New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Tuesday he does not support an upcoming event featuring Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), though he acknowledged the city likely has no power to stop it.
Bhagwat is scheduled to speak Saturday at Madison Square Garden as part of what organizers are calling the “Universal Oneness Celebration,” an event expected to draw around 5,000 attendees, local media reported. It is part of a broader global outreach tour tied to the RSS’s centenary year, wherein Bhagwat is visiting the United States, Canada and the UK.
When asked whether the event should be canceled at a press conference, Mamdani said: “I don’t support the rally, but I don’t know if the city has any jurisdiction on canceling a private event.”
Mamdani is the first Muslim and Indian American mayor in New York City’s history. He added that his opposition to the visit reflected his role leading a city that believes in “the belonging of each and every person, no matter their color, their creed, their religion, their faith, wherever they’re from.”
His mother is acclaimed Indian filmmaker Mira Nair. He added that he grew up with an understanding of India as “a pluralistic society of a secular Republic that believed in the belonging of each and every person who was from India.”
“It has been incredibly troubling to see the rise of a movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision.”
The event is organized by American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue, which says it has backing from over 135 Hindu American organizations and is meant to promote shared heritage and interfaith unity.
However, several interfaith and civil rights groups – including Hindus for Human Rights, the Indian American Muslim Council and the Interfaith Center of New York – have criticized the event over Bhagwat’s involvement and the RSS’s history. They held a news conference outside New York City Hall calling for the event to be canceled.
“Mohan Bhagwat does not represent Hindus. He leads an extremist Hindu nationalist movement that has fueled violence, exclusion and fear for minority communities,” said Sravya Tadepalli, Deputy Executive Director of Hindus for Human Rights, in a statement. “New York should not provide the RSS with a stage on which religious nationalism can be repackaged as unity.”
The RSS is a right-wing Hindu organization founded by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in 1925. Also referred to as the Sangh, it is Hindi for National Volunteer Organization. The group describes itself as a “Hindu centric civilizational, cultural movement” focused on uniting Hindus and disputes accusations that it promotes intolerance.
The RSS is the ideological parent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the prime minister has had a longstanding association with the organization.
In recent years, the organization has launched a global campaign to counter perceptions that it is a paramilitary group involved in violence against minority communities.
However, days earlier, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom urged sanctions against the RSS and asked the American government not to extend diplomatic courtesies to RSS members. The US government advisory body called the RSS an “umbrella organization whose sub-groups have perpetrated attacks on religious minorities, including Christians and Muslims.”
United Nations bodies and human rights groups have also pointed to a rise in abuses against India’s religious minorities in recent years, citing hate speech, a religion-based citizenship law, demolitions of Muslim-owned properties, the revocation of autonomy for Muslim-majority Kashmir, and more.
India’s BJP-led government denies any discriminatory intent, pointing to programs such as food subsidies and electrification initiatives, which it says benefit all communities.
The organization has been banned in India on multiple occasions, including in 1948 after a Hindu nationalist who had ties with the RSS assassinated independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.