There is an old observation that a nation’s character is best read not in what it celebrates but in who it leaves behind. India’s recent trajectory offers a useful test case. Protests in New York, paired with a fresh push from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) for targeted sanctions, have forced renewed attention onto the growing institutional reach of Hindu nationalism. USCIRF has called on Washington to sanction leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Indian government officials, and has gone further still, requesting that the visa of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat be revoked outright. USCIRF Chair Dr. Asif Mahmood framed this as a response to a rapidly deteriorating religious freedom environment, one driven by incitement at the state level and violence directed at minority communities. Outside Madison Square Garden, a coalition of 48 civil society organizations, among them Hindus for Human Rights, the Indian American Muslim Council, the Sikh Coalition, and the Dalit Solidarity Forum, assembled to oppose a public appearance by Bhagwat. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani added his own voice to the criticism, calling the rise of Hindu nationalism deeply troubling and reaffirming his commitment to a secular, pluralistic society.
This international scrutiny did not emerge in a vacuum. It is best understood as a response to a decades long project to redefine India’s constitutional identity from the ground up. Founded in 1925 and shaped in part by the structural logic of early 20th century European nationalist movements, the RSS has functioned for generations as a patient grassroots network with a singular aim: converting a secular republic into an explicitly Hindu state. Through its political vehicle, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), core elements of that Hindutva vision have migrated from the political fringe into the machinery of mainstream governance. Critics and human rights monitors argue this migration has steadily worn down democratic safeguards, producing an environment in which non-Hindu populations face official discrimination and vigilante violence with limited consequence for either.
Decades of institutional expansion have driven Hindutva priorities from grassroots networks into the core apparatus of national governance.
At the center of the dispute sits Article 25 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion to every citizen without qualification. The nationalist framework, by contrast, treats India first as a homeland for its Hindu majority, leaving minorities to either assimilate or accept marginal status. This is not merely rhetorical positioning. Over the past decade it has translated directly into policy. The Citizenship Amendment Act, combined with the National Register of Citizens, generated widespread anxiety among millions of Bengali Muslims over their legal standing, arriving alongside the construction of detention centers in Assam. More than a dozen states have since passed strict anti conversion laws that fall disproportionately on interfaith couples and constrain minority religious gatherings.
Beyond formal legislation, state governments have increasingly turned to punitive administrative measures that bypass the courts altogether, a practice now widely known as bulldozer justice. Local authorities in several states have repeatedly deployed heavy machinery to demolish homes, businesses, and places of worship belonging to Muslims in the aftermath of communal unrest. Rights organizations describe these demolitions as a form of illegal collective punishment designed to intimidate rather than adjudicate. At the same time, law enforcement is frequently accused of selective inaction, allowing armed vigilante groups to operate against minority neighborhoods, clergy, and houses of worship largely unchecked.
Extrajudicial administrative demolitions and selective law enforcement increasingly replace formal judicial processes in communal disputes.
This trajectory carries a measurable human cost. Independent monitors have documented that more than 80 percent of recorded mob lynchings and cow vigilante attacks since 2014 occurred in states governed by the BJP. Violence tied to cow protection alone has caused at least 78 deaths and hundreds of additional injuries, with Muslims accounting for more than 86 percent of those killed. Christian communities describe a comparable escalation, with rights monitors recording more than 700 violent incidents targeting churches, rural congregations, and pastors across Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh in a single year. Dalits, meanwhile, continue to face violent reprisal for the ordinary exercise of civic life, accessing public resources, marking cultural events, or challenging entrenched caste hierarchies.
The pressure has since migrated online, where digital harassment and generative AI have expanded the available tools of intimidation considerably. Early efforts relied on open source applications like Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai, which listed more than a hundred prominent Muslim women, journalists, lawyers, and activists, in fabricated online auctions. More recently, political operatives and right wing accounts have adopted deepfakes and AI generated media to produce degrading content and inflammatory campaign material. Regional party chapters have released animated advertisements depicting caricatured Muslims overtaking public infrastructure, imagery calibrated specifically to stoke demographic anxiety in the run up to elections.
This dynamic has not remained confined within India’s borders either. American and Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies have opened investigations into alleged state linked surveillance, harassment, and targeted plots against diaspora activists and Sikh dissidents abroad. It is precisely this pattern that has led USCIRF to repeatedly recommend that the U.S. State Department designate India a Country of Particular Concern, a recommendation echoed by the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project, which continues to list India among the highest risk locations for mass targeted violence.
Transnational targeting of diaspora groups has prompted international security investigations and calls for diplomatic sanctions.
These transnational dimensions explain why diaspora coalitions in New York declined to treat a high profile overseas appearance as a routine cultural gathering. At the demonstrations outside Madison Square Garden, organizers were deliberate in framing their opposition as a matter of civil rights rather than religious hostility. Sravya Tadepalli of Hindus for Human Rights was explicit on this point, noting that Bhagwat does not speak for all Hindus and characterizing his organization’s broader agenda as one built around exclusion rather than cohesion across South Asia.
Extending international platforms to majoritarian figures carries consequences that outlast the events themselves, lending a measure of global legitimacy to domestic policy at home. As federal bodies like USCIRF continue to press for concrete sanctions and visa restrictions, Washington faces a widening tension between the convenience of an existing diplomatic relationship and the human rights principles it claims to uphold. The protests in New York are best read as a signal that international advocacy networks intend to keep pressing that tension rather than let it quietly resolve itself, on the premise that ignoring domestic persecution abroad ultimately erodes the credibility of secular democracy everywhere, not only in South Asia.
About the Author
Adam Reed is an International affairs analyst focusing on geopolitics, defense strategy, and global security trends.