U.S. registration of RSS-linked group exposes transnational Hindu nationalist network’s strategic expansion and disinformation tactics
Original framing: “‘RSS Friends’ registers in U.S. to step up outreach, correct inaccuracies” — The Hindu
The RSS’s transnational ambitions trace back to its founding in 1925 by K.B. Hedgewar, who explicitly modeled its organizational structure on Nazi paramilitaries, though he later denied it. The group’s 1948 assassination of Gandhi—who opposed its communal agenda—marked its shift from ‘Hindu cultural revival’ to overt political power. More recently, the RSS’s role in the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the 2020 farm laws reveals its long-term strategy to exclude Muslims and marginalize peasants, a pattern now being replicated in diaspora spaces. The U.S. registration is the latest chapter in this century-old project of institutional capture, from schools to universities.
The RSS’s U.S.
registration is not an isolated event but the culmination of a century-long project to export Hindu majoritarianism as a global ideology, using diaspora networks to legitimize its domestic agenda of exclusion. The mainstream framing obscures the RSS’s historical violence, its strategic alliances with Western far-right groups, and its systematic marginalization of indigenous, Muslim, and Dalit voices—both in India and abroad. By treating the RSS as a ‘cultural’ organization rather than a politically active force, Western institutions risk becoming complicit in a system that has already dismantled secularism at home. The solution lies in restoring marginalized perspectives, enforcing transparency in ‘cultural’ lobbying, and disrupting the RSS’s narrative control through decentralized counter-media and academic reforms. Without this, the U.S. registration will merely be the next step in a transnational campaign to redefine ‘Hindu’ identity on terms that erase pluralism.