Swami Agnivesh’s Religion of Resistance.

Swami Agnivesh was a longtime teacher, advisor, and moral guide for Hindus for Human Rights. His 2006 speech, “Religion, Human Rights and Universal Spiritual Ethos,” is worth revisiting today because it offers a vision of religion that is courageous, justice-centered, and deeply humane.

Download the full speech: “Religion, Human Rights and Universal Spiritual Ethos” by Swami Agnivesh

Opening of the speech in Religious Socialism

Swami Agnivesh delivered this speech at the ILRS Congress in Oslo, Norway, where he spoke to an international gathering of religious socialists about faith, human rights, and the universal spiritual values that bind movements for justice together. The speech was later published in Religious Socialism, a DSA-linked publication associated with the Religion and Socialism Commission / Religious Socialists network: a periodical for “people of faith and socialism in North America.”

That setting gives the speech a renewed resonance today. Long before our current debates about religion, authoritarianism, and the political left, Swami Agnivesh was already offering a powerful answer: faith, at its best, is not a retreat from the world. It is a force for human rights, anti-poverty struggle, and resistance to oppression.

In the speech, Agnivesh reflects on being born into an orthodox Brahmin family and later questioning ritual, caste, superstition, and religious authority. He explains that his faith moved away from fear and outward symbols toward a simple but radical understanding: “God is truth. God is love. God is justice.” To worship God, he says, is to become more loving, compassionate, and just.

For Agnivesh, religion could never be passive. Seeing poverty and inequality in Calcutta, he rejected the idea that injustice was fate or karma. He came to believe that real spirituality required confronting unjust social structures. “My religion is to resist injustice,” he said.

That message remains central to HfHR’s work. Swami Agnivesh reminds us that questioning is not a betrayal of faith. Resisting injustice is not separate from worship. And human rights work must be rooted not only in law and policy, but in a deeper commitment to truth, compassion, humility, and liberation.

At a time when religion is so often weaponized in service of exclusion and power, Agnivesh offers another path: a faith that resists tyranny and untruth, and calls us to become more just in the world.

Download the full speech: “Religion, Human Rights and Universal Spiritual Ethos” by Swami Agnivesh