“Respected Bhagwatji, Your Definition Is Not Mine: A Bharatiya Hindu response to New York Address”, MyIndMakers, 31 Aug 2026.
“Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Sarsanghchalak Dr Mohan Bhagwat has just concluded a high-profile leg of the Sangh’s centenary-year global outreach, addressing the “One World, One Humanity” faith leaders’ conference organised by the World Council of Religious Leaders in Manhattan, and separately the Universal Oneness Celebration before several thousand members of the Hindu diaspora from India at Madison Square Garden. The keynote address was delivered at the World Council of Religious Leaders venue on Avenue of the Americas in New York on August 29, 2026, as part of a three-nation outreach tour covering the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom timed to the Sangh’s hundredth year.
The speech has been reported, understandably, as a moment of reassurance, a gentle, statesmanlike message to an anxious world. Bhagwat told the gathering that a person who believes Muslims should have no place in the country would cease to be a Hindu, recounting that Muslims had once asked him during a dialogue whether the RSS’s vision of a Hindu Rashtra meant they would eventually be driven out. He said all paths lead to the same goal, that every human being possesses equal dignity, and that there is no difference between human beings. He described diversity as a decoration that sits upon an underlying unity, something to be accepted, respected and protected, in the same way one protects one’s own particular nature. To the diaspora, he added that Bharatiya-Americans must be loyal first to their karmabhumi, their land of work, and only afterwards, never as an obligation, turn their attention to their janmabhumi, their land of birth.
Read in isolation, on a stage built for interfaith goodwill, none of this is objectionable. It is, in fact, the kind of statement that will earn Dr Bhagwat generous press abroad and a further round of “RSS chief moderates Hindutva” headlines at home. But civilisational and political questions cannot be answered from a podium built for goodwill alone. They have to be tested against history, against the lived experience of the Hindu community over the hundreds of years of history and particularly the last hundred years of so-called leaders like Gandhi and Nehru from their community failing to do their duty, and against the textual tradition that the RSS chief invokes but, by his own admission, does not claim mastery over. Tested that way, this address deserves a considerably more sceptical reading than it has received…………………………”
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