World’s Largest Far Right Paramilitary Rallied in NYC. It Should Alarm Everyone.

On February 20, 1939, the Madison Square Garden arena in New York City hosted a chilling spectacle. A portrait of George Washington hung at the center of the arena, flanked by U.S. flags and swastikas. Over 20,000 people packed the stands to hear Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund — one of the most prominent U.S.-based organizations aligned with the Third Reich — project his vision of a “white, Gentile-ruled United States.” Outside, 100,000 anti-Nazi protesters clashed with police on Eighth Avenue, determined to stop the legitimization of European fascism on U.S. soil.

Eighty-seven years later, global leaders in ethno-fascism and their sympathizers returned to Madison Square Garden.

On August 29, 2026, 5,000 people gathered at Madison Square Garden to hear Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak (Supreme Leader) of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). As the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the RSS is the world’s largest far right paramilitary organization, with an estimated 4 million members spread over 73,117 branches across India. Just as the Bund attempted to leverage the image of George Washington to legitimize Nazism in their rally of 1939, the RSS used this invite-only event — apparently attended by 180 religious leaders from 30 countries — to sanitize a century-old project of Hindu fascism. Obscuring its extremist agenda, the RSS cloaked the gathering in the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism, branding it with the theme “Universal Oneness.”

In his 42-minute keynote, the septuagenarian Bhagwat played the part of a playful but discerning uncle, dispensing meandering aphorisms about an “innate, eternal oneness” that connects humanity and nature. Rooting these concepts in the Atman (soul) and India’s civilizational values, Bhagwat painted a picture of a nation that champions “unity in diversity.” In a jarring contrast to his movement’s actual record, he claimed that India chooses to tolerate its enemies rather than subjugate them — elevating the country as a global exemplar of enlightened governance.

While Bhagwat spoke inside, an interfaith and anti-caste coalition protested outside. It consisted of groups like SALAM (South Asian Left), Hindus for Human Rights, and the Indian American Muslim Council, along with members of some of the 66 organizations that signed on to a statement earlier this week condemning Bhagwat’s visit. Their speeches exposed the hypocrisy of Bhagwat’s claim to “unity in diversity,” demonstrating how the RSS and its massive network of Hindu supremacist partners — including nearly a thousand nonprofit organizations, cultural organizations, paramilitary groups, unions, and political parties, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar (or the Family of the Sangh) — routinely practice the exact opposite of what Bhagwat preaches.

Speakers pointed out how the RSS’s notion of unity is, in fact, exclusively reserved for Hindus — and only for those who are wealthy and upper-caste. Shree Baphna from SALAM talked about how Hindutva (or the Hindu supremacist movement) attempts to divert mass anger “away from those in power and towards those communities who are exploited and oppressed.”

Baphna added:

When a Dalit [lower caste person] demands land, dignity and the annihilation of caste, Hindutva says, ‘forget caste – you are Hindu. When an Adivasi [Indigenous person] defends jal, jungle, zameen [water, forests and land] against mines, dams and corporations – Hindutva says, ‘forget your history – you are a vanvasi – a child of the Hindu nation.’ Shame!

Ritu Gupta from the nonprofit Hindus for Human Rights, noted that Mohan Bhagwat is here “pretending to spread the message of oneness.” But this is not the message Bhagwat’s supporters spread in India, Gupta retorted. “In India they say, ‘Hindus only – everybody else, get out!’ These Hindus who support the message of purging India of its minorities do not represent all Hindus. There could be no bigger hypocrisy than this!”

Others, including a spokesperson for the Palestinian organization Pal Awda, extended the critique of Bhagwat’s rhetorical “oneness” to India’s role as a regional colonizer in Kashmir and partner to genocidal Israel. “We have a responsibility to stand against genocide whenever, and wherever,” the Pal Awda representative, who requested anonymity, said. “The RSS has deep ties to Zionism and has worked to create an Israel-like vision for India based on [an] ethnonationalist state and subjugation of minorities.” Moreover, the “Hindutva-Zionism relationship is not merely ideological,” the spokesperson added, explaining that the relationship is constructed through diplomatic links, military cooperation, and corporate capital flows.

As one striking example of this strategic alliance, in 2022 the Adani Group owned by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, a personal friend to Modi, purchased 70 percent of the Haifa port. Today, the Indian flag flies next to the Israeli flag in Israel’s second largest port. The Indian and Israeli governments also cooperate heavily on military equipment, counterterrorism, and surveillance technology, including software partnerships. Another speaker on August 29 added, “The Hindutva politics that normalizes repression in Kashmir is a mirror image of the Zionist state — carrying out the same occupation and dispossession in Palestine.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a number of New York City council members have also publicly opposed the RSS rally. Additionally, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom urged the U.S. government to sanction the RSS due to its violent attacks on religious minorities.

Hindu Supremacy’s Enduring Ties to European Fascism

To fully understand the significance of Bhagwat holding court at Madison Square Garden — and the intensity of the counter-protests — one must grasp the bloodline that binds his organization to the very regime the German American Bund was celebrating in 1939. The founders of the RSS, which was created in 1925, met with and drew direct lessons from the European fascists.

In 1931 BS Moonje, a Hindu nationalist and mentor to the first Supreme Leader of the RSS, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, traveled to Italy to meet with Benito Mussolini and tour various military academies and militant youth organizations such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla and the Avanguardisti. Moonje wrote in his diary that he was inspired by these fascist organizations and intended to reshape the RSS along these organizational lines. It is said that under Hedgewar the RSS adopted many of their core features — such as their targeted recruitment of young boys (beginning at age 5), use of paramilitary training, and the total subordination of the organization to a supreme, lifetime leader — from Moonje’s accounts of the Italian Balilla.

Further, in 1939 M.S. Golwalkar — the RSS’s second Supreme Leader, whose portrait Bhagwat still routinely garlands — wrote in his manifesto, We, or Our Nationhood Defined, that Germany’s ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people was a model for India “to learn and profit by.” In that same text, he characterizes Muslims as historical “despoilers” and “murdering hordes” who destroyed Hindu kingdoms, arguing that they should either be forced to assimilate to Hinduism. If they refuse, he argues, they should be “wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges.”

Today, under Bhagwat’s leadership and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12-year reign, Golwarkar’s 1939 blueprint has become de facto state policy. In 2019, the RSS-backed Modi regime passed a slate of controversial laws effectively dismantling what was left of India’s secularism, tying citizenship to religion, explicitly excluding Muslims. This legal subordination works in tandem with extralegal vigilante violence committed by partners of the RSS like the Bajrang Dal.

Lynchings and mob attacks on individuals or small groups of people constitute a kind of slow-burning structural violence that has led Brown University political scientists Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs to compare Hindu nationalism to America’s Jim Crow South. There has been a steady rise in such incidents since 2014, disproportionately in BJP-ruled states. In just the first year of Modi’s third term (2024-2025), the Association for Protection of Civil Rights recorded 602 such hate crimes. Of these, 173 involved physical violence against minorities, resulting in 25 deaths — every one of them Muslim.

Punitive home demolitions and evictions are also surging. According to the Housing and Land Rights Network, evictions across India climbed from 107,625 in 2019 to 222,686 in 2022, before reaching 515,752 in 2023 — a 379 percent increase over five years. The network’s data also reveals that Muslims are vastly overrepresented among those whose homes are destroyed.

Waging sustained opposition to the regime on any of these counts has become nearly impossible. Critics — including peaceful activists, academics, media, and dissident politicians — are routinely persecuted under draconian laws like the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which eliminate standard burdens of proof to permit the indefinite pretrial detention of political opponents. This systematic criminalization of dissent has led the prestigious V-Dem Institute to classify India as an electoral autocracy, dropping the country’s democratic freedom ranking from 65th in 2016 to 106th in 2026 — the bottom 20 percent globally. Even more alarming, Genocide Watch has repeatedly warned of an impending genocide against India’s 250 million Muslims, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ranks India at the “second-highest risk of a new mass killing.”

Yet, despite this grim record, the highest leader of this fascistic movement was handed one of the world’s most coveted stages — welcomed to preach and court donors in the heart of the U.S.’s financial capital.

Bhagwat’s Event Was the Culmination of a Decades-Long Strategy to Influence U.S. Politics

Just as the German American Bund sought to build a fifth column in the U.S., the RSS has for five decades worked to build material power in the diaspora. To organize its Madison Square Garden rally, the RSS drew on sophisticated, multi-layered clandestine networks, the mechanics of which were exposed in a new, multi-part investigative series on the RSS’s “Vishwa Vibhag” or “Overseas Department” by Savera, a U.S.-based coalition against supremacy.

In this series Savera tracked the shell organizations facilitating the RSS’s U.S. activities. Bhagwat’s event was formally hosted by the innocuous-sounding American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue (also known as “AHEAD Forum”), which poses as an independent diaspora group.

The Savera series shows that this is a bald-faced lie. AHEAD Forum was, in fact, incorporated in California in May 2025 by Khanderao Kand, a long-time RSS operative and founder-president of the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies. Kand’s deep ties to the RSS and the BJP were exposed when the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies was implicated in a potentially illegal lobbying effort to influence the U.S. Congress. When Kand became a public relations liability, his name was quietly scrubbed from AHEAD Forum’s paperwork and replaced by a colleague. AHEAD Forum’s other directors are similarly embedded in the “American Sangh,” the network of U.S.-based RSS affiliates.

At the top of this hierarchy sits Saumitra Gokhale. Gokhale is listed on tax forms for the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh — the U.S. wing of the RSS — as a yoga instructor earning $36,000 a year, according to Savera. But researchers found no record of Gokhale teaching yoga. In reality he is a senior RSS pracharak (full-time missionary) and the global coordinator of the Vishwa Vibhag.

The Savera series reveal how the Vishwa Vibhag — or the “largest far right network in the world”— operates across 1,600 branches in 55 countries, utilizing organizations like the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America to weave a dense web of “transnational entanglements.” Contrary to claims that they operate independently of the RSS, the series shows how they in fact are so closely intertwined that Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh leaders are made to attend regular RSS training camps in India. They employ the same terminology (“shakhas”) to refer to branches, borrow from RSS’s prayers and paraphernalia, and pay obeisance to portraits of RSS leaders, including none other than Golwalkar himself. Sewa International is the main fundraising arm of the Vishwa Vibhag — and rakes in millions of dollars of revenue each year.

Ideologically, the American Sangh appropriates the language of Western multiculturalism, global peace, and even decolonizationto shield its majoritarian, proto-fascist project. This was on full display at the Madison Square Garden event. At the same time, it openly allies itself with white nationalists and Zionists — as seen in Trump’s 2019 “Howdy Modi” mega rally in Houston or in the Republican Hindu Coalition formerly chaired by Steve Bannon.

These two faces of the Sangh are not solely fixated on India; they actively intervene in U.S. politics. For example, they have waged aggressive, well-funded campaigns to rewrite California school textbooks to reflect right-wing nationalist histories. They recently spearheaded a successful push to kill a civil rights bills aimed at banning caste-based discrimination — culminating in an infamous veto by Democratic GovernorGavin Newsom). Taking a page from the Zionist Anti-Defamation League’s playbook, they weaponize U.S. civil rights rhetoric framing any criticism of the RSS or the BJP’s human rights record as “Hinduphobia” to intimidate lawmakers and silence academics.

The Hindu right wields this outsized political and lobbying muscle despite the fact that only a minority of Indian Americans actually support the BJP. Affiliates like the Hindu American Political Action Committee and Hindu American Foundation have spent years embedding themselves within Washington and local municipalities. Federal Election Commission reports show them donating handsomely across the aisle to Democrats such as Raja Krishnamoorthi and Shri Thanedar alongside Republicans such as Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, and many more.

Typically, the use of front organizations has worked to hedge against accusations of operating on behalf of a foreign agent. However, recently, for reasons that are still unclear, the RSS has also sought to deepen its directinfluence over U.S. politicians. In late 2025, an investigation by the U.S.-based news outlet Prism revealed that the RSS had hired Squire Patton Boggs — one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms — to influence U.S. lawmakers. The firm was paid $330,000 during the first three quarters of 2025.

Bringing RSS on as a domestic client rather than registering it under FARA was likely in violation of federal transparency norms. After the Prism report was published, thus, Squire Patton Boggs hastily amended its congressional disclosures, scrubbing the RSS from the paperwork and claiming that its “ultimate client” was actually Vivek Sharma, a Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical executive.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the RSS’s shadowy lobbying initiative and Bhagwat’s visit come at a moment when the Modi regime is facing an unprecedented crisis. Economic stagnation, recurring labor unrest, Hindu temple scandals, and mass student protests have mired Modi’s third term and substantially weakened his domestic standing. Bhagwat’s liberal-sounding message thus appears aimed at restoring a more palatable “brand” for the Sangh Parivar, laying the groundwork for global cooperation under a future leader. This is also a stark reminder of who, in fact, controls the levers of power — the parent RSS — no matter the ultimate fate of Modi or even the BJP.

But if the RSS believes it can quietly secure its legacy, the communities resisting it tell a very different story. Outside the venue, Safa Ahmed of the Indian American Muslim Council spoke directly to Bhagwat’s underlying anxiety, saying:

Islam and Muslims have been in India for 1,400 years, and they will [remain] here after another 1,400 years and even beyond that. So long as we exist, we will never be erased from India. But you — Mohan Bhagwat, and your fascist … fan pals — the masks are off for you. You are being mocked by the youth of India. You are being mocked by New York City. You are afraid of losing it all … And it’s you who will be remembered as a sad, insecure group of people who could only take pride in your identity via the erasure of another — that is, if you are remembered at all!

Ahmed’s prophecy will ultimately bear out, but we cannot afford to passively wait for it. We cannot leave our Muslim, Adivasi, Dalit, and left comrades on the front lines in India to fight this battle alone. Rallies, social media mockery, and the construction of broad, intersectional coalitions like we saw on Saturday are a strong start. But sooner than later we need to go beyond symbolic protest to challenge the Sangh at its root.

This will require disrupting Hindutva diasporic organizations wherever they operate, ruthlessly exposing these “cultural organizations” as fronts for the spread of fascism. It means cautioning the public about the bad-faith weaponization of “Hinduphobia” — which the Hindu right uses to shield itself from criticism — and impeding the Sangh’s ties to global right-wing players like MAGA and Israel. It means educating the nascent Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) movement on the violent reality of the Sangh, so it compels DSA-elected officials to act. Finally, just as global movements boycotted the Nazis, the apartheid-era Afrikaners, and now Israel — the left needs to develop creative strategies to choke off the Sangh from its financial lifelines in the U.S. A first step would be to scrutinize its various alliances with big capital, including in the tech and defense sectors, and examine how these partnerships enable funds to flow into India via charitable fronts like Sewa International, IDRF, and Ekal Vidyalaya.

The 1939 Bund rally is remembered today as a sinister moment in U.S. history — a time when New York allowed the most violent political current in the globe to claim a major stage in our financial capital. Mohan Bhagwat’s 2026 visit must be recognized as its modern equivalent. To avoid repeating the horrors of interwar fascism, we must urgently build a transnational, intersectional bloc capable of defeating the American Sangh.