A Global Trail of Violence

The rise of far-right tendencies within the ethnic and religious minority community of Hindu Americans raises the specter of multiracial compradors of White supremacist projects in the U.S. The links between White supremacists and Hindu supremacists in the U.S. are merely one example of broader affinities between far-right movements, and the rise of an “international ethnonationalism,” with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India joining the likes of Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Donald Trump in eroding democratic norms and institutions. In a world as interconnected as ours, far-right movements, and threats to democracy and pluralism more broadly, are deeply transnational phenomena. Supremacist and ethnonationalist movements across the world are no longer merely faraway conflagrations; their progenitors are well-networked, their strategies and language shared, and their impacts contagious. 

However, a lack of awareness about Hindu supremacy has led well-meaning centrist and progressive institutions to misrecognize Hindu supremacists as representative of the wider, far more diverse, and more liberal Indian American community. American politicians and civil society are frequently hoodwinked into collaborating with and legitimizing a far-right movement that operates under the guise of being a minority community within the U.S.’s multicultural framework. This has routinely meant that organized and well-financed Hindu supremacists can infiltrate and influence spaces where they do not belong. 

Pro-democracy actors in the U.S. must better understand the connections between these seemingly far-flung developments and the health of our democracy. This report offers a robust and insightful analysis of this phenomenon, taking as its starting point the deep transnational reach of the Hindu supremacist movement, and its organizational breadth and sophistication, before walking readers through the impact these actors have had on our own, similarly fragile democracy. The Global VHP has sat at the center of this network for over five decades, founding a sprawling network in the U.S., while remaining closely tied to its parent organization in India. 

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In this report, we examine the VHP’s destructive footprint across the world, with an emphasis on India and the United States, arguably its two largest and most politically significant chapters. The report summarizes a significant body of reporting and analysis that has identified the VHP as a key player in a decades-long process of wrenching apart Indian society. While the report focuses on key examples of spectacular violence in which the VHP has been clearly implicated, a focus on outbreaks of mass violence alone would understate the extent of harms faced by Muslims and other minorities in India. The VHP’s role in spreading hate speech and conspiracy theories; in acts of violent mobilization, intimidation, and harassment; as well as in acts of physical violence, is endemic. While the VHP’s American presence (the VHP-A) has played key roles in facilitating, protecting, and materially and politically supporting the VHP in India, including during these instances of mass anti-Muslim violence, the VHP’s destructive impact has not been limited to India. In the United States, the VHP-A has played a harmful role in multiple spheres: through their collaborations with other supremacist organizations and ideologies; their attacks on U.S. civil society organizations; their role in moving Indian American communities to the right, and their unvarnished Islamophobia and bigotry. Actors in U.S. civil and political society must see the VHP-A, despite its claims to be the representative of a minority community, as a key part of a global far-right ecosystem, and as the critical threat to pluralism, democracy, and civil rights that its actions betray it to be.

What Is Hindu Supremacy? Hindutva Ideology and the VHP’s Global Roots

Hindu supremacy, sometimes referred to as Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, is a century-old ethnonationalist political ideology distinguished from Hinduism by its emphasis on the absolute hegemony of Hindus in India.^[2] Hindu supremacists seek to create a Hindu state around a narrow interpretation of Hinduism based on a glorified, mythical past.^[3] This political goal involves the expulsion or subordination of Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities in India. It also intensifies the violent subordination of oppressed-caste and indigenous communities (Dalits and Adivasis, respectively).^[4] Hindu supremacists reject the notion of a secular, pluralistic, democratic India, and seek to redefine the territorial boundaries of the country and encompass territories across Asia based on ancient Hindu scriptures.^[5]

The roots of the VHP, and of Hindu supremacy more broadly, can be traced back to the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps). Founded in September 1925, the RSS drew inspiration from Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s military academies and youth organizations.^[6] Since its inception, the RSS has developed a sprawling network of subsidiary organizations around the world, like Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as charities, religious organizations, and labor unions.^[7] This network empowers the RSS and its organs, like the VHP, to operate under many names in different sections of society.^[8] The RSS, which has repeatedly been involved in anti-minority violence, was banned once during British rule and then thrice by the post-independence Indian government, including after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a member of the RSS, Nathuram Godse.^[9]

Sangh Parivar A vast network of organizations across the world centered around the Hindu supremacist RSS as a central node. While the RSS formally acknowledges its control over less than three dozen organizations, research suggests that the entire network spans tens of thousands of organizations.^[10]

The VHP was founded in India in 1964, and in 1970 the VHP-A was founded in the U.S.^[11] Both wings were set up on the orders of M.S. Golwalkar, the second Supreme Leader of the RSS.^[12]

M.S. Golwalkar The second Sarsanghchalak (Supreme Leader) of the RSS—and one of its chief ideologues. In We or Our Nationhood Defined, Golwalkar argues that Hindus should be inspired by the genocidal treatment of Jewish people by the Nazis as a model of how to treat religious minorities in India.^[13]

Under the guise of so-called “religious regeneration,” the VHP seeks to mobilize Hindus both in India and outside to convert the current Indian secular republic into a theocratic nation, often through violent agitation. Over the past five decades, the VHP—together with its youth militias, the Bajrang Dal and the Durga Vahini—has been responsible for a long and gruesome history of violence, particularly against Muslim and Christian minorities in India. In 2018, the VHP was designated as a “militant religious organization” by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).^[14]

The VHP has always been a transnational entity, seeking to build international networks to support an otherwise nativist cause. As of 2019, the VHP had a self-declared presence in 29 countries across the world.^[15] Its U.S. wing has been the “crown jewel” in this network, playing a critical role in the significant harms the VHP has wreaked worldwide.

In the United States, the VHP-A has formally founded dozens of organizations, projects and programs, including student, advocacy and temple wings. It has also informally birthed or remained closely tied to dozens of organizations committed to similar Hindu supremacist goals.^[16] In this mode, the VHP-A operates as the apex body of a similar hydra-headed network of organizations, taking on a role in the U.S. analogous to that of the RSS in India.^[17] 

However, by claiming to be a purely “religious” organization and claiming to represent Hindus in the U.S., the VHP-A has enjoyed significant privileges and access to domestic political power, including undeserved representational legitimacy and even funding from government sources.^[18] The harms caused by the VHP have left an indelible impact not just on communities in India and its diaspora, but the broader American political landscape as well.

The VHP’s Role in Anti-Muslim Violence in India

Hindu supremacist violence in India is frequent and widespread, making it difficult to convey the full scale of harm perpetrated by an organization like the VHP. Given the scale of anti-Muslim rhetoric, public mobilization, verbal harassment, and physical violence, particularly against Muslims, no description of the VHP’s involvement in violence can be exhaustive. Although some data remains available, attempts at collecting independent data on hate crimes have been stymied by censorship and harassment by the Modi government.^[19] Scholars studying the Hindu Far Right have convincingly demonstrated that riots and pogroms against Muslims and other minorities are often the outcome of a long process of misinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and other forms of hate speech that dehumanize targeted communities.^[20] Acts of violence that mark the “culmination” of these campaigns are often described as organic and spontaneous conflagrations between communities, but more commonly tend to be deliberate and strategic choices, outsourced to lesser-known militias whose ties to larger organizations like the VHP are often obscured. This report follows scholarship on the Hindu Far Right in understanding various forms of violence—discursive and physical, and quotidian and spectacular—to be interconnected rather than discrete categories. In this context, it is critical to understand the extent to which the VHP is at the forefront of long-running campaigns that use dehumanizing language to incite violence against religious minorities. Most often—and as is the case with various far-right groups globally—this rhetoric is grounded in language marking out targeted communities, largely Muslims, as threats. For example, the VHP has played a key role in bringing to existence a variety of misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories targeting Muslims. Among the concepts popularized by Hindu supremacist leaders are: 

• “Love Jihad,” a conspiracy theory claiming that Muslim men are conspiring to lure away Hindu women in order to forcibly convert them to Islam;^[21] 
• “Land Jihad,” which argues that Muslims are deliberately purchasing or occupying private and public lands to achieve demographic advantage;^[22]
• “Flood Jihad,” which accuses Muslims of orchestrating floods;^[23]
• “Thook Jihad,” which suggests that Muslims “spit” on Hindus to spread infectious diseases; 
• “Halal Jihad,” which argues that Halal food certifications reflect a coordinated attempt to threaten the Indian economy and raise money for terrorism; sometimes also described as “economic Jihad,” which argues that ordinary Muslim businesses and individuals are engaged in a coordinated effort to cause economic harm to Hindus;^[24]
• “Fertilizer Jihad,” which blames Muslims as primarily responsible for the overuse of fertilizers in the agricultural sector;^[25]
• “UPSC Jihad,” which claims that Muslims are “infiltrating” the Indian bureaucracy by gaming and manipulating the rules of national civil service exams organized by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC);^[26] and
• “Population Jihad,” a Hindu supremacist adaptation of the Great Replacement Theory, which asserts the existence of a coordinated attempt by Muslims to become the majority community in India, overtaking Hindus.^[27]

These patently false conspiracy theories are typically followed by calls to boycott Muslims; calls for Hindus to take up arms; and, finally, explicit calls for violence. In a similar fashion, the cause of cow protection has also been regularly used by VHP and Bajrang Dal units to incite or justify several acts of violence, including lynchings.^[28] A recent article in the Journal of Democracy compared this phenomenon, and the broader situation in India, to the Jim Crow era in the US, citing hundreds of lynchings, largely of Muslims, since the BJP’s rise to power in 2014.^[29] Even if under-reported, statistics taken from public sources display a frightening picture. Conservative but defensible estimates from sources such as the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) list the VHP and its youth militias as responsible for 62 violent incidents (24 violent demonstrations, 34 occasions of mob violence, an armed clash and 3 attacks) between 2016 and 2019 alone.^[30] HindutvaWatch’s half-yearly report on Hindu supremacist violence in India, covering the first six months of 2023, identified the VHP and its youth wings as perpetrators of hate speech acts a staggering 62 times—in other words, a reported incident every 3 days.^[31] In recent years, these trends have only accelerated, and the VHP has been allowed an environment of near-total impunity. The Guardian, for example, recently wrote that “Hindu vigilante groups such as VHP have been allowed to operate freely and have increasingly begun to take the law into their own hands.”^[32] Increasingly, emboldened by this impunity, VHP leaders have advocated for the ethnic cleansing and/or genocide of the country’s Muslim citizens, and have themselves perpetrated mass violence against Muslims on a local scale.^[33] These, for example, are the words of a VHP General Secretary: “You see, this is no less than a civil war. And in a civil war, we have to pick up the weapons. We cannot just give speeches. We will fight the way it is needed.”^[34]

Timeline: The Global VHP in Major Events

1992 Babri Masjid Demolition: The hegemony of Hindu supremacist groups in India today can be traced back to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, a violent campaign led and orchestrated by the VHP beginning in the 1980s that culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid by a VHP-led mob in December 1992. In the months that followed the mosque’s demolition, anti-Muslim riots in a number of Indian cities killed approximately 2,000 people.^[35]

“The mobilisation of the karsevaks and their convergence to Ayodhya and Faizabad was neither spontaneous nor voluntary. It was well orchestrated and planned.”—The Liberhan Commission

2002 Gujarat Riots: Under the watch of Narendra Modi, then serving as Chief Minister of the state, a pogrom took place in Gujarat in 2002, with targeted and coordinated violence against Muslims. Muslims were killed en masse and cleansed from entire neighborhoods, and subject to targeted lootings and horrific instances of sexual violence and torture.^[36] In total, nearly 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.^[37] A UK government inquiry into the violence, recently made public by the BBC, concluded that the violence was pre-planned and that “the VHP and its allies acted with the support of the state Government.”^[38]

2008 Anti-Christian Riots in Odisha: In the Kandhamal district of Odisha, after a VHP-led social boycott of Christians in the district, VHP members attacked Christian minorities, their homes and places of worship, leaving three dead and hundreds displaced.

2020 Delhi Riots: The Delhi Riots were a wave of anti-Muslim violence in North East Delhi that coincided with President Trump’s February 2020 visit to the city. Beginning on 23 February 2020, after Hindu supremacist leaders had made violent and provocative speeches against peaceful sit-in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), Hindu supremacist mobs attacked Muslims engaged in non-violent protest. This prompted a week of communal violence where mobs roamed the streets of India’s capital, attacking Muslims. Of the 53 people killed, over two-thirds were Muslim.^[39] In addition, thousands of Muslims were also displaced, and forced into selling their property out of fear of the violence recurring.^[40]