On August 30, Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), walked into Madison Square Garden in New York City to address several thousand people, largely Indian Americans. The occasion was called the ‘Universal Oneness Celebration’, organised by American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue with the support of more than 200 Hindu organisations. The choice of venue was not incidental. In September 2014, only months after he became prime minister, Narendra Modi had used the same arena for a spectacular political coronation before 18,000 admirers. Bhagwat’s appearance therefore carried an unmistakable message: the organisation that formed Modi had now come to occupy the stage on which Modi’s diaspora cult was first displayed.

Bhagwat’s words were studiously emollient. Humanity is one, he said, while diversity is its natural decoration. He defined dharma not as religion or ritual but as the principle that sustains the universe. Indians in the United States, he added, must first be loyal to their karmabhoomi, the land in which they live and work. He went beyond ‘live and let live’ to urge his audience to ‘make others live’. Most strikingly, he said that a Hindu who believes Muslims should not remain in India ceases to be a Hindu.

These soothing sentences cannot be separated from their political setting. Kapil Sibal correctly identified the contradiction: Bhagwat speaks wisely abroad but remains silent when hatred operates at home. The RSS cannot be judged by the varnish applied to a New York speech. It must be judged by the society its vast machinery has helped to construct – one in which Muslims are lynched on suspicion of carrying beef, Muslim homes and shops are demolished by bulldozers, Christians face intimidation, and caste oppression is disguised by the language of Hindu unity. Bhagwat offered universal fraternity in a city governed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had publicly described the RSS ideology as exclusionary. Outside the hall, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits, and secular organisations rejected the RSS claim to speak for them. This protest was as Indian as anything said inside.

Yankee Hindutva

More than a decade ago, I used the phrase ‘Yankee Hindutva’ to describe the peculiar political culture that had grown among a section of Indian Americans. The phenomenon preceded Modi’s victory in 2014, but his rise gave it a hero, a state, and an intoxicating sense of vindication. Modi’s 2014 Madison Square Garden rally resembled a US political party convention: giant screens, choreographed chants, T-shirts bearing his face, dozens of US legislators, and a revolving stage. It converted political power in India into theatre for a prosperous minority in the US.

The performances continued. At the 2019 ‘Howdy Modi’ rally in Houston, Modi appeared alongside Donald Trump and effectively placed a section of the diaspora inside Trump’s political spectacle. Their embrace was not merely personal. Trump’s chauvinism, hostility to Muslims, and contempt for democratic restraint found an echo in Hindutva’s majoritarian vocabulary. Modi returned the compliment at Ahmedabad in 2020 with ‘Namaste Trump’. Here were two leaders presenting themselves as wounded nations made fresh, each promising greatness by finding internal enemies and disciplining dissent.

Why does this appeal endure? It is inadequate to say that Indian Americans simply adore Modi. Part of the emotion is older and more complicated. A racialised minority, long treated in the US as foreign and inassimilable, experiences genuine excitement when an Indian prime minister is welcomed by the White House, fills a famous stadium, or embraces the US president as an equal. The applause contains pride at India’s stature and pleasure in the community’s own arrival. But this understandable longing for dignity is harvested by organised Hindutva. The desire not to feel small becomes identification with a strongman; cultural self-respect is converted into religious majoritarianism; Indian civilisation is reduced to an RSS account of Hindu civilisation. Power substitutes for emancipation.

Nor is the community politically uniform. Indian Americans have generally voted for the Democratic Party, while many among them applaud Modi. Progressive Indian organisations, including Hindus for Human Rights, have consistently opposed Hindutva. The contradiction matters. It shows that Yankee Hindutva is not the automatic politics of migration but the result of organisation, money, selective memory, and social pressure.

The RSS’s American Machinery

The RSS does not operate in the US principally under its own name. Its most important organisational relative is the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), which describes itself as a cultural and service organisation. The HSS’s own figures claim 267 shakhas or centres in 186 cities across 33 states, alongside 85 Hindu Yuva university chapters. Its activities – children’s programmes, physical exercises, festivals, camps, charity drives, and civic outreach – appear innocuous when considered separately. Taken together, however, they create an intergenerational social world in which Hindu identity is organised, disciplined, and increasingly detached from India’s plural and anti-colonial history.

This is how a community turns rightward: not primarily by reading party manifestos, but through family networks, temples, summer camps, student associations, WhatsApp groups, and apparently non-political cultural events. Charity gives the network legitimacy, heritage classes shape historical memory, and civic engagement cultivates access to elected officials. The line between culture and politics is kept deliberately porous. Hindutva is presented not as one political ideology among others but as Hindu identity itself, so that criticism of the RSS can be misrepresented as hostility to Hindus.

The post-1965 Indian migration to the US carried a particular historical burden. Most of this professional migration arrived after India’s great freedom struggle and after the heroic phase of the US Civil Rights Movement. It benefited directly from both while having participated in neither. Indian independence gave migrants a passport issued by a sovereign country rather than a colonial possession. The Civil Rights Movement undermined the racist immigration regime and made possible the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act through which many Indians entered. Yet a large part of the community inherited the victories without absorbing the political education that produced them.

Instead, US immigration policy selected doctors, engineers, scientists, and other professionals and then celebrated their success as proof of US meritocracy. The ‘model minority’ myth hid the state selection that had brought a highly educated population into the country. Worse, it used Indian achievement as a weapon against African Americans: if Indians could succeed, the argument ran, racism could not be decisive. This was a cruel historical amnesia. Indian advancement rested upon Black struggle. The proper response was not gratitude as sentiment but solidarity as politics.

Yankee Hindutva thrives in this gap. It offers identity without history and pride without solidarity. It tells Indian Americans that their wealth proves civilisational superiority, rather than recognising the anti-racist struggles and public institutions that made their lives possible.

Bhagwat told his audience to serve their karmabhoomi. Very well. To serve the US means to join its unfinished struggle against racism and against deep social inequality; to honour India means to defend the secular, democratic, and egalitarian promise of its freedom movement. Everything else is pageantry beneath the lights of Madison Square Garden.