation’s role as Hudson’s local host on the Tawang delegation)

• Narendra Modi, “X post documenting October 7, 2025 Mead delegation meeting” (October 7, 2025; Modi’s own photograph and identification of Mead by his Hudson Institute title)

Public Accountability Response Before the Event

• Indian American Muslim Council, “Coalition Condemns Hudson Institute for Platforming Indian Extremist Group Blamed by U.S. Commission for Violence Against Minorities” (April 21, 2026; 25-organization coalition statement)

The Conference: Hosabale’s Remarks

• IndiaBlooms / IBNS, “Is the RSS Hindu Supremacist? Its General Secretary Hosabale Went to Washington With an Answer” (April 24, 2026; documents Hosabale’s remarks at the Hudson fireside chat including the Ku Klux Klan denial, the “we see the oneness in everybody” supremacy denial, and the “civilisational identity, not religious one” framing)

• IANS via Prokerala, “RSS General Secretary Hosabale outlines global vision rooted in culture, social cohesion at Hudson Institute” (April 24, 2026; documents Hosabale’s “RSS doesn’t get into this politics of the government of India… we are in alignment” framing and the “expanded its outreach to thinking and influencing sections… particularly the Western countries” admission)

• The Print, “RSS desperately seeks acceptance abroad: Cong on Hosabale’s ‘Ku Klux Klan’ remark in US” (April 24, 2026; documents Hosabale’s “Ku Klux Klan” remark and Jairam Ramesh’s response on behalf of the Indian National Congress)

• Mangalorean.com, “Dattatreya Hosabale highlights PM Modi’s long RSS association, stresses ideological links”(April 24, 2026; documents Hosabale’s affirmation of Modi’s RSS roots)

The Conference: Madhav’s Retraction

• The Tribune India, “’What I said was wrong’: BJP’s Ram Madhav retracts remarks on oil imports made in US”(April 24, 2026; post-event coverage of Panel III naming Madhav, Campbell, and Threlkeld as the panelists; documents Madhav’s factual retraction)

• IndiaWest, “India-US Ties Face Trust Deficit, Needs Reset: Hudson Institute Conference” (April 24, 2026; post-event coverage of Panel III naming Madhav, Threlkeld, and Campbell)

Hudson Institute’s Foreign Funding Record

• Eli Clifton, “Taiwan Funding of Think Tanks: Omnipresent and Rarely Disclosed” (The American Prospect, June 17, 2020; documents Hudson’s undisclosed TECRO funding)

The India Foundation’s Structure and Governance

• Siddharth Varadarajan and M.K. Venu, “Exclusive: Think-Tank Run by NSA Ajit Doval’s Son Has Conflict of Interest Writ Large” (The Wire, November 2017; Shaurya Doval’s funding opacity, Cabinet ministers on board, Doval’s own “works very closely with the BJP and the government” admission)

• The Caravan, “How Ties With The Think Tanks Vivekananda International Foundation and India Foundation Enhance Ajit Doval’s Influence” (2017; Praveen Donthi profile of Doval family think tank network; “former official of the ministry of external affairs” describing the Foundation as “opaque about its finances”)

• Anuradha Sajjanhar, “The double-sidedness of Hindutva: Inside the BJP’s think tanks” (Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 28 No. 1, 2023; peer-reviewed academic study of BJP think tanks as instruments of “soft Hindutva”)

• Economic Times, “How National Security Advisor Ajit Doval’s son Shaurya reinvented himself into a key policy player” (2015; senior Indian bureaucrats describing the India Foundation as “Modi Sarkar’s quasi-NAC”)

• Remya Nair, “More visible & vocal — India’s homegrown think tanks are booming, influencing debate & policy”(ThePrint, July 2021; documents the India Foundation’s “grip” over Modi government policy thinking)

• India Foundation, “Governing Council” (current board of governors)

• India Foundation, “President” (Ram Madhav biographical page)

• Ram Madhav, “About” (Madhav’s own biography: “at the centre of curating many Track 1.5 and Track 2 initiatives placing the India story on global stage”)

Overseas Friends of BJP-USA

• Pieter Friedrich, “OFBJP now listed as foreign agent under US Law, ties with ruling BJP laid bare” (TwoCircles, September 16, 2020; documents Overseas Friends of BJP-USA’s August 27, 2020 FARA registration, Adapa Prasad’s role, and OFBJP-USA’s structural ties to the BJP)

• US Department of Justice, FARA Unit overview (statutory framework and registration requirements)

← Part 1: Defying US Sanctions Call, Hudson Institute Hosts RSS Leaders in DC

On April 23, 2026, Walter Russell Mead will conduct a one-on-one fireside chat with Dattatreya Hosabale at Hudson Institute’s “New India Conference” in Washington. Hosabale is the General Secretary of the RSS — the organization the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom asked the State Department to sanction seven weeks ago. Mead is Hudson’s Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship, and he also delivers the closing remarks.

Hudson will describe the Mead-Hosabale session as an interview. Anyone who has read Mead’s Wall Street Journalcolumns on India over the past seven years understands that what Hudson is staging on Thursday is a ceremony, not an interview.

The Hosabale fireside is not the beginning of Mead’s relationship with the RSS, but its reward.

To understand what Mead did to earn the chair, read his Wall Street Journal record on India. It is public, archived on Hudson’s own website, and it begins in 2019.

In May 2019, after Modi’s re-election, Mead wrote in the Journal that “Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism can do what the Congress vision no longer can: assemble a consensus that makes India governable.” In August 2020, as Modi laid the cornerstone of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, Mead acknowledged that Hindu nationalism could “alienate, marginalize and even endanger” India’s 182 million Muslims and 30 million Christians, then dismissed the risk in the same breath: “Mr. Modi’s saffron politics has its drawbacks, but there is no realistic alternative in India today.” Hindu nationalism, in Mead’s framing across those early columns, was the necessary price of Indian governance.

Then the relationship deepened.

In March 2023, Mead published “India’s BJP Is the World’s Most Important Party” in the Wall Street Journal, and Hudson immediately republished the column on its own site. Mead told his readers the column was based on “an intensive series of meetings with senior BJP and RSS leaders, as well as some of their critics.” He described the RSS as “perhaps the most powerful civil-society organization in the world,” compared the BJP favorably to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Likud Party, and called the BJP “the most important foreign political party in the world” from the standpoint of American national interests. Americans, he concluded, “need to engage much more deeply” with the movement.

Mead had met personally with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and with Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, whom Mead himself acknowledged in the column as “considered one of the most radical voices in the movement.” Adityanath founded the Hindu Yuva Vahini paramilitary youth wing, declared on video that “if Muslims take one Hindu girl, we’ll take 100 Muslim girls,” and ranked first among Indian elected officials for hate speech incidents in 2024. The Indian press refers to him as “Bulldozer Baba” for his program of state-ordered demolitions of Muslim homes and businesses.

The column recorded Bhagwat’s talking points as fact. Mead reported that Bhagwat “spoke to me about the need to accelerate India’s economic growth, and disavowed the idea that religious minorities should suffer discrimination or loss of civil rights.” Mead printed this with no context, no skepticism, and no countervailing evidence. Absent from the column: the three RSS bans, the organization’s founding ideological debt to European fascism, and Bhagwat’s own alleged sanction of the Samjhauta, Ajmer, Malegaon, and Mecca Masjid bombings as described by Swami Aseemanand to The Caravan in 2014.

Also absent: the decade from 2005 to 2014 in which the US State Department denied Modi a visa under the International Religious Freedom Act — the only person ever banned under that clause — over his documented role, as Gujarat Chief Minister in 2002, in a pogrom that killed more than a thousand Muslims.

Contemporary critics challenged the column at the time.

Journalist Rashmee Roshan Lall, writing in April 2023, called the piece “credulous in the extreme,” noting the obvious: the BJP or RSS would never tell anyone, “let alone an American academic and analyst, that the agenda is to cow the minorities and teach them their place in the new India.”

A month later, writing in The UnPopulist, Salil Tripathi went further, calling Mead’s column “more abject, craven, and sycophantic than even Raimondo’s valentine to Modi,” a reference to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s fawning characterization of Modi as “unbelievable, a visionary” after the spring 2023 Biden administration summit.

Two months later, Mead met Modi in person. Mead’s follow-up column, published in the Journal and archived as “Modi’s Audacious Plan for India” on Hudson’s site, opens with Mead asking Modi how he should go about understanding the political and religious movement Modi leads.

Modi’s answer, per Mead: “Go to two places. Varanasi and Ayodhya. This turned out to be excellent advice.”

Mead was taking travel directions from Modi on how to understand the RSS. He went to Ayodhya and witnessed the consecration of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir — the temple built on the rubble of the Babri Masjid, whose December 1992 demolition triggered riots that killed more than 2,000 people and remains the single most destructive communal episode in independent Indian history. Mead wrote approvingly about the “spontaneous” chants of “Jai Shri Ram” he encountered there.

He described his conversations with “Hindu scholars and priests about their hopes for a renaissance of Hindu culture and faith after centuries of alien rule.”

Mead wrote “centuries of alien rule,” but he did not invent the framing. The conceit that Muslim rule of the Indian subcontinent constituted foreign occupation, and the dismantling of Muslim heritage therefore constitutes decolonization, is the ideological scaffolding on which the entire Hindutva project rests. Mead, in writing this column, was not reporting it but adopting it.

Two months after Mead’s May 2023 Ayodhya trip, in July 2023, he traveled to Udaipur as a guest of the India Foundation, which is the think tank Ram Madhav, the RSS’s lifelong political organizer, leads. It is also Hudson’s documented co-host partner on Thursday’s “New India Conference” and on their September 2023 invitation-only Jaishankar event.

The Wall Street Journal column Mead published on return opens with a line he wrote himself:

When the India Foundation invited me to participate in a weekend conference with a group of Hindu nationalist intellectuals and political figures aligned with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh organization, I accepted immediately.

Mead concluded the column by reporting that he left Udaipur “more hopeful” about the RSS’s role in building “a united and self-confident India.”

Mead published that column in the middle of the Manipur violence. On May 3, 2023 — weeks before Mead’s Udaipur trip — ethno-religious mob violence had erupted across Manipur state between the Hindu-majority Meitei community and the predominantly Christian Kuki-Zo tribes. By mid-July, when Mead filed his Udaipur dispatch, Human Rights Watch had documented more than 100 people killed and tens of thousands displaced. More than 200 churches were burned. The Kuki-Zo women paraded naked and gang-raped by a Meitei mob in a video filmed on May 4 — a video that Modi himself described, after its global release two days before Mead’s column ran, as “a disgrace for the entire country” — had already begun circulating internationally.

The Meitei vigilante groups conducting the violence were openly aligned with the RSS-affiliated ecosystem. BJP state Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, whose government presided over the killing, made public statements that civil rights organizations documented as fueling the attacks. Modi had not visited the state.

Mead’s Udaipur column made no reference to Manipur, to the Kuki, to the Christian communities under attack, or to the violence unfolding three hundred miles from where he was sitting as the India Foundation’s guest, and he left Udaipur “more hopeful.”

The pattern did not end in 2023. In November 2024, Mead published “US-India Relations from 15,000 Feet” in the Wall Street Journal, dateline Tawang — the regional center of India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, a militarily sensitive zone on the disputed India-China border where Indian authorities ordinarily restrict foreign access. Mead’s own words in the column:

Our local host was the India Foundation, which has close relations with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Thanks to the foundation, a small delegation organized by the Hudson Institute (my think tank base in Washington) had been cleared to visit this sensitive border region.

The India Foundation — Ram Madhav’s RSS-aligned think tank, and Hudson’s co-host partner on Thursday’s “New India Conference” — obtained border clearances in a Chinese-disputed zone for a Hudson-organized delegation, and Mead took a three-hour flight from New Delhi and a seventy-minute helicopter ride over Bhutan to file from the disputed frontier as the BJP apparatus’s guest.w

The pattern accelerated through 2025, running right up to the week USCIRF recommended sanctions against the RSS. In June, eight months before that recommendation, Mead published “Will Trump Lose India?” in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Indians sympathetic to Trump “anticipated fewer lectures from Washington on topics like minority rights.” Mead was not attributing the phrase to a source but using it in his own analytical voice — US concern for the lives of Indian Muslims and Christians was “lectures,” and one of the features Indian elites wanted from a second Trump administration was their reduction.

Three months later, Mead published “A US-India Repair Attempt”, which framed Modi’s appearance at an anti-American Chinese summit as a relationship problem to be managed, and approvingly cited Trump’s characterization of Modi as “a great prime minister.”

On October 7, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally hosted Mead in New Delhi. Mead was leading another Hudson Institute delegation, and the meeting included Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri. Modi posted the photograph on his own X account, thanking Mead and the delegation for “strengthening India-US ties.” The PMO, DD News, the Tribune, and ANI all carried the image.

Mead filed his next column from New Delhi. Published October 20, 2025, “India Still Wants to Work with Trump” reports that “in meetings with Indian government, opposition and business leaders from Prime Minister Narendra Modi on down, your Global View columnist heard a consistent message. India’s political and business leaders still want to work with the US.” Mead documented his own access to senior BJP figures as the evidence for his analysis, and the analysis omitted any mention of USCIRF’s then-current sanctions recommendation against the RSS.

Six months after Modi hosted Mead in New Delhi, Hudson hosts Hosabale in Washington with Mead in the interviewer’s chair.

That is the seven-year record. Mead did not balance any of it in his subsequent work, did not return to these subjects, did not revise, and did not correct.

In the framework that used to govern American journalism about authoritarian movements, this kind of arrangement had a name: access journalism. American newsrooms treated it as a professional failure. Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize for his 1932 New York Times coverage of the Soviet Union — coverage that laundered Stalin’s forced collectivization and denied the Ukrainian famine then in progress — became the central cautionary tale in every graduate journalism program in the United States. The lesson was that access comes at a price, and the price is editorial capture.

The analogy with Duranty holds in one direction but breaks down in another. Duranty reported from Moscow under active Soviet surveillance, while Mead writes from Bard College and Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, free of any coercion whatsoever, and the editorial capture is therefore voluntary. Mead holds an endowed chair at Bard, the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellowship at Hudson Institute, and a regular column in the Wall Street Journal. When he describes the RSS as “perhaps the most powerful civil-society organization in the world,” his words move through the American policy bloodstream in a way that Ram Madhav’s own words do not, and that is the value Madhav and Bhagwat recognized when they opened their doors to him.

On Thursday, Mead will sit across from Dattatreya Hosabale — an RSS lifer whose recorded statements endorse love jihad, demonize Bangladeshi Muslims as “infiltrators,” and attack the Indian Constitution’s secular and socialist foundations. Five days before boarding the plane to the United States, Hosabale described the RSS’s impact in a single phrase: “Hindu nationalism.”

That is who Hudson is putting in the chair, and Hudson will brand the event as policy dialogue. What is actually scheduled is a paid-for, prepared, Washington-stage delivery of RSS self-representation to American elite opinion, and Mead has spent seven years establishing that he is the interviewer who will not press.

That leaves the institutional question. Mead is a fellow within a structure that paid his flights to Udaipur, co-hosts events with Ram Madhav’s India Foundation, and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, tax-subsidized by the American public, four blocks from the White House.

Tomorrow: the Hudson Institute / India Foundation partnership, the Track 1.5 / Track 2 framework, and the Foreign Agents Registration Act question that Hudson has not answered and that, given its documented conduct, it cannot.

Pieter Friedrich is an investigative journalist covering ethnonationalism, transnational repression, and South Asian geopolitics. Part 1 of this series, on Hudson Institute's hosting of the RSS's General Secretary fifty days after USCIRF called for sanctions, is here. Part 3, on the Hudson Institute / India Foundation partnership and the FARA question, publishes April 22.

Sources and Further Reading

Mead’s Wall Street Journal India Columns (Hudson’s Own Archive)

• Walter Russell Mead, “The Promise and Peril of Modi’s Triumph” (Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2019; Hindu nationalism as “consensus that makes India governable”)

• Walter Russell Mead, “Saffron India Is an Opportunity and Danger” (Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2020; acknowledged minority risk, dismissed it)

• Walter Russell Mead, “India’s BJP Is the World’s Most Important Party” (Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2023; republished on Hudson’s site)

• Walter Russell Mead, “Modi’s Audacious Plan for India” (Wall Street Journal, May 2023; republished on Hudson’s site)

• Walter Russell Mead, “The Movement Shaping a Modern India” (Wall Street Journal, July 2023, after the India Foundation’s Udaipur conference; republished on Hudson’s site)

• Walter Russell Mead, “US-India Relations from 15,000 Feet” (Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2024; Mead’s own documentation of the Hudson–India Foundation travel program to sensitive Indian border regions)

• Walter Russell Mead, “Will Trump Lose India?” (Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2025; Mead framing US minority-rights advocacy as “lectures”)

• Walter Russell Mead, “A US-India Repair Attempt” (Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2025; reframing Modi’s anti-American Chinese summit appearance as a relationship problem)

• Walter Russell Mead, “India Still Wants to Work with Trump” (Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2025; filed from New Delhi following Mead’s delegation meeting with Modi, Sitharaman, and Puri)

Modi-Mead New Delhi Meeting (October 2025)

• Prime Minister’s Office, “PM interacts with US delegation led by Mr. Walter Russell Mead” (pmindia.gov.in, October 7, 2025)

• Narendra Modi, X post with photograph (October 7, 2025)

• ANI via The Tribune, “PM Modi meets US delegation led by Walter Russell Mead to boost ties” (October 7, 2025; wire photograph of the meeting)

Critical Response to Mead’s WSJ Coverage

• Rashmee Roshan Lall, “For the West, the ‘Indian century’ may have already begun” (April 21, 2023; contemporary critical response to Mead’s March 2023 column)

• Salil Tripathi, “Joe Biden and Walter Russell Mead Deserve an ‘F’ on India” (The UnPopulist, May 2023)

Adityanath’s Public Record

• Amnesty International, “India: New Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh must retract previous statements against Muslims” (March 2017; documents Adityanath’s “100 Muslim girls” video, Hindu Yuva Vahini founding, and 2014 Election Commission reprimand)

• The Revealer, “The Machinery of Muslim Erasure in Modi’s India” (June 2025; documents Adityanath’s 2024 #1 rank for hate speech incidents and “Bulldozer Baba” governance)

Modi Visa Denial (2005–2014)

• US Department of State, “Issue of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s Visa Status” (State Department archive, March 2005)

Bhagwat Sanction Allegation

• The Caravan, “Press Release: Swami Aseemanand Says the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat Sanctioned Terrorist Attacks” (February 2014)

Manipur Violence (2023–ongoing)

• Human Rights Watch, “Indian Government Finally Responds to Violence in Manipur” (July 21, 2023; contemporaneous casualty documentation)

• Christianity Today, “Manipur Mobs Destroyed Hundreds of Our Churches. Yet God Calls Us Christians to Repent.”(August 2023; Kuki Christian pastor testimony)

The Hudson–India Foundation Partnership (Context for Part 3)

• Hudson Institute, “India’s Role in a New Pacific Order” (September 29, 2023; documented Hudson–India Foundation co-hosted event)

• Hudson Institute, “The New India Conference” (April 23, 2026; event page)

→ Part 2: How Hudson’s Star Fellow Spent Seven Years Laundering India’s RSS in the WSJ

On March 4, 2026, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its 2026 Annual Report. For the first time ever, USCIRF named India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for US sanctions, including asset freezes and entry bans, citing the RSS’s “responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom.”

Fifty days later, on April 23, 2026, Hudson Institute hosts the RSS’s General Secretary, Dattatreya Hosabale, at its Washington offices. Hudson seats him for a solo fireside chat with Walter Russell Mead, the institute’s Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow. Mead delivers the closing remarks.

The event is “invite only.”

Hudson Institute is not convening a research forum. Hudson is laundering a paramilitary.

On April 23, four blocks from the White House and with American taxpayer subsidy, the think tank hands a solo Washington stage to the General Secretary of an organization the US government’s own religious freedom body has asked be sanctioned, and seats the RSS’s lifelong political organizer on a policy panel with Bethany Poulos Morrison, the sitting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs. None of this is disputed. All of it is documented.

The RSS is a fascist paramilitary founded in 1925, the same year Hitler published Mein Kampf and founded the SS. Its co-founder BS Moonje traveled to Italy in 1931 to study Mussolini’s fascist institutions, then declared the RSS was their Indian equivalent. Its second Sarsanghchalak, or Supreme Chief, MS Golwalkar, wrote in 1939 that Nazi Germany’s purge of Jews was “race pride manifested at its highest” and “a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”

Independent India banned the RSS three times: in 1948 after an RSS member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, in 1975 during the Emergency, and in 1992 after its cadres demolished the Babri Masjid, triggering riots that killed more than 2,000 Muslims.

Nehru called the RSS, in a 1947 letter to provincial governors, “a private army… definitely proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines, even following the techniques of the organisation.”

The RSS’s religious wing, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), was classified as a “militant religious organization” in the CIA World Factbook in June 2018, a designation the agency reportedly removed three weeks later after VHP pressure. RSS-affiliated groups carried out the pogroms in Gujarat in 2002 and Manipur from 2023, alongside lynchings and church burnings across India.

In four interviews with The Caravan magazine, conducted between 2012 and 2014 inside Ambala Central Jail, RSS member Swami Aseemanand, then accused of three bombings that killed scores of Muslims, alleged that current RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat personally sanctioned the attacks. Aseemanand told The Caravan that Bhagwat said of the violence: “It’s very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sangh.”

The list of the dead is long, and the victims divide into two categories. There are those killed directly by RSS members or by the paramilitary’s affiliated street organizations, and there are those killed under the political regime the RSS built to hold state power.

The direct dead: Mahatma Gandhi, shot through the chest in 1948 by an RSS member, Nathuram Godse. Graham Staines, Australian missionary, burned alive inside his vehicle with his two young sons in Odisha in 1999 by the Bajrang Dal, the VHP’s militant youth wing. Ehsan Jafri, former Member of Parliament, dismembered and burned alive at his Ahmedabad home in 2002 by a Hindu mob led by VHP and Bajrang Dal cadres, while the Gujarat state police refused to respond. Bilkis Bano, pregnant, gang-raped the same week in 2002 by the same coordinated pogrom network, her three-year-old daughter’s skull crushed in front of her.

The regime dead: Mohammad Akhlaq, lynched in 2015 over rumors his family had eaten beef, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government elected the year before. Junaid Khan, 16, stabbed to death on a train in 2017 under the same government. Pehlu Khan, dairy farmer, beaten to death by cow vigilantes in 2017 under the same government. Stan Swamy, 84-year-old Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist, dead in Indian custody in 2021 after the BJP government denied him a straw to drink water, despite his Parkinson’s. More than 250 churches burned in Manipur since May 2023, under a BJP state government that the country’s ruling party refused to remove even as the violence escalated. Rohingya refugees, documented by Human Rights Watch in 2025, thrown from Indian naval vessels into the sea by the Indian military under BJP civilian command.

These are not abstractions. These are people who had names.

That is the paramilitary USCIRF asked the State Department to sanction.

Hudson Institute is hosting its General Secretary on April 23.

Dattatreya Hosabale is not a moderate.

Outlook India documented in 2021 that the RSS made him its number-two — a position that "controls the actual functioning of the organisation" — because he would weaponize the RSS for BJP elections.

Within months of his elevation, Hosabale publicly endorsed “love jihad,” the Islamophobic conspiracy theory that casts Muslim men as predators waging a demographic war on Hindu women. He has demanded strict anti-conversion laws and “population control” measures. He has described Bangladeshi Muslims as “infiltrators” creating a demographic “imbalance.” He has called for the removal of the words “secular” and “socialist” from the preamble of the Indian Constitution, a demand the Congress Party called “a deliberate assault on the soul of our Constitution,” and the Communist Party (Marxist) said exposed the RSS’s “long-standing objective of subverting the Constitution and its intent to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra.”

In December 2025, at an event in Uttar Pradesh attended by lawmakers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP, Hosabale demanded Indian Muslims perform Hindu rituals. On April 18, 2026, five days before his Hudson appearance, Hosabale sat for an exclusive interview with the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) marking the RSS’s centenary. Asked about the organization’s impact after a hundred years, he said: “The impact that RSS has is the Hindu nationalism… pride in our nation and culture and civilisation values.”

Hosabale is not stopping in Washington alone. Last Friday, April 17, he addressed the Thrive 2026 conference at Stanford University, sharing a stage with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former US National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, delivering prepared remarks about “civilisational knowledge systems” and ethics in technology.

Stanford on April 17, Hudson on April 23 — this is an American tour by the second-ranking officer of a paramilitary the US government has moved to sanction.

Hosabale is not the only senior RSS figure Hudson is hosting.

Directly preceding Hosabale’s fireside chat, Hudson has seated Ram Madhav on the panel titled “New Paths Forward for US-India Relations.” Madhav is lifelong RSS. He has been a pracharak, a full-time RSS worker, since 1981. He served as the RSS’s national spokesperson from 2003 to 2014. He was National General Secretary of the BJP, the RSS’s political wing, from 2014 to 2020. He currently sits on the National Executive of the RSS. He presides over the India Foundation, the RSS-aligned think tank that describes itself as a curator of “Track 1.5 and Track 2 initiatives placing the India story on the global stage,” diplomatic shorthand for foreign-policy influence operations outside official channels.

In December 2013, months before Modi took power, the Swedish neo-fascist publisher Daniel Friberg, whose Arktos imprint distributes the literature of the European white-nationalist far right, traveled to New Delhi and personally met with Madhav. On Al Jazeera’s Head to Head in 2015, on camera, preserved on videotape, never retracted, Madhav declared that the RSS intends to erase Pakistan and Bangladesh and absorb both nations into a single Hindu state. On July 9, 2024, Madhav delivered the plenary address at the fourth National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, sharing the stage with Stephen Miller, Jack Posobiec, J.D. Vance, and Viktor Orbán’s political advisor. Madhav told that audience he had come “to tell you about the success story of conservatism in India — the defeat of the left-liberal-Marxist-radical Islamist cabal in India.” On January 11, 2026, Madhav was in Chantilly, Virginia, addressing the Overseas Friends of BJP-USA, the BJP’s American organizing arm and a registered foreign agent.

Fifteen weeks later, on April 23, Hudson Institute seats Madhav on an American policy panel. The sitting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Bethany Poulos Morrison, shares that panel with him.

Hudson is staging an event no American think tank has previously attempted.

A solo fireside chat is a format normally reserved for heads of state and Cabinet officials, and Hudson gives it to the General Secretary of a foreign paramilitary. The paramilitary's intellectual ambassador gets seated next to a sitting federal official, and the Indian government's own ambassador, Vinay Kwatra, opens the day. The India Foundation, the RSS-aligned think tank, is Hudson's documented partner on the event, and the two have co-hosted invitation-only Washington events together since September 2023.

In 2021, when US Chargé d’Affaires Atul Keshap merely met with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in Delhi, Human Rights Watch’s Asia Advocacy Director John Sifton issued a public rebuke:

“The United States does not attend the Vietnam Communist Party’s General Assembly Jubilee, just as the US Ambassador to Germany in 1933 did not attend Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. You don’t do that… Don’t meet with party leaders who have overturned democracy, and certainly don’t meet with them when they are spouting such hateful and dangerous rhetoric.”

Sifton described a meeting. In Delhi. Involving a single diplomat.

Hudson flies the RSS’s number-two officer to Washington, sits him across from its most distinguished fellow for a live-streamed interview, and places a sitting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State on a panel with the RSS’s intellectual ambassador.

Sifton compared such a scenario to a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, and Hudson is hosting one in Washington.

Hudson knows what USCIRF said on March 4, knows what the RSS is, and knows what both Hosabale and Madhav have said. Hudson is doing it anyway.

Hudson Institute is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. Its tax status is granted in exchange for operating in the public interest. Its Washington office sits four blocks from the White House. The distinguished-fellow titles, the invite-only access, the reliable Wall Street Journal platform, all of it is public infrastructure. American taxpayers subsidize it.

Hudson Institute is not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA was written for entities acting at the direction of foreign political movements. It was written for entities operating under documented partnerships with foreign political parties’ captive think tanks. It was written for entities convening a foreign party’s paramilitary leadership before sitting US federal officials. The statute describes Hudson’s April 23 event in plain language. The Department of Justice has declined to apply it.

USCIRF did its job on March 4.

The IRS, the Department of Justice, and Congress refuse to do theirs. On April 23, the RSS walks into Washington. The cameras roll. A sitting US federal official shakes hands with a paramilitary’s intellectual ambassador. The institute’s most distinguished fellow conducts the friendly interview. The world’s largest, oldest, and fastest growing fascist outfit walks away with a fresh whitewash.

This is not engagement, research, or inquiry. This is the RSS's de facto Washington office, operating openly, with the endorsement of a sitting US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.

[END OF PART 1]

Pieter Friedrich is an investigative journalist covering ethnonationalism, transnational repression, and South Asian geopolitics. Part 2 of this series, on Walter Russell Mead's seven-year record laundering the RSS for Wall Street Journal readers, is now live here. Part 3, on the Hudson Institute / India Foundation partnership and the FARA question, publishes April 22.

Sources and Further Reading

The USCIRF Sanctions Call

• USCIRF, “USCIRF Releases 2026 Annual Report: Exposes Egregious Religious Freedom Abuses From Key Nations” (press release, March 4, 2026)

• USCIRF, 2026 Annual Report (full PDF, India country chapter contains the RSS sanctions recommendation)

• USCIRF, 2026 Annual Report Release Event (event page with transcript link)

• Indian American Muslim Council, “IAMC lauds USCIRF’s call to sanction RSS” (March 4, 2026)

The Hudson Event

• Hudson Institute, “The New India Conference” (official event page, April 23, 2026; full speaker list)

• Hudson Institute, “India’s Role in a New Pacific Order” (September 29, 2023; documented Hudson–India Foundation co-hosted event, Mead interviewing Jaishankar)

The RSS: Nazi Inspiration, Violent Record

• Human Rights Watch, “’We Have No Orders to Save You’: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat” (April 2002; VHP and Bajrang Dal attribution of Jafri/Gulbarg and Naroda Patia attacks)

• Human Rights Watch, “India: Scores of Rohingya Refugees Expelled” (August 2025; Indian naval vessel forced-entry-into-sea documentation, BJP-led state campaign)

• The Caravan, “Press Release: Swami Aseemanand Says the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat Sanctioned Terrorist Attacks” (February 2014; audio recordings, transcripts, and interview excerpts by Leena Gita Reghunath)

• The Caravan, “Blinkered Justice: The Dismantling of Cases Against Suspected Hindu Militants” (August 2015; case trajectory after BJP electoral victory)

Hosabale’s Public Record

• IANS, “RSS calls for renewed push to ‘decolonise mind’: Dattatreya Hosabale” (April 18, 2026; Stanford interview marking RSS centenary)

Madhav’s Public Record

• Ram Madhav, “India’s Vision for World Conservatism” (plenary address, NatCon 4, Washington DC, July 9, 2024; full video)

• National Conservatism Conference, “Ram Madhav speaker page” (NatCon 4 official)

• Political Research Associates, Ben Lorber, “Hindu Supremacy and the Multiracial U.S. Far Right” (October 30, 2024; Madhav’s full NatCon quote in context)

• Religion Dispatches, Annika Brockschmidt, “White Nationalist Mottos, the Fate of Jews in the New Christian State, and ‘Appeal to Heaven’ Humor — Day 2 of NatCon 2024” (September 2025; eyewitness NatCon coverage)

• First Things, “Is Hindu Nationalism Friendly to Christianity?” (August 2024; Christian-right response to Madhav’s NatCon pitch, including Graham Staines documentation)

• Ram Madhav, “India and the Global Right Turn” (Madhav’s own account of NatCon delegation, published in Indian Express July 13, 2024)

• Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “Members of India’s BJP Join the Far Right Transnational Conference Circuit” (July 7, 2024)

Mead’s RSS Laundering Record (Hudson’s Own Archive)

• Walter Russell Mead, “India’s BJP Is the World’s Most Important Party” (Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2023; republished on Hudson’s site)

• Walter Russell Mead, “Modi’s Audacious Plan for India” (Wall Street Journal, May 2023; republished on Hudson’s site)

• Walter Russell Mead, “The Movement Shaping a Modern India” (Wall Street Journal, July 2023, after India Foundation Udaipur conference; republished on Hudson’s site)

• Walter Russell Mead, “US-India Relations from 15,000 Feet” (Wall Street Journal; Mead’s own documentation of Hudson–India Foundation travel program to sensitive Indian border regions)

The Sifton / Keshap Precedent

• Pieter Friedrich, “Human Rights Watch: US Ambassador’s RSS Meet ‘Troubling’ & ‘Disturbing’” (CounterCurrents, September 23, 2021; full Sifton remarks with Nuremberg comparison)

• HRW’s John Sifton, “US Ambassador Meeting RSS: Troubling & Disturbing” (original Congressional briefing video, September 22, 2021)

• Justice For All, “UNACCEPTABLE: U.S. Ambassador meets with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat” (September 22, 2021)

• TwoCircles, “Indian-American organizations demand US Ambassador resign for RSS meet” (September 25, 2021)

Montgomery County officials canceled a planned event at the Germantown Library featuring the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), a known hate group, following community backlash, according to reporting by Bethesda Magazine. Yet the cancellation has intensified scrutiny over the organization’s prior engagement with county leadership and its broader presence in local civic spaces.

The event, which was expected to feature Hindi-language materials, drew opposition from a coalition of civil rights and religious groups, including Hindus for Human Rights, the Indian American Muslim Council, and No Hindutva Maryland. The coalition emphasized that the issue was not about language or religion, but about “political ideology entering public institutions under the guise of cultural programming.”

The county ultimately canceled the program. Critics say the episode reflects a longer pattern of engagement that predates the library controversy.

Indian American Muslim Council director of public affairs Ajit Sahi said it is not possible to separate VHPA’s activities in the United States from the broader Hindutva movement in India. “[The VHPA] deliberately go around the country, and the kind of things they talk about is yoga, language, the Hindu religion,” he said. “And naturally, because they are a tiny minority, nobody cares to ask them, ‘What are your politics? Are you progressive people? Are you inclusive people?’”

Over the past several years, VHPA has appeared at public-facing events and engaged with local officials, including County Executive Marc Elrich. In 2024, Elrich issued a County Executive’s citation at a VHPA-linked rally that drew protest from community members who objected to the event’s association with the destruction of a historic mosque in India; the following year, VHPA’s own public communications highlighted Elrich’s presence at a Diwali celebration connected to the organization.

Advocates say these instances illustrate how VHPA has been treated as a legitimate community partner despite concerns raised by researchers and civil rights groups.

“This situation did not arise in a vacuum,” stated No Hindutva Maryland. “It is the result of years of poor judgment and enablement by the county government, especially County Executive Marc Elrich… A basic Google search could have prevented the willing embrace of this dangerous organization by the local government.”

Research cited by critics includes a factsheet from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative examining VHPA and its ideological context, as well as academic analysis from Rutgers University on the activities of Hindutva-aligned organizations in the United States. Findings from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom have also documented worsening conditions for religious minorities in India, including episodes of violence linked to mobilization by groups such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

A group of South Asian candidates for Montgomery County Council At-Large — Arif Wali, an Afghan American Muslim; Hamza Khan, a Pakistani American Muslim; and Prabu Selvam, an Indian American Hindu — issued a joint statement opposing VHPA’s involvement in county-supported programming.

“We strongly oppose the involvement of VHPA in public programming and spaces supported by Montgomery County,” the candidates said. “Montgomery County should not provide platforms or legitimacy to organizations tied to hate.”

The candidates emphasized that their opposition is not directed at Hindi language or South Asian culture, noting that Hindi is spoken across religious communities and that cultural programming should reflect that diversity. “This is not about opposing Hindi literature,” their statement read. “It is about ensuring that Montgomery County does not provide a platform to organizations whose documented record includes the promotion and normalization of hate.”

The Germantown event’s cancellation has been welcomed by critics as a necessary step, yet many say it does not resolve the broader questions raised by VHPA’s prior engagement with county officials. Sahi echoed that sentiment, calling the cancellation “the correct step,” while adding that “this partnership should never have been pursued in the first place.”

Advocates are now calling for clearer guidelines governing partnerships and programming in public institutions, arguing that the county must apply consistent standards when evaluating organizations seeking access to civic spaces.

Maryland has emerged as a hotbed of Hindu supremacist organizing following the election of Lt. Governor Aruna Miller in 2022. Miller’s long and intimate history of engagement with far-right Hindu supremacist groups traces at least as far back as 2018, as documented by the Huffington Post, Salon, the Independent of London, and other news outlets.

On April 12, Montgomery County Public Libraries will unveil a new Hindi-language collection at the Germantown Library. The county’s own press release describes it as a celebration of “language and diversity.” County Executive Marc Elrich, Councilmember Kristin Mink, and Council Vice President Marilyn Balcombe are all scheduled to speak. It sounds like exactly what a progressive, diverse county should be doing.

There’s just one question nobody seems to be asking: Who donated the books?

The answer is right there in the press release. The 160-plus titles were purchased “with the generous support of the Balvihar Hindi School, part of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America.”

Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America — VHPA. The World Hindu Council of America. The US wing of an organization that the CIA’s World Factbook designated as a “militant religious organization” — and one that, despite claiming to be legally independent, transferred over $7 million to its Indian parent and affiliates between 2001 and 2020, according to a report covered by The Wire.

The American arm of a group that played a central role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid — a 16th-century mosque torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992, an act that triggered riots killing some 2,000 people — and in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.

An organization that, according to a 2025 Rutgers University report, is part of a network of US-based Hindutva groups — Hindutva being the Hindu nationalist political ideology driving India’s far right — that have collectively spent more than $158 million over two decades on projects including influencing members of Congress.

And an organization that keeps hosting speakers who call for the elimination of Muslims.

The Speakers VHPA Brings to America

In June 2025 — less than a year ago — VHPA co-hosted Kajal Singhala at an event in Dallas. Singhala has been identified by India Hate Lab as one of the most prolific hate speakers in India: 35 documented hate speeches in 2023 alone, nine including explicit calls for violence. At the Dallas event, she called for an economic boycott of Muslims. Over 30 American and Indian church leaders signed a joint statement condemning the event. The Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on the IRS to investigate VHPA’s tax-exempt status.

Singhala is not an anomaly. In 2022, VHPA co-hosted a multi-city US tour for Sadhvi Ritambhara, a VHP leader indicted by India’s own government as one of 68 persons responsible for the destruction of the Babri Masjid, whose speeches have been called “the single most powerful instrument for whipping up anti-Muslim violence.” She was denied a UK visa after her American tour. A year earlier, VHPA had invited Yati Narsinghanand — a priest who has publicly declared that “all Muslims should be eliminated” and who praised the beating of a 14-year-old Muslim boy for drinking water at his temple — to headline a series of events. That one was cancelled only after public outcry.

This is the organization donating books to a Montgomery County library.

Public Facilities, Public Legitimacy

The Germantown Library is not the first Montgomery County public facility VHPA has used. In January 2024, the organization held a Ram Temple consecration celebration — marking the construction of a Hindu temple on the ruins of the Babri Masjid — at Gaithersburg High School, a public school. CAIR Maryland and an interfaith coalition wrote to Montgomery County officials expressing concerns.

In March 2026 — three weeks before the library unveiling — VHPA held another event at the same Gaithersburg High School, titled “Western Media’s Whitewashing of Hindu Genocide in Bangladesh.” The language comes straight from the Hindutva advocacy ecosystem.

In three weeks, the same Hindutva organization in the same county went from pushing ideology at a public high school to cutting a ribbon at a public library with elected officials at the podium.

What Officials Know — and Choose to Ignore

Multiple inside sources confirm that Montgomery County’s elected officials have been briefed for years on the nature of Hindutva and VHPA specifically. They are not uninformed. They are choosing to participate anyway.

The Germantown Library sits in the community where Lt. Governor Aruna Miller lives and where she once served as state delegate. To understand why that matters, you have to understand the network.

VHPA is not a standalone organization. It is one of three major American affiliates of India’s Sangh Parivar — the “family of organizations” built around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary founded in the 1920s. The RSS’s political wing is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s ruling party under Narendra Modi. Its religious wing is the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) — VHPA’s parent.

Each has an American counterpart: the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) for the RSS, the Overseas Friends of the BJP (OFBJP) for the BJP, and VHPA for the VHP. Though legally distinct, their leadership and donor networks are heavily cross-pollinated.

Miller’s campaigns collected at least $110,000 from individuals tied to this network — donors linked to VHPA, HSS, and the OFBJP — across four campaigns since 2011, according to federal campaign finance records and state filings documented by The Intercept, HuffPost, and Salon. Her campaign treasurer organized fundraisers attended by HSS and OFBJP leaders. She praised Modi as a “rock star” at an OFBJP banquet in 2014 — a man who had been banned from entering the US for nearly a decade over “severe violations of religious freedom.” When Peace Action Montgomery asked her to return the money, she refused.

VHPA’s Balvihar Hindi School operates in Germantown, the book donation goes to the Germantown Library, and the officials speaking at the event represent the same districts where this network has been building influence for over a decade.

The Questions Nobody Is Asking

What are the 160 books? Who selected them? Did the library vet the organization donating them? Did anyone in county government pause before celebrating an organization whose parent was designated as militant by the CIA — and whose national leadership has, within the past year, platformed a speaker who called for the economic boycott of Muslims?

One hundred and sixty books is a modest investment. The return — a county press release, a library partnership, and elected officials who know better lending their names to the event — is enormous.

April 12 is nine days away. Montgomery County’s officials can still choose not to show up. The question is whether they will — or whether they’ll do what they’ve done for years: stand at the podium, smile for the cameras, and pretend they don’t know who’s standing beside them.