Calls grow to block ‘Hindu-supremacist’ RSS chief’s visa ahead of New York City event

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) urged Washington on Thursday to revoke the visa of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat, ahead of a planned event in New York City on Saturday.

The group said that India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has enforced policies close to the RSS's ideology, and is discriminating against communities, noting that religious freedoms in India are deteriorating, with violence and incitement rampant.

"We urge the US government to consider targeted sanctions against RSS members and Indian officials complicit in religious freedom violations, including revoking the visa issued to Mohan Bhagwat and making him ineligible for future entry into the United States,” a statement from USCIRF read.

The RSS is a Hindu nationalist group from which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP emerged. Bhagwat's event on Saturday has already triggered protests in New York this week, with activists demanding the event be cancelled over the RSS’s targeting of religious minorities.

Turning India into a ‘Hindu ethnostate’

Safa Ahmed, a board member at the Indian American Muslim Council told The New Arab that Bhagwat’s visit to New York City is part of a campaign to rehabilitate the RSS’s image internationally.

Ahmed described Bhagwat as the leader of “the largest far-right organization in the world, and an all-male paramilitary group that works to mainstream Hindutva, or Hindu supremacist ideology. This Nazi-inspired ideology explicitly calls on Hindus to turn India from a secular democracy into a Hindu ethnostate".

Earlier this year, the USCIRF recommended targeted sanctions against the RSS, noting the group had been involved in acts of extreme violence and intolerance against members of minority groups for decades.

“RSS offshoots have carried out mob lynchings of Muslims, attacked churches and worshippers, disrupted prayer services, and facilitated arrests of Christians on fabricated forced-conversion allegations. The year 2025 marked the fifth consecutive record year of anti-Christian violence, with nearly 900 reported incidents; at least 110 Christians reportedly remained jailed under anti-conversion laws in January 2026,” Ahmed said.

“Activists from the Indian Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Sikh, and Dalit communities oppose this event not just because of the horrific violence the organization has inflicted on minorities in India, but also because over 100 RSS-affiliated organizations are operating in the United States,” she continued.

Some of the chief concerns among activists are that the BJP has enforced anti-minority citizenship measures, anti-conversion and cow-slaughter laws, and other policies that have curtailed freedom of religion and expression.

In Assam, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been excluded from the citizenship register under the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), where people are designated as“foreigners", exposing them to detention and expulsion.

More recently, the “Special Intensive Revision” of electoral rolls removed millions of voters, prompting UN experts to warn of discriminatory disenfranchisement of minorities.

According to Ahmed, the RSS and affiliated groups also regularly engage in wedge politics in the US to position themselves as a “good” and “model” minority, while painting other minorities - especially Muslims and Sikhs - as violent and incompatible with American values.

She also said that many Hindu supremacists in India and the US are increasingly coming out in alignment with the white supremacist far right and the Make America Great Again movement.

The latest developments come as reports on Thursday also stated the organisers of the event’s account was suspended, and shortly reinstated amid backlash.

The American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue later posted on X, writing: “We are back up! We got “botted” by misguided opponents who tried to game the X algorithm and get our handle blocked.”

New York City Zohran Mamdani has also publicly denounced the event, adding however, that the city does not have any jurisdiction to cancel it.