On August 29, Rev. Adriene Thorne — senior minister of New York’s Riverside Church, the pulpit from which Dr. Martin Luther King preached against the Vietnam War — sat one seat away from Mohan Bhagwat at Madison Square Garden.

She says she was never told the RSS was involved. She was never told Bhagwat would be there. The program the organizers sent three days before the event left the Guest of Honour line blank, and they filled that name in only after it was over.

In my new video essay, I go through the invitations, the program, and the organizers’ own emails — including the one, sent the day before, telling every invitee what to wear and explaining exactly why the photograph mattered more than anything anyone would say.

With footage from inside Madison Square Garden, Thorne’s own account, and a U.S. religious freedom commissioner answering the question the RSS has spent twenty years trying to bury.

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On August 29, 2026, Mohan Bhagwat — chief of the RSS, India’s Hindu nationalist paramilitary — took the stage at Madison Square Garden. Outside, a diverse coalition of civil rights organizations and humanitarian individuals gathered on Seventh Avenue.

The RSS said in May that it organized these foreign visits to counter perceptions that it is a paramilitary outfit involved in attacks on minority communities. This is what it got instead.

These are my remarks.

The RSS came here for a celebration. They got us instead.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat flew seven thousand miles just to be in that building today. So listen to what they say he’s here for. Dialogue. Mutual respect. Harmony and universal oneness. Looking beyond divisions. A shared responsibility to protect and care for communities, nations, humanity, nature and all creation.

Nature and all creation.

Read that back. Dialogue. Respect. Diversity. Harmony. Oneness. Throw those words on a screen in New York City and you can imagine exactly what visuals would accompany them. A sunrise over the ocean. A babbling brook. A child releasing a butterfly. A dove landing on somebody’s outstretched palm. Cupped hands holding a seedling. Slow piano.

Then the title card: brought to you by… the men who burn families alive in their homes. Oh, and also smash children to death in front of their pregnant mothers, and then gang-rape the mothers.

That’s the RSS. And this whole thing — the arena, the Sanskrit, the tax-deductible nonprofit, the two hundred partner organizations — is lipstick on a pig.

They came here to try to make America think that they’re normal, that they’re respectable, that they’re harmless, that they’re really just cute and cuddly.

And that’s the one thing that we can take from them today. After today, nobody is going to want to cuddle Mohan Bhagwat.

Now, don’t think that this is the RSS’s American debut. They’ve been carving out space in this country for decades, and they’ve gotten good at it. Good enough that they made it all the way to the top.

Until this year, the woman who ran American intelligence was one of theirs.

Tulsi Gabbard. Director of National Intelligence. Before that, a nobody from Hawaii who suddenly appeared in the United States Congress after hundreds of thousands of dollars from Hindutva donors paved her way. Aligned with the HSS, the RSS’s American wing. Stood with the RSS in India. RSS leadership at her wedding.

And they don’t care which party you belong to. She learned that lesson well from her puppet masters. They bankrolled a progressive Democrat into Congress, and she walked out running American intelligence for Donald Trump. Their principles lie with whichever side is winning at the moment.

But she wasn’t the only one they got their hooks into. She was just the one who reached the highest level of power — so far.

They’re not lobbying Capitol Hill from the outside. They’ve been occupying it from the inside.

Suhas Subramanyam sits in Congress in Virginia. Aruna Miller is the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. Raja Krishnamoorthi burned twenty-nine million dollars trying to buy himself a United States Senate seat in Illinois, and he lost. Shri Thanedar held a seat in Michigan until three weeks ago, when Detroit threw him out for a thirty-four-year-old democratic socialist who called his victory a roadmap for defeating the fascism harming our country.

Every one of them was found, formed, fielded, and funded by the exact same donor network that constructed Tulsi Gabbard. And a great many of those donors are leaders of the RSS’s American family — the people who organized this event, and who are sitting in there right now.

And look at what has happened to them this year. Gabbard is history. Krishnamoorthi is in the rearview mirror. And Thanedar got run out of Detroit.

That is why Mohan Bhagwat is in New York. He didn’t come here to be introduced. The big boss came here to survey the wreckage, and to ask his American lieutenants how they let it happen. The HSS. The VHP of America. The organizations behind the rally, who were spawned by the same movement as the men who smash children to death in front of their pregnant mothers and then gang-rape the mothers. Same founder. Same manifesto. Same program. Same guru — the guru who was penning praise for Hitler’s racial policies in 1939, at the same time that this building was hosting a rally of American Nazis.

I said Nazis. And they don’t like being called what they are. So just this week, a spokesman for India’s ruling party lectured me about when I may and may not speak about the RSS, and accused me of misleading the American people about it. As an American. Speaking in America. About an event happening on US soil.

So they say that Americans have no standing to name this organization. Let’s name it. I’ll give you the first letter. You give me the rest.

R —

A lot of people think this is just a foreign problem, and that you’re protesting on behalf of Indians. But it’s already inside our government, and it’s inside the most famous arena in America right now, right behind us. It’s our problem now, and we’re the ones who have to deal with it.

And we’ve already found the start to a solution.

We name them.

I say R. And you say…

R —

On August 25, 2026, I spoke on the steps of New York City Hall alongside clergy, community leaders and civil rights advocates at a press conference demanding that Madison Square Garden cancel the August 29 appearance of Mohan Bhagwat, chief of India’s RSS.

Brad Lander — former New York City Comptroller and the Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, which includes City Hall — also spoke, and condemned the RSS.

The event was convened by a coalition of dozens of organizations including Hindus for Human Rights, Sikh Coalition, Indian American Muslim Council, Dalit Solidarity Forum, Save America From Hindutva, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, Rabbis for Ceasefire, the New York Sikh Council, the Movement for Black Lives, CAIR-NY and DRUM.

Inside City Hall at the same hour, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about the rally for the first time in the seven days since I appealed to him to speak. He said the rise of Hindu nationalism has been incredibly troubling and that he finds himself in deep opposition to it. Asked directly whether the event should be canceled, he said he doesn’t support the rally, but doesn’t know whether the city has jurisdiction over a private event.

Below is the video, and beneath it the full text of what I said.

In 1939, as twenty-two thousand Nazis occupied Madison Square Garden, the RSS’s own guru penned a manifesto praising the Nazi purging of German Jews as a wonderful example to emulate in India. Two continents, the same year, and an identical appetite for purging a country of the wrong kind of people. And this week, eighty-seven years after American Nazis claimed the stage of the most famous arena in the United States of America, India’s Nazis will walk in their footsteps.

Founded in 1925, the RSS is the world’s oldest, largest, and fastest growing fascist paramilitary, and it has spent a century devoted to a blitzkrieg mission to remaking India in its Hindu nationalist image, and to building the kind of fatherland that their guru wanted, one where Muslims and Christians live as guests or don’t live at all. Six million uniformed men who answer to no one but their Supreme Leader, Mohan Bhagwat, whose victory tour celebrating the paramilitary’s first hundred years will stage its grandest spectacle at Madison Square Garden on the 29th of August.

They have built their fatherland fantasy on a foundation of corpses from the first, starting with the original act of terrorism in independent India — the assassination of Gandhi by an RSS member. India moved to crush the paramilitary inside of a week, and the Home Minister who signed that ban warned that their speeches were full of communal poison, that the poison had cost that country the life of Gandhi, and that after Gandhi was murdered, the RSS handed out sweets.

Well, the RSS’s fingers must be sticky by now from all the sweets they have distributed over the decades, because they have perpetrated more than a dozen pogroms in the century since they assassinated Gandhi, and their stormtroopers keep smashing down doors across India to drag families into the streets and slaughter them there, hunting Christians through their villages while they torch the churches and gut the orphanages, raping nuns and burning missionaries alive. In Gujarat they gang-raped Muslim women in the road and set them on fire, hacked children apart in front of their mothers, and burned whole families alive inside their own homes, butchering two thousand in three days. And they did not just slaughter Gujarat’s Muslims: they turned them into such a rarity that they’re practically a rumor, which Mayor Mamdani knows all too well, because when he tells people that his father’s family are Gujarati Muslims, he says that they’re shocked that there are still any left at all after what the RSS did to them.

That’s the movement which has entranced Western fascists from its origins to the present day. Anders Breivik, the most lethal white nationalist terrorist of the twenty-first century, called on Hindu nationalists and white nationalists to learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible because their goals are, in his words, more or less identical. And the RSS has been jumping into bed with its Western counterparts ever since, sending its leaders here to slip under the sheets with the supremacists who are trying to remake our country along religious nationalist lines. It’s a mutual admiration society, naturally, because white nationalism and Hindu nationalism are two sides of the same goddamn coin — and God knows we already have enough trouble with our own fascists without importing anybody else’s.

Yet India’s fascists arrive in disguise, because the RSS cloaks its legacy of death in the rhetoric of “universal oneness,” and their chief is coming here specifically to launder a hundred years of butchery on the most famous stage in America — and yet the blood drenching the RSS’s hands will stain everyone who welcomes them. Which is why Madison Square Garden must yank the red carpet out from under the brownshirts of India.

Cancel the rally before the RSS poisons the Big Apple and then tries to hoodwink us, by pageantry, into taking a bite of that poisoned apple so that we slip into the slumber of “universal oneness” as Mohan Bhagwat presides over a vile spectacle of fascism.

Seven days after I appealed to Mayor Zohran Mamdani to speak against Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the Hindu nationalist RSS paramilitary, taking the stage at Madison Square Garden on August 29, he finally responded — inside City Hall, at a press conference on housing, in answer to a reporter’s question, while a coalition of advocates held a press conference outside those same doors demanding cancellation.

He had the moment and he mangled it. Asked about the RSS, he spoke about his mother’s family in India, about the pluralistic society and secular republic he was taught to believe in, and about finding himself in deep opposition to a movement predicated on an exclusionary vision — a movement he failed to name: the RSS. All true, and none of it what was asked. When the reporter pressed — should the rally be canceled at MSG this weekend? — his answer was: “I don’t support the rally, but I don’t know if the city has any jurisdiction on canceling a private event.”

Nobody asked him to cancel it. Nobody claimed the city could. What was asked of him, seven days ago and again today, is that he use the bully pulpit that comes with being mayor of New York to call on Madison Square Garden to cancel it themselves. That requires no jurisdiction. It requires a sentence.

And he reached for his mother’s India when the question was about his father’s.

The RSS didn’t just commit violence against religious minorities in India. In Gujarat it slaughtered Muslim men, women and children — dragged them into the streets, burned them alive, disemboweled them, dismembered them, gang-raped pregnant women, and cut fetuses out of their bellies to hold them up on the tips of swords.

That is what the RSS did to Gujarati Muslims. That is what it did to his father’s people.

On August 29, its chief takes the stage at Madison Square Garden.

I’ve been talking for the past six days about how the chief of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat — the chief of that Hindu nationalist paramilitary — is coming here on the 29th of August. There, to Madison Square Garden, directly across the street from where I’m standing right now.

And wouldn’t you know it. Tonight, on August 23rd, I walk out of the subway and there’s a truck running, warning about it.

You see right behind me?

RSS ideology burned 400 churches in Manipur. Now the RSS chief claims Madison Square Garden. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat claims to speak for Indian Americans, but he does not speak for them. He says that every Indian in India is a Hindu — that Indian Christians, Indian Muslims, Indian Sikhs, that they don’t exist.

RSS out of NYC. RSS paramilitary out of Madison Square Garden.

And Mayor Mamdani. I’ve been running a petition to him. My video appealing to Mayor Mamdani to speak against this has garnered over 100,000 views since I put it out just a few days ago. Mayor Mamdani has condemned Hindu nationalism before. He’s been vocal against Narendra Modi, against Modi’s violence against religious minorities, against his fascist ideology.

But Mayor Mamdani has so far been silent. He has not raised his voice to utter a single syllable yet — yet — about how the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is coming here to Madison Square Garden, across the street from where I’m standing, in just exactly six days from now.

And so you see, James Dolan, the chairman of MSG. He’s being called on to scrap the RSS paramilitary event on August 29th. Why? Because MSG is throwing its doors open to the RSS, a group which is responsible for massacring Muslims in the streets.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is being asked to listen to the call of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has called for sanctioning the RSS and for denying the RSS access to travel into our country.

And so you see, AOC. AOC’s been great. AOC actually boycotted the event a few years back when Modi was attending to speak at a joint session of US Congress. But here in New York City, AOC, that progressive voice, she’s not being heard. She hasn’t uttered a word against Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the RSS, coming on August 29th to MSG to speak, to headline what is essentially a rally of India’s Nazis.

In 1939, MSG hosted a rally of American Nazis. And now, in 2026, on August 29th, MSG is once again throwing open the doors to host a rally of India’s Nazis — the RSS, a fascist organization which took direct inspiration from Mussolini and Hitler.

It was founded at the same time, and it looked over at those fascists in Europe and said — instead of what the rest of the world was saying, instead of what America ended up saying — the RSS looked over at those fascists in Europe and said, oh my God, they have such wonderful ideas. Maybe we should copycat them.

And that’s what they’ve been doing for 100 years since they were founded in 1925.

And now, 101 years later, the chief of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, is coming to the United States, to New York City, to Madison Square Garden itself, to the most famous arena in this country, in our country. To headline a rally of India’s fascist paramilitary RSS. To circle everyone around and cheer him on while he propagates his Hindu nationalist ideology, which says that the foreigners in India are native-born Christians and Muslims, and that they should be either eradicated or eliminated.

And that ideology has been put into practice repeatedly, starting from the very first in 1948, when the RSS assassinated Mohandas Gandhi himself as the first act of terrorism in independent India.

And yet, as you can see, the RSS’s guru praised Hitler’s Holocaust. Despite the fact that the guru of the RSS — a man who is garlanded and honored by the chief of the RSS who will be here in six days at Madison Square Garden — despite that, MSG, James Dolan, Jim Dolan, is throwing open the doors and rolling out the red carpet to welcome the chief of the RSS, to host a rally of the RSS at the most famous arena in the United States of America.

And so I am calling — and whoever’s running this truck is also calling — for RSS out of NYC.

We have enough problems with fascists in our own country. We don’t need to be hosting India’s fascists here as well, especially when India’s fascists are in the pockets of, courting, siding with, aligning with, and partnering with America’s fascists. Because white nationalism and Hindu nationalism are two sides of the same goddamn coin, and we don’t need either one of them. We need to cut them off at the root, and we need to start by saying: cancel the RSS rally at Madison Square Garden, August 29th.

So join me. #RSSOutOfNYC

Call Madison Square Garden, demand that they cancel the event. Call your New York City Council member, call your US Congress member. Ask them — demand that they speak against RSS fascism being hosted, saluted, on American soil.

Over two days in August 2017, hundreds of men marched by torchlight through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting that Jews would not replace them, and then they carried Nazi flags through that same city while one of them drove a car into a crowd and killed a woman.

Leading them was Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who coined the term alt-right. Standing shoulder to shoulder with him that weekend was a European publisher of far-right books who, four years before Charlottesville, had flown to Delhi to meet the national spokesman of the RSS — India’s Hindu nationalist paramilitary. He came home and declared that his company would become the Indian right’s gateway to the Western world.

That spokesman was Ram Madhav. He sits today on the RSS’s National Executive.

Yesterday I filmed outside the district office of Julie Menin, Speaker of the New York City Council. She is the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and the first Jewish Speaker in the Council’s history. Five months ago she and Council Member Yusef Salaam convened an interfaith rally at City Hall for a package of bills against antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Christian hate.

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

The video traces why Charlottesville and the RSS are not a coincidence — the man who invented Hindutva defending the Nuremberg Laws and calling Nazism the savior of Germany, the French Nazi propagandist whose book carried a foreword by an RSS co-founder and whose ashes lie beside those of the American Nazi Party’s founder, Ram Madhav sharing a plenary stage with J.D. Vance at a conference headlined by Stephen Miller, and the Hudson Institute handing the RSS’s second-in-command a Washington stage fifty days after a federal commission recommended the organization for sanctions.

It also includes the four questions I put to Ram Madhav on a Washington sidewalk in April, none of which he answered.

Sign the petition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

SOURCES

"White Nationalist Terrorism & Its Saffron Inspirations," Raiot — https://raiot.in/white-nationalist-terrorism-its-saffron-inspirations/

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

Ram Madhav at NatCon 4, Washington DC, July 2024

Dattatreya Hosabale at the Hudson Institute, 23 April 2026 — Press Trust of India

Today, I stood outside the Consulate General of India on East 64th Street in Manhattan — Narendra Modi’s government, operating on American soil — to report on the man arriving here next week.

Modi’s government, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom reported in its latest annual report, has allowed “Hindu nationalist mobs” to harass, incite, and instigate “violence against Muslims and Christians with impunity.” That’s no surprise considering that Modi is a member of the RSS, a paramilitary which serves as the fountainhead of Hindu nationalism — the Indian equivalent of Christian nationalism.

Next week Mohan Bhagwat lands on American soil: the chief of the RSS, the world’s oldest, largest, and fastest growing fascist paramilitary, one which is on a blitzkrieg mission to remake India in its Hindu nationalist image. He arrives in Washington on August 25 and takes the stage at Madison Square Garden on August 29.

Yet on August 19, that same religious freedom commission told this government to shut the door on him.

USCIRF’s chairman warned that India’s Prime Minister is a member of the RSS and raised the alarm that Bhagwat is visiting New York City despite the fact that the RSS is an umbrella organization whose sub-groups have perpetrated attacks on religious minorities, including Christians and Muslims. A commissioner went further, cautioning that RSS leaders — even those affiliated with the Indian government — should not be honored with high-level meetings or diplomatic courtesies, and that this government should instead be sanctioning RSS members responsible for violations of religious freedom.

This isn’t a pressure group. This is the body Congress built to track religious persecution across the world and tell the President who to punish for it. Its commissioners are appointed by both parties. And they’ve been reporting on this for over twenty years — that the RSS seeks to make India a Hindu state, that it aggressively presses its view that non-Hindus are foreign to India, thus creating a climate of fear and making non-Hindus feel unwelcome in the country, and that it has perpetrated numerous incidents of intimidation, harassment, and violence against religious minority communities.

So in March of this year they named it for sanctions — freeze their assets, bar them at the border — “for their responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom.”

And into that, on the twenty-ninth, walk American elected officials. The organizers say they’ll be in that room — maybe even up on that Madison Square Garden stage.

Legislators in another country have already acted. On August 7, Canadian MPs Jenny Kwan and Heather McPherson wrote to their own government demanding that Bhagwat be denied entry. Their words: let us be clear, Mr. Bhagwat’s presence in Canada would be a danger to Canadians, he is not welcome here.

And 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 already agreed to chair the thing. That was Tulsi Gabbard, whom I’ve dubbed the princess of the RSS. Even she decided that appearing on an American stage alongside Mohan Bhagwat was too hot a potato politically.

So there’s your standard. Canadian legislators acted. Tulsi Gabbard walked. And right now, not one elected official in this country has said a syllable.

Every official who walks into that arena on the twenty-ninth will do it by betraying their own nation’s federal commission on international religious freedom. There is no defense in ignorance. You are either in that room standing with fascists, or you are on record saying you won’t be.

Sign the petition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani:

SOURCES

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

USCIRF commissioner statements, 19 August 2026, via @USCIRF on X

Kwan and McPherson letter to the Government of Canada, 7 August 2026

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

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.

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