A powerful Hindu extremist group, whose member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, revered in India as the Father of the Nation, which was banned thrice and from which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party emerged has said it had organised foreign trips, including to the US, to counter perceptions it is a paramilitary outfit involved in large-scale attacks on minority communities.
Raqib Hameed Naik, the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), presented a record of human rights abuses against minorities in India and called for targeted Global Magnitsky sanctions against leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), RSS and others.
Modi joined the RSS in his youth, and the rise of his BJP to near-national dominance is widely attributed to the RSS’ vast network of cadres, during a period marked by a hardening Hindu-Muslim political divide in the officially secular country where Hindus (over 80 percent and over a billion) are a majority.
The RSS claims it is a “Hindu centric civilisational, cultural movement” whose goal is to “carry the nation to the pinnacle of glory”, including by uniting Hindus and protecting the religion.