On August 29, Mohan Bhagwat, chief of India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), will stand on a stage at Madison Square Garden and speak to thousands of Indian Americans about unity, civic responsibility, and global harmony. I have spent much of the last decade documenting what that language obscures. I served as a Trump-appointed commissioner and chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and now co-chair of the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Roundtable. Before Bhagwat’s audience applauds, he should be asked a direct question: will he sit down with the bipartisan federal body Congress created specifically to assess religious freedom conditions around the world?

I am a Christian, and I have spent my career defending the right of every person, of any faith or none, to practice their beliefs without fear. That mandate is why USCIRF has recommended, for seven consecutive years, that the State Department designate India a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) for engaging in or tolerating particularly severe violations of religious freedom, the same category reserved for the world’s most severe religious freedom violators. It is not a category India’s government enjoys sharing with Iran, North Korea, and Eritrea, and Delhi’s Ministry of External Affairs has repeatedly dismissed USCIRF’s findings as biased. But USCIRF’s record, built year after year, doesn’t rest on the claims of activists with an agenda. It draws on hearings, research, and firsthand testimony from Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits, and others who described the same deterioration from different corners of the same country.

What USCIRF reports actually found

USCIRF’s research on South Asia’s anti-conversion laws found that these statutes, ostensibly neutral, have been disproportionately enforced against religious minorities seeking to leave India’s majority faith, and we called for their repeal. USCIRF’s review of the Citizenship Amendment Act found that, combined with a nationwide National Register of Citizens, it risks rendering millions of Indian Muslims stateless. And in its 2026 annual report, USCIRF went further than in any previous year: it named the RSS itself as an organization whose officials should face targeted sanctions for their role in severe violations of religious freedom.

That last finding deserves more attention than it has received. The organization Bhagwat leads is not simply the subject of criticism from press coverage or advocacy groups. It is, in the judgment of a commission created by an act of Congress and staffed by appointees of both political parties, an organization whose conduct rises to the level of sanctionable religious persecution.

That should matter when its leader comes to Madison Square Garden to speak about global harmony.

A pattern, not an incident

None of this is new to Bhagwat. I have watched conditions for India’s religious minorities worsen year after year: churches burned and pastors beaten in BJP-governed states while mosques and madrasas have been demolished as “encroachments.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself was denied a US visa for nearly a decade after the 2002 Gujarat violence against Muslims that took place on his watch as chief minister. 

Modi is a product of the same organization now presenting itself to American audiences as a voice for pluralism. The RSS is the ideological parent of the BJP.  It cannot claim the achievements of Indian democracy while disclaiming responsibility for what has happened to religious minorities under governments built from its own cadre.

The challenge

So I have a direct challenge for Mohan Bhagwat: meet with USCIRF while you are in the United States. Sit with commissioners, hear directly what they have documented, and respond to it in the same room rather than from a stage surrounded by well-wishers. If the RSS’s centenary-year outreach is a genuine attempt to address what it calls “misconceptions,” there is no better place to start than with the body Congress created to independently assess violations of religious freedom.

I would also ask Bhagwat to sit with India’s own religious minorities in America: the Indian American Muslim Council, which has tracked the human cost of Hindutva politics for over two decades; the Federation of Indian-American Christian Organizations in North America, which documented more than 1,500 attacks on Christians in India in a single year; Sikh American organizations, whose faith the RSS has long tried to fold into a single Hindu identity that Sikhs themselves have repeatedly rejected; and Dalit civil rights advocates who have fought Hindutva-aligned lobbying against basic caste-discrimination protections in American states.

A unity tour that only faces friendly crowds is not unity. It is avoidance. Religious freedom is not a partisan issue, and I did not treat it as one when a Republican president appointed me to defend it. I am not asking Mohan Bhagwat to agree with USCIRF’s findings. I am asking him to hear them, in person, and answer for them. 

If Bhagwat wants Americans to believe the RSS stands for unity and global harmony, he should be willing to face those who have documented a very different record. That is the minimum any leader claiming to represent unity owes the people his organization’s record has affected.