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.
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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
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