India’s largest and most feared Hindu supremacist organization retained a prestigious American lobbying company to influence U.S. lawmakers, a Prism investigation has revealed. The news comes just as the ethnonationalist group has become bolder than ever in pursuing a genocidal agenda against Christians, Muslims, tribals, and Dalits (untouchables) in India.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or National Volunteer Corps paid the law firm Squire Patton Boggs $330,000 in 2025 to lobby members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
The lobbying was aimed at providing a platform for the RSS in Congress and promoting bilateral relations between the Trump administration and India’s Hindu supremacist government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The RSS is the ideological parent and mentor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or Indian Peoples’ Party, a Hindu nationalist faction that has held power over India’s federal government for over 16 years.
Under the Modi-led government from 2014 to the present, Christians have experienced an unprecedented torrent of persecution. According to Christian Solidarity International (CSI), 2025 marked the fifth consecutive year of record-breaking violence against believers in the world’s most populous nation.
My organization the Vulnerable People Project has confirmed from publicly accessible records that the RSS hired the American lobbying firm to secure its interests in foreign and defense policy without identifying itself as a foreign entity. The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS USA) functions as the RSS’s American wing.
Squire Patton Boggs did not register its RSS lobbying under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a 1938 law that requires such agents to make periodic disclosures about their relationship with a foreign state.
The more light that has been shed on RSS, the more it has slinked away from public scrutiny – inadvertently lending decisive credibility to all the accusations against it.
In November, the national publicity chief of the RSS, Sunil Ambedkar, flatly denied reports that his organization had hired the lobbying firm. “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh works in India and has not engaged any lobbying firm in (sic) United States of America,” he wrote on X.
A week later, the RSS mouthpiece Organiser published an article confidently claiming that the “RSS’s outreach is fully disclosed under LDA [the Lobbying Disclosure Act].” The article accused the Indian American Muslim Council – which is as concerned about rampant Hindu nationalist persecutions of minorities as any Christian advocacy group – of running a decade-long “sophisticated anti-India lobbying machine in Washington.”
But after Prism Media’s report exposed the Hindu supremacist conspiracy, the Organiser deleted its article – all but completely confirming the whole defense had been a lie.
Following the controversy, the lobbyists at Squire Patton Boggs ended its contract with the RSS on December 29th, 2025.
The organization said that the political consulting firm State Street Strategies had hired it on behalf of the RSS to “introduce the RSS to US officials.” It later amended disclosures to indicate the hiring was done by a Massachusetts-based individual, Vivek Sharma, rather than by the RSS.
Prism Media Report Should Open Our Eyes to the Wider Campaign to Normalize Persecution in India
The RSS’s hiring of U.S. lobbyists is part of a growing movement of Hindu supremacism in the West with a clear goal of politically paving the way for a future “Hindu India” that can only come about over the dead bodies and ethnically cleansed villages of minorities, including Christians.
In February 2025, a report on “Transnational Funding in Hindu Supremacist Movements” released online by the Polis Project revealed the “unprecedented surge of American money” and “the expansive global network of financial flows behind Hindu supremacist movements.”
The report followed the money trails between Hindu-American corporations and the thuggish supremacists brutalizing minorities on the ground in India. It identified the Bhutada Family Foundation and the Gupta & Aggarwal Family Foundation. These nonprofits and the families running them are among the most influential in U.S. Hindu circles and also run million-dollar corporations, the report noted.
But while some Hindu groups fund the actual crimes, others use their power and money to influence American policy, according to the report “Hindu Nationalist Influence in the United States (2014-2021): The Infrastructure of Hindutva Mobilizing.”
As an example, it cited the Hindu American Foundation receiving $142,000 from the Uberoi Foundation to fund a campaign aimed at removing the dehumanizing term and concept of “Dalit” (routinely used by Hindu supremacists but repulsive to Western ears) from U.S. textbooks in the academic years 2005-6 and 2016-17.
The radical outfits are also benefiting from U.S. taxpayer dollars. In 2021, five organizations with ties to Hindu supremacist groups, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, received COVID-19 relief funding amounting to $833,000, according to data released by the United States’ Small Business Administration (SBA).
In his book “Saffron America: India’s Hindu Nationalist Project at Work in the United States,” Pieter Friedrich warns that “other much wealthier, older, and far more genuinely powerful Hindu nationalist organizations throughout the country have similarly duped naive American politicians over many years.”
“Around the US, politicians stand willing and ready to award recognition to practically any organization which approaches them requesting it, no vetting apparently ever required, and, upon gaining it, even the most illegitimate of organizations can begin to establish a veneer of legitimacy,” Friedrich writes.
And just as Hinduism becomes radicalized into a radical ideology – and at a time when it needs reform rather than thoughtless promotion – American Hindu money is also being used to present Hinduism to Americans as non-religious, harmless, and a mark of upper-middle-class sophistication. Think yoga, Reiki, and transcendental meditation.
Meanwhile, the HSS now has approximately 235 centers across 164 cities in 34 U.S. states, which draw a regular attendance of 5,000 to 7,000 Hindu activists.
Hindu supremacist entities posing as charities in the U.S. are also pouring millions of dollars into militant Hindu outfits in India that are using the funding to target Christians and establish a homeland for Hindus alone.
The filings by Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHP-A) show that it transferred more than $7 million dollars to VHP India and its subsidiaries between 2001 and 2020, a report by the Global NPO Coalition’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF) found.
The report found that it “is apparently clear that these groups are raising money which is being used for terrorist activities, hate speeches, and carrying out genocidal threats to the minorities in India.”
Putting Pressure on Our Elected Officials
Friedrich laments: “I have spent a lot of time this year talking in America, trying to get American Christian clergy to pay attention to the issue of persecution of Indian Christians. And when I talk with them, probably 75 or 80% of them are completely ignorant of the issue.”
As a Christian, I refuse to be complicit in that status quo as my brothers and sisters suffer horribly at the hands of an ascendant Hinduism. And I believe now is the time to speak out more confidently than ever before. Because Hindu supremacism is no longer just a threat to Indian Christians. It has reached the halls of power in our nation – and as citizens of a democratic republic, here, we have the power to make our elected officials answer to us.
Will you join me?