• Hindutva, or Hindu supremacy, is a far-right ethno-nationalist political ideology that believes in the supremacy of Hindus over all other Indians, especially Muslims and Christians. According to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, Hindutva “is a modern political ideology used… to carve out an exclusive identity and justify discrimination and violence against minority communities.” Hindu supremacists also seek to turn India’s secular democracy into an ethno-religious state, or Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation).Modeled off European fascist movements of the 1930s, including Nazism, Hindu supremacism has been legitimized and mainstreamed by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), leading Hindu supremacists in India to become “assertive, militant, and increasingly violent.” 

Hindutva is based on the belief that Hindus are superior to non-Hindus. It asserts that India should be a Hindu state and theocracy rather than a secular democracy, in which the interests and values of Hindus should dominate all areas of society. The ideology “rejects diversity,” according to the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC). It labels religious minorities, especially Muslims, as “outsiders” or “invaders” who do not belong in India. It advocates reducing these groups to second-class citizens or subjecting them to mass violence to maintain the perceived purity and dominance of the Hindu population. 

These beliefs were articulated by M.S. Golwalkar, one of Hindutva’s founding ideologues and second chief of the militant Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS): “The foreign races in [India] must either adopt Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture.” If minorities wanted to stay, he added, they must be “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizens’ rights.”

Muslims especially are targeted by the Hindu supremacist ideology, to the point where calls for mass violence and genocide against Muslims have become normalized in India, and Hindu supremacists have become key players in amplifying global Islamophobia. According to Bridge Initiative and the Community Policy Forum, “Countless reports have documented the drastic rise in hate speech, open calls for violence against minorities (primarily Indian Muslims), increasingly discriminatory legislation rendering Muslims second-class citizens, and government actions… to reconstruct India into a Hindu-only nation.”

Hindu supremacist ideology was largely shaped by ideologues Vinayak Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar. Both upper-caste Hindu men were inspired by European fascist movements, particularly Nazism. 

Savarkar was a staunch supporter of British colonialism who first articulated Hindu supremacist ideology in his 1923 book ​​Essentials of Hindutva. In it, Savarkar refers to Islam as an “alien adulteration” and asserts that Muslims and Christians are incapable of showing loyalty to India. Based on his ideology, the Hindu militant group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded two years later, in 1925. 

Golwalkar was the second chief of the RSS and is considered one of the group’s most revered figures. He became chief of the RSS in 1940 and reportedly forbade its members from taking part in Gandhi’s Quit India Movement. In 1966, he wrote Bunch of Thoughts, a collection of his lectures on Hindu supremacy. The book labels Muslims and Christians as “internal enemies” of India and quotes Golwalkar as saying, “If we (Hindus) worship in the temple, he (the Muslim) would desecrate it. If we carry on bhajans and car festivals (rath yatras), that would irritate him. If we worship cow, he would like to eat it. If we glorify woman as a symbol of sacred motherhood, he would like to molest her.” 

Hinduism is an ancient and diversely practiced religion, while Hindutva is a political ideology, and the two should not be conflated. Savarkar himself made clear that Hindutva is not the same as Hinduism, stating, “Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva… Failure to distinguish between these two terms has given rise to much misunderstanding. ” 

Sadhana, a progressive Hindu advocacy group, writes that Hindutva violates the teachings of Hinduism. “This is a majoritarian vision no different from the ugliness of white nationalism or conservative politicians who argue that the United States is a Christian country,” the group writes.

Most Hindus, both in India and the diaspora, wholly reject the Hindutva ideology. However, Hindu supremacists often deliberately conflate their bigoted views with Hindu beliefs. According to SASAC: “This attempted cover-up… seeks to deflect legitimate criticism of an extreme political ideology that is harmful to many groups and individuals [and] it tries to narrow the diverse range of Hindu traditions and expressions of Hindu identities.”

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is a militant far-right volunteer organization. Founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a man who once referred to Muslims as “foreign snakes,” the RSS sits at the top of India’s network of Hindu supremacist groups and their affiliated schools, charities, and programs, known collectively as the Sangh Parivar. The RSS had almost 585,000 members and over 57,000 branches in 2020.

Throughout its history, the RSS and its members have been involved in acts of violence. In 1948, former RSS member Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, following which Hindutva’s founding ideologue, Vinayak Savarkar, was also named as an accused in the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi. The RSS was also a primary driver of a hateful campaign that claimed that the Babri Masjid, a historic mosque in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya, was built on the remains of a temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Ram. The campaign culminated in a mob of RSS and other militant group members destroying the mosque in 1992, sparking nationwide anti-Muslim violence that killed thousands. 

In contemporary times, the RSS and its affiliated groups have been involved in massacres, mob attacks and lynchings, hate speeches, and other forms of anti-minority violence and intimidation. 

In 2022, RSS member Yashwant Shinde blew the whistle on the group’s training some of its members in bomb-making and targeting Muslims and their places of worship around the mid-2000s, according to The Nation Magazine.

According to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, the RSS has been linked to both white supremacist groups and American Hindu far-right groups. The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) network looks after its global interests, with the first HSS established in Kenya in 1947. As of 2023, HSS operates in over 40 countries, including the United States and Canada.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of the RSS. The party originated from a now-dissolved nationalist party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), founded in 1951 by RSS member Syama Prasad Mukherjee. Mukherjee’s consultation with an RSS leader before forming the BJP is noted on the BJP’s official website. 

The RSS regularly appoints its senior leaders to serve political roles in the BJP. A 2020 assessment of Modi’s government by The Print, an Indian news portal, estimated that one in five BJP ministers had an affiliation with the RSS. 

In July 2024, the BJP-led government lifted a decades-old ban on government employees joining the RSS.

Narendra Modi began his indoctrination into the Hindu supremacist movement in 1958 when he joined the RSS at the age of eight. By the late 1960s, he had become a permanent member of the militant group, working for and being mentored by an RSS Prant Pracharak, or regional leader. 

Through the next decade, Modi continued to climb the ranks of the RSS and was eventually promoted to the role of prant pracharak himself in 1981. His talents were noted by RSS leadership and eventually transferred to the RSS-linked BJP. 

Hindu supremacist ideology has been a driving force behind major policies of the Modi-led BJP government. The infiltration of this ideology into every pillar of Indian democracy has resulted in significant democratic backsliding and the normalization of outright authoritarian tendencies. As Indian American economist Ashoka Mody writes, Modi “today presides over an autocracy in all but name.”

Indian political scientist Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs, writing for the Journal of Democracy, compare the integration of Hindu supremacy into Indian society to a “new Jim Crow,” writing, “Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims… using both legislative power and extralegal methods.” Meanwhile, criticism of this new normal is suppressed, as The Observer summarizes: “Modi and the BJP have pursued an… intimidatory campaign against opponents, independent media organizations, individual journalists, civil society groups and free speech in general.”

As a result of these abuses, the Sweden-based Values of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute labeled India as “one of the worst autocratizers” due to Modi and the BJP, which V-Dem calls “anti-pluralist [and] Hindu nationalist,” in its 2024 Democracy Report. Similarly, Freedom House rates India as only “partly free” in its World Freedom Index due to rising persecution of minorities, while Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked India number 159 out of 180 countries in its 2024 World Press Freedom Index, placing it closer on the list to authoritarian regimes like Russia than to its democratic allies. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended that the US government designate India as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for egregious violations of human rights and religious freedoms.

Center for American Policy (CAP), an independent policy institute, notes that “India exhibits several of the hallmarks of a backsliding democracy: a breakdown in political pluralism, a decay in independent state institutions, and a clampdown on political dissent… All of this is set against the background of violent ethno-majoritarian rhetoric.”  

The RSS has spawned a number of groups and organizations working to advance Hindu supremacy, known collectively as the Sangh Parivar or the family of Hindu nationalist organizations. The Sangh Parivar includes hundreds of organizations directly or indirectly affiliated with the RSS. Some are militant groups with their own extensive histories of violence, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal, which function as the cultural wing and youth wing of RSS, respectively. Other groups operate in educational and charity spaces, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the RSS; Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the RSS;  Ekal Vidyalaya, an education project aimed at spreading anti-minority hatred to children in remote tribal villages; and Sewa Bharati, the service wing of the RSS that uses missionary-style aid to spread Hindu supremacist ideology to vulnerable groups. A prominent and violent cow vigilante group, the Gau Raksha Dal (GRD), also enjoys “the full support of the BJP government and the RSS.” 

The mainstreaming of Hindu supremacy has had devastating consequences on the lives of religious minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians in India. This impact is evident in the increasing violence, discriminatory laws and policies, and rampant hate speech targeting these communities. 

At the state level, Muslims are subjected to a myriad of discriminatory practices. These include targeted home demolitions, a lack of protection from law enforcement and the judiciary, and normalized hate speech from elected officials and mainstream media platforms. State-sponsored violence often manifests in pogroms.

Mob violence and hate crimes against Muslims are rampant. Instances of mob lynchings, physical assaults, cow vigilante attacks, mob attacks on Muslim neighborhoods, mosque vandalisms, and economic boycotts have become disturbingly common. Christians, too, face severe persecution. Churches are frequently attacked, and Christians are often accused of forced conversions, leading to social ostracism, physical violence, and legal harassment.

Read more about anti-minority violence and persecution in IAMC’s reports or in our India Human Rights Monitor (IHRM) news roundup archives. You can subscribe to daily IHRM updates by joining our email list. 

According to the South Asia Scholar Activist Collective, there are a number of Hindu far-right groups operating in the United States. Some of these organizations are the overseas branches of Indian militant Hindu groups and affiliated organizations, including: 

• The Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHP-A), the American wing of the VHP and the oldest US-based Hindu supremacist group
• The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the American wing of the RSS
• Sewa International, the international offshoot of Sewa Bharati 
• Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation USA, which allows Americans to support Hindu supremacist educational projects in India
• The Overseas Friends of the BJP, which pushes support (including financial contributions) for the BJP in the diaspora

The VHP-A has spawned several projects dedicated to lobbying for Hindu supremacist interests in civic and educational spaces, such as HinduPACT, HinduACTion, and Hindu Students Council. The Bridge Initiative at Georgetown University has also labeled the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA), Param Shakti Peeth of America (PSPA), and Global Hindu Heritage Foundation (GHHF) as part of the US-based network of Hindutva organizations.

While not every American Hindu supremacist group is an offshoot of an Indian organization, many collaborate with and provide a platform for members of such organizations.

Unlike their Indian counterparts, some American Hindu supremacist groups often conceal their bigoted beliefs behind the language of civil rights and victimhood, portraying themselves as benign cultural organizations or advocates for the Hindu-American minority. This tactic enables them to smear critics of Hindu supremacist ideology and the Modi government’s anti-minority policies as “anti-Hindu” or “Hinduphobic.”

Hindu supremacist actors harm marginalized communities in the United States by engaging in harassment and acts of intimidation, suing activists and journalists, raising funds to support Hindu supremacist activities in India, collaborating with global far-right actors, promoting hate speech and propaganda, lobbying against civil rights protections, interfering in democratic processes, and seeking to push Hindu supremacist narratives in the American education system, civil rights spaces, and interfaith spaces. 

According to Savera, a research group led by a coalition of civil rights groups, American Hindu supremacists have ongoing material collaborations with the American right and white supremacists. Most notably, the Republican Hindu Coalition appointed Steve Bannon as its co-chair in 2019; that same year, American Hindu far-right groups organized an event called “Howdy Modi” event in Texas, where a crowd of around 50,000 welcomed both Modi and Donald Trump as special guests. In 2024, RSS leader Ram Madhva was invited to speak at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., alongside “representatives from the American, Hungarian, Israeli, Polish, and British far right.” 

Hindu supremacist groups and actors have played a prominent role in manufacturing and amplifying anti-Muslim hatred on a global scale. A study conducted by the Islamic Council of Victoria found that between 2017 and 2019, over half of all anti-Muslim posts on X originated in India. In 2023, Al Jazeera reported that Indian social media users, including verified accounts, fueled anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim disinformation campaigns featuring hashtags such as #IslamIsTheProblem. 

Both Indian and American Hindu supremacist groups have worked with anti-Muslim actors. Prominent anti-Muslim ideologue Robert Spencer regularly amplifies Hindu supremacist propaganda, appears as a guest speaker on platforms affiliated with the VHP-A, and has labeled Muslims as “aggressors” who “want to destroy” Hinduism. VHP-A affiliates and the Hindu American Foundation have also collaborated with the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank that has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a formentor of “anti-Muslim sentiment.”