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The New India Abroad article on the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America urges the reader to reach a grave conclusion without meeting a grave burden of proof. It throws around words meant to stain, isolate, and frighten. It suggests menace. It hints at danger. It invokes national security. It piles on ideological labels. But where, exactly, is the evidence that VHPA broke American law, funded or incited violence in the United States, or was charged by any U.S. authority with criminal wrongdoing? That is the question the piece never answers, because it cannot. 

That omission is not minor. It is the whole story.

VHPA is not some shadowy pop-up operation. By its own account, it has been in the United States since 1970 and presents itself as one of the oldest and largest Hindu organizations in America, rooted in religious education, community service, youth programming, and advocacy for Hindu civil rights and dignity. Its public-facing principles are not the language of militancy. They are the language of civilizational continuity, pluralism, and community life. You do not have to agree with every view held by every Hindu organization to acknowledge a basic fact. A fifty-plus-year American organization should not be branded as extremist by insinuation when its accusers cannot point to criminal charges, convictions, or proven acts of violence by the organization in the United States. 

That is what makes the article so revealing. It is not trying to prove wrongdoing. It is trying to make proof unnecessary.

Also Read: Exposing IAMC’s Manufactured Smear Campaign Against VHPA

Its central method is guilt by association. Link VHPA to the broader Hindu nationalist ecosystem. Inflate every political dispute in India into a civilizational indictment. Import the harshest allegations available. Then declare the American Hindu organization compromised by ancestry, affinity, or shared vocabulary. This is not journalism at its best. It is ideological laundering. The accusation is made to seem larger than the evidence. The emotional verdict is delivered before the factual case even begins. 

And when that weak structure needs reinforcement, the article leans on USCIRF as though an advisory commission’s rhetoric settles the matter. It does not. USCIRF itself says its mission is to assess conditions abroad and make recommendations to the U.S. government. That is an advocacy and advisory function, not a judicial one. Its reports are not convictions. Its recommendations are not verdicts. Its political composition also matters. USCIRF’s current vice chair, Asif Mahmood, is a Pakistani-origin political activist. Asif Mahmood’s presence on the commission and the increasing pro-Pakistan rhetoric emanating from USCIRF are not coincidental. Whatever one thinks of the commission, nobody should pretend it floats above politics like a sacred tribunal. It is an appointed body, and its claims are part of a political process, not the end of one. 

In the past, the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) has hired paid lobbyists to advocate its position before USCIRF. Asif Mahmood has spoken at an IAMC event. That context matters even more because IAMC has openly celebrated USCIRF’s hostile line against the RSS and India. In March 2026, IAMC publicly applauded USCIRF’s call to sanction the RSS. In October 2024, CAIR publicly welcomed an IAMC survey that attacked Hindutva and echoed the same broad narrative architecture now recycled in diaspora polemics. That does not prove a hidden conspiracy. It proves something more basic and more visible. There is an activist ecosystem in the United States that reinforces, amplifies, and circulates one-sided narratives about Hindu organizations and then presents those narratives back to the public as if they emerged from neutral civic concern. 

IAMC’s pattern is especially telling. Its public record shows relentless agitation against Hindutva, against RSS-linked organizations, and against India’s current political direction. That is its chosen lane. It is not a general-purpose, morally even-handed watchdog that speaks with the same urgency whenever Hindus are attacked, displaced, or targeted. Its activism has a clear ideological direction, and that direction is almost always accusatory when the subject is a Hindu public organization. Even its recent statements frame RSS-related events in America as questions not simply of debate but of national security. This is cancel culture politics in policy clothing. It aims to make Hindu association itself radioactive. 

That is why the New India Abroad piece should be read not as an investigation, but as an attempted quarantine. The objective is not to persuade readers that VHPA committed a crime. The objective is to make polite society treat VHPA as though the crime has already been established. It is a reputational tactic familiar from ideological activism in America. Attach the target to a disfavored moral frame. Repeat the association often enough. Demand social exclusion before legal proof. Then, when someone asks for evidence, act offended that evidence was requested in the first place.

But evidence still matters.

So let us return to first principles. If VHPA has broken American law, name the law. If VHPA has funded criminal violence in the United States, show the transactions. If VHPA has incited violence, quote the words and identify the victims. If VHPA has been charged, indicted, convicted, sanctioned, or found liable for illegal conduct, present the record. If none of that exists, stop pretending that ideological dislike is a substitute for fact.

The burden is on the accuser, not on Hindu Americans, to prove their innocence every time an activist network decides to recycle a smear.

There is also something uglier beneath all this. Hindu organizations in America are expected by their critics to exist only on probation. They may pray, celebrate festivals, teach children, host camps, defend temples, and speak about Hindu civilizational interests, but only so long as they do so timidly, apologetically, and under constant suspicion. The moment they show confidence, memory, or political self-respect, the old machine starts up. Suddenly, they are not a faith community with a legitimate voice. They are a threat to democracy. They are a danger to minorities. They are the local arm of some vast transnational menace. It is nonsense, but it is effective nonsense because it exploits the moral vanity of elite spaces.

VHPA should not accept that frame for even a second.

A Hindu organization in America does not need to apologize for existing, for organizing, for teaching its children, for defending its heritage, or for rejecting lazy slander. It certainly does not need to bow to activist outfits whose public posture toward Hindu concerns is overwhelmingly adversarial. A fifty-year-old American Hindu institution with no demonstrated criminal blemish is not required to answer for every accusation manufactured by people who have already decided that Hindu civic assertion is illegitimate. 

The article’s real thesis is simple. It does not merely want to criticize VHPA. It wants to delegitimize the Hindu organization in public life by making the association itself appear incriminating. That is why it avoids the one test that matters most. Not rhetoric. Not innuendo. Not ideology by osmosis. Proof.

Show the crime or stop the smear.

 

The writer is the Founder and Executive Chair of HinduPACT and past-President of World Hindu Council of America (VHPA)

 

 

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad.)

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