RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s ‘secretive New York hosts’
Al Jazeera reports Bhagwat’s US host AHEAD was registered less than a year ago and has already changed its California address
The RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is said to have stayed in The Pierre, a luxury hotel overlooking Central Park in New York, a hotel owned by the Taj Group.
Even as several Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh organisations protested and demanded that ‘Hindutva’ be kept out of New York, the RSS chief addressed a supposedly inter-faith rally on Saturday at Madison Square Garden. He made all the right noises and spoke eloquently about oneness of mankind and universal brotherhood. Any Hindu who wanted India to be without Muslims, he declared, would not in fact be a Hindu, the media reported him as saying.
However, why Bhagwat is visiting the US as part of a three-nation tour which will also take him to Canada and the UK has persisted. Who financed his trip and stay? Is his visit meant to help raise funds? Or is the visit meant for lobbying with US members of the Congress and the administration as part of an outreach programme? Author and journalist Salil Tripathi told The Wire in an interview that while Indian consular staff and businessmen are known to have called on the RSS chief, he was personally not aware of any meeting of Bhagwat with lawmakers or administrators.
Tripathi pointedly said that while he supported the right of Bhagwat to visit the US and the right of RSS critics to oppose the visit, he would have wished for Bhagwat to agree to a debate with the critics on the vision and functioning of the RSS. Some critics also pointed out that had Bhagwat and the RSS were serious about an inter-faith gathering, they would have invited New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and engaged with him in a public dialogue.
Bhagwat’s visit, his first after the lobbying controversy, is also seen as a damage control exercise in some quarters. In 2025 Squire Patton Boggs (SPB), one of the largest lobbying firms in Washington DC, emailed historian Audrey Truschke and sought a meeting on behalf of the RSS. The RSS, the firm acknowledged, had retained SPB to educate US lawmakers about its mission. The firm had registered, as per US law, to lobby for the RSS and disclosed that it had received $330,000 (around Rs 3 crore) in the first three quarters.
When the story blew up, RSS spokesperson Sunil Ambekar denied that the RSS had engaged any lobbying firm in the US. A week later RSS mouthpiece Organiser contradicted Ambekar and claimed that the outreach had been fully disclosed under US laws. The report has since then been deleted by the publication. The controversy was fuelled also by the fact that the exercise was filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act rather than the Foreign Agents Registration Act, because the latter would have forced disclosure of every meeting, email, call, and transaction. Within the next few weeks SPB replaced the RSS with one Vivek Sharma, a Massachusetts pharmaceutical executive as the client. The contract was then cancelled in December, 2025.
Al Jazeera in a report said that the principal organiser of Bhagwat’s events in New York is a US-based non-profit group called American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue (AHEAD) Forum, registered as a non-profit organisation in May, 2025. US IRS data shows that AHEAD’s current directors are Sudesh Agrawal, Naresh Rajanna and Rasita Vishnuram. An umbrella organisation opposing the RSS in US, Savera, identified Agrawal as the one who runs the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh’s Cleveland chapter and Rajanna too as a HSS activist. Vishnuram is a Senior Fellow at BlueKraft Foundation, a pro-Modi propaganda unit described as “one of the most influential, and least publicly visible, communication platforms associated with the Modi government.”
A website under its name, and linked to Rajanna’s NY address, explicitly describes itself as working on a nine-front effort to help world leaders understand the RSS, arguing that understanding India “requires comprehending Hinduism as the soul of India and RSS as a driving ideology”.
The key person behind the RSS outreach is identified as Saumitra Gokhale, “a middle-aged man who leads the US branch of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), and who is listed in the organisation’s records as a “yoga instructor” drawing $36,000 in annual salary since 2015. He is much more than a Yoga instructor though, points out a report by Savera. “Gokhale attends, every year, the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS, or All India Representative Meeting) – the highest decision-making body of the RSS. The report mentions that there is no documented instance of Gokhale actually doing or teaching yoga.
“Beyond repeated travel between India and North America, Gokhale’s travels have taken him to locations as disparate as Auckland, Bogotá, Nairobi, Tokyo, Mexico City, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname. ‘Our data, since it relies on public sources, is obviously an undercount, but it makes clear: for a man whose tax filing calls him a $36,000-a-year yoga instructor, Gokhale has accumulated a lot of airline miles,’ the report notes, raising a series of questions that remain unanswered.”
How is Gokhale’s travel financed? Why does the RSS disguise this role behind the fabrication of a “yoga instructor”? And why is such a powerful and well-connected man almost invisible to the public?