USCIRF’s Call for Sanctions on the RSS Marks a Major Shift
USCIRF report: https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2026-03/USCIRF_2026_AR_3326_NEW.pdf
USCIRF’s Call for Sanctions on the RSS Is a Major Moral and Political Marker
In a significant and sobering development, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has explicitly recommended targeted sanctions on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in its 2026 Annual Report. In the India recommendations, USCIRF calls on the U.S. government to “impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities, such as India’s Research and Analysis Wing and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),” for their “responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom,” including asset freezes and/or entry bans into the United States.
This matters deeply.
For years, those of us who have spoken out against Hindutva have been told that we are overreacting, being divisive, or unfairly naming an ideology and its institutions. But what communities on the ground, journalists, scholars, and human rights advocates have documented again and again is that the assault on religious freedom in India is not random. It is not marginal. It is not merely the work of a few extremists acting alone. It is structural, ideological, and sustained. USCIRF’s naming of the RSS makes clear that this reality can no longer be dismissed as rhetorical excess or partisan framing.
The RSS is not a fringe body. It is one of the central engines of Hindu nationalist ideology and organizing in India. Its influence has helped shape a political climate in which Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis, Sikhs, and dissenters of many kinds face deepening exclusion, fear, and vulnerability. When a U.S. government body focused on religious freedom calls for sanctions on the RSS by name, it is acknowledging something many have paid a high price to say aloud: that religious freedom violations in India are being enabled and normalized by powerful institutions, not just individual bad actors.
It is important to be precise. USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan advisory body; its recommendations are not automatic policy. But that does not make this symbolic or disposable. These reports shape policy conversations, public understanding, and the terms of international scrutiny. The fact that USCIRF now recommends targeted sanctions on the RSS marks a new threshold in how the crisis in India is being recognized.
There is also a deeper moral truth here. Religious freedom is too often invoked selectively, stripped of context, or reduced to a talking point. But religious freedom means very little if it does not include the courage to name systems that terrorize minorities while wrapping themselves in the language of tradition, nation, and civilization. What is at stake in India is not simply abstract pluralism. It is whether people can live, worship, organize, speak, love, and dissent without fear. It is whether democracy can survive the steady sanctification of exclusion.
For those committed to a liberatory, plural, and ethical vision of Hinduism, this moment should not be read as an attack on Hindus. It is a warning about the consequences of allowing Hindu identity to be captured by supremacist politics. Hindutva does not speak for all Hindus, and the RSS does not represent the only possible Hindu public life. Many of us have spent years insisting that a faith rooted in dignity, interdependence, and moral courage must stand against domination, not sanctify it.
USCIRF’s recommendation does not deliver justice on its own. But it does mark something important: a widening refusal to look away. It tells us that the stories communities have carried, the abuses people have risked so much to document, and the warnings advocates have repeated for years are breaking through denial.
Now the real question is whether policymakers will act, whether media will take this seriously, and whether international civil society will finally reckon with the scale of what religious minorities and democracy defenders in India have been facing.
This should not pass quietly. It should be read, shared, and understood for what it is: a major acknowledgment that the machinery of religious freedom violations in India includes powerful institutions that must be named and challenged.
Read the report here:https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2026-03/USCIRF_2026_AR_3326_NEW.pdf