Courtesy: X/RSSorg
RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat told an interfaith audience in New York on Saturday that a Hindu who wants Muslims “driven out” of India cannot remain a Hindu. The remark, reported by The Indian Express and independently carried by The Hindu and The Times of India, was made at the Faith Leaders Conference organised by the AHEAD Forum.
He was speaking on 29 August 2026 at Madison Square Garden, where organisers put attendance at about 5,000 to more than 6,000 Indian-Americans and religious leaders. The programme formed part of the RSS’s centenary-year outreach in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Bhagwat recalled questions put to him during a 2018 lecture series in India.
“In 2018, during my lecture series, Muslim brothers asked me that I talk about Hindu Rashtra and if that meant Muslims would be driven out. I said no, that is not Hindutva. If any Hindu thinks there should be no Muslims in India, he will not remain Hindu,” he said, according to The Indian Express. “If you want to call yourself a Hindu you have to believe that all paths are leading to the same Goal. And every human has dignity. There is no difference between human beings.”
Does this change how Hindu Rashtra is heard abroad?
That line travelled fastest. News agencies and Indian dailies treated it as the centre of the New York message because it restated, on US soil, a position Bhagwat has used since 2018: Hindutva, as he defines it, does not mean expulsion. The Hindu summarised the same claim: a person who believes Muslims should have no place in Bharat would cease to be a Hindu.
He placed that claim inside a larger theology. Hindu tradition, he said, holds that all faiths pursue divinity. India, he added, had historically sheltered people of different denominations who could not find safety elsewhere. A “baggage” from the past still fed communal disturbance, he said, according to The Indian Express.
On X, verified news handles circulated the same clip within hours. Public reaction split. Some users treated the line as a rebuke to critics of the RSS. Others asked why similar language is not always matched by Sangh-affiliated politics at home. Those posts are sentiment, not official RSS statements.
Why start with society if the aim is to shape policy?
Bhagwat did not hide an interest in politics. He said socio-religious organisations may want to influence public policy, even to “stop wars”. They should not begin there.
“Politics has now become a game of self-interest. Where there is me and my, there is no solution. We and ours is the solution,” he said. Public opinion in a democracy, he argued, is what politicians cannot easily defy. Build that first.
He cited RSS relief work after the 1996 mid-air collision over Haryana involving a Saudia flight and a Kazakhstan Airlines aircraft. Workers helped survivors and arranged last rites, he said, without treating victims as “Muslims” first. “Had we been in politics, we would not have been able to do it.” Dialogue with Muslims and Christians after 2018 was “the first step, service is another”. Progress is slow. “Continue sitting, something will happen.”
At the larger Madison Square Garden session later the same day, he told the diaspora that unity and diversity sit in Bharat’s “DNA”. America’s keyword is pluralism. Bharat’s phrase is unity in diversity. Citing Swami Vivekananda, he said every nation has a mission. Bharat’s, in his telling, is to make the world see that diversity can decorate an underlying oneness, “not by preaching, but by practice”, The Indian Express reported. He also asked Indian-Americans to stay loyal to their karmabhumi, the country where they work.
What did other faith leaders and New York politics add?
Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, former Archbishop of Abuja, spoke of Africa’s “baggage”: Islam and Christianity arrived as rivals for conversion. “We need to shed them,” he said. He questioned the drive to “make disciples of all nations” if the result is communities killing one another, according to media reports.
The event did not land in a quiet city. Earlier in the week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he did not support the programme and called the RSS vision “exclusionary” and at odds with the plural, secular India he grew up with. He also said the city may lack jurisdiction to cancel a private booking at Madison Square Garden. Civil rights groups
