{"id":918946,"date":"2026-07-11T00:17:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T05:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/11\/u-s-congress-candidate-rakhi-isranis-problem-isnt-pride-but-indias-rss\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T00:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T05:17:08","slug":"u-s-congress-candidate-rakhi-isranis-problem-isnt-pride-but-indias-rss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/07\/11\/u-s-congress-candidate-rakhi-isranis-problem-isnt-pride-but-indias-rss\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Congress Candidate Rakhi Israni\u2019s Problem Isn\u2019t Pride But India\u2019s RSS"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A Hindu American Foundation board member called me a white Christian nationalist for reporting on Rakhi Israni, but disputed not a single fact. Here\u2019s the movement her essay would not name.<\/em><\/em><\/h3>\n
<\/figure>\n

The featured image shows the HAF board member<\/strong>\u2019<\/strong>s father, Vijay Pallod (front row, far right), with his cousin-in-law, HSS-USA<\/strong>\u2019<\/strong>s Ramesh Bhutada (second row, third from right), both in the uniform of the RSS at a December 2010 summit in Pune, India.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Americans know the difference between a faith and a political movement that claims to speak for it.<\/p>\n

Christian nationalism is not Christianity, and reporting on a Christian nationalist organization is not bigotry against Christians.<\/p>\n

I know that distinction holds, because this week Kavita Sekhsaria, a board member of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), published two thousand words<\/a> concluding that there is little difference between me and a white Christian nationalist.<\/p>\n

My offense was reporting on Rakhi Israni<\/a>, a Democrat running for the open congressional seat in California\u2019s fourteenth district that Eric Swalwell vacated this spring<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

She titled her essay \u201cPride Is Not Supremacy,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

She demanded evidence, and asked me to quote them and to document the conduct.<\/p>\n

So here is the movement, here is its name, and here is what it is.<\/p>\n

The Movement She Would Not Name<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Israni\u2019s 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

You do not have to take this reporter\u2019s word for what the RSS is, because India\u2019s own government has banned it three times<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s first home minister, Sardar Patel, ordered that first ban<\/a> to root out \u201cthe forces of hate and violence,\u201d and he wrote that its members had carried out arson, robbery, and murder.<\/p>\n

Its founders wrote down what they believed. In 1923, the man who coined the movement\u2019s creed, V.D. Savarkar, defined a Hindu as someone whose holy land lies inside India<\/a>, which by design read Muslims and Christians, whose holy lands sit in Mecca and Jerusalem, out of the nation.<\/p>\n

The historian Christophe Jaffrelot, the leading scholar of the movement, records what came next, when the RSS\u2019s second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, looked at Nazi Germany exterminating its Jews and, in his 1939 book<\/a>, called it \u201crace pride at its highest.\u201d<\/p>\n

She titled her essay \u201cPride Is Not Supremacy.\u201d The man who wrote her movement\u2019s first systematic statement of itself looked at the purging of the Jews and called it pride.<\/p>\n

This is not history sealed under glass. Last December the RSS\u2019s current chief, Mohan Bhagwat, declared that India is a Hindu nation and needs no constitutional approval<\/a> to be called one, and days earlier he had drawn the very line this article opens with \u2014 between a faith and a political creed that claims to speak for it. The movement, he said, is \u201ccalled Hindutva, not Hinduism.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Murder and Pogrom<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Bajrang Dal is the militant arm of the same Vishwa Hindu Parishad whose American branch\u2019s officers are among Israni\u2019s donors, and a decade later the same network\u2019s activists drove the Kandhamal pogrom in Odisha<\/a>, which left more than a hundred people dead, three hundred churches burned, and tens of thousands of Christians driven from their homes.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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\u2019s writer said does not exist.<\/p>\n

More Than a Third<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

The network is not in India. It is here, on Israni\u2019s own filing, where more than a third of the outside money her campaign raised, $351,954<\/a>, came from donors affiliated with the American Sangh, the RSS\u2019s family of organizations in the United States. These are its officers and the families that built it here.<\/p>\n

HAF presents itself as a civil-rights group for Hindu Americans, but its own history says otherwise.<\/p>\n

That characterization is not mine. A report by Political Research Associates<\/a> calls HAF \u201ca key node in the global Hindu supremacist movement,\u201d bound to the RSS\u2019s American branches by money, organization, and people, and it is language that Congress\u2019s own research service<\/a> later relayed and that a Rutgers law school study<\/a> independently confirmed.<\/p>\n

Its co-founder, Mihir Meghani, came up through the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), and he wrote a manifesto, \u201cHindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology,\u201d<\/a> that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP; India\u2019s ruling party and the political wing of the RSS) later published as its own. It celebrated the mob destruction of the Babri mosque<\/a> as the release of \u201cthousands of years of anger and shame,\u201d and it told India\u2019s Muslims that their place in the nation depended on their submission to that Hindu nationalist order.<\/p>\n

Andrew Cockburn, writing in Harper\u2019s,<\/a> found HAF \u201cclosely connected in word and spirit to the RSS and its spin-offs.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Her Father in Uniform<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

She left out what they served it as.<\/p>\n

Kavita Sekhsaria \u2014 born Kavita Pallod \u2014 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\u2019s first cousin) traveled to Pune, India, for a summit of the RSS\u2019s overseas wing, where they were photographed in the movement\u2019s uniform<\/a>, posing with the man who founded that wing.<\/p>\n

Four years later, Pallod flew to India with a team of thirty to campaign for Narendra Modi\u2019s election, telling me, \u201cOnly because of Narendra Modi, I went to campaign in India.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bhutada is the national vice president of that overseas wing, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, and Houston\u2019s first chapter of it began in his own house, with one of its offices still running out of a warehouse his company owns.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cRSS training,\u201d<\/a> and that Americans uneasy about the man ought to reconsider the RSS that shaped him.<\/p>\n

These are not Hindus who happen to know one another. They are the officers of a movement, and she is one of them.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s, The Caravan, Human Rights Watch, a federal commission, and Golwalkar\u2019s own books.<\/p>\n

What she would not do, in an essay written to humanize the very men who run the RSS\u2019s American structure, was admit what they run. The silence was the answer.<\/p>\n

The Plot, and the Punchline<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

That silence has a pattern. In 2025, California\u2019s 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\u2019s managing director, Samir Kalra, called the veto a victory for the civil rights of all Californians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Months later, Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom<\/a> 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\u2019s own show and mocked the plot for being botched<\/a>. \u201cIf you\u2019re gonna do a job,\u201d he said, \u201cfucking do it right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sikh and Hindu rights groups condemned the segment, noting that Kalra seemed to concede India had ordered the killing.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s assassination plot failed.<\/p>\n

From the Movement to the Ballot<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rakhi Israni was the movement\u2019s lawyer.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s executive board, then as legal director of its political arm<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A Guest in the Living Room<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Reporting on the RSS\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the essayist\u2019s own family has been close enough to the RSS to host its supreme chief: her father told me, in 2019, that Ramesh Bhutada \u2014 the relative beside him in the Pune uniform photograph, now also a donor to Israni\u2019s campaign \u2014 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\u2019s donor, and yet the essayist called me a Christian nationalist for naming the movement he leads.<\/p>\n

The Doll and the Senator<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>, and of how the two of them admired \u201chis moral clarity and the values he represents,\u201d an odd scene, she suggests, for anyone cast as a puppet of the BJP.<\/p>\n

It is worth examining where Bernie Sanders aimed that clarity because, in 2019 in Houston (her family\u2019s own city), he stood before the Islamic Society of North America and called India\u2019s BJP government\u2019s revocation of Kashmir\u2019s autonomy, its crackdown on dissent, and its communications blackout unacceptable<\/a>, demanding that the United States speak out for the Kashmiri people.<\/p>\n

As Trump and Modi staged the Howdy Modi rally<\/a> in that same city weeks later, Sanders wrote in the Houston Chronicle that the celebration would meet a human-rights crisis with \u201ca deafening silence.\u201d<\/a> When anti-Muslim mobs \u2014 incited by BJP leaders \u2014 killed dozens in Delhi the next year, he called it \u201ca failure of leadership on human rights.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s own father, and its honorary co-chairs included Rishi Bhutada, who sits on HAF\u2019s board, alongside the candidate\u2019s own parents, Hakumat and Radha Israni<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The rally Sanders condemned was built by the network that now funds Israni\u2019s campaign.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In her family\u2019s city, Sanders named what was being done to Kashmiris and to India\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n

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Pieter Friedrich<\/strong>\u00a0is a freelance journalist specializing in analysis of South Asian affairs. He is the author of\u00a0Sikh Caucus: Siege in Delhi, Surrender in Washington<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Saffron Fascists: India\u2019s Hindu Nationalist Rulers<\/em><\/a>\u00a0as well as co-author of\u00a0Captivating the Simple-Hearted: A Struggle for Human Dignity in the Indian Subcontinent<\/em><\/a>. Discover more by him at\u00a0PieterFriedrich.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A Hindu American Foundation board member called me a white Christian nationalist for reporting on Rakhi Israni, but disputed not a single fact. Here\u2019s the movement her essay would not name. The featured image shows the HAF board member \u2019 s father, Vijay Pallod (front row, far right), with his cousin-in-law, HSS-USA \u2019 s Ramesh<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":918947,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1549,2542],"tags":[6274,6262],"class_list":["post-918946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-candidate","category-congress","tag-candidate","tag-congress"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}