By M Ghazali Khan
London: Indian diaspora organisations protested in Parliament Square on Sunday against the visit to the UK of Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Hindu supremacist organisation RSS.
Twenty different groups organised the protest, including the advocacy group South Asia Solidarity Group (SASG).
Holding placards condemning Hindutva crimes in India, participants chanted anti-fascist and anti-RSS slogans and delivered speeches deploring Narendra Modi’s anti-minority pogroms in India.
Kalpna Wilson, of SASG, the main organiser of the protest, said, ‘We know when we are dealing with Mohan Bhagwat; we know that the RSS, his organisation, which they are now referring to as the world’s largest NGO…It got its inspiration from the Nazis and from Mussolini’s fascists in Italy a hundred years ago. We know that they looked at what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in the 1930s, and they said that’s the model we need in India. That’s what we need to do to Muslims.’
Talking about racist activists in the UK and the RSS, Ms Wilson said, ‘We know very well that the vile Islamophobe, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, was invited and promoted multiple times to India by the RSS mouthpieces. We know that he promised to bring his white supremacist thugs to Leicester to join in the Islamophobic violence that the HSS [the UK branch of RSS] started that day.’
She also mentioned Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long association with the RSS, saying that he ‘Has turned India into the biggest ally of the genocidal Zionist entity… India is the biggest buyer of Israeli weapons. And we know how those weapons tested on Palestinians are being used against the Kashmiri people.’
Several other speakers addressed the protest, including Satpal Munan, chairman of Caste Watch UK; Naim Budiuzzaman of the Indian Muslim Council (UK); and Rajiv Sinha of Hindus for Human Rights.
The protesting organisations had, earlier last week, written to the UK government’s Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief and the UK Foreign Office, demanding a boycott, condemnation and sanctions against Bhagwat and other RSS leaders.
Expressing solidarity with the participating organisations and supporting their demands, independent MP and former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn said in a statement, “Britain should not be hosting the leader of a hate group with a grievous history of far-right violence.
‘This is a deeply authoritarian, exclusionary and discriminatory organisation which has suppressed religious freedom and inspired horrific attacks on minorities.’
Having visited the US and Canada, Bhagwat is currently on a tour of Western countries, ostensibly seeking to whitewash his party’s Hindu supremacist—Hindutva—image, shaped, especially, by attacks on religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, as well as other marginalised communities, by armed members of his party in India.
The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—or National Volunteer Organisation) is the parent body of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The RSS and its affiliate bodies have been at the forefront of what critics describe as a dangerous and violent campaign against religious minorities, Dalits and other marginalised communities, including those known as low-caste Hindus.
The RSS was formed in Nagpur in 1925 by Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a former teacher at Banaras Hindu University. Coming from Maharashtra, Hedgewar founded an organisation that, from its inception, played an active role in anti-Muslim militancy in India. It recruits young volunteers (Swayamsevaks) and gives them martial training. Its aim is to form a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu state) where, according to its second chief, M. S. Golwalkar, who took over the organisation after Hedgewar:
‘The foreign races … must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights. There is, at least should be, no other course for them to adopt. We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races, which have chosen to live in our country.’
Otherwise:
‘German race pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – Jews. Race Pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well near impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan [India] to learn and profit by.’
The RSS has active branches in the UK, the US, Canada and several other countries, operating under the name Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS).
In 2016, the UK’s Charity Commission concluded an inquiry into HSS UK, raising concerns about the charity’s governance and the management of an event. The Commission also examined the organisation’s relationship with the RSS. While it found no evidence of formal links between the two, it advised HSS trustees to ensure that the RSS had no control or influence over the charity or its affairs. However, HSS’s distance from the RSS is evident in RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s visit to the UK.
Ever since the BJP came to power in 2014, 44 people have been lynched by Hindu mobs in various parts of India, 36 of whom were Muslims, allegedly over accusations that they had slaughtered cows—revered and worshipped by Hindus and whose slaughter is banned in many parts of India.
Prior to Mohan Bhagwat’s visit, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) expressed concern over his visit, listing crimes perpetrated against minorities in which individuals associated with the RSS were involved.
Earlier, in its 2026 Annual Report, issued in May, USCIRF had urged the U.S. Department of State to “designate India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for engaging in systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations.”