How The RSS Is Testing America’s Foreign Influence Laws

"When laws like FARA are selectively enforced or quietly sidestepped, they invite abuse by actors who do not share our commitments to pluralism, democracy, or the rule of law."

Harjot Singh
December 18, 2025 | 5 min. read | Analysis

When foreign influence efforts are ignored or dismissed by the U.S. government, even as legal red lines are crossed, the consequences extend far beyond Washington. Each failure of enforcement sets a dangerous precedent, telling autocratic governments and extremist movements worldwide that U.S. transparency laws are negotiable. That risk is now apparent as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a powerful Hindu nationalist organization based in India, has quietly begun lobbying members of Congress through a major DC firm while avoiding the disclosures required under federal law.

As most readers well know, but many in the U.S. Congress do not, the RSS is a Hindu nationalist paramilitary group that has been operating in India for nearly a century and serves as the ideological backbone of the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself is a lifelong RSS member who rose through its ranks. For decades, scholars and human rights organizations have documented the RSS’s role in promoting an exclusionary vision of a Hindu India - one that has coincided with democratic backsliding, rising religious intolerance, and organized discriminatory violence against India’s religious minorities.

According to public lobbying disclosures, the RSS has launched a well-funded lobbying effort in Washington. As first reported in an investigative report published by Prism last month, a major U.S. lobbying firm, Squire Patton Boggs (SPB), registered earlier this year to lobby Congress on the RSS’s behalf on issues described broadly as “U.S.–India bilateral relations.” Government filings show that the firm received hundreds of thousands of dollars for this work, yet the registration did not identify the RSS as a foreign entity.

More alarming still, the firm did not register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A law specifically designed to ensure transparency when foreign actors seek to influence American public policy.

This lack of registration matters. FARA requires far more detailed disclosure than the Lobbying Disclosure Act, the less stringent statute under which the firm chose to register. Under U.S. law, anyone acting in the United States at the order, request, direction, or control of a foreign principal must register under FARA if they engage in political or lobbying activities on that principal’s behalf. That obligation extends to indirect arrangements as well: an agent working through an intermediary does not escape disclosure requirements simply because another entity sits in between them and their true client.

In this case, the lobbying was routed through a U.S.-based intermediary - State Street Strategies, doing business as One+ Strategies - which Squire Patton Boggs listed as its client in connection with the RSS. Multiple legal experts have noted that such an arrangement does not remove the activity from FARA’s scope and may raise further serious concerns about deliberate efforts to avoid its transparency requirements. By choosing to file under the Lobbying Disclosure Act rather than FARA, this campaign has largely escaped public scrutiny, leaving Congress little oversight into the nature, scope, or targets of the RSS’s influence efforts.

SPB’s role here is also especially alarming in light of the firm’s recent history of representing foreign clients implicated in grave human rights abuses. Until 2021, it served as a lead lobbying firm for a Saudi media entity linked to a senior Saudi official who was later sanctioned for his role in the brutal murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Only after sustained public pressure, and after multiple Members of Congress refused to meet with the firm because of that relationship, did SPB terminate the contract. That the firm has thus already been the subject of intense scrutiny for lobbying on behalf of foreign clients implicated in human rights violations makes its current relationship with RSS-linked interests all the more alarming.

Beyond legal technicalities lies a more fundamental question: who is the RSS, and why should Americans care?

Historians have long described the RSS as a far-right paramilitary organization whose founding leaders openly expressed admiration for Nazi fascism. From 1925 onwards, the RSS has promoted an exclusionary form of Hindu nationalism and has since evolved into the central node of a vast global network of affiliated Hindu nationalist groups. A recent investigation estimates that this network may include as many as 2,500 subsidiaries worldwide, a structure which has been described by some scholars as the oldest and largest far-right movement of its kind. Independent observers, including the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, have warned about the RSS’s role in “decades of extreme violence and intolerance” directed at religious minorities in India.

Under RSS-backed BJP leadership, India has experienced a marked rise in religious intolerance, violent majoritarianism, democratic erosion, and violence against minorities - developments documented by U.S. government agencies, including the State Department.

Historically, the RSS has advanced a supremacist vision of majoritarian dominance that seeks to discipline religious minorities through dehumanization, social exclusion, and coercion. Its affiliates have been credibly linked to advancing anti-minority rhetoric, organized hate campaigns, and mob violence targeting Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and others.

For Sikh Americans, these concerns are deeply personal.

The RSS’s vision of India as a Hindu Rashtra (a Hindu nation) explicitly relegates non-Hindus, whether Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, or others, to second-class status. Its ideology has long insisted that Sikhs and other minorities must either assimilate into the Hindu fold or accept subjugation with diminished rights. When genocidal massacres against Sikhs were unleashed across India in November 1984, many RSS members were accused of participating in the mass violence; prominent RSS ideologues, including Nana Deshmukh, were reported to have publicly defended the nationwide killings.

That such an organization now seeks legitimacy and access in the halls of the U.S. Congress is deeply distressing not only to Sikh Americans, but to all who value pluralism, human rights, and democratic accountability.

This is what makes the RSS’s quiet push into Washington so dangerous. Lobbying is not merely about persuasion; it is about legitimacy, access, and power. When an organization with a documented history of sectarian extremism seeks to shape U.S. policy behind closed doors, without full transparency, it undermines the democratic norms we claim to uphold at home and promote abroad.

The U.S. Congress and Justice Department should take this matter seriously. Most urgently, the Department of Justice should examine whether U.S. lobbying laws have been properly followed and whether FARA applies. Members of Congress, for their part, should ask hard questions before engaging with any lobbyists connected to the RSS, and ultimately look to decline meetings with anyone representing nefarious interests or intent. Constituents, too, can and should make their voices heard by contacting their members of Congress and urging them to question and refuse meetings with any lobbyists acting on behalf of the RSS.

Transparency is not a partisan issue, it is a democratic one.

When laws like FARA are selectively enforced or quietly sidestepped, they invite abuse by actors who do not share our commitments to pluralism, democracy, or the rule of law. As Sikh Americans, we have a moral responsibility to speak out on this issue, not least of all because our community has seen what happens when extremist ideologies are normalized and shielded from accountability.

With ongoing concerns about Indian transnational repression still fresh in the minds of many Sikh Americans, any additional instance of unlawful foreign interference must be treated with utmost seriousness.

The United States cannot become a place where intolerant movements quietly rehabilitate their image while evading the very laws meant to protect our democracy.

Harjot Singh is the Federal Policy Manager at the Sikh Coalition, the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the United States. He holds a master’s degree in Human Rights Studies from Columbia University and previously served as a student fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

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