The General Secretary of an organisation the US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended for sanctions, on stage in Washington fifty days later
Pieter Friedric
ON April 23, 2026, Hudson Institute hosted Dattatreya Hosabale — General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — at its Washington offices for a solo fireside chat with the institute’s Distinguished Fellow, Walter Russell Mead. Hudson seated Ram Madhav, the India Foundation’s president, on a panel scheduled to include a sitting US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. It seated Vijay Chauthaiwale, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s sitting Head of Foreign Affairs, alongside a former Biden-era Deputy Secretary of State.
The conference convened fifty days after the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended the RSS for US sanctions.
Hudson Institute and the India Foundation have collaborated for nearly three years. The April 23 conference was the most consequential operational event in that partnership to date.
The India Foundation is the institutional bridge between Hudson and the RSS.
It was founded by Shaurya Doval — son of Ajit Doval, India’s National Security Adviser since 2014. Its president is Ram Madhav, a lifelong RSS pracharak (full-time RSS organizer) since 1981 and a current member of the RSS National Executive. At various points, its board has included sitting Indian government ministers — Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha, and Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar.
Shaurya Doval, asked on camera in a 2017 The Wire investigation to describe the India Foundation’s work, said the organization “works very closely with the BJP and the government in terms of many aspects of our policy formulation.” Asked to disclose the Foundation’s funding sources, Doval offered only the phrase “Conferences, Advertisement, Journal” — declining to name donors, amounts, or commercial partners. Similarly, The Caravan, profiling the Doval network the same year, reportedthat “a former official of the ministry of external affairs who is familiar with the foundation told me it is opaque about its finances.” Even earlier, in 2015, senior Indian bureaucrats quoted by the Economic Times described the India Foundation as “Modi Sarkar’s quasi-NAC” — a shadow policy body operating outside formal government structure. By 2021, ThePrint described the Foundation’s “grip” over the Modi government’s policy thinking using the same characterization.
In the academic literature, Anuradha Sajjanhar’s 2023 Journal of Political Ideologiesstudy classifies BJP-aligned think tanks like the India Foundation as instruments of “soft Hindutva” — organizations that “avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda nevertheless.”
In his own public biography, Madhav describes himself as “at the centre of curating many Track 1.5 and Track 2 initiatives placing the India story on global stage.”
Track 1.5 and Track 2 are terms of art. Track 1 is formal diplomacy by credentialed officials. Track 2 is the parallel channel conducted by academics and think tanks. Governments use Track 2 for activity they want off the record — activity that Track 1 cannot conduct without producing diplomatic records, press coverage, and congressional oversight. Track 1.5 is the hybrid zone, where sitting officials participate under the cover of nongovernmental convenings.
Hudson Institute is its American partner.
The partnership’s operational record is on Hudson’s own pages.
The founding event, on September 29, 2023, was “India’s Role in a New Pacific Order”— and it put a sitting Cabinet minister, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, on Hudson’s stage with the India Foundation’s own board chairman. Hudson’s own event page described the September 2023 co-host billing without euphemism:
Join Hudson Institute and the India Foundation for an invitation-only event focused on the role Washington and the American business community can play in strengthening bilateral economic and strategic relationships between the US and India.
Between that founding event and April 23, 2026, both institutions kept the partnership active. Mead, for instance, filed four additional Wall Street Journal columns on India, including one filed from Tawang, a restricted military zone on the Chinese-disputed border, during a Hudson-India Foundation delegation trip in November 2024. By Mead’s own admission in that Journal column, “Our local host was the India Foundation, which has close relations with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Thanks to the foundation, a small delegation organized by the Hudson Institute (my think tank base in Washington) had been cleared to visit this sensitive border region.”
Most recently, on October 7, 2025, Narendra Modi personally hosted Mead at his residence in New Delhi, photographed the meeting, and posted the image on his own X account, identifying Mead by his Hudson Institute title.
This is the partnership infrastructure: a Washington 501(c)(3) repeatedly hosting a New Delhi think tank founded by the Indian National Security Adviser’s son, run by an RSS National Executive member, and openly self-described as a Track 1.5 diplomacy vehicle.
What Hudson scheduled, and what did not happen, is documented.
On April 14, 2026, Hudson Institute’s published event page named Bethany Poulos Morrison — the sitting US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs — as a Featured Speaker on Panel III: “New Paths Forward for U.S.-India Relations.” Morrison was scheduled to share that panel with Ram Madhav. The New India Abroadreport on April 14, nine days before the conference, confirmed all three panelists: Madhav, Kurt Campbell, and Morrison.
Meanwhile, the USCIRF sanctions recommendation against the RSS had been on the books since March 4. Parts 1 and 2 of this series, naming Morrison’s scheduled appearance with Madhav as central evidence of the partnership question, were published April 20 and 21. On April 21, a 25-organization coalition led by the Indian American Muslim Council publicly condemned Hudson’s hosting of RSS leaders.
Morrison did not appear on Panel III on April 23. Post-event coverage from Indian press outlets — The Tribune, IndiaWest, IANS, Prokerala — covered Panel III in detail and named only three participants: Madhav, Campbell, and Stimson Center senior fellow Elizabeth Threlkeld.
After the event, Hudson removed Morrison from the published Featured Speakers list on its event page. Threlkeld was substituted in. The April 9, 2026 Internet Archive snapshot of Hudson’s event page preserves the original billing with Morrison’s name on the Featured Speakers list.
A 501(c)(3) Washington think tank scheduled a sitting US federal official to share a stage with the RSS’s National Executive member fifty days after USCIRF’s sanctions recommendation. Following weeks of public accountability pressure, the federal official did not appear. After the event, Hudson rewrote its own public record to remove her.
The withdrawal does not undo the scheduling. The scrub does not undo Hudson’s institutional decision.
What Hudson’s stage produced, a federal employee who attended described to me as an effort to launder the RSS.
Hosabale told the Hudson audience that the RSS is not an “Indian version of the Ku Klux Klan,” is not a supremacist organization, and is not properly understood as a religious movement at all. Hindu identity, as the RSS understands it, is “a civilisational identity, not a religious one… based on world view, human relation with nature and historic facts.” The fears that Indian religious minorities have expressed are misconceptions to be clarified through “continuous and comprehensive dialogue.” The RSS’s relationship to Modi’s government is alignment, not direction. Hosabale said the RSS “has expanded its outreach to thinking and influencing sections… particularly the Western countries.”
Each of these moves did the same work. They denied the RSS’s documented record — three Indian government bans, decades of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian violence, USCIRF’s March 4 sanctions recommendation — by reclassifying the organization as a benign civilizational project misunderstood by its critics. Mead did not press on any of it. Jairam Ramesh, the Indian National Congress’s general secretary for communications, posted on X the same day that the RSS “derived inspiration from European fascist movements,” citing “abundant evidence.” Yet Ramesh was not the one on the Hudson stage.
This was the General Secretary of an organization the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended for sanctions, on stage in Washington fifty days later, defining his organization in the language he wanted American policy elites to internalize. Nothing in the room challenged him.
Meanwhile, on Madhav’s panel, a different kind of failure unfolded.
Madhav made factually incorrect claims about his own government’s foreign policy. He told the Hudson audience: “India agreed to stop buying oil from Iran. We agreed to stop buying oil from Russia despite so much criticism from our opposition. India agreed to a 50% tariff without saying too much.” Within hours, Madhav publicly retracted:
“What I said was wrong. India didn’t agree to stopping import of oil from Russia anytime. Also it vigorously protested 50 per cent tariff imposition. I was trying to make a limited counterpoint to the other panellist, but it was factually incorrect. My apologies.”
The president of Hudson’s institutional partner, at Hudson’s own conference, made false statements about Indian foreign policy and had to retract them publicly. Hudson’s programming did not produce scholarly dialogue. It produced messaging that could not survive contact with the public record.
This is what Hudson Institute platformed.
What April 23 produced, at its close, was the image that makes the partnership unmistakable.
Ram Madhav walked out of the Hudson venue accompanied by two men. The first was Vijay Chauthaiwale, the BJP’s Head of Department of Foreign Affairs and a featured panelist at the same conference. The second was Adapa Prasad — National President of Overseas Friends of BJP-USA.
On the sidewalk, I asked Madhav directly about the RSS’s documented record — the violence against Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs the organization is implicated in. Madhav did not answer. He got into a waiting car with Chauthaiwale and Prasad, and the three of them drove off together.
Overseas Friends of BJP-USA has been registered with the US Department of Justice since August 27, 2020, as a foreign agent of the Bharatiya Janata Party under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Its FARA filings describe it as operating “on behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party” in the United States.
That was the partnership in motion.
What Hudson did on April 23, 2026, was hand the leadership of a US-sanctions-recommended foreign paramilitary a Washington policy stage.
What that leadership did with the platform is now in the public record. Hosabale used it to soften the RSS’s image for American audiences. Madhav used it to make claims about Indian foreign policy that he had to retract. Madhav, the BJP’s Head of Department of Foreign Affairs, and the BJP’s FARA-registered American lobbying operation departed Hudson together.
This was not research. It was a reputation laundering operation conducted on a tax-exempt American policy stage four blocks from the White House.
Therefore, the question is no longer whether Hudson has been reckless. The question is whether anyone with the authority and the standing to examine what Hudson did will choose to do so.
Hudson’s board of trustees has the institutional record; the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have jurisdiction to examine the foreign-influence questions Hudson’s programming raises; the American press has the facts.
Finally, the Internal Revenue Service has authority to examine Hudson’s foreign-funding disclosures. Hudson has a documented history of receiving foreign-government-adjacent funding without disclosure. In 2020, The American Prospectreported that Hudson had received more than $100,000 in 2018 from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) — Taiwan’s de facto embassy in the United States. None of Hudson’s researchers disclosed the funding in their published work favoring closer US-Taiwan ties. Moreover, Hudson has also received funding from the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), a Japanese government-related trade promotion body.
Whether the India Foundation or its BJP-aligned principals have made financial contributions to Hudson since September 2023 is not publicly known. Hudson has not disclosed the financial arrangements of the November 2024 Tawang delegation either — which side bore which costs, and whether any Indian government entity provided support. These are facts Hudson is required to disclose on its Form 990 filings.
USCIRF did its job on March 4.
The April 23 conference is the test of whether anyone else will do theirs.
