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Several press reports and prominent commentators on Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat’s speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden tell us that his words on ‘oneness in diversity’ mark a welcome departure from hardline Hindu supremacism. Others believe that Bhagwat has given the RSS a liberal spin in the US, in words he would not use in India.
Both these assessments are off the mark.
Bhagwat has given near-identical speeches several times in India, including earlier this year. Indeed he told his US audience as much, recalling his 2018 speech given at Nagpur. He uses the same formulations in both the US and India, but in the latter, he is more expansive.
Place one next to the other, and the Hindu supremacist sophistry becomes unmistakeable.
The concept of ‘universal oneness’ can mean that all beings, all things, and all spiritual traditions are equally valid expressions of the same perennial philosophy, the same inner oneness.
It would follow that the Hindu traditions too would be one among such diverse expressions. But that’s not what Bhagwat said. At the NYC event, he said the Hindu tradition is synonymous with the philosophy of oneness. Hindus, he said, safeguarded this philosophy from “foreign invaders”, and generously shared it with the rest of the world.
In his 2018 iteration of this point, he explained that the RSS “insists on the name ‘Hindu’” to stand for all the traditions born in Bharat (“Bharat mein janmein sabhi panth-sampradayon ka naam hindutva hai”). The RSS, he said, considered “Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Sanatanis, and Arya Samajis” to be Hindu, but these communities were free to call themselves ‘Bharatiya’ if they so preferred.
Speaking at a ‘100 Years of the Sangh Journey’ event in February this year, he said that ‘everyone living in India is Hindu,’ and all would have to accept Hindutva as their national/civilisational identity sooner or later. He assured Muslims and Christians, as well as Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Parsis, that they could practice their religion while “accepting Hindutva”, and in fact “Hindutva is a guarantee of your safety.” If they do not accept Hindutva, is Bhagwat implying that there is no guarantee of their safety?
Unity in diversity is possible when separate and equal entities choose to unite with each other. Bhagwat on the other hand deploys ‘oneness’ to impose a single identity on the others, whether or not they like it. At the Sangh centenary event, Bhagwat declared that repeated calls for “Hindu–Muslim unity” were harmful. Hindus and Muslims are “already one,” he said, so to speak of ‘Muslim’ as a distinct community/identity was divisive and compromised the ‘oneness’ of the nation.
In April this year, Bhagwat declared that there was no need to announce the country to be a Hindu Nation, because this was self-evident. The Ram Temple, he said, stands proud in Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid once stood, and this was proof that in Modi’s leadership, the Hindu Nation was resurgent.
As Bhagwat has it, then, diverse ‘others’ must accept Hindutva as the One that unites them.
At the Sangh centenary event, he explained, as he had in 2018, that while all Indians are Hindus, they are classified as four kinds of Hindus. The first, those who know they are Hindu and have pride in being Hindu. “Just as one solves the easy questions first in an exam paper”, he said, the RSS organises these proud Hindus first. But eventually it aims to organise all the others.
The second kind are those who say, “we know we are Hindu, so what”, that is, they take no pride in it. The third are those who know they’re Hindu, but don’t acknowledge it publicly out of “material considerations or political correctness.”
And the fourth, he said, are those who have forgotten, or been made to forget, that they are Hindu. In November 2025 he made it clear who were the fourth category: Muslims and Christians, he said, are descended from Hindu ancestors, but they have forgotten it or were “made to forget it.”
The “core culture of the country is Hindu,” he had said, and “that is why Bharat is a Hindu Rashtra.”
The RSS organises proud Hindus, he said, who in turn reach out to the latter three sections of Hindus, so that eventually “every Hindu must realise he is a Hindu.”
The word ‘pride’ is the key. Surely ‘oneness’, the realisation that one’s own spiritual tradition has no monopoly on wisdom, requires humility? Instead, Bhagwat says the RSS organises proud Hindus who then work to teach non-Hindus to become proud Hindus.
In this light, go back to his NYC assertion that Hindus who did not want Muslims are not true Hindus. Proud Hindus must ‘want’ Muslims, not as proud Muslims, but as wayward Hindus who must re-learn Hindu pride.
In 2018, he said all problems and disputes can be resolved peacefully by dialogue, as long as (emphasis mine) all those involved “have Bharat’s interests at heart, have pride in our ancestors, and devotion for our culture.” If Muslims and Christians do not display pride in Hindu ancestry and devotion to Hindu culture, is Bhagwat suggesting that they are opposed to national interests, and therefore that ‘disputes’ with them cannot be resolved peacefully?
In the US and Canada, he declared that Bharat, inspired by the principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the entire world is one family) had always been a refuge for the persecuted. But when it comes to persecuted Muslim refugees, Bhagwat has not only been unwelcoming, but has even rationalised their persecution. He said Rohingyas had been driven out of Myanmar “because of their links with terror groups,” and had now “infiltrated” India. At the Sangh centenary event, he incited people to “detect” Bangladeshi “infiltrators,” whose “language gives them away,” and deny them employment. He is rationalising the victimisation and violence meted out to Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers.
The claim that foreign Muslim terrorists have conspiratorially ‘infiltrated’ Indian society and voter rolls is a pretext to challenge the citizenship status of every Indian Muslim. Bhagwat is encouraging Hindus to denounce their Muslim neighbours and practice apartheid towards Muslim workers. This is hardly the language of oneness.
Bhagwat says that the sacred code of the Hindus doesn’t call itself the Hindu dharmashastra, rather it is the ‘Manav Dharmashastra’, the moral code for all humanity. The ‘Manav dharmashastra’ is another term for the Manusmriti, which prescribes a rigid caste and gender hierarchy, and is especially violent towards inter-caste sexual relationships that go ‘against the grain’ (pratiloma) of this hierarchy. How is a code that classifies certain castes as clean and others as unclean, be compatible with ‘oneness’?
At Bhagwat’s event in Canada, the representative for TUSHA (the United States and Hindu Association of North America) said that Hindus and Sikhs were “proud that we are born in the world’s oldest multicultural country Bharat and we are living in the world's youngest multicultural country Canada.” But Bhagwat makes it clear that ‘Bharat’ is not a multicultural country, but a Hindu nation that requires pride and devotion in Hindu culture alone.
Bhagwat’s conception of ‘oneness’ goes back to that of RSS founding father Guru Golwalkar. In Bunch of Thoughts (1966) he declared that Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains were divisive because they did not accept Hindutva. Those who demanded the abolition of untouchability, caste-based reservations, women’s equality, an end to the imposition of Sanskrit-based Hindi, indeed those who acknowledged the existence of discrimination and oppression in society, were all guilty of promoting “hatred, enmity, selfishness.”
By implication, the Constitution of India itself promotes divisiveness and hatred, because it protects the specific rights of individual citizens and minorities, and recognises the duty of the State and citizens to protect these rights.
By the Sangh’s calculus, recognising diverse communities, both Hindu and non-Hindu, as equal citizens, amounts to dividing Hindu India. In the name of ‘oneness’ it demands that Hindutva be accepted by all citizens, all communities, as the only acceptable identity and ideology: One Hindu Nation, One Hindu Culture, One Hindu citizenship.
Kavita Krishnan is a Marxist feminist activist and author.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
