A critic who cannot concede a good sentence can’t examine a bad one.
RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat, at an interfaith summit in New York on 29 August, recalled Muslims who had asked him after his Delhi lectures of 2018 whether they would be driven out of a Hindu Rashtra. He replied that expulsion would not be Hindutva at all, and that a Hindu who wants a Bharat without Muslims will not remain a Hindu.
Those dismissing this statement as public relations are being lazy. Consider the domestic weather in which it lands: a decade of election seasons conducted in the vocabulary of infiltrators and graveyards, bulldozers that arrive before charge sheets, and television studios where a Muslim panellist is invited so that four others may shout at him. In this atmosphere, the head of the Sangh telling a section of his own following that they have argued themselves out of the faith they claim to defend is worth having. Indian commentators who could not bring themselves to say so should ask themselves why.
He said more that deserves recording. Diversity, he told the Madison Square Garden crowd, must be accepted, respected and protected. Those who extend protection only to the obedient, he said, conduct themselves as rakshasas (demons). Both propositions, taken seriously, indict a great deal of what is done in his name. Having said that, I have to report what three sets of Indian readers actually heard.
The Muslim reading
A Muslim citizen who reads the sentence closely notices its construction. His right to exist in India is established by way of a proposition about what a Hindu must believe. The whole load is carried by Hindu self-definition.
Persuade enough Hindus that the Sarsanghchalak has misdescribed their faith, which a loud section already believes he has, and the protection goes out with the theology. The constitutional sentence is built the other way round. Muslims belong to India because India is equally theirs. Their citizenship is neither granted by nor dependent on the goodwill of the majority. That version survives a bad decade—and a change of Sarsanghchalak.
The second thing an Indian Muslim notices is the word ‘shelter’. Bharat, Bhagwat said, gave shelter to those who had nowhere safe to go. As history that is honourable and true of the Parsis at Sanjan and the Jewish people of Cochin. Applied to Indian Muslims, it is a category error with a long tail. Their ancestors’ labour, languages, architecture, jurisprudence and military service are constituents of India rather than guests within it. The Urdu in which much of the freedom movement was argued is not a loanword. Maulana Azad was not a lodger.
Bhagwat answered the question of expulsion and left untouched the question of ownership, the one that has been live all along.
The Sikh reading
For Sikhs, the difficulty is simpler. He said nothing about us at all.
Sikhs are absent from Bhagwat’s New York speech. And it is now a pattern. Bangkok, November 2023, at the World Hindu Congress: Islam referenced, Christianity referenced, Sikhism absent. Kochi, August 2025: a Sikh vice-chancellor proposes a chair on Vedic resonances in Sri Guru Granth Sahib in the Sarsangchalak’s presence, uncorrected from the dais. Nagpur, October 2025: Guru Tegh Bahadur invoked in the 350th year of the martyrdom and framed as Hind ki Chadar, the shield of Hindu society. Mumbai, February 2026: gurdwaras praised for their cleanliness, referenced as material for a general point about temples.
The Sangh has said the necessary sentence before, under pressure and in private. In January 2001, after the uproar over KS Sudarshan, the fifth Sarsanghachalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, describing Sikhism as a sect of Hinduism, the RSS spokesman M.G. Vaidya handed Sardar Tarlochan Singh, then at the National Commission for Minorities, a written note recording that Sikhism is a separate religion with a distinct ideology. In August 2005, Ashok Singhal of the VHP issued a letter to the same effect. Neither has been repeated by a Sarsanghchalak from a public stage.
Sikh history also supplies a harder test than oneness. In 1675, at Chandni Chowk, Guru Tegh Bahadur gave his life for the religious freedom of the Kashmiri Pandits. He did not ask them to accept the Sikh understanding of the divine. Nor did he tell them that beneath their janeu and his own kesh ran a single thread making all faiths ultimately one, a claim that would have recast the coercion of a minority by the state as a misunderstanding within one family, to be dissolved by better feeling rather than resisted. He defended their right to remain different from him. That is the standard. I protect you because your conscience is yours, and it stays yours precisely where it contradicts mine.
The Christian reading
Christians received the warmest formulation of the evening: friendship before persuasion, dialogue conducted since 2018, service rendered without discrimination.
They also received an invitation to return to the true form of their faith, which will converge on a universal human dharma. A Christian can reasonably say that the belief in the incarnation is not something to be corrected, and that religious pluralism does not require him to agree with that.
The sharper problem for Christians is the distance between the dais and the street. While the Sarsanghchalak speaks of protected diversity in Manhattan, his affiliates press anti-conversion statutes state by state. A Christmas function at a Nagaur school or a mall in Raipur can be disrupted by activists who have absorbed the Sangh’s confidence and skipped its caveats. Nobody in Nagpur has yet been visibly and personally answerable for any of it.
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What the three have in common
All three readings converge on one omission. Each community was told it would be protected. None was told that nobody is entitled to be its protector, because all are equal owners. Protection is a duty the protector defines, revises, and may one day find inconvenient. Ownership is a right the owner asserts against the protector.
There is a cheap remedy available for at least one of these. The Sarsanghchalak could travel to Amritsar, pay obeisance at Sri Harmandir Sahib, and say in his own voice, without the adjective and without the dharma qualifier, that Sikhism is a separate religion distinct from Hinduism. It would cost him nothing he values, and it would tell Muslims and Christians what they cannot know at present, which is whether what was said in New York will also be said in Nagpur.
KBS Sidhu is a retired IAS officer who superannuated as Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab. He is the Founder-Editor of The KBS Chronicle. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)