Kolkata: In the last week of December 2025, over 1,600 persons from 79 countries gathered in the southern city of Hyderabad to attend the Vishwa Sangh Shibir over five days, the seventh such edition.
This global gathering of swayamsevaks—volunteers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation that serves as the ideological fountainhead of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—took the form of a shibir, or camp, attended by functionaries of various RSS-linked organisations from overseas.
The “Sangh” refers to the RSS, while the collective of various organisations linked to the RSS is called the Sangh Parivar, or the RSS family.
The organisers billed the December 2025 event as a cultural and spiritual programme, for “collective action rooted in the timeless principles of Sanatan Dharma.” Hindu nationalist forces refer to Hinduism as Sanatan Dharma, or the eternal religion.
Ayyengari Surender Reddy, who works with the Sangh-affiliate Bharat Vikas Parishad, described the shibir as a collective effort of organisations, such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), Sanatan Dharma Swayamsevak Sangh (SDSS), Hindu Seva Sangh, Sewa International, Samskrita Bharati, and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP).
The shibir of global “Sangh-inspired organisations” took place six weeks after Sunil Ambekar, the Akhil Bharatiya Prachar Pramukh (chief spokesperson) of the RSS, declared that the RSS works “only in Bharat”.
Ambekar’s statement was in response to a report on Prism, a US-based independent news website, that US lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs (SPB) had disclosed receiving $330,000 from another lobbying firm, State Street Strategies (SSS), doing business as One+ Strategies, on behalf of the RSS.
The lobbying registration document said the “specific lobbying issues”, current and anticipated, were “US-India bilateral relations,” but quarterly filings showed that One+ Strategies paid SPB $120,000, $100,000 and $110,000, during January-March, April-June and July-September 2025, respectively, to “introduce the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to US officials.”
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
