FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Savera report maps the RSS’s secretive “Vishwa Vibhag,” or Overseas Department, and finds that one in six of the Sangh’s branches outside India, along with its de facto global command, sit in the United States
Press Contact: [email protected] – Safa Ahmed, Indian American Muslim Council
New York – August 26, 2026: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has spent a century insisting that it works “only in Bharat [India].” A new report from Savera names the department that does its work everywhere else, and locates that department’s center of gravity in the United States.
“Transnational Entanglements: The RSS ‘Vishwa Vibhag’ or ‘Overseas Department’” documents the bureaucracy through which the RSS runs its global operations, including a coordinator, two continental co-coordinators, and a set of full-time RSS pracharaks (cadre) assigned to five geographic zones covering the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Gulf, South and Southeast Asia, and Australasia. The report draws on the RSS’s own publications, internal bulletins, tax filings, event records and leadership biographies to reconstruct a command structure the organization has never publicly acknowledged.
It is the second installment in a series occasioned by the arrival in the United States today of RSS Supreme Leader Mohan Bhagwat, who speaks at Madison Square Garden on August 29. The first installment, “Fibs, Fronts & Fixers,” identified the shell entity organizing that event and named Saumitra Gokhale, listed in Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) tax filings as a yoga instructor earning $36,000 a year, as Global Coordinator of the RSS’s Overseas Department. This report documents what he coordinates.
Key findings
The RSS’s global operation is run from the United States. HSS USA serves as the de facto international headquarters of the Vishwa Vibhag. Its own 2025 report lists 267 shakhas across nine regional divisions, about one in every six of the roughly 1,600 shakhas the Sangh claims outside India.
The HSS is the RSS. Senior HSS positions are effectively reserved for RSS pracharaks, and the organization replicates the RSS’s uniforms, unit structure, titles, prayers and iconography. Gokhale has explained on camera that swayamsevaks abroad operate under locally chosen names: as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh in the Global North, the Hindu Sevai Sangam in Malaysia, the Sanatana Dharma Swayamsevak Sangh in Myanmar, or the Vivekananda Seva Sangh in Singapore.
One man sits atop three of the Vishwa Vibhag’s Indian hubs: Shri Vishwa Niketan in Delhi, the Antar Rashtriya Sahayog Parishad in New Delhi, and the Vishwa Adhyayan Kendra in Mumbai, who administer the RSS’s overseas work between them. Shyam Parande is Secretary of the first, Secretary-General of the second, and International Coordinator of Sewa International, the RSS’s diaspora fundraising arm. The report also documents shared phone and fax numbers among these bodies, and self-attested financial arrangements between them.
Overseas cadre are trained in India. The seventh Vishwa Sangh Shibir, held near Hyderabad in December 2025, drew 1,610 delegates from 79 countries. RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale delivered the keynote and Bhagwat addressed the closing session.
The RSS has documented its own traffic. Samvad, the Vishwa Vibhag’s newsletter, records 717 visitors to its Delhi headquarters between 2008 and 2024, and 470 trips by RSS functionaries to Sangh outposts abroad. The United States tops both lists, with the United Kingdom second.
The HSS’s direct ties to the RSS are crucial because American Sangh organizations share their leadership. Thirty HSS-USA figures identified in the report hold simultaneous positions in other Sangh-linked bodies, among them the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, Sewa International, the Overseas Friends of the BJP, the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation and the Hindu American Foundation.
Sixty-five organizations have signed a public statement calling on U.S. civil society and elected officials to withhold any platform, honor or photo opportunity from Bhagwat and his network. Signatories include Grassroots Asians Rising, the Movement for Black Lives, 18 Million Rising, Faith in Public Life, Showing Up for Racial Justice, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Faith Against Religious Nationalism, and the American Council for Judaism, alongside a range of South Asian organizations.
Quotes:
“The RSS has told one story in India and another one here for fifty years. What this report does is put the paperwork on the table. Hindus in America are entitled to know that groups presenting themselves as cultural and charitable organizations answer to a chain of command in Nagpur, and that our religious life is being borrowed as cover for a political project most of us reject.”
— Sunita Viswanath, Executive Director, Hindus for Human Rights
“Elected officials are going to be asked for citations and photographs this week. They should read this report first. The organizations behind the Madison Square Garden event are the same ones that covertly send their members to RSS training camps in India, that worked to defeat caste discrimination protections in California and to kill a bill on transnational repression, and that operate through layers of secrecy our coalition has worked to disentangle.”
— Kiran Kaur Gill, Executive Director, SALDEF
Read the full report: https://wearesavera.org/resources/reports/transnational-entanglements/
Read Part One, “Fibs, Fronts & Fixers”: https://www.wearesavera.org/resources/reports/fibs-fronts-fixers/