Several press reports and prominent commentators on Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat’s speech at New York’s Madison Square Garden tell us that his words on ‘oneness in diversity’ mark a welcome departure from hardline Hindu supremacism. Others believe that Bhagwat has given the RSS a liberal spin in the US, in words he would not use in India. 

Both these assessments are off the mark.  

Bhagwat has given near-identical speeches several times in India, including earlier this year. Indeed he told his US audience as much, recalling his 2018 speech given at Nagpur. He uses the same formulations in both the US and India, but in the latter, he is more expansive. 

Place one next to the other, and the Hindu supremacist sophistry becomes unmistakeable. 

The concept of ‘universal oneness’ can mean that all beings, all things, and all spiritual traditions are equally valid expressions of the same perennial philosophy, the same inner oneness. 

It would follow that the Hindu traditions too would be one among such diverse expressions. But that’s not what Bhagwat said.  At the NYC event, he said the Hindu tradition is synonymous with the philosophy of oneness. Hindus, he said, safeguarded this philosophy from “foreign invaders”, and generously shared it with the rest of the world. 

In his 2018 iteration of this point, he explained that the RSS “insists on the name ‘Hindu’” to stand for all the traditions born in Bharat (“Bharat mein janmein sabhi panth-sampradayon ka naam hindutva hai”). The RSS, he said, considered “Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Sanatanis, and Arya Samajis” to be Hindu, but these communities were free to call themselves ‘Bharatiya’ if they so preferred. 

Speaking at a ‘100 Years of the Sangh Journey’ event in February this year, he said that ‘everyone living in India is Hindu,’ and all would have to accept Hindutva as their national/civilisational identity sooner or later. He assured Muslims and Christians, as well as Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Parsis, that they could practice their religion while “accepting Hindutva”, and in fact........

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