Publication: New York Times
Title: Youth Hostels, Blood Banks, Yoga: How One Far-Right Network Spread Across the World
Publication URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/opinion/india-far-right-rss-hindu.html
Publication Date: Dec. 23, 2025,
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Op-Ed | The NYT’s “Far-Right Network” Takes a Map of Hindu Civil Society and Calls It a Menace
Opinion | What the NYT Gets Wrong About RSS, Ram Janmabhoomi, and India
SamyaTattwa by AHAD
The New York Times’ latest broadside against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi follows an old and tired pattern: reduce India to a morality play, cast Hindus as the villain, and flatten a century of social work, legal process, and civilizational memory into a few loaded labels. It’s not analysis; it’s a narrative machine that rewards its readers’ priors while misinforming them about the world’s largest democracy.
If you know that pattern, you can spot its tells. When India ended the British-era anomaly of Article 370 in 2019, the NYT splashed a religion-coded headline across its front page: “Hindu-Led India Puts Clamp on Muslim Kashmir.” That framing signaled the paper’s default lens—faith as fault-line, Hindus as aggressors—even though the move was a sovereign, parliamentary decision about a state’s constitutional status. 
When the consecration of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple (RJB) in Ayodhya became a national, lawful celebration in 2024, the NYT Opinion account told the world Mr. Modi was giving India the “Hindu utopia” his party promised—again, not reportage but sermonizing, and again pegged to a caricature of Hindus as theocratic maximalists. 
And when India stunned the world in 2014 by putting a probe in Mars orbit on its first try, the NYT ran a cartoon of a dhoti-clad man with a cow knocking on the “elite space club” door—so condescending that the paper later apologized. The episode matters because it revealed a reflex: India’s Hindu imagery is “rustic,” unserious, not quite at home among “modern” nations—until a public outcry forces a climbdown. 
This op-ed lays out what the NYT leaves out: what the RSS actually does, what the Ayodhya verdict actually says, how India’s democracy actually decided these questions—and why comparing a Supreme-Court-mandated restoration of a temple to mob-glorifying Confederate statues is historically illiterate.
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What the RSS Is (and Isn’t)
The RSS is not a “shadowy cabal.” It is a century-old socio-cultural movement whose daily shakhas socialize citizens into discipline, voluntary service, and civic bonding. Scholars who have studied the organization for decades—Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle—describe a sprawling ecosystem of affiliates that work in education, labor, rural uplift, and relief, and note that understanding the RSS requires seeing both its ideological project and its sustained service networks. 
Those networks show up when it counts. During the devastating 2018 Kerala floods, Seva Bharati (an RSS-linked service body) moved relief materials, ran medical and cleanup drives, and supported local authorities—coverage you can find in mainstream Indian outlets, not “Sangh” pamphlets. 
Nor is the RSS legally proscribed or “underground.” In July 2024, the Madhya Pradesh High Court criticized the Union government’s decades-old ban on central employees associating with the RSS and welcomed its removal—calling the old prohibition a “mistake.” That’s a court of law, not a WhatsApp forward. 
If you want a civilizational, not caricatured, reading: Mohan Bhagwat’s public addresses in recent years have emphasized harmony, respect for all places of worship, and eschewing hooliganism—hardly the marching orders for majoritarian thuggery that the NYT insinuates. 
And if the paper insists on framing the RSS against Gandhi, honesty requires noting Gandhi’s own words after visiting an RSS camp: he was “very well impressed by their discipline,” the absence of untouchability, and simplicity. That’s in the Gandhian record. 
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What the Ayodhya Verdict Says (and Why It Matters)
A century of litigation over the Ram Janmabhoomi site culminated in a unanimous five-judge Supreme Court verdict on November 9, 2019. The court awarded the disputed land to a trust for a temple and simultaneously directed that five acres be allotted for a new mosque elsewhere in Ayodhya—an explicit bid for closure and equity. This is the highest court applying Indian evidence law and balancing equities, not a street veto. 
The court’s reasoning did not rest on slogans. Among the evidentiary bases considered across the litigation history were Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) findings presented to the Allahabad High Court, documenting pre-existing non-Islamic structures beneath the 16th-century mosque. You can read ASI excerpts and case summaries in the court records. We can disagree about interpretive weight, but pretending no record exists is unserious. 
On that basis, the Ram temple’s consecration in 2024 was not a “hard-right turn,” as American op-ed writers declaimed, but the culmination of a judicial process that also protected Muslim rights by ordering land for a mosque. That is the opposite of theocracy; it is adjudicated reconciliation. 
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Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Confederate Statues: Stop the False Analogy
The NYT’s subtext is clear: a temple in Ayodhya is “like” public monuments celebrating oppression elsewhere. History says otherwise.
Confederate statues in the United States were largely erected during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era to intimidate Black Americans and re-inscribe white supremacy, as the American Historical Association explains. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture likewise documents how these monuments served segregationist politics. SPLC’s timeline shows the spikes in dedications aligning with backlash moments, and the National Park Service notes they functioned as visible reminders of a racial order. 
Ram Janmabhoomi is not that. It is not a state-sponsored idol to violent rebellion against equality; it is a court-approved restoration at a site that Hindus have revered for centuries, coupled with a court-mandated mosque in the same city. The remedy is restitutional and plural, not triumphalist. Conflating the two erases the very context that gives each object meaning. 
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On Kashmir: A Headline That Revealed a Habit
“Hindu-Led India Puts Clamp on Muslim Kashmir.” Those nine words did a lot of work. They coded a constitutional debate as a sectarian crackdown, stripped the conflict of Pakistan’s decades of proxy terror, and presented a sovereign decision by a multi-faith Parliament as a faith war. This is not about forbidding criticism of the move; it’s about lazy framing that imputes motive by religion—a habit that repeatedly surfaces in the NYT’s India coverage. 
That habit also surfaced in the NYT Opinion framing of Ayodhya as a “Hindu utopia”—moral panic dressed up as analysis. If you want to critique government policy, do it. But stop turning 1.1 billion Hindus into stand-ins for a political caricature. 
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What “Muscular Hinduism” Actually Looks Like on the Ground
If you only read the NYT, you’d think “Hindu nationalism” equals mobs and dog whistles. On the ground, a lot of it looks like hospitals, hostels, and relief work. In December 2025, Mohan Bhagwat inaugurated a 144-bed cancer hospital in Chandrapur—hardly the stuff of secret militias. In flood-hit states, the same networks that turn out for morning drills show up with food packets, pumps, and medical camps. These are facts reported by mainstream outlets. 
And the ethos repeatedly articulated by the RSS’s chief is inclusivity and restraint: respect all places of worship, avoid provocation, build social harmony. One can argue about how evenly that message filters through society (no large movement is free of deviants), but the line from the top is not the hooliganism the NYT loves to staple to an entire tradition. 
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Gandhi, Again—But the Full Picture
If the goal is to invoke Gandhi as the conscience of the nation, do it honestly. Gandhi’s September 16, 1947 address to RSS volunteers in Delhi recalls his earlier visit to a Wardha camp, where he praised their discipline and the “complete absence of untouchability.” That hardly fits the NYT’s picture of an eternally bigoted militia. Gandhi also urged moral vigilance—fair enough. He did not anathematize the organization as irredeemable. 
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What a Fair Narrative Would Look Like
A fair paper would:
• Acknowledge the Supreme Court’s verdict and its dual remedy for temple and mosque without sneering that millions of Hindus celebrating a court-approved shrine are marks of a “hard-right turn.” 
• Describe the RSS as both ideological and service-oriented, drawing on long-form scholarship rather than cut-and-paste epithets. 
• Report the courts’ and governments’ current posture toward the RSS (including the 2024 High Court remarks and lifting of the central ban on employees’ association) instead of implying illegality by innuendo. 
• Stop religion-coding Indian policy debates unless the policy’s text and enforcement actually discriminate by religion. The Kashmir headline is a case study in how not to do it. 
• Ditch the double standards: when the paper errs (as with the Mars cartoon), own it before the backlash, not after. 
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The Counter-Narrative the NYT Won’t Print
India is not ditching pluralism; it is renegotiating post-colonial compromises within democratic institutions. The RSS is not a fascist specter; it is a mass movement that has folded tens of millions into regularized civic service, social solidarity, and a self-respect many Hindus felt was denied them by both colonialism and a post-colonial elite moral economy.
The Ram Janmabhoomi temple is not a Confederate statue. Confederate pillars glorified treason in defense of slavery and were raised to terrorize citizens. Ayodhya was adjudicated as a religious restitution with a parallel remedy for Muslims. The comparison collapses history into a meme. 
No one denies India’s challenges or the need to police vigilante criminality—equally, without fear or favor. But the way to cover a democracy is to report facts, read judgments, quote scholarship, and resist reductive frames that turn a billion people’s faith into a threat assessment.
If the NYT wants to debate ideas, here are a few to start with: How should a post-colonial state honor civilizational memory within a secular Constitution? How does a democratic polity balance historic restitution with forward-looking pluralism? How can India and its critics name bad actors without smearing entire communities?
Until then, readers might remember the paper’s record: the religion-coded Kashmir headline, the “Hindu utopia” trope for Ayodhya, the Mars cartoon that punched down at a brown nation’s breakthrough. That is not rigorous skepticism. It’s a habit—and it’s time to break it. 
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Sources for further reading (a non-exhaustive selection)
• Ayodhya verdict & case record: Supreme Court summary and contemporaneous coverage; Allahabad HC files referencing ASI excavations. 
• RSS scholarship: Andersen & Damle’s work; review in Foreign Affairs. 
• Gandhi on RSS: 16 Sept 1947 speech. 
• Service work: Seva Bharati flood relief reporting in Deccan Herald/Chronicle. 
• Legal posture toward RSS: MP High Court remarks; central order lifting ban on employees’ association. 
• Confederate monuments context: AHA statement; Smithsonian NMAAHC; SPLC timeline; NPS history page. 
• NYT’s recent framings: Kashmir front-page headline; “Hindu utopia” Ayodhya framing; 2014 Mars cartoon apology. 
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Bottom line: India’s story is too big to be squeezed into American culture-war templates. The RSS has critics and deserves scrutiny—so does everyone in public life. But scrutiny without context becomes slander. If the NYT wants to cover India with credibility, it should retire its Hinduphobic tropes and start engaging with India as it is: plural, argumentative, democratic—and increasingly unwilling to be misread.