Hindus for Human Rights backs USCIRF call for sanctions on RSS, calls it a turning point
Hindu rights group says USCIRF's naming of RSS marks a new threshold in international recognition of India's religious freedom crisis
WASHINGTON (MNTV) – Hindu rights organization Hindus for Human Rights has welcomed the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s recommendation to impose targeted sanctions on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), calling it a significant moral and political marker in the global reckoning with religious persecution in India.
In a statement responding to USCIRF’s 2026 Annual Report, the organization said the commission’s explicit naming of the RSS — one of India’s most powerful Hindu nationalist organizations — validated what communities on the ground, journalists, scholars, and human rights advocates have been documenting for years.
“For years, those of us who have spoken out against Hindutva have been told that we are overreacting, being divisive, or unfairly naming an ideology and its institutions,” the organization said, adding that the assault on religious freedom in India is “not random, not marginal, and not merely the work of a few extremists acting alone — it is structural, ideological, and sustained.”
USCIRF’s 2026 report recommended that the U.S. government impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities including India’s Research and Analysis Wing and the RSS, citing their “responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom,” including asset freezes and entry bans into the United States.
Hindus for Human Rights said the recommendation carries weight even though USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan advisory body whose findings are not automatic policy.
“These reports shape policy conversations, public understanding, and the terms of international scrutiny,” the statement read.
“The fact that USCIRF now recommends targeted sanctions on the RSS marks a new threshold in how the crisis in India is being recognized.”
The organization was careful to frame the development not as an attack on Hindus, but as a warning about what it described as the capture of Hindu identity by supremacist politics.
“Hindutva does not speak for all Hindus, and the RSS does not represent the only possible Hindu public life,” it said, arguing that a faith rooted in dignity and moral courage must stand against domination, not sanctify it.
The statement called on policymakers, media, and international civil society to take the USCIRF finding seriously and act on it.
“This should not pass quietly,” it concluded.
“It should be read, shared, and understood for what it is: a major acknowledgment that the machinery of religious freedom violations in India includes powerful institutions that must be named and challenged.”
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