Transnational Entanglements: The RSS “Vishwa Vibhag” or “Overseas Department”

In the predecessor to this report, we peeled back the layers of influence behind the new entity organizing Mohan Bhagwat’s August 29 Madison Square Garden speech. That excavation took us to enigmatic but powerful figures like Khanderao Kand and, even higher up, Saumitra Gokhale, whose innocuous titles and organizations seek to conceal key roles in advancing the RSS’s overseas work.

In this report, we use publicly available evidence from the RSS’s own sources to delve deeper into how the RSS conducts its work outside India through a covert coordinating unit generally called the Vishwa Vibhag (“World/Overseas Department”).³ The presence and activities of this unit, we show, lay bare the reality that the RSS does indeed operate across the world, and that it does so in a covert but bureaucratized and systematic manner. Mere “inspiration” does not describe the material infrastructure the RSS has across the world. Our report also makes clear that the HSS, in contrast to its public claims, is neither independent nor autonomous of the RSS, but rather serves as, and is, the RSS itself.⁴

This claim, although self-evident in the HSS’s vocabulary, paraphernalia and aesthetic, is true in a deeper material and organizational sense. The HSS’s top leaders (including, but not restricted to Gokhale) do not merely hold RSS “backgrounds” but in fact simultaneously hold positions in the RSS, to the extent that the top positions in the Global HSS are effectively reserved for RSS pracharaks.⁵ RSS leaders (like Bhagwat today, and Dattatreya Hosabele before him) regularly visit and speak at HSS branches abroad.⁶ And most revealingly, HSS and overseas Sangh leaders go through an array of specific training supervised by the RSS, culminating with travel to India for RSS training camps.⁷

That the HSS is an extension of the RSS has ramifications that extend further, in that the HSS in turn has porous organizational boundaries of its own. Key figures in the HSS are not just RSS members; they also spread into the Sangh’s other units, and simultaneously hold positions in other organizations like the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA, Sewa International, Hindu American Foundation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, and so on.⁸

Transnational connections are a reality of the 21st century and are hardly inherently problematic. But the Sangh faces a bind: it has spent so long fearmongering about outside interference even as it constructs the largest far-right network in the world.⁹ Given its century-long habits of secrecy and subterfuge, the RSS is unlikely to depart from its deceptions and deceits. But governments and communities across the world must face up to the reality, the mechanisms, and the consequences of the RSS’s tentacular spread across the world. This report seeks to demystify the hidden machinations of the RSS and advance that public accountability.

Key Figures: Who Runs the RSS’s Vishwa Vibhag?

The Vishwa Vibhag, according to RSS sources themselves,¹⁰ is together run by a samyojak (coordinator), one or two sah-samyojaks (co-coordinators), and a set of officials assigned to roughly five different continents or geographic zones: North and South America, Europe, Africa and the Gulf, South and South-East Asia, and Australasia.¹¹ All of these figures are, necessarily, RSS pracharaks. A pracharak is a full-time, celibate RSS worker – something of a cross between a missionary and a bureaucrat¹² – deputed by the organization to seed and supervise branches and front organizations, including abroad. The domestic and overseas positions (within the RSS and HSS respectively) attributed to Gokhale and his fellow Vishwa Vibhag pracharaks are, as such, one and the same.

The pracharak system is a key mechanism that ensures, as scholars explain, that “it is to India that the overseas components of the Sangh Parivar look for their material and ideological leadership.”¹³ In addition to pracharak supervision, the RSS also maintains control through a few other mechanisms: regular training camps in India for overseas workers (Vishwa Sangh Shiksha Varg, or VSSV¹⁴), financial ties routed through the RSS’s fundraising wing, Sewa International;¹⁵ as well as frequent visits from RSS leaders to affiliates across the world. HSS handbooks even have specific technical language for this organizing practice: “Pravas”, which describes “a pre-planned visit to a Shakha” by a traveling Sangh official designed to offer guidance and “knit all the Shakhas in a common thread.”¹⁶

The organizational chart below maps the key figures of the Vishwa Vibhag: Gokhale, his two continental sah-samyojaks (co-coordinators) and a wider set of RSS pracharaks responsible for specific regions and organizations.

Key Organizations of the Vishwa Vibhag

As is typical of the Sangh, its Vishwa Vibhag cannot be traced to a single entity, but rather involves a network of interconnected bodies.²⁸ Many of these organizations share the same individuals, the same addresses, sometimes even the same phone and fax numbers,²⁹ and also organize joint events – evidence that actually makes visible the reality that governing power is concentrated among a small handful of individuals.³⁰ Below, we present a few key bodies that work for the Vishwa Vibhag.

Shri Vishwa Niketan (SVN), Delhi

A Delhi-based trust dedicated to “promoting Indian culture and heritage among Indians living abroad,” SVN functions as the India-based hub for overseas (HSS) work. It publishes the fortnightly diaspora bulletin Samvad — which the former coordinator of the Vishwa Vibhag, Shankarrao Tatwawadi, attributes to the Vishwa Vibhag in an article in the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser.³¹ SVN has hosted the past two iterations of the Vishwa Vibhag’s flagship convening, the Vishwa Sangh Shibir (VSS), a global gathering of senior overseas RSS functionaries held roughly every five years³². The 7th edition, held in December 2025, near Hyderabad, allegedly drew 1,610 delegates from 79 countries.³³ RSS Sarkaryawah Dattatreya Hosabale gave the keynote and Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat addressed the close³⁴ —which makes clear the importance of this training camp to the RSS executive. Shyam Parande, a high-level RSS leader involved in its global work, and the International Coordinator for Sewa International, is Secretary of SVN.³⁵

Antar Rashtriya Sahayog Parishad (ARSP), New Delhi

Although ARSP’s own website makes no mention of the RSS and describes itself as non-political,³⁶ scholarship has explicitly identified ARSP as the body “established by the RSS in 1978 to manage overseas operations.”³⁷ ARSP’s founder was Baleshwar Agrawal,³⁸ a senior RSS leader³⁹ who also worked with the HSS-affiliated Friends of India Society International ⁴⁰and founded the RSS-run Hindusthan Samachar news agency.⁴¹ Agrawal served as ARSP’s secretary-general for 4 decades between 1983 and 2013.⁴² Its current secretary-general is, again, Shyam Parande — the same figure who is Secretary of SVN and Sewa International’s International Coordinator.⁴³ The ARSP’s Bangalore and Gujarat chapters organized the 1990, 1995 and 2005 editions of the Vishwa Sangh Shibir.⁴⁴

Vishwa Adhyayan Kendra (VAK), Mumbai

VAK’s own stated top objective is “to be a coordinating centre from Mumbai for HSS activities overseas”⁴⁵; it also lists HSS, ICCS, and Sewa International as associated organizations.⁴⁶ VAK organized the 2000 and 2010 editions of the Vishwa Sangh Shibir.⁴⁷ The VAK’s own five zones overlap exactly with those of the RSS Vishwa Vibhag,⁴⁸ and it hosts the annual Lakshman Rao Bhide Memorial Lecture (Bhide being the RSS Global Coordinator until 1993).⁴⁹ VAK also has a close relationship with Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini,⁵⁰ an RSS-run training center, hosts RSS leaders at events⁵¹, and even has a self-attested financial arrangement with Shri Vishwa Niketan.⁵²

The HSS

Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS)

The Vishwa Vibhag’s key coordination organization is, of course, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh – the form taken by the RSS outside India. The organization claims to be active in over 55 countries, running over 1,600 shakhas (as of 2024).⁵³ Sciences Po’s “Seeing the Sangh” database documents the following HSS chapters.

Although the HSS often denies formal links with the RSS, claiming to be “autonomous and independent… having no legal or financial relationship with any other organization,”⁵⁴this is a brazen lie that the HSS itself struggles to uniformly keep up. The RSS’s own Mumbai-based overseas coordinator conceded that “We don’t call it Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh overseas… we can’t use the word ‘Rashtriya,’”⁵⁵ while scholars Ingrid Therwath and Christophe Jaffrelot characterize HSS as simply “the RSS operated under a different name,” noting that this obfuscation is “an effort to mask the links they have with the RSS to avoid being overtly stigmatized.”⁵⁶

“

As I said, Swayamsevaks went out from India and then they started the Sangh by different names — although Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh is the most popular name, in different countries you’ll find different names. In Malaysia it is called the Hindu Sevai Sangam; the same name is there in Sri Lanka also. Then, in Myanmar, it has been called Sanatana Dharma Swayamsevak Sangh, in Singapore, Vivekananda Seva Sangh, and so on and so forth. Depending on the local situation, different names have been created.

— Saumitra Gokhale, RSS Global Coordinator⁵⁸

That the HSS, in contrast to its public claims, serves as, and is, the RSS itself is also visible in the fact that it uses similar uniforms and has the same basic unit – the shakha – as the RSS.⁵⁹ HSS events feature the same trifecta of portraits as the RSS (its founder K.B. Hedgewar, its second leader M.S. Golwalkar, and a portrait of Bharat Mata) and involve the same songs, prayers and activities swearing fealty to the Sangh as RSS shakhas.⁶⁰

“

For all activities outside of Bharat, the source of inspiration remains the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Pujaneeja Doctor ji, who was the founder of Sangh, and Pujaneeya Guruji, who led the organization for 33 long years and gave direction to many other initiatives by Sangh Swayamsevaks.

— Saumitra Gokhale, RSS Global Coordinator⁶¹

The HSS also replicates RSS titles in its governance and functioning — Sanghchalak, Karyavah, Pracharak, Sampark Pramukh, and so on – and even copies the RSS’s leadership structure.⁶² For example, the HSS UK runs an “Akhil UK Pratinidhi Sabha” or “All UK Representative Body” modeled on the RSS’s Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (All India Representative Body).⁶³

Sangh publications are repeatedly clear, to an internal audience, that these chapters are all part of the same unit. Consider this example from Haindava Keralam, a Sangh mouthpiece in Kerala.

Vijaya Dashami holds great importance as a Sangha Utsav. This was the day when Dr. Shri Keshav Baliram Hedgewar started Sangha in 1925 with a handful of kids with an objective of uniting Hindu society and promoting Hindu way of life. Apart from having thousands of Shakhas in India, the organization now has presence in 32 other countries including USA in the form of 700 shakhas.⁶⁴

These self-attestations are corroborated, as we earlier noted, by the reality that top leaders in the Global HSS are almost necessarily RSS members or pracharaks,⁶⁵ by the fact that visiting RSS leaders are clearly accepted as organizational leadership,⁶⁶ and by the regular flow of HSS officials to India for RSS training camps.⁶⁷

To illustrate this point, we examined the records of the Vishwa Vibhag’s own newsletter, Samvad, which helpfully chronicled hundreds of visits to and from the Vishwa Vibhag HQ in India by RSS and HSS officials between 2008 and 2024. We found a whopping 717 documented visitors to the Vishwa Vibhag HQ in India, and at least 470 documented instances of RSS functionaries in the Vishwa Vibhag traveling to Sangh outposts across the world. We visualize these results below; the full data can be found in Appendix E.⁶⁸

HSS USA

The HSS USA now serves as the de-facto international headquarters of the Vishwa Vibhag. Although the RSS first entered US shores through the VHP of America,⁹⁵ the HSS USA soon followed (founded 1977; registered as a charity 1989) and has now overtaken the VHP-A as the American Sangh’s central node. It is organized into 9 Sambhags⁹⁶ or regions with 267 shakhas (according to its own 2025 report) — which means that about one-sixth of the approximately 1,600 shakhas the Sangh runs outside India are in the USA.⁹⁷ Below, we present available information about the HSS USA’s leadership and organizational structure.

Evidence suggests that the HSS, like the RSS in India, has an influential set of leaders who might not hold formal departmental responsibilities but are part of a National Karyakarini (Executive). A list of members of this National Executive has never been published. Although some names can be confirmed in this body, others can only be inferred or speculated by their holding of national-level leadership positions in the HSS, and we mark them accordingly (*).

HSS USA Overflows into the American Sangh

That the HSS is an extension of the RSS has ramifications that extend further, in that the HSS in turn has porous organizational boundaries of its own. Key figures in the HSS are not just simultaneously RSS members; they also spread into the Sangh’s other units, and also hold positions in other organizations like the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA, Sewa International, Hindu American Foundation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, and so on. We present below twenty examples of high-ranking HSS leaders operating across other organizations as an illustrative, if incomplete, sample.

HSS Canada

Founded in 1973 by RSS pracharak L.M. Sabherwal, HSS Canada is the central node of all Sangh activities in the country. Its website lists 33 shakhas across Canada’s different provinces.⁹⁸ The Vishwa Vibhag’s key node of contact in the country is its Canada “Desh Pracharak,” Santosh Prabhu.⁹⁹

HSS UK

Founded in 1966, the UK branch of the HSS claims 117 shakhas across the country.¹⁰⁰ Its office in Leicester served as the RSS’s overseas headquarters and the HQ of the Vishwa Vibhag, taking over from Nairobi, for many decades under Shankarrao Tatwawadi.¹⁰¹

HSS shakhas across the UK · reproduced from HSS UK’s own Sangh Darshan map

Other Key Overseas Sangh Organizations Managed by the Vishwa Vibhag and HSS

International Centre for Cultural Studies (ICCS)

The ICCS presents itself as a non-political, socio-cultural organization networking indigenous traditions across the world. In reality, however, it serves as the Sangh’s effort to cultivate an “anti-Abrahamic alliance”–something the Sangh’s own publications often slip into admitting: the RSS’s own mouthpiece, the Organiser, described ICCS’s work as contradistinction to how “Islamic jihadis and church-funded outfits are seen promoting intolerance and terrorism across the world.”¹⁰² ICCS was founded in the mid-1990s in Nagpur, the RSS’s HQ city, by S.W. Bakhle and RSS pracharak Yashwant Pathak,¹⁰³ with a US chapter following suit soon after.¹⁰⁴ RSS outlets themselves call ICCS “an RSS inspired organization,”¹⁰⁵ and its gatherings have frequently been hosted in or with RSS institutions, from VAK Mumbai¹⁰⁶ to Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini¹⁰⁷ to the ICCS office within the RSS headquarters itself.¹⁰⁸ In fact, the 2021 birth-centenary of Vishwa Vibhag founder Chamanlal was organized under the ICCS banner¹⁰⁹ — making clear the extent to which ICCS sits in the Vishwa Vibhag.¹¹⁰ ICCS’s triennial “Gathering of the Elders” conferences are repeatedly headlined by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat,¹¹¹ with significant participation from Western pagan and indigenous bodies, many of whom are likely unaware of ICCS’s ties to the RSS and the RSS’s own history of violence and its troubled relationship with India’s indigenous communities.¹¹²

FIIDS (Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies).

A Washington-based diaspora policy-advocacy body with a stated focus on US–India ties, trade and counter-terrorism,¹¹³ FIIDS presents itself as an independent think-tank but is in fact a front of the HSS USA. Its Founder and President, Khanderao Kand, is an RSS and HSS member who has served as its joint general secretary, on its national executive, and as its national public relations coordinator,¹¹⁴ while another leader, Radheshyam Dwivedi, is an Honorary Board member at Sewa International.¹¹⁵ FIIDS’s activities have included producing briefing documents for Modi's US visits,¹¹⁶ and campaigns against USCIRF for critiques of India’s human rights record.¹¹⁷ FIIDS worked with the Hudson Institute to sponsor a Washington Post columnist's trip to India to cover the RSS's centenary; the columnist explicitly noted that "my trip was sponsored by the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies, whose president is affiliated with RSS.”¹¹⁸

FISI (Friends of India Society International)

Founded in the mid-1970s during the Emergency with the help of Rajendra Singh, the RSS’s fourth Sarsanghchalak, FISI has gone from fighting for democracy in exile to advancing its erosion. Although it claims to be “an international, non-denominational, and non-political association of the friends of India,”¹¹⁹ it has been led by long-time RSS leader Bhishma Agnihotri¹²⁰ and is run by personnel from American Sangh orgs.¹²¹ It has fundraised for IDRF in the past, organized pro-CAA marches in the USA, and hosts a number of Sangh speakers on its Youtube channel.¹²² Like with FIIDS, FISI offers the American Sangh an avenue to advance Hindu far-right ideas and policies under the banner of an innocuous, non-political title.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) overseas units

The VHP was founded on 29 August 1964 in Mumbai; its founders included RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar and RSS pracharak S.S. Apte¹²³. As Savera’s past reports have shown, the VHP’s global wings that emerged out of the VHP were not independent entities but daughter organizations: born from its efforts, and tied by shared personnel, regular coordination meetings and deep financial links. The bureaucracy we described there indeed emerges from none other than the Vishwa Vibhag.¹²⁴

The VHP of America, for example, was founded by Mahesh Mehta, an RSS pracharak acting on Golwalkar’s explicit orders, and remained tied by personnel, coordination meetings, transnational visits and financial ties to its parent, the VHP in India. In his memoirs, Mehta explicitly thanked the RSS Vishwa Vibhag for their support in his work, writing “I must take note of the contributions of Shree Laxmanrao Bhide, the Vishwa Vibhag Pracharak of RSS in helping me during the Indian Emergency and thereafter in developing organization work in the USA.”¹²⁵ The VHP-A was led for many decades by Mehta, and went on to found, whether directly or indirectly, a majority of American Sangh organizations active today – from the Hindu Students Council to Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation to the Hindu American Foundation.¹²⁶ The same pattern is true across the world, from the VHP UK to the VHP Canada, which was similarly founded by RSS pracharak L.M. Sabherwal.¹²⁷

Under the guise of being a religious minority, the Global VHP succeeded in burrowing into spaces of power by instrumentalizing the language of multiculturalism, as Gokhale himself has boasted about.

“

In Kenya they have successfully created a syllabus for what they call RE - Religious Education in schools. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand it is called RI - Religious Instruction); there also, literature has been created. These books go into the schools to teach Hinduism in the RE class. So, this was an effort by our own karyakartas [workers], who created a team and they published these.

— Saumitra Gokhale, RSS Global Coordinator¹²⁸

Today, RSS pracharak Swami Vigyananand is tasked with coordinating the VHP’s global network, ¹²⁹which convenes every four years at the World Hindu Congress (held in 2014 in Delhi, 2018 in Chicago, in 2023 in Bangkok, and in December 2026 in Mumbai). ¹³⁰Below, we list various VHP wings operating across the world and present a snapshot of Vigyananand’s own global itinerary.

Sewa International

The RSS’s service wing, Sewa Bharati, was founded in 1989 to coordinate and expand the RSS’s service efforts; ¹³¹its counterpart, Sewa International, functions as the diaspora fundraising arm coordinated with HSS.¹³² Sewa International USA (founded 2003; EIN 20-0638718) is the US arm of this network, and self-describes as “part of a larger movement that started in India in 1989.”¹³³ Similar branches in Canada and the UK, but also locations as diverse as Nigeria and Sri Lanka, also contribute to this network, bringing many millions of dollars a year to the RSS in India.¹³⁴ Sewa International’s overlap with HSS is extensive, to the extent that Sewa International’s leadership appears joint at the hip with the National Executive Team of the HSS.¹³⁵ Below is a list of Sewa International wings operating across the world.

Appendix

A. Ram Vaidya — full appearance log

B. Anil Vartak — full appearance log

C. Swami Vigyananand — full appearance log

D. Shared personnel — HSS figures with other Sangh posts

E. The Samvad “Pravas” record — functionary movements & overseas visitors