On April 23, the Hudson Institute hosts the RSS General Secretary, seven weeks after USCIRF asked the State Department to sanction the outfit
Peter Friedrich
ON March 4, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its 2026 Annual Report. For the first time ever, USCIRF named Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for US sanctions, including asset freezes and entry bans, citing the RSS’s “responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom.”
Fifty days later, on April 23, the Hudson Institute hosts the RSS’s General Secretary, Dattatreya Hosabale, at its Washington offices. Hudson seats him for a solo fireside chat with Walter Russell Mead, the institute’s Ravenel B Curry III Distinguished Fellow. Mead delivers the closing remarks.
The event is “invite only.”
Hudson Institute is not convening a research forum. Hudson is laundering a paramilitary.
On April 23, four blocks from the White House and with American taxpayer subsidy, the think tank hands a solo Washington stage to the General Secretary of an organisation the US government’s own religious freedom body has asked be sanctioned, and seats the RSS’s lifelong political organiser on a policy panel with Bethany Poulos Morrison, the sitting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs. None of this is disputed. All of it is documented.
The RSS is a fascist paramilitary founded in 1925, the same year Hitler published Mein Kampf and founded the SS. Its co-founder B S Moonje travelled to Italy in 1931 to study Mussolini’s fascist institutions, then declared the RSS was their Indian equivalent. Its second Sarsanghchalak, or Supreme Chief, M S Golwalkar, wrote in 1939 that Nazi Germany’s purge of Jews was “race pride manifested at its highest” and “a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”
Independent India banned the RSS three times: in 1948 after an RSS member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, in 1975 during the Emergency, and in 1992 after its cadres demolished the Babri Masjid, triggering riots that killed more than 2,000 Muslims.
Nehru called the RSS, in a 1947 letter to provincial governors, “a private army… definitely proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines, even following the techniques of the organisation.”
The RSS’s religious wing, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), was classified as a “militant religious organisation” in the CIA World Factbook in June 2018, a designation the agency reportedly removed three weeks later after VHP pressure. RSS-affiliated groups allegedly carried out the pogroms in Gujarat in 2002 and Manipur from 2023, alongside lynchings and church burnings across India.
In four interviews with The Caravan magazine, conducted between 2012 and 2014 inside Ambala Central Jail, RSS member Swami Aseemanand, then accused of three bombings that killed scores of Muslims, alleged that current RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat personally sanctioned the attacks. Aseemanand told The Caravan that Bhagwat said of the violence: “It’s very important that it be done. But you should not link it to the Sangh.”
The list of the dead is long, and the victims divide into two categories. There are those killed directly by RSS members or by the paramilitary’s affiliated street organisations, and there are those killed under the political regime the RSS built to hold state power.
The direct dead: Mahatma Gandhi, shot through the chest in 1948 by an RSS member, Nathuram Godse. Graham Staines, an Australian missionary, burned alive inside his vehicle with his two young sons in Odisha in 1999 by the Bajrang Dal, the VHP’s militant youth wing. Ehsan Jafri, a former Member of Parliament, dismembered and burned alive at his Ahmedabad home in 2002 by a Hindu mob, while the Gujarat state police refused to respond. Bilkis Bano, pregnant, gang-raped the same week in 2002 by the same coordinated pogrom network, her three-year-old daughter’s skull crushed in front of her.
The regime dead: Mohammad Akhlaq, lynched in 2015 over rumours his family had eaten beef, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government elected the year before. Junaid Khan, 16, stabbed to death on a train in 2017 under the same government. Pehlu Khan, dairy farmer, beaten to death by cow vigilantes in 2017 under the same government. Stan Swamy, 84-year-old Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist, dead in Indian custody in 2021 after the BJP government denied him a straw to drink water, despite his Parkinson’s. More than 250 churches burned in Manipur since May 2023, under a BJP state government that the country’s ruling party refused to remove even as the violence escalated. Rohingya refugees, documented by Human Rights Watch in 2025, thrown from Indian naval vessels into the sea by the Indian military under the BJP civilian command.
These are not abstractions. These are people who had names.
Dattatreya Hosabale is not a moderate.
Outlook India documented in 2021 that the RSS made him its number-two, a position that “controls the actual functioning of the organisation” — because he would weaponise the RSS for BJP elections.
Within months of his elevation, Hosabale publicly endorsed “love jihad,” the Islamophobic conspiracy theory that casts Muslim men as predators waging a demographic war on Hindu women. He has demanded strict anti-conversion laws and “population control” measures. He has described Bangladeshi Muslims as “infiltrators” creating a demographic “imbalance.” He has called for the removal of the words “secular” and “socialist” from the preamble of the Indian Constitution, a demand the Congress Party called “a deliberate assault on the soul of our Constitution,” and the Communist Party (Marxist) said exposed the RSS’s “long-standing objective of subverting the Constitution and its intent to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra.”
In December 2025, at an event in Uttar Pradesh attended by lawmakers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP, Hosabale demanded that Indian Muslims perform Hindu rituals. On April 18, 2026, five days before his Hudson appearance, Hosabale sat for an exclusive interview with the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS)marking the RSS’s centenary. Asked about the organisation’s impact after a hundred years, he said: “The impact that RSS has is the Hindu nationalism… pride in our nation and culture and civilisation values.”
Hosabale is not stopping in Washington alone. Last Friday (April 17), he addressed the Thrive 2026 conference at Stanford University, sharing a stage with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former US National Security Advisor H R McMaster, delivering prepared remarks about “civilisational knowledge systems” and ethics in technology.
Hosabale is not the only senior RSS figure Hudson is hosting.
Directly preceding Hosabale’s fireside chat, Hudson has seated Ram Madhav on the panel titled “New Paths Forward for US-India Relations.” Madhav is a lifelong RSS. He has been a pracharak, a full-time RSS worker, since 1981. He served as the RSS’s national spokesperson from 2003 to 2014. He was National General Secretary of the BJP, the RSS’s political wing, from 2014 to 2020. He currently sits on the National Executive of the RSS. He presides over the India Foundation, the RSS-aligned think tank that describes itself as a curator of “Track 1.5 and Track 2 initiatives placing the India story on the global stage,” diplomatic shorthand for foreign-policy influence operations outside official channels.
In December 2013, months before Modi took power, the Swedish neo-fascist publisher Daniel Friberg, whose Arktos imprint distributes the literature of the European white-nationalist far right, travelled to New Delhi and personally met with Madhav. On Al Jazeera’s Head to Head in 2015, on camera, preserved on videotape, never retracted, Madhav declared that the RSS intends to erase Pakistan and Bangladesh and absorb both nations into a single Hindu state. On July 9, 2024, Madhav delivered the plenary address at the fourth National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, sharing the stage with Stephen Miller, Jack Posobiec, J D Vance, and Viktor Orbán’s political advisor. Madhav told the audience that he had come “to tell you about the success story of conservatism in India — the defeat of the left-liberal-Marxist-radical Islamist cabal in India.” On January 11, 2026, Madhav was in Chantilly, Virginia, addressing the Overseas Friends of BJP-USA, the BJP’s American organising arm and a registered foreign agent.
Fifteen weeks later, on April 23, Hudson Institute seats Madhav on an American policy panel. The sitting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Bethany Poulos Morrison, shares that panel with him.
Hudson is staging an event no American think tank has previously attempted.
A solo fireside chat is a format normally reserved for heads of state and Cabinet officials, and Hudson gives it to the General Secretary of a foreign paramilitary. The paramilitary’s intellectual ambassador gets seated next to a sitting federal official, and the Indian government’s own ambassador, Vinay Kwatra, opens the day. The India Foundation, the RSS-aligned think tank, is Hudson’s documented partner on the event, and the two have co-hosted invitation-only Washington events together since September 2023.
In 2021, when US Chargé d’Affaires Atul Keshap merely met with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in Delhi, Human Rights Watch’s Asia Advocacy Director John Sifton issued a public rebuke:
“The United States does not attend the Vietnam Communist Party’s General Assembly Jubilee, just as the US Ambassador to Germany in 1933 did not attend Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. You don’t do that… Don’t meet with party leaders who have overturned democracy, and certainly don’t meet with them when they are spouting such hateful and dangerous rhetoric.”
Sifton described a meeting. In Delhi. Involving a single diplomat.
Hudson flies the RSS’s number-two officer to Washington, sits him across from its most distinguished fellow for a live-streamed interview, and places a sitting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State on a panel with the RSS’s intellectual ambassador.
Sifton compared such a scenario to a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, and Hudson is hosting one in Washington.
Hudson knows what USCIRF said on March 4, knows what the RSS is, and knows what both Hosabale and Madhav have said. Hudson is doing it anyway.
Hudson Institute is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organisation. Its tax status is granted in exchange for operating in the public interest. Its Washington office sits four blocks from the White House. The distinguished-fellow titles, the invite-only access, the reliable Wall Street Journal platform, all of it is public infrastructure. American taxpayers subsidise it.
Hudson Institute is not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA was written for entities acting at the direction of foreign political movements. It was written for entities operating under documented partnerships with foreign political parties’ captive think tanks. It was written for entities convening a foreign party’s paramilitary leadership before sitting US federal officials. The statute describes Hudson’s April 23 event in plain language. The Department of Justice has declined to apply it.
USCIRF did its job on March 4.
The IRS, the Department of Justice, and Congress refuse to do theirs. On April 23, the RSS walks into Washington. The cameras roll. A sitting US federal official shakes hands with a paramilitary’s intellectual ambassador. The institute’s most distinguished fellow conducts the friendly interview. The world’s largest, oldest, and fastest-growing fascist outfit walks away with a fresh whitewash.
This is not engagement, research, or inquiry. This is the RSS’s de facto Washington office, operating openly, with the endorsement of a sitting US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
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Pieter Friedrich is an investigative journalist covering ethnonationalism, transnational repression, and South Asian geopolitics.
