‘Hindutva In America’ – How Rutgers’ ‘Hindutva in America’ narrative defends Khalistanis and Islamist while targeting Hindu advocacy

A few months back, Rutgers’ Centre for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR) put out a report and a roadshow around a familiar thesis that is “Hindutva in America”. It framed Hindutva as a far-right project, treated diaspora groups as RSS fronts, and claimed that Hindutva is a menace to American pluralism. 1/n On October 27th, @RutgersU will platform open Hindu hate on college campus. This is not an academic exercise. It’s blatant bigotry that calls for a federal investigation against American Hindu organizations and accuses them of being foreign agents. It will paint a… pic.twitter.com/UsVR3EA1u9— CoHNA (Coalition of Hindus of North America) (@CoHNAOfficial) October 4, 2025 On 17th June, a launch video was published on CSRR’s YouTube channel and now they are hosting a panel discussion revolving around the report on 27th October with Sahar Aziz, Professor of Law at Rutgers, and two speakers, doctoral student Nikaytaa Malhotra and anti-Hindu “historian” Audrey Truschke, who is famous for twisting facts about Hinduism. Not to forget, Truschke is so deep in hate for Hindus that she openly abused Bhagwan Ram in her writings on social media. The message with such a panel is clear enough. They want to rebrand mainstream Hindu advocacy as a security problem without providing any concrete evidence to support their narrative on merits. What the report is and what it prescribes The document claims Hindu organisations rode the post-9/11 Islamophobia wave to gain acceptance for an “ethnonationalist” agenda. According to the report, in the United States, the movement does two things that paint Muslims as suspicious and shut down academic freedom. From that, it draws five prescriptions that are anything but modest. It calls on officials and civic bodies to sever ties with Hindu groups it dislikes; for federal authorities to force FARA registration on any outfit it deems an RSS “proxy”; for charities associated in any way with Hindu nationalism to publish exhaustive foreign-link disclosures; for Washington to sanction or deny visas to individuals accused of aiding anti-minority violence in India; and for universities to be trained up on “Hindutva-inspired” discrimination and shield professors and students accordingly. If the cure sounds like a blacklist in search of a disease, that’s because it largely is. Source: csrr.rutgers.edu In this report, we are mainly concentrating on the discussion posed during the introductory video published in June this year and later will discuss the published paper itself. The framing problem The discussion collapsed the moment they put “Hindu”, “Hindutva”, “RSS” and “BJP” into one undifferentiated bogeyman. They claimed that whatever is linked to Hinduism, including Hindutva, RSS and BJP, and even anyone who is Hindu, is part of para-political outgrowths of Nagpur, where RSS’s headquarters are located. RSS, VHP and their offshoot organisations, in India and abroad, are community civic bodies. These are similar to diaspora organisations that are formed by other communities worldwide. However, when it comes to Hindu organisations, they conveniently labelled them as promoters of caste policies, hate crimes against non-Hindu communities and more. The troubling part is, they were not analysis, but bundling. By equating Hindu organisations and their ideology with that of Western concepts of “far right”, “fascist”, “white nationalist” and “Christian Zionist”, speaker Deepa Sundaram diluted the thick line that differentiates the Indian “right wing” from the Western one. Misinformation about Savarkar and the RSS One of the most interesting aspects of the discussion was that, in the beginning itself, Sundaram made a major blunder. She called Veer Savarkar the founder of RSS. Savarkar was not the founder of RSS and the organisation was founded by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in 1925. If they want to build a grand theory on the genealogy of an organisation, it is essential to at least get the genealogy right. The “anti-Hindu org” trope (HAF and CoHNA) Then came the ritual smear of Hindu organisations operating in the US, namely the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) and the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA). Sundaram basically called them sinister fronts of Hindutva. In the real world, HAF and CoHNA are registered, public-facing advocacy and civil-rights outfits that track anti-Hindu hate, brief lawmakers, support temple safety and speak for the Hindu community that, newsflash, is a minority community in the US. So-called academics like Sundaram and Truschke have ideological differences with HAF and CoHNA and it is understandable, especially in the case of the latter, who is a fan of Aurangzeb. However, that does not give them the right to turn the disagreement into defamation and paint genuine Hindu organisations as some sinister plan of Hindus living in India. The Islamophobia catch-all During the discussion, the narrative of “Islamophobia” poppe