Mohan Bhagwat has given his critics an unusually generous proposition to work with. Speaking in New York under the banner of ‘Universal Oneness’, the RSS chief invoked VasudhaivaKutumbakamor the world is one family, spoke of the dignity of every human being and said that different religious paths ultimately lead towards the same truth. He went further: if a Hindu believes there should be no Muslims in India, he said, that the person ceases to be a Hindu.These are welcome words. Let’s take them seriously, because once we do, the questions for the RSS become unavoidable.
If all religious paths lead towards the same ultimate reality, why should changing paths become a matter for the state? If a Hindu freely chooses Christianity, a Christian embraces Islam or a Muslim chooses another faith, has the destination changed because the traveller changed roads? Laws against conversion through force, fraud or coercion are legitimate. But when a consenting adult’s voluntary change of faith invites declarations, official scrutiny or investigation, the state begins to enter the territory of conscience. Otherwise, ‘all paths are worthy of respect’ quietly becomes: all paths are acceptable, provided you remain on the one into which you were born. That is not freedom of conscience. It is inherited identity guarded by political power.
This makes America an extraordinarily ironic place for Bhagwat’s sermon. The United States hardly needs the RSS to teach it that different religions can coexist. Its constitutional order already protects the freedom to believe, preach, reject or change religion. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, atheists and converts do not need Bhagwat’s permission to coexist. The state does not decide which road to God an adult citizen may take.VasudhaivaKutumbakam is worth preaching anywhere. But America is hardly where that philosophy faces its hardest test. Its real test is India.
The contradiction becomes sharper because the RSS simultaneously defines India as a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. Sangh leaders argue that the term is civilisational rather than theocratic and does not exclude Muslims or Christians. Take that claim seriously too. Bhagwat has now supplied a standard by which it can be judged. If wanting an India without Muslims is contrary to Hindu values, what happens when Muslims are portrayed as ‘infiltrators’, ‘demographic threats’ or ‘people whose loyalty must constantly be proved’? Why does the ideological leadership of the Hindu nationalist movement not confront such language more forcefully in India, which is its karmabhoomi?
The question is not whether the RSS orders every inflammatory speech or every act of violence committed in the name of Hindu causes. Such a claim requires evidence. The harder question is responsibility. The RSS has spent a century building an extraordinary network of organisations and shaping a political movement whose most successful expression is today’s BJP. It cannot claim ideological parenthood when that movement triumphs and become a distant relative whenever its language turns ugly. Influence carries responsibility.
And VasudhaivaKutumbakam faces another test even before we reach Muslims and Christians: caste. Can the world truly become one family while notions of purity and pollution continue to divide people within the Hindu fold? Untouchability was constitutionally abolished decades ago, but caste humiliation did not disappear with the Constitution.
A recent incident makes the question painfully contemporary. After Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, a Dalit, addressed a rally in Haldwani, Uttarakhand, a shuddhikaran ritual was performed at the venue. The organisers denied that Kharge’s caste was the reason, while Congress called the episode an expression of untouchability. Beyond that political dispute lies a far more disturbing question: if the world is one family, how can the presence of another human being leave a place in need of ‘purification’? What kind of VasudhaivaKutumbakam can coexist with the very idea that a fellow Hindu may somehow render a space impure?
Bhagwat himself has spoken against caste discrimination, and that should be acknowledged. But oneness must mean more than condemning untouchability in principle. It must reach the Dalit denied dignity, the backward community struggling for equal opportunity and those historically denied equal access to social power and learning. A philosophy large enough to embrace the whole world must first ensure that nobody within its own home is higher or lower, pure or impure by birth.
The international reporting around Bhagwat’s visit shows why these questions followed him to New York. Associated Press framed the event through protests, calls for sanctions and the debate over Hindu nationalism, even devoting a section to the RSS effort to ‘engage and change its image’. The Wall Street Journal described the international tour as an effort to build recognition and credibility beyond India. Al Jazeera quoted critics who called it a ‘goodwill tour’ aimed at improving the RSS’s image abroad – a characterisation the RSS rejects. Different publications and different editorial traditions, yet their coverage converged on a broader question: is the RSS simply explaining itself to the world, or is it also trying to change how the world sees it back at home?
There is a simpler and perhaps fairer way to examine that question: put New York and India beside each other. In New York, all religious paths deserve respect; in India, conversion between those paths is increasingly regulated. In New York, Muslims cannot be excluded from India; in India, critics document persistent anti-Muslim hate speech and ask why Hindu nationalist leadership does not confront it more forcefully. In New York, diversity must be preserved; in India, the RSS simultaneously defines the nation as a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. In New York, VasudhaivaKutumbakam; in India, continuing disputes over anti-conversion laws, cow vigilantism, demolitions, caste and minority rights. The contradictions do not need embellishment. They need answers.
The same standard must apply to cow vigilantism, attacks on religious gatherings and hate speech directed at minorities. Crime must be investigated, forced conversion prosecuted and illegal construction dealt with according to law. But suspicion cannot become guilt, religion cannot become evidence and birth cannot determine human worth.
There is no need, therefore, to dismiss Bhagwat’s New York speech simply as hypocrisy. That would make the argument too easy. The more demanding response is to place the RSS before the words of its own chief and ask it to answer them. If Bhagwat says Muslims are an inseparable part of India, why is the RSS not heard more forcefully confronting language that portrays them as ‘outsiders’, ‘suspects’ or ‘threats to the nation’? If preserving diversity is its principle, why is the same force not visible in defending the religious freedom of Christians? If caste discrimination and untouchability are unacceptable, why does Indian society still have room for notions such as shuddhikaran after the presence of a Dalit, and where is the ideological force of the Sangh against that mentality? And if ‘Hindu Rashtra’ genuinely means an India in which Muslims, Christians, Dalits and every other Indian belong equally, prove it not through definitions and speeches but through the lives of people in India.
That is the real question for the RSS: is the Sangh prepared to hold itself in India to the principles its chief has proclaimed before the world in New York?
And then comes the final irony: why travel to America to preach religious coexistence? The First Amendment already gives Americans extraordinarily strong protection for freedom of religion and speech. A Muslim doesn’t require Hindu acceptance to remain Muslim. A Christian doesn’t require permission to preach Christianity. A Hindu doesn’t need permission to practise Hinduism. A citizen who changes faith doesn’t need an ideological organisation to approve the journey. America has its own long history of racism, religious prejudice and discrimination, but its constitutional principle on this question is clear.
VasudhaivaKutumbakam is not merely an attractive political slogan; its roots lie in ancient Hindu thought. The Maha Upanishad expresses its moral core in a striking contrast: the narrow-minded divide humanity into ‘one’s own’ and ‘the other’; for the broad-minded, the whole world is one family. If Bhagwat genuinely presents that principle as part of the RSS worldview, then perhaps the most important audience for this lecture is not an American gathering in New York but the Sangh’s own cadre. And perhaps a more consequential venue than Madison Square Garden would be the RSS headquarters in Nagpur or its annual gathering, where Bhagwat could tell his own workers: if the world is one family, the Muslim is not ‘the other’, the Christian is not ‘the other’, the Dalit is neither inferior nor impure, and a person who freely changes his religious path does not cease to belong to the human family. To preach VasudhaivaKutumbakam in New York is a message; to make it a standard of belief and conduct for the RSS cadre in Nagpur would be its real test.
The RSS has carried VasudhaivaKutumbakam from Nagpur to New York in its centenary year. That is only half the journey. Now the question is whether the message that ‘the world is one family’, delivered in New York, will return to Nagpur as an equally clear principle for the Sangh’s own cadre. For the truth of VasudhaivaKutumbakam will not be proved on a global stage, but at home by erasing the line between ‘one’s own’ and ‘the other’.