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.
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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/
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