A Hindu American Foundation board member called me a white Christian nationalist for reporting on Rakhi Israni, but disputed not a single fact. Here’s the movement her essay would not name.
The featured image shows the HAF board member’s father, Vijay Pallod (front row, far right), with his cousin-in-law, HSS-USA’s Ramesh Bhutada (second row, third from right), both in the uniform of the RSS at a December 2010 summit in Pune, India.
No one calls it an attack on Christianity to report that the Family Research Council lobbies Congress, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State describes the FRC as a Christian nationalist political lobby rather than a house of worship. Americans know the difference between a faith and a political movement that claims to speak for it.
Christian nationalism is not Christianity, and reporting on a Christian nationalist organization is not bigotry against Christians.
I know that distinction holds, because this week Kavita Sekhsaria, a board member of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), published two thousand words concluding that there is little difference between me and a white Christian nationalist.
My offense was reporting on Rakhi Israni, a Democrat running for the open congressional seat in California’s fourteenth district that Eric Swalwell vacated this spring, along with the network that funds her campaign. Sekhsaria disputed not one figure in that reporting, and she named not one of the organizations in it.
She titled her essay “Pride Is Not Supremacy,” and she conceded that the people I wrote about are all connected, and that she grew up hearing Islamophobic things in her own community. Then she aimed her readers not at the movement that produces that bigotry, but at the reporter who writes about it.
She demanded evidence, and asked me to quote them and to document the conduct.
So here is the movement, here is its name, and here is what it is.
The Movement She Would Not Name
Israni’s campaign cash traces to the American network of an Indian movement called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the root of a large family. The political party that now governs India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong RSS man, grew out of it, as did the street groups that enforce its agenda there and the web of American nonprofits that advance its interests and defend its name here. Different names, one movement.
You do not have to take this reporter’s word for what the RSS is, because India’s own government has banned it three times. The first ban came in 1948, after a man who had belonged to it assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the second in 1975, when the national government suspended democratic rule, and the third in 1992, after a mob from the movement tore down the centuries-old Babri mosque.
India’s first home minister, Sardar Patel, ordered that first ban to root out “the forces of hate and violence,” and he wrote that its members had carried out arson, robbery, and murder.
Its founders wrote down what they believed. In 1923, the man who coined the movement’s creed, V.D. Savarkar, defined a Hindu as someone whose holy land lies inside India, which by design read Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands sit in Mecca and Jerusalem, out of the nation.
The historian Christophe Jaffrelot, the leading scholar of the movement, records what came next, when the RSS’s second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, looked at Nazi Germany exterminating its Jews and, in his 1939 book, called it “race pride at its highest.”
She titled her essay “Pride Is Not Supremacy.” The man who wrote her movement’s first systematic statement of itself looked at the purging of the Jews and called it pride.
This is not history sealed under glass. Last December the RSS’s current chief, Mohan Bhagwat, declared that India is a Hindu nation and needs no constitutional approval to be called one, and days earlier he had drawn the very line this article opens with — between a faith and a political creed that claims to speak for it. The movement, he said, is “called Hindutva, not Hinduism.”
Murder and Pogrom
The bigotry is not theoretical, either. In 1999, a mob of the Bajrang Dal burned an Australian missionary named Graham Staines alive in his car, along with his two sleeping sons, aged ten and six, and Human Rights Watch documented it at the time.
The Bajrang Dal is the militant arm of the same Vishwa Hindu Parishad whose American branch’s officers are among Israni’s donors, and a decade later the same network’s activists drove the Kandhamal pogrom in Odisha, which left more than a hundred people dead, three hundred churches burned, and tens of thousands of Christians driven from their homes.
In its report covering 2025, released this March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended that the United States impose targeted sanctions on the RSS for severe violations of religious freedom, and its commissioners are appointed by the president and the congressional leadership of both parties. That is the evidence HAF’s writer said does not exist.
More Than a Third
The network is not in India. It is here, on Israni’s own filing, where more than a third of the outside money her campaign raised, $351,954, came from donors affiliated with the American Sangh, the RSS’s family of organizations in the United States. These are its officers and the families that built it here.
HAF presents itself as a civil-rights group for Hindu Americans, but its own history says otherwise.
That characterization is not mine. A report by Political Research Associates calls HAF “a key node in the global Hindu supremacist movement,” bound to the RSS’s American branches by money, organization, and people, and it is language that Congress’s own research service later relayed and that a Rutgers law school study independently confirmed.
Its co-founder, Mihir Meghani, came up through the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), and he wrote a manifesto, “Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology,” that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP; India’s ruling party and the political wing of the RSS) later published as its own. It celebrated the mob destruction of the Babri mosque as the release of “thousands of years of anger and shame,” and it told India’s Muslims that their place in the nation depended on their submission to that Hindu nationalist order.
Andrew Cockburn, writing in Harper’s, found HAF “closely connected in word and spirit to the RSS and its spin-offs.”
HAF has gone after its critics in court, and when the historian Audrey Truschke and four others publicly tied it to Hindu supremacist groups, HAF sued them for defamation, and a federal judge threw the case out.
Her Father in Uniform
The woman who called me a bigot wrote movingly about her father and her relatives as ordinary people who served their community, and she is right that they served it.
She left out what they served it as.
Kavita Sekhsaria — born Kavita Pallod — is the daughter of Vijay Pallod. Her father sat on the governing council of the VHPA. In December 2010, he and Ramesh Bhutada (the husband of Vijay’s first cousin) traveled to Pune, India, for a summit of the RSS’s overseas wing, where they were photographed in the movement’s uniform, posing with the man who founded that wing.
Four years later, Pallod flew to India with a team of thirty to campaign for Narendra Modi’s election, telling me, “Only because of Narendra Modi, I went to campaign in India.”
Bhutada is the national vice president of that overseas wing, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, and Houston’s first chapter of it began in his own house, with one of its offices still running out of a warehouse his company owns.
While Pallod was in India that year, Bhutada stayed in Houston and ran a phone bank of seven hundred volunteers calling voters in India to put Modi in power. He later wrote, in the Houston Chronicle, that Modi won because of his “RSS training,” and that Americans uneasy about the man ought to reconsider the RSS that shaped him.
These are not Hindus who happen to know one another. They are the officers of a movement, and she is one of them.
That is why her essay never once said the three letters R-S-S. She conceded the connection because she could not deny it, and she demanded that I document the conduct because she assumed I could not. The conduct is documented, though, and most of it not by me, coming from Harper’s, The Caravan, Human Rights Watch, a federal commission, and Golwalkar’s own books.
What she would not do, in an essay written to humanize the very men who run the RSS’s American structure, was admit what they run. The silence was the answer.
The Plot, and the Punchline
That silence has a pattern. In 2025, California’s legislature passed a bill to train police to recognize transnational repression, the precise crime an agent of a foreign government was then being prosecuted for committing against an American citizen on American soil. HAF lobbied to kill it, and when the governor vetoed the bill, HAF’s managing director, Samir Kalra, called the veto a victory for the civil rights of all Californians.
Months later, Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to that very plot, the murder-for-hire of a United States citizen in New York directed by an Indian intelligence officer, and Kalra then went on HAF’s own show and mocked the plot for being botched. “If you’re gonna do a job,” he said, “fucking do it right.”
Sikh and Hindu rights groups condemned the segment, noting that Kalra seemed to concede India had ordered the killing.
This is the organization that calls reporting on it bigotry: the one that lobbied against protecting Americans from foreign transnational repression, and then laughed when India’s assassination plot failed.
From the Movement to the Ballot
Rakhi Israni was the movement’s lawyer.
She was no bystander to any of it: she was the first elected president of a VHPA student project, served as legal counsel on the VHPA’s executive board, then as legal director of its political arm, and she testified before the California Senate against the bill that would have made the state the first in the country to ban caste discrimination.
The network that built her now funds her run for a seat in Congress, the body that funds the religious-freedom commission and can act on its recommendation to sanction the RSS.
The body that would judge the movement is the body she wants to join. The voters who will judge in the fourteenth district will do so on June 2.
A Guest in the Living Room
Reporting on the RSS’s American network is no more bigotry against Hindus than reporting on the Family Research Council is bigotry against Christians, because the Hindu supremacist movement is not Hinduism, and on that one point this reporter and the head of the RSS agree. It was Bhagwat, after all, who drew the line.
Meanwhile, the essayist’s own family has been close enough to the RSS to host its supreme chief: her father told me, in 2019, that Ramesh Bhutada — the relative beside him in the Pune uniform photograph, now also a donor to Israni’s campaign — had welcomed Mohan Bhagwat into his Houston home. So the man who demands a Hindu nation has been a guest in the living room of the candidate’s donor, and yet the essayist called me a Christian nationalist for naming the movement he leads.
The Doll and the Senator
Her essay reaches, near its end, for a witness to her own conscience, when she writes of tearfully giving a state official a knit Bernie Sanders doll, and of how the two of them admired “his moral clarity and the values he represents,” an odd scene, she suggests, for anyone cast as a puppet of the BJP.
It is worth examining where Bernie Sanders aimed that clarity because, in 2019 in Houston (her family’s own city), he stood before the Islamic Society of North America and called India’s BJP government’s revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy, its crackdown on dissent, and its communications blackout unacceptable, demanding that the United States speak out for the Kashmiri people.
As Trump and Modi staged the Howdy Modi rally in that same city weeks later, Sanders wrote in the Houston Chronicle that the celebration would meet a human-rights crisis with “a deafening silence.” When anti-Muslim mobs — incited by BJP leaders — killed dozens in Delhi the next year, he called it “a failure of leadership on human rights.”
The Howdy Modi celebration was not staged by strangers to either the essayist or the candidate. Its committee chair was Jugal Malani, its patrons included Ramesh Bhutada, its honorary committee carried Vijay Pallod, the essayist’s own father, and its honorary co-chairs included Rishi Bhutada, who sits on HAF’s board, alongside the candidate’s own parents, Hakumat and Radha Israni.
The rally Sanders condemned was built by the network that now funds Israni’s campaign.
That is the moral clarity the essayist says she admires, and it was aimed against exactly what her own family built, at the Modi her father flew to India to help elect, whose rise her relative Ramesh Bhutada credited to RSS training in that same Houston Chronicle.
In her family’s city, Sanders named what was being done to Kashmiris and to India’s Muslims, plainly and in public. She asks for equal rights for every community in America, and yet her essay never reaches the question of whether she wants the same for Muslims, Christians, and Kashmiris in India, the people the movement she defends exists to keep beneath them.
One of us rejected a religious nationalist ideology, in public and by name. The other serves one, and wrote two thousand words to keep from saying its name.
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Pieter Friedrich is a freelance journalist specializing in analysis of South Asian affairs. He is the author of Sikh Caucus: Siege in Delhi, Surrender in Washington and Saffron Fascists: India’s Hindu Nationalist Rulers as well as co-author of Captivating the Simple-Hearted: A Struggle for Human Dignity in the Indian Subcontinent. Discover more by him at PieterFriedrich.net.