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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. The quote is often misattributed to Gandhi, but whoever said it got the sequence right.

For years, those of us documenting the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America’s ties to India’s Hindu supremacist movement were ignored. Then they laughed at us. Now, finally, they are fighting us.

A Hindi-language book event co-sponsored by a VHPA school at the Germantown Library in Montgomery County gets canceled after a civil-rights coalition raises concerns. And the response? This op-ed in New India Abroad, accusing us of running a George Soros-funded, anti-Hindu misinformation machine. It is a masterclass in the oldest trick in the Hindutva playbook: ignore the message, attack the messenger.

The piece does not dispute a single documented fact about the VHPA.

Also read: New Hindi-language book collection unveiled at Maryland library

It does not deny that the VHPA was founded in 1970 on the instructions of M.S. Golwalkar, the then leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the 100-year-old Indian paramilitary. Golwalkar is on record having  praised Nazi Germany as a model for how to treat religious minorities.

It does not deny that the VHPA has transferred at least $7 million to the VHP and its affiliates in India.

The VHPA does not deny that it invited Yati Narsinghanand, a cleric who has publicly called for the extermination of Muslims, to the U.S. It does not deny that it platformed Kajal Hindustani, an Islamophobic speaker who has called Muslims “braindead zombies” and “living monsters” and advocated their economic boycott, and who urged New York Hindus not to vote for Zohran Mamdani because he is Muslim.

It does not deny that the VHPA invited Yati Narsinghanand, a cleric who has publicly called for the extermination of Muslims, to the United States. Nor does it deny that the VHPA platformed Kajal Hindustani, an Islamophobic hate speaker who has called Muslims “braindead zombies” and “living monsters,” and who urged New York Hindus not to vote for Zohran Mamdani because he is Muslim.

It does not deny that the VHPA has repeatedly hosted Sadhvi Rithambara, a self-styled female monk who has a four-decade history of Islamophobic hate-mongering and who was named by an Indian judicial commission as culpable for the 1992 demolition of the Babri mosque that triggered riots killing thousands of Muslims.

Also Read: From the library to the legislature: What VHPA’s and CoHNA’s own records reveal

It does not deny any of it, because none of it can be denied. Most of this information is in the VHPA's own publications, IRS filings and event calendars.

So the piece pivots, as these pieces always do, to the messengers. Hindus for Human Rights, one of the many organizations that led the coalition letter to the library, is smeared as “HINOs,” or “Hindus in Name Only.”

Scholars who have published peer-reviewed research on Hindutva are dismissed as paid agents of Soros-funded “academic nexuses.” Pieter Friedrich, who has written about Hindutva for years, is a “hired help.” Everyone is on somebody's payroll. Everyone is part of the conspiracy. Everyone, that is, except the one group that actually does answer to a foreign organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The piece’s single load-bearing citation for its grand conspiracy theory is a report called “The Invisible Hands” by an online outfit called DisinfoLab. In December 2023, the Washington Post reported, based on three sources familiar with the operation, that DisinfoLab was at that time run by Lt. Col. Dibya Satpathy, then an active-duty officer of India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India's external intelligence agency.

Also Read: The politics of denial: Hindi on the shelf, Hindus shown the door

DisinfoLab’s reports have been amplified by BJP officials, cited by Indian ministers on primetime television, and used to smear U.S. elected officials including Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.

And DisinfoLab is not the only controversy surrounding RAW. In February 2026, Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to murder-for-hire and conspiracy charges tied to a plot, allegedly directed by a RAW officer to assassinate an American citizen in New York City. Canada has also accused Indian government agents of assassinating Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia.

The VHPA is, in fact, a national security risk for the United States. Its Indian counterpart, the VHP, was listed as a “militant religious organization” in the CIA World Factbook in 2018. It is the American appendage of an Indian fascist paramilitary, the RSS, one that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan Congressionally-mandated panel, has recommended this year for the U.S. sanctions.

Also read: Who gets to speak for Hindu Americans? Not the far Right

Rutgers University's Center for Security, Race and Rights concluded in 2025 that U.S.-based Hindutva groups constitute “a threat to equality and religious pluralism” in this country, and recommended that organizations functioning as proxies of the RSS and its affiliates be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The same report documented VHPA's role in a broader pattern of transnational repression — intimidation, surveillance, and harassment campaigns run by foreign-aligned networks against American citizens who speak out. 

The real scandal here is not the Germantown Library's reasonable decision to pause an event, but what the VHPA has been doing to American Hindus for five decades. Millions of Hindus in this country are pluralist, progressive, decent people who love their faith and want nothing to do with Hindutva politics. They deserve to know that the supposed “Hindu cultural organization” running the Balvihar school their child attends was founded on the orders of a man who praised Hitler's treatment of Jews.

 

The writer is Executive Director of Indian American Muslim Council

(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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