On April 23, the prominent conservative think tank the Hudson Institute hosted a conference titled “The New India Conference”. The event brought together what it described as “leading intellectuals” from India, though in reality most of the Indian participants were drawn from the Hindu nationalist movement, particularly the RSS and its political affiliate, the BJP. Notably absent were voices representing the many diverse streams of thought that characterise the Indian public sphere. The Hudson conference asserted that India’s importance to American interests had never been greater, yet argued that knowledge gaps had increased, leading to India (read the Hindu nationalist movement) being misunderstood in the US.

The conference drew early attention due to a controversy involving Ram Madhav, an RSS ideologue, who portrayed India’s foreign policy as strikingly deferential to the US, suggesting that India had complied with US demands on everything from oil purchases from Iran and Russia to high tariffs with little resistance. The backlash in India was swift, with critics across the political spectrum challenging both the accuracy of his claims and the image of subservience they projected. Madhav issued a prompt apology, acknowledging that India had not in fact ceased buying Russian oil and had protested against the US tariffs. The episode became a flashpoint in India’s public discourse, and while it does highlight what critics of the Narendra Modi government describe as an inexplicably accommodating posture towards the US, it ultimately obscured a more consequential dimension of the conference: the gross misrepresentation of Hindu nationalism.

The conference was framed around the idea that India is undergoing a transformation: that there is a “New India” that the US does not fully understand. According to this narrative, a knowledge gap in Washington, DC, is contributing to friction in bilateral ties. Yet, in substance, the event reflected a deeper concern within segments of the US strategic establishment: that a weakening relationship with India could undermine broader geopolitical objectives, particularly efforts to balance or contain China. For many in the US policy community, India remains a critical strategic partner. As a result, the conference seemed less about understanding India in all its complexity and more about recalibrating the US approach to ensure that the partnership remains intact despite neglect from the Donald Trump administration.

The early morning sessions were largely dominated by diplomatic platitudes, including routine and standard opening remarks from the Indian Ambassador. The final two sessions, however, were the most revealing ones. I would strongly encourage anyone concerned about US-India relations—or interested in understanding the contours of this so-called New India and its posture towards the US—to watch them. Both sessions are available on YouTube, and indeed, the entire conference proceedings can be watched there.

Advocates of strong US-India relations

Notably, prominent advocates of strong US-India relations were among the key voices at the event. These included Kurt Campbell, who was in charge of the Indo-Pacific region and was referred to as the Asia tsar in the Joe Biden administration, and Lisa Curtis of the Center for a New American Security, who most recently was the leading author of a report titled Repairing the Breach, which examined the growing distance and deteriorating state of US-India relations. Their presence and their interventions highlighted the strategic anxiety with regard to India-US relations among a segment of the Washington, DC, elite.

Campbell was arguably the standout voice: articulate in explaining India’s economic strengths and strategic value and unusually candid in conveying Indian frustration at President Donald Trump’s dismissive posture towards India and the erosion of initiatives such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). The Quad, which comprises the US, India, Australia, and Japan, was active during the Biden administration, with regular leaders’ summits that emphasised India’s centrality to global politics by showcasing Prime Minister Modi alongside the US President and the Prime Ministers of Japan and Australia. The decline in the frequency of these engagements has clearly reduced India’s visibility—and that of Modi—on the centre stage of world politics since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

Indian commentators have argued that one of the casualties of Trump’s changing posture towards India has been trust. They suggest that it will now be increasingly difficult for India to trust the US, and this has become a dominant theme in discussions on India-US relations. Elizabeth Threlkeld, director of the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center, offered a particularly useful unpacking of this concept. She argued that “trust” means different things to Indians and Americans. For Americans, trust implies alignment: confidence that another country’s policies broadly converge with US interests. For Indians, however, trust often implies expectation: that the US should tolerate policies and decisions by India even when they run counter to US interests. In this light, the unwillingness of the Trump administration to accommodate divergence is being interpreted in India as a breach of trust. This is an important insight, and one that Indian policymakers would do well to reflect upon.

Incidentally, it was in response to Threlkeld that Ram Madhav made his intervention, attempting to portray India as a more compliant ally of the US and therefore more deserving of American trust. But, unfortunately for him, his effort to gloss over the growing differences between the US and India resulted in a major controversy back home.

The final panel, effectively the conference’s plenary session, featured Dattatreya Hosabale, the general secretary of the RSS, hosted by Walter Russell Mead of the Hudson Institute. The session signalled that the institute was introducing the RSS to the highest levels of the US’ policy discourse. Hosabale, by the way, is famous in India for arguing that Hinduism is supreme and Muslims must adopt Hindu ways of worship and along with Islamic prayers must also adopt pantheistic nature worship.

What followed was a lengthy question-and-answer session—lasting over an hour—between Mead, Hosabale, and the audience. Throughout, Hosabale presented a highly sanitised account of the RSS, describing it as a volunteer-driven organisation devoted to social service and national development. He downplayed or denied its ideological foundations in Hindu nationalism, instead framing it in terms of India’s “civilisational identity”, a formulation that often serves as a softer vocabulary for articulating Hindutva.

Remarkably, neither Mead nor members of the audience challenged these characterisations. The effect was surreal. Early in the exchange, Mead did offer a moment of analytical clarity by situating the RSS alongside organisations such as the Chinese Communist Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, entities that combine ideological, social, and political functions. Yet this line of enquiry was not pursued.

Absent from the discussion was the more widely recognised characterisation of the RSS within India itself: as a highly disciplined cadre-based organisation with a long history of ideological mobilisation and paramilitary-style training, including uniformed drills and marches. Its goal is to unite India as a Hindu nation by erasing all other religious identities and cultural heritages. The disconnect between this reality and the narrative presented on stage underscored the extent to which the session functioned less as critical enquiry and more as unexamined amplification.

NPR interview

This gap is even more striking when the session is contrasted with NPR’s interview with Hosabale, arranged by the RSS’ lobbyist in Washington, DC. In that interview, Rob Schmitz did a greater job than Mead or the Hudson Institute in educating the audience about the history of the RSS and the controversies surrounding it over the decades. When confronted directly with questions about minority rights and ideological commitments, Hosabale struggled to respond convincingly, exposing the fragility of the narrative presented at Hudson. The NPR interview exposed the RSS, while the Hudson panel appeared almost designed to camouflage its more troubling and dangerous aspects.

The US policy community has, in fact, been aware of the dangers of Hindu nationalism for decades. In 2005, Modi—then Chief Minister of Gujarat and a lifelong RSS member—was denied a US diplomatic visa, and his existing visa was revoked under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act due to concerns about alleged violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. He remains one of the very few political leaders to have faced such action under that law. Since then, concerns about religious freedom in India have continued to surface at the highest levels of US policymaking: from Vice President Kamala Harris’ remarks to Modi in 2021, as reported in Los Angeles Times, to repeated public statements by the then Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, affirming that the US was closely monitoring the deterioration of human rights in India, and even President Barack Obama, who emphasised religious tolerance during his 2015 visit to India. Obama reiterated his concerns in 2023. The issue is neither new nor poorly understood in the US.

If anything, the problem is not a lack of knowledge but a selective disregard of it. Efforts by influential policy institutions to normalise or whitewash the ideological dimensions of Hindu nationalism may offer short-term diplomatic convenience, but they risk undermining the long-term credibility of US-India relations. One of the most persistent concerns raised about the RSS and the broader Hindutva project is that, in seeking to redefine India as a Hindu state, it is also attempting to erase Muslims from the country’s historical and political narrative: through the renaming of places, the rewriting of history, political violence, voter suppression, widespread hate speech, and the systematic marginalisation of Muslims in public life. The absence of Muslim representation in the current government and the broader decline of Muslim visibility in the public sphere—despite a population of over 200 million—only reinforce these concerns.

It is therefore telling that even a conference dedicated to understanding the “New India”, hosted by the Hudson Institute, reproduced this pattern of erasure. There were no Muslim speakers. There was no meaningful discussion of the challenges facing Indian Muslims. And even when questions were directed at RSS representatives, the core ideological question of Hindutva—and its implications for pluralism and democracy—was largely avoided. In that sense, the conference did not merely misunderstand India; it mirrored the very exclusions that define the political trajectory it sought to explain.

Muqtedar Khan is a professor of international relations and Islamic studies at the University of Delaware and a senior non-resident fellow of the Middle East Policy Council. He is also the host of the widely viewed YouTube show on global affairs called Khanversations.

Also Read | RSS versus the Constitution

Also Read | Do Muslims need to change their approach?