Mamdani, Bhagwat and the American Paradox of Inclusion
By Gajanan Khergamker
There is an extraordinary irony in what unfolded at Madison Square Garden this weekend. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani publicly opposed RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's appearance, questioned the ideology he associates with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and made his disapproval unmistakably clear, yet none of that stopped thousands of people from turning up to hear Bhagwat speak. What was intended, at least politically, as an expression of mayoral disapproval consequently became something rather different in practice: a highly visible demonstration that in a constitutional democracy, political authority and political opinion are not interchangeable, and that a mayor's opposition does not confer upon City Hall a veto over a lawful private gathering.
The numbers themselves tell an important part of the story. The "Universal Oneness Celebration", organised by the American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue (AHEAD), drew more than 5,000 attendees according to the event organisers and programme information, with more than 200 Hindu-American organisations associated with the gathering. The scale matters because it punctures the suggestion that Bhagwat's appearance represented an isolated or marginal expression of the Indian-American community; whatever disagreements exist within that community, the Madison Square Garden audience demonstrated that there is a substantial constituency willing to hear the RSS chief in person.
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| RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat speaking at the Madison Square Garden |
The symbolism was amplified beyond the Garden itself. Images of Bhagwat appeared on Times Square billboards before the event, while the programme was presented around themes of "resolve, harmony and dialogue", alongside the Indian philosophical proposition of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam - the world as one family. The contrast could hardly have been sharper: while opponents attempted to define Bhagwat's appearance as a manifestation of exclusionary Hindu nationalism, organisers and supporters presented it as an exercise in cultural confidence, civilisational dialogue and Hindu-American representation.
This does not mean that the RSS's critics were wrong to raise questions about its ideology. They are entitled to challenge its conception of Hindu nationalism, its historical record, its relationship with the Bharatiya Janata Party and its approach towards India's religious minorities. Those are legitimate subjects for scrutiny, and an American democracy that protects Bhagwat's right to speak must simultaneously protect the right of his critics to question, protest, investigate and condemn what he represents.
But that is precisely why Mamdani's intervention deserves closer examination. The Mayor was entitled to oppose Bhagwat; he was entitled to describe the RSS as exclusionary; and he was entitled to explain why he believed its ideology was inconsistent with his understanding of India's secular and pluralistic tradition. What he could not do merely by expressing that opposition was convert personal or political disapproval into municipal prohibition — and, significantly, his own remarks acknowledged uncertainty over whether New York City possessed jurisdiction to cancel a private event. Reuters reported that Mamdani opposed the programme while recognising the question of the city's legal authority over it.
That distinction is not a technical footnote. It is the central constitutional fact around which the controversy ultimately revolves. The state does not acquire a power to prohibit an unpopular idea merely because an elected official considers that idea objectionable. Nor does a private venue become an instrument of government simply because the person occupying City Hall dislikes the person appearing on its stage. Madison Square Garden was not transformed into a municipal facility by political controversy, and Bhagwat did not require a mayoral endorsement before addressing an audience that had voluntarily assembled to hear him.
The outcome therefore exposed the limits of political signalling. Mamdani could condemn the event; activists could protest it; human-rights organisations could challenge the RSS; American officials could debate Bhagwat's visa; commentators could describe the organisation in terms ranging from cultural movement to Hindu nationalist force. But none of these arguments, by themselves, could erase the legal distinction between an objectionable political opinion and an unlawful public act.
Indeed, the more consequential development was what happened inside Madison Square Garden. Bhagwat did not arrive before a hostile vacuum. He addressed a large, visibly supportive audience during the RSS's centenary year and spoke about Hindu thought, social unity and the place of Muslims within that worldview. In one of the most striking remarks reported from the address, Bhagwat said that there was no place in Hindu thought for excluding Muslims and that a person who wanted an India without Muslims ceased, in his formulation, to be genuinely Hindu.
That statement does not settle the much larger debate about the RSS. It does, however, complicate the caricature of the Madison Square Garden gathering as a simple exercise in majoritarian triumphalism. Bhagwat was able to put his own argument before an American audience rather than having his position defined exclusively by his critics. That is precisely what open societies are supposed to permit: competing claims are placed in the public domain, where they can be accepted, rejected, challenged or subjected to scrutiny.
The irony is that Mamdani's opposition may have made that public examination more significant rather than less. Had there been no mayoral intervention, the Madison Square Garden programme might have remained principally a diaspora event marking the RSS centenary and Bhagwat's international outreach. Instead, the Mayor's opposition transformed it into an American political story about Hindu identity, free expression, municipal authority, religious pluralism and the boundaries of legitimate political disagreement.
Controversy, in other words, supplied the event with an audience beyond the audience inside the Garden. This is where the American rhetoric of inclusion encounters its most uncomfortable test. Diversity, equity, pluralism, belonging and representation are now central components of the language of American public life. Yet inclusion is not tested when society is asked to accommodate identities and ideas that it already regards as legitimate. It is tested when the speaker is politically inconvenient, culturally unfamiliar or ideologically objectionable.
A society that says, "You are welcome, provided we approve of what you believe," is not practising unconditional pluralism. It is practising conditional tolerance. The distinction matters particularly for the Hindu-American community because political and religious identity are often being collapsed into one another. The RSS is not synonymous with Hinduism, just as opposition to the RSS cannot automatically be described as opposition to Hindus. At the same time, Hindu civilisational identity cannot be treated as inherently suspect merely because one influential Hindu organisation articulates a political conception of India that many Americans and Indians find controversial.
The intellectual error lies in refusing to distinguish among Hinduism, Hindu identity, Hindu nationalism, the RSS and the BJP. Once these categories are collapsed, criticism of one organisation can easily become suspicion of an entire community, while defence of Hindu identity can equally be misrepresented as an automatic defence of every position associated with the RSS.
Neither approach is serious enough for a mature democracy. The American debate should therefore be asking a more difficult question: Are political and religious movements being judged consistently, or are some forms of identity expression automatically granted the presumption of minority protection while others are more readily interpreted through the vocabulary of majoritarianism, extremism or exclusion?
That question cannot be answered simply by declaring America "anti-Hindu". Such a claim would be too broad and insufficiently evidenced. The United States contains competing political institutions, courts, administrations, civil-society organisations and communities, and its policies towards India, Hindu Americans and religious freedom cannot responsibly be reduced to a single ideological position. But neither should concerns about asymmetry be dismissed merely because the sweeping accusation is unsustainable.
The scrutiny directed at India and the RSS by American religious-freedom organisations is real. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom has criticised India's record on religious freedom and has advocated measures against Indian actors, including the RSS. At the same time, the American political system contains a substantial constituency that views Hindu nationalism primarily through the prism of minority rights, religious freedom and alleged discrimination. Those concerns may be justified in particular cases; the larger democratic question is whether the same evidentiary and ideological standards are applied consistently across communities and political movements.
Madison Square Garden therefore became more than a venue. It became a test of whether pluralism extends beyond political comfort. The answer, at least in practical terms, was visible in the crowd.
More than 5,000 people were expected at the event, and the participation of more than 200 Hindu-American organisations indicated a degree of institutional support that could not be wished away by political criticism. That support does not establish that the RSS is correct, nor does it invalidate the concerns of its opponents. It establishes something more modest but important: that a substantial section of the Indian-American and Hindu-American public wants the opportunity to hear, represent and debate a civilisational and political worldview that has become increasingly influential in India.
That constituency has a democratic right to exist even when its worldview is unpopular among sections of New York's political establishment. The distinction between protest and prohibition is therefore indispensable. Protesters have every right to demonstrate outside Madison Square Garden. They have every right to argue that the RSS promotes an exclusionary conception of India, to demand scrutiny of Bhagwat's record, to challenge his statements and to attempt to persuade people not to attend his events. Mamdani, too, has every right to use the enormous platform of the mayoralty to make his opposition known.
What democratic government cannot legitimately do merely because it dislikes a political viewpoint is manufacture an administrative barrier to lawful expression. That is why Mamdani's inability to prevent the Madison Square Garden appearance ultimately matters more than his opposition to it.
The Mayor's words did not empty the Garden. They did not persuade thousands of attendees to remain at home. They did not prevent Bhagwat from speaking. They did not prevent the organisers from presenting the event as an expression of Hindu-American identity and the Indian philosophical principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. Nor did they prevent Bhagwat from presenting his own understanding of Hindu thought to an audience that had chosen to listen.
In that sense, the constitutional architecture worked exactly as it was supposed to. A mayor can object. A citizen can protest. A civil-rights group can condemn. An organisation can defend itself. An audience can applaud. Another audience can walk away. The state, however, is not supposed to decide that an idea becomes too objectionable to be heard merely because those in political authority dislike it.
That is the uncomfortable discipline imposed by liberal democracy. It is also why the comparisons and historical analogies invoked by some opponents of the event should be treated carefully. Critics have drawn attention to Madison Square Garden's history, including the infamous 1939 Nazi rally, in arguing that the venue should not provide a platform to movements they regard as extremist. But the existence of a genuinely abhorrent historical event at a venue does not establish that every subsequent controversial speaker is equivalent to the speakers who appeared there in the past. Historical analogy can illuminate; it can also become a substitute for evidence.
If the RSS is genuinely exclusionary, its critics should demonstrate that through its record, statements, organisational practices and political consequences. If Bhagwat's arguments are incompatible with pluralism, they should be challenged argument by argument. If the organisation's supporters believe those accusations are false, they should be allowed to make their case before precisely the kind of diverse audience that gathered at Madison Square Garden.
That is more powerful than censorship because it replaces administrative judgement with public judgement. There is another irony here. The event itself was presented by its organisers as an interfaith and multicultural gathering, while critics questioned whether the language of universal oneness concealed a narrower project of Hindu consolidation. RSS functionary Sunil Ambekar described the celebration as an interfaith gathering in which Bhagwat would address a diverse, multicultural and multi-faith audience.
That competing interpretation should not be resolved by government decree. Let the audience hear Bhagwat. Let interfaith leaders respond. Let journalists investigate. Let academics analyse the RSS. Let Hindu Americans disagree among themselves. Let Muslim Americans challenge Bhagwat's conception of India. Let Christians, Jews, secular Americans and others participate in the debate. That is what an open society looks like when it encounters an organisation about which citizens profoundly disagree.
The alternative is considerably more dangerous: allowing political authorities to decide in advance which ideological communities deserve public legitimacy.
And that is where the American paradox of inclusion becomes impossible to ignore.
If inclusion means accommodating only those communities whose political vocabulary is sufficiently compatible with the prevailing ideological preferences of the moment, then inclusion becomes a form of gatekeeping. If, however, inclusion means that Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, secular, conservative, progressive and nationalist voices are permitted to speak within the boundaries of law — while everyone else remains free to criticise them — then inclusion becomes something more difficult and far more democratic. The Madison Square Garden gathering demonstrated that the distinction matters.
Mamdani's opposition may have been politically forceful, but it did not translate into governmental control. Bhagwat's supporters did not require the Mayor's approval to fill the Garden. His critics did not lose their right to protest because the event went ahead. And the American constitutional framework did not collapse merely because a controversial Indian political figure was allowed to address thousands of people in one of the country's most famous venues.
Quite the contrary. The more than 5,000 people who gathered effectively demonstrated that the political marketplace does not operate according to mayoral preference. The audience was free to hear Bhagwat, and the rest of America was free to judge what it heard. That may ultimately be the most important outcome of the controversy.
Mamdani did not stop Bhagwat. He did something else: he helped make Bhagwat's appearance a much larger political event than it might otherwise have been. The Mayor's opposition ensured that the RSS's centenary outreach in New York became an international conversation about Hindu identity, Indian nationalism, American pluralism and the limits of municipal power.
And Bhagwat, standing before a packed Madison Square Garden, was able to answer his critics in the oldest democratic way possible — by speaking. The real test, therefore, is not whether Zohran Mamdani likes Mohan Bhagwat. He plainly does not. Nor is it whether Mamdani regards the RSS as compatible with his conception of a secular and pluralistic India; he has made clear that he does not.
The more important question is whether Mamdani, and the political culture he represents, can accept the principle that democratic freedom must protect the right to hear arguments that powerful people consider repugnant just as vigorously as it protects the right to condemn them. Because if New York's celebrated pluralism can accommodate only those identities whose politics have first passed an ideological inspection, then the problem is no longer Mohan Bhagwat alone.
It is the possibility that "inclusion" has acquired an admission policy. And the Madison Square Garden crowd may have demonstrated, rather emphatically, that the people standing outside that admission gate are no longer prepared to wait for permission to enter.
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