A powerful Hindu extremist group, whose member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, revered in India as the Father of the Nation, which was banned thrice and from which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party emerged has said it had organised foreign trips, including to the US, to counter perceptions it is a paramilitary outfit involved in large-scale attacks on minority communities.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale said on Tuesday that he has been addressing gatherings in the US, Germany and Britain, with more planned, to “dispel certain misgivings and misconceptions about the RSS”.
He said the main accusations against the supremacist group, also world’s largest paramilitary organisation, included that it was “pulling society backwards”, that it promotes “Hindu supremacist things”, and that “others have become second-class citizens”.
“The fact is entirely different,” Hosabale told a rare briefing for foreign media in the group’s newly built 12-floor building in Delhi.
Hosabale said he met academics, policymakers and business leaders in his visits.
He said RSS leaders would visit more countries in Europe, Southeast Asia and other regions to raise awareness about the organisation.
The outreach by the supremacist group came after the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said in a report in November that it “has been involved in acts of extreme violence and intolerance against members of minority groups for decades”.
The commission is a bipartisan body of the US federal government that monitors religious freedom around the world and makes policy recommendations to the president, the secretary of state and the US Congress.
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Last week, an expert tracking Hindu hate crimes against Muslims and Christians and other marginalised groups in India testified before USCIRF, telling it the persecution “bears the sanction of the country’s top political leadership led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi” and is carried out through the state apparatus and the militant networks of RSS and its affiliates, including the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
Raqib Hameed Naik, the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), presented a record of human rights abuses against minorities in India and called for targeted Global Magnitsky sanctions against leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), RSS and others.
Modi joined the RSS in his youth, and the rise of his BJP to near-national dominance is widely attributed to the RSS’ vast network of cadres, during a period marked by a hardening Hindu-Muslim political divide in the officially secular country where Hindus (over 80 percent and over a billion) are a majority.
The RSS claims it is a “Hindu centric civilisational, cultural movement” whose goal is to “carry the nation to the pinnacle of glory”, including by uniting Hindus and protecting the religion.
It has been banned several times since its inception in 1925, including after a member Nathuram Godse assassinated independence hero Gandhi in 1948.
Indian opposition leaders, particularly Rahul Gandhi of the main opposition Congress party, have repeatedly accused the RSS of promoting a divisive, majoritarian ideology that he says threatens India’s secular fabric and fuels intolerance towards minorities.
Modi has already delivered on two key agenda items for the RSS: building a temple to the Hindu deity Ram on the site of a some 400-year-old mosque razed by Hindu zealots in 1992, and annexing the Muslim-majority India-administered Kashmir in 2019.
The other key goal is to end discrimination based on Hindu caste, Hosabale added.
India’s opposition successfully leveraged concerns among underprivileged castes to hand PM Modi a rare setback in the 2024 national election, when his party fell short of a majority and was forced to rely on allies.
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Hosabale, who was in Washington DC recently for a talk at the conservative think-tank the Hudson Institute, said that “Hindus have never followed supremacist ideas, never invaded any country and have nothing to apologise for.”
Hosabale echoed comments made by Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, who has frequently stated that India has never invaded or occupied any country or region.
Historians, however, say Hindu rulers and empires have invaded and conquered other countries and kingdoms multiple times in history.
After gaining independence from Britain in 1947, Indian troops entered Goa and annexed the region which was under Portuguese rule for over 450 years.
