After the RSS’s attempt to clandestinely lobby US congress was exposed5, Mohan Bhagwat, its Supreme Leader, is coming to America to launder his organization’s reputation in person.
In this report, the first in a series occasioned by Mohan Bhagwat’s visit to three of the RSS’s most important overseas sites of influence – the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom – we shed light on the secretive operations of the RSS abroad. We follow the RSS’s illegal lobbying effort last year into its sequel this August, revealing the hidden networks behind the shadowy organization hosting Bhagwat in Madison Square Garden. But we go deeper still, for the true movers and shakers of the RSS sit behind an additional layer of smoke and mirrors.
The protagonist of our report is the RSS’s chief operative in the United States – a man listed in tax forms as a humble “yoga instructor” making $36,000 a year for the HSS, the RSS’s US wing. In contrast to his stated job title, this enigmatic individual has travelled to hundreds of locations across the globe in what we show to be his true role: the Global Coordinator of the RSS’s secretive Vishwa Vibhag, or Overseas Department.
As the quotes above show, the RSS likes to pretend that it has no overseas operations. Drawing on the organization’s own publications, videos, and other statements, this report demolishes this fabrication.
Our reports that follow will delve into the full extent of the RSS’s overseas operations, the people and organizations through which it operates, and the extent of its clandestine penetration across the world. But for now, let us dive deeper into the context of Bhagwat’s visit, the nature of his host, and the top lieutenant he relies on to expand his organization overseas.
Cloak and Daggers: Who is Behind the Mysterious Organization Hosting Mohan Bhagwat?
Mohan Bhagwat’s visit to the US next week is, on paper, organized independently, by a new entity called the AHEAD (American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue) Forum. Bhagwat’s visit is headlined by a “Universal Oneness” celebration at Madison Square Garden on 29 August 2026, a marquee event of the RSS’s centenary outreach that will allegedly draw more than 5,000 people.6 Although AHEAD Forum’s press release only vaguely refers to “hundreds of participating” organizations, the fingerprints of the HSS are visible in the event’s very name: “Universal Oneness” is HSS-USA’s own signature branding, used frequently for its Raksha Bandhan events.7 The registration page for the event makes references to “partner organizations” and requires an “Organization Code” for registration, but reveals nothing about who these organizations in fact are.8 But our research can reveal that behind this cloak-and-daggers approach is a familiar strategy: the use of front organizations like AHEAD Forum to conceal the role of the HSS and the Vishwa Vibhag.
AHEAD Forum was incorporated in May 2025 and given tax-exempt status by the IRS in September of that year.9 It has three listed directors: Sudesh Agrawal, Naresh Rajanna and Rasita Vishnuram.10 But its registration records show a deeper hand: its incorporating agent was Khanderao Kand, a long-time RSS and HSS leader and the founder-president of the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies (FIIDS).11 AHEAD Forum was first registered at Kand’s own address.12 Kand, who has worked across the RSS, HSS and OFBJP for decades,13 was exposed by investigative reporting as a key figure involved in the RSS’s illegal lobbying efforts in the US,14 which caused huge public embarrassment to the RSS and HSS.15 Kand’s close associations with the RSS and BJP (see below) were likely now a liability.
- Kand with RSS and BJP leaders in April 2026 at the Hudson Institute, whose conference he claimed to have assisted organizing. Instagram, 28 Apr 2026 — instagram.com/p/DXsQ_m-nAXu
- Kand with RSS pracharak and former Vishwa Vibhag Coordinator Shankarrao Tatwawadi at the RSS HQ in Nagpur. Instagram, 13 Mar 2025 — instagram.com/p/DHIUl82OO9q
- Kand with Indian PM Narendra Modi in September 2024. Instagram, 5 Oct 2024 — instagram.com/p/DAvUeIhpXwZ
- Kand with fellow organizers of the September 2024 Modi&US event, including BJP Foreign Affairs Department in-charge Vijay Chauthaiwale. Instagram, 22 Sep 2024 — instagram.com/p/DAN-bZhJSND
- Kand with Vishwa Vibhag official Santosh Pillai in August 2024. Instagram, 30 Aug 2024 — instagram.com/p/C_SuiSDtx8s
- Kand taking “darshan” at the RSS HQ in Nagpur, pictured here in front of a statue of RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar. Instagram, 20 Aug 2024 — instagram.com/p/C-4QVtDNNC1
- Kand in August 2024 with RSS pracharak Shyam Parande, who runs multiple entities of the Vishwa Vibhag. Instagram, 13 Aug 2024 — instagram.com/p/C-nXLclsjuT
- Kand in August 2024 with BJP Foreign Affairs Department in-charge Vijay Chauthaiwale, who Kand claimed has been akin to a brother for “almost 30 years.” Instagram, 13 Aug 2024 — instagram.com/p/C-nVNdvOMIN
- Kand with Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and former US Ambassador to India Richard Verma in 2015. X (@khanderao), 26 Mar 2026 — x.com/khanderao/status/2037029853871169669
A few months after the expose, Kand moved in March 2026 to remove his name as AHEAD Forum’s principal agent and hand it over to another figure, Harish Kandpal. Its registration was also moved from his address to Kandpal’s.16 Kandpal, however, is none other than Kand’s FIIDS colleague, and served as its Vote Registration Program Manager and on the organization’s Silicon Valley team.17
A deeper examination also reveals that all three listed directors are deeply embedded in the American Sangh24 and the HSS in particular. Sudesh Agrawal runs the HSS’s Cleveland chapter19 and works with its campus wing, Hindu YUVA,20 participated in the 2018 World Hindu Congress,25 and also volunteers with Ekal Vidyalaya.26 Rajanna is similarly involved with the HSS, with records showing him participating in its events in Illinois,21 while Vishnuram is a Senior Fellow at BlueKraft Foundation,22 a pro-Modi propaganda unit described as “one of the most influential, and least publicly visible, communication platforms associated with the Modi government.”23 Vishnuram is a recipient of the foundation’s “Viksit Bharat Fellowship,”27 which was launched on Indian PM Modi’s birthday and seeks to sponsor pro-BJP and pro-Modi content production.28
Although AHEAD Forum seeks to present itself as a freshly-minted, neutral-sounding American non-profit, the mask often slips. A website under its name, and linked to Rajanna’s NY address,29 explicitly describes itself as working on a nine-front effort to help world leaders understand the RSS, arguing that understanding India “requires comprehending Hinduism as the soul of India and RSS as a driving ideology.”30
The AHEAD Forum is, in other words, a clear product of the HSS-FIIDS network, and an effort in continuation with a longer history of the RSS’s overseas lobbying efforts, built for the explicit purpose of propagandizing for the RSS abroad. The Sangh’s efforts to use these layers of concealment is, we know, in keeping with a longer history of its most powerful figures operating outside public accountability. In fact, even Kand, FIIDS, and the AHEAD Forum are a degree removed from its most powerful actors. We now return to Saumitra Gokhale, its top official who operates even further in the shadows.
The Ghost Yoga Instructor
When Mohan Bhagwat lands on US shores on August 26, the single most important figure involved in coordinating his trip will be Saumitra Gokhale, a middle-aged man who leads the US branch of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), and who is listed in the organization’s records as a “yoga instructor.”31 It is in the name of yoga that Gokhale draws a $36,000 annual salary – an arrangement that dates back to 2015.32 But what does the HSS have to do with a “yoga instructor”, and what does Gokhale actually do? The further we dug into this question, the deeper into a minefield we found ourselves – one that had little to do with yoga, and instead had us uncovering the bowels of a hidden bureaucracy that controls the largest far-right network in the world.4
Yoga does indeed feature in the HSS, as part of its focus on physical activity, calisthenics and paramilitary training. 33It also has a role more broadly within the range of cultural activities the HSS offers to meet the needs of an alienated, homesick immigrant community. But, alas, we could not find a single record of Saumitra Gokhale personally leading a yoga session, teaching a class, holding a yoga certification, or even demonstrating an asana.34 Even sympathetic bios of Gokhale describe him in various forms – as a trained engineer, an RSS pracharak, and the HSS Global Coordinator – but none of them mention yoga at all.35 Gokhale is not a “yoga instructor” – unless the “yoga” in fact refers not to the physical and spiritual practice, but the organizational gymnastics of the global Sangh.
Gokhale, rather, is a full-time RSS pracharak, and the Global Coordinator of its ‘Vishwa Vibhag’, or ‘Overseas Department.’36 Gokhale is not just the RSS’s top official in the USA, but its most powerful official outside India, and part of the inner circle of the RSS executive itself; indeed, Gokhale attends, every year, the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS, or All India Representative Meeting) – the highest decision-making body of the RSS.37 His ”yoga instruction,” despite no documented instances of him actually doing or teaching yoga, has brought him in the company of scores of Hindu far-right leaders,38 helped him share a stage with Indian consular officials across continents,39 and taken him to dozens of countries across the world. His travels have not, sadly, served to share the lessons of yoga across the world, but rather to coordinate the growth of the RSS network across the globe.
Gokhale’s presence in the US, his footprint across the world, and his role in the RSS’s Overseas Department show that this sleight of hand is no white lie. Rather, they throw into stark light one of the RSS’s foundational falsehoods, a fabrication that upholds its shadowy operations: that it works “only in Bharat”41 and never meddles outside India’s borders.42 This report sets the record straight on that lie.
The Jet-setting Yoga Instructor
Sangh sources note that Saumitra Gokhale became an RSS pracharak in 1995, soon after completing a Master’s Degree in Engineering.43 After a stint in his native Maharashtra, he was deputed abroad in 1999 – first in the Caribbean, before becoming the America zone pracharak in 2004.44 He took on the role of “Vishwa Vibhag samyojak” in March 2011 – a title the Sangh’s own fortnightly, Samvad, almost always uses.45 Sangh publications and Indian media outlets frequently describe him in the context of the “Vishwa Vibhag” and alternatively call him a “Senior RSS pracharak,”46 even as English-language coverage of his presence in the US uses the term “HSS Global Coordinator.”47 The different descriptions, ultimately, are strategically chosen variations of what is fundamentally a single role.
The RSS “Vishwa Vibhag samyojak” or “HSS Global Coordinator” has always been held by a high-ranking leader of the RSS, often for decades on end. The first to hold this role was Chamanlal Grover (d. 2003), an RSS pracharak who led and founded the RSS’s Vishwa Vibhag somewhere between 1946 and 1950.48 Grover worked from the RSS headquarters in Delhi, Keshav Kunj, where he was “solely responsible to keep close contact with the swayamsevaks going abroad.”49 Grover’s successor as Vishwa Vibhag coordinator was Lakshmanrao Bhide, another RSS pracharak who was first sent abroad to East Africa in 1958, and who later led the department for decades before taking over the RSS-run think-tank Deendayal Research Institute.50 Bhide was in turn followed by Shankarrao Tatwavadi, who held the role from 1993 to 2011 before taking over the RSS’s science wing, Vijnana Bharati,51 and handing over the reins to Saumitra Gokhale.
| Coordinator | Tenure as head | Other RSS work & later posts |
|---|---|---|
| Chamanlal Grover | 1948 – n.d.† (d. 2003) | Founded the RSS Vishwa Vibhag in 1948; RSS pracharak based at Keshav Kunj (Delhi HQ), “solely responsible” for contact with swayamsevaks going abroad; commemorated by ICCS in 2021.525354 |
| Lakshmanrao Bhide | n.d.† – 1993 | RSS pracharak; first sent abroad to East Africa (1958); later headed the Deendayal Research Institute (RSS think-tank); VAK’s annual memorial lecture is named for him.535556 |
| Shankarrao Tatwavadi | 1993 – 2011 | RSS pracharak; “International Coordinator of HSS”; on stepping down took over Vijnana Bharati (the RSS’s science wing).5758 |
| Saumitra Gokhale current | 2011 – present since Mar 2011 | RSS pracharak (since 1995), deputed abroad from 1999 (Caribbean → Canada → USA); concurrently HSS Global Coordinator and on the Sewa International & ICCS boards.355960 |
Although Gokhale maintains a low-profile, a careful review of Sangh publications show that Gokhale is constantly on the move coordinating the Sangh’s global network. Beyond repeated travel between India and North America, Gokhale’s travel takes him to locations as disparate as Auckland, Bogotá, Nairobi, Tokyo, Mexico City, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname.61 Our data, since it relies on public sources, is obviously an undercount, but it makes clear: for a man whose tax filing calls him a $36,000-a-year yoga instructor, Gokhale has accumulated a lot of airline miles.
This itinerancy is hardly intrinsically suspicious – travel and mobility are parts of the human experience, and one would expect a man charged with managing the RSS’s international network to travel. Our point, rather, is the cloak of secrecy surrounding this figure, which in turn raises multiple important questions. How is Gokhale’s travel financed? Why does the RSS disguise this role behind the fabrication of a “yoga instructor”? And why is such a powerful and well-connected man almost invisible to the public?
It is on the RSS to offer answers, but given they are unlikely to do so, we offer our best speculations.
The first is perhaps self-evident for anyone with a sense of the RSS’s conspiratorial and authoritarian instincts. Operating in the shadows allows the RSS to work outside legal or democratic structures, which its leadership has long abhorred. 62If the RSS’s top man abroad is an enigma, if its work and its harms can always be evaded as the actions of “independent” and “autonomous” actors – indeed, if it does not even legally exist! 63– then how can the power-brokers that rule the RSS ever face democratic accountability? Having enjoyed a century hiding from public scrutiny, the RSS is unlikely to now do politics in an open, democratic arena.
But in addition to its basic cloak-and-dagger proclivities, the RSS also struggles with a specific contradiction: seeking to simultaneously be nativist in ideology but transnational in power-building. When it comes to the idea of national borders and sovereignty, the RSS has clearly tried to have its cake and eat it too. On one hand, its project is grounded in a chauvinistic, xenophobic ethno-nationalism – one that has never hesitated to dismiss its opponents as conspiratorial outsiders. 64But the hypocrisy of doing so while building an extensive transnational apparatus – the largest far-right network in the world 65– is obvious.
How can Mohan Bhagwat shake hands with his MAGA counterparts, and build a global far-right alliance, 66if the reality of his organization’s influence in the US through the HSS is visible? And how, when he returns to India, can Bhagwat and his allies crush opposition in the name of receiving foreign funding, 67and being “anti-national”, if it becomes visible that his own organization is in fact the dominant recipient of foreign funds and foreign political support in India? To keep a lid on this tension, the existence of the Vishwa Vibhag must be denied, and the HSS and RSS kept separate – despite all evidence to the contrary.
Savera’s next installment will delve into the details of how the Vishwa Vibhag operates and the extent of its influence. Stay tuned.
Appendix A: The Exposed Illegal Lobbying Effort
On 16 January 2025, Squire Patton Boggs (SPB)—one of Washington’s largest lobbying firms—registered to lobby the US Congress on behalf of the RSS. Over the first three quarters of that year, it sent its lobbyists both into the bowels of the House and the Senate and to the RSS’s own events in India, and collected $330,000 for its efforts.14
But almost every feature of the arrangement was built to keep the RSS’s hand out of view. SPB was hired not by the RSS directly but through an intermediary, State Street Strategies, doing business as One+ Strategies, in the hope that the RSS would never appear as the client of record. The whole campaign was filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act rather than the Foreign Agents Registration Act, because the latter would have forced disclosure of every meeting, email, call, and transaction. But the ultimate hand of the RSS was unmistakeable – including when Squire Patton Boggs’s Bradford Ellison emailed the Rutgers historian Audrey Truschke to say his team had been retained by the RSS to educate lawmakers about its mission and impact.14
When this was exposed by Prism Reports in November 2025, the RSS was put on the defensive. Its chief spokesperson, Sunil Ambekar, denied that the organization had engaged any lobbying firm in the United States, only for the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, to contradict Ambekar a week later, claiming in a now-deleted article that the outreach had been fully disclosed under the LDA all along.14
The next month, SPB quietly amended its own paperwork, retroactively replacing the RSS as client with one Vivek Sharma—an Acton, Massachusetts pharmaceutical executive affiliated to the RSS who had appeared in the original registration as a sponsor of the effort. The contract was terminated on 29 December.15