On the evening of August 27 at 6.43 pm, the FARA unit of the Justice Department stamped in two short forms from a group which calls itself RSS Friends.
The address given by the registrant was in Peachtree Corners, a suburb located north-east of Atlanta, and it was assigned registration number 7763. In the section which asked which foreign principal it worked for, it entered: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Keshav Kunj, Jhandewalan, New Delhi.
Two days later Mohan Bhagwat entered the stage at the Infosys Theatre within Madison Square Garden, with an audience which Spectrum News estimated to number about 5,000, while several hundred protesters had assembled outside.
The head of the RSS was on the first leg of a three-country tour of the United States, Canada and Britain, the itinerary having been arranged to mark the organisation's centenary. He arrived in New York on 25 August.
The rally is not referred to in any of the paperwork, but the sequence is difficult to overlook, and so is what the forms admit.
Exhibit A requires a registrant to select one of six categories for its foreign principal: partnership, corporation, association, committee, voluntary group, or other. RSS Friends checked the box marked 'other' and included an appendix.
According to that appendix, the Sangh is an unincorporated body composed of individuals based in India and is thus a foreign organisation and a foreign principal within the meaning of 22 USC § 611(b)(3), regardless of whether it is constituted as a society, trust, company or non-profit organisation under Indian law.
The law favours the filing. Section 611(b)(3) includes a partnership, an association, a corporation, an organisation or some other combination of persons who have been organised under the law of a foreign country or whose principal place of business is in a foreign country; it is the second part of that phrase which is relevant in this case, since the RSS has never pursued the first option.
It has been a matter of political debate in India for many years. Congress leaders have asked to see the Sangh's registration certificate; in November Jairam Ramesh stated that Bhagwat had admitted the RSS is not registered and does not pay tax. Whereas the Congress employs this as an attack point, the appendix regards it as irrelevant.
In every other respect the forms shrink. To the questions concerning whether the RSS is supervised, owned, directed, controlled, financed or subsidised by a foreign government or political party, RSS Friends answers 'no'.
Exhibit B shows that there is no written contract with the Sangh and no exchange of correspondence; instead it ticks the residual box, for an understanding that is neither.
There have been no political activities under section 1(o) of the Act, no registrable activity before the date of registration, and no money moving in either direction in the 60 days prior to that date.
There is a sentence which sounds as if it has been written by a lawyer with a future complaint in mind. According to Exhibit B, the fact that there is no written contract should not be taken as a representation that no relationship, request, understanding, coordination, authorisation or direction exists; the group will instead make known the real facts regarding its activities.
The same appendix elsewhere describes its relationship with the RSS as one that exists 'if any'.
The work in question consists of communications activities: providing background information on the Sangh's history and its service programmes, writing articles, conducting interviews and producing content for social media, responding to journalists, holding discussions with researchers and think tanks, organising events, and, where appropriate, communicating with agencies, public officials and policymakers.
The agreement with the foreign principal is dated August 17, and an agent is given ten days from that date to register. The forms arrived on the tenth day.
Exhibit A was signed by Rajendra Sonarikar and Jayant Pant. Exhibit B was signed by PratikKumar Suthar.
RSS Friends operates a website, rssfriends.org, which is based on a GoDaddy template. The organisation refers to itself as a "well-wisher organisation" whose aim is to offer factual clarity, and states that politically motivated individuals and the media in the United States misrepresent the Sangh, the effects of which are felt by Hindu Americans.
One of the pages gathers favourable coverage of Dattatreya Hosabale, the general secretary of the RSS, during his visit to America in April, and a second page includes links to reports from India and other countries about the event on 29 August.
At the foot of the site sits the label FARA requires on material an agent distributes: disseminated by RSS Friends, a registered foreign agent, on behalf of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, India, with further details on file at the Justice Department. The people who set up the site are aware of the rules. The contact address listed there is in Laurel, Maryland, not the one in Georgia that appears on the federal form.
The Justice Department makes available as one downloadable file its full foreign-principal register, the file consisting of 17,748 records relating to 7,078 registrants, the earliest entries being from 1942. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is listed once, the entry being dated 27 August 2026, the registrant being RSS Friends and the termination field left blank, which means that the registration is still in force.
India is represented by 130 of the entries. The first, dated March 1944, involves a man in New York acting on behalf of the Orient Press of India. After that come the embassies and consulates, the tourist offices located in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, the tea and sugar boards, the trade authorities, Air India, and a long series of lobbying agencies in Washington engaged by the Republic of India.
There are two entries relating to secessionism, that of the Council of Khalistan and one for a Nagalim office. There is no Hindu nationalist organisation listed anywhere in the register. When the entire register is searched for the terms Hindu, Sangh, Swayamsevak, Parivar, Vidyalaya, Sewa or Vivekananda, the only result obtained is the one concerning the RSS.
The Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, which has for many decades run the American branches of the Sangh, is not present either as a foreign principal or as a registrant.
The situation with regard to the party is entirely different. The Bharatiya Janata Party has been listed as a foreign principal on three occasions. Overseas Friends of BJP-USA was registered on August 27, 2020, exactly six years before RSS Friends, and that registration is still active, based in Herndon, Virginia.
The Ethos Foundation, which operates under the name Bharati Foundation, was registered and then cancelled on the same day in July 2022. And in April 2024, when India was holding its elections, an organisation known as Non Resident Indians For Mission 2024 LLC was registered with two foreign principals: the BJP, and the Office of the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi. Both were terminated on 4 June, the day the results were announced.
And the difference is important, because a foreign political party is one of the categories listed by FARA, which meant that the BJP filings had a simple option to tick. Since the RSS is not a political party, RSS Friends had to argue its way into the residual category.
The closest parallel is last year's lobbying episode. Squire Patton Boggs registered on January 16, 2025 in relation to the RSS and received approximately $330,000 during the first three quarters of 2025, information first reported by Prism in November. Two aspects of that registration drew criticism.
It had been filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act rather than FARA, and the Lobbying Disclosure Act requires far less. Also, the client named on the paperwork was not the RSS but a US intermediary, State Street Strategies, operating as One+ Strategies. The firm can hardly have been unfamiliar with the alternative, since it holds FARA registration number 2165, has been on the register since October 1969, and was registered as an agent for the Embassy of India from 2008 to 2010.
At the time, lawyers stated that routing an arrangement through a middleman does not put it outside the scope of FARA. Sunil Ambekar, the RSS's publicity chief, said flatly that the Sangh works in Bharat and had hired no lobbying firm in the United States. A few weeks after the report was published the campaign was terminated, and amendments filed in late December substituted a private individual for the RSS as the client.
Against that record, registration 7763 does the one thing none of the earlier filings did. It places the Sangh's own name in the foreign principal box, in writing, and under penalty of perjury.
The date can be interpreted in two ways, and the documents do not decide between them.
The first reading is defensive. The Sangh's year in the United States had been difficult. Its lobbying contract had been cancelled and the filings altered.
In its annual report, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had recommended that assets be frozen and entry bans imposed on members of the RSS, and on August 26, the day before the filing, it publicly called for targeted sanctions and for Bhagwat's visa to be revoked.
India's foreign ministry described the commission as biased and said such institutions should be ignored. Civil rights and interfaith groups were urging Madison Square Garden to call off the event. Mayor Zohran Mamdani stated that he opposed the event and did not believe the city could prevent a private booking.
When lawyers expect a complaint to be filed and want the reply to be that disclosure has already taken place, this is what they recommend: register a US entity, describe the activity as narrowly as the form allows, and deny political work and money outright.
The second interpretation is duller. The agreement was dated August 17, the ten-day clock ran, and the forms were submitted on day ten. On that account it is the date the arrangement was struck, rather than the date of the rally, that produced the timing.
Both can be true at once. What the registration settles is what happens afterwards. RSS Friends now has to submit a supplemental statement to the Justice Department every six months, detailing its activities, receipts and disbursements, must file the informational material it publishes, and faces up to five years' imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000 for a wilful violation.
Its first six-month return will be the first public account of what a declared agent of the RSS actually does in the United States, and the first test of whether the answer remains no political activities and no money.
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