Mayor Mamdani —

On August 29, the leader of the RSS speaks at Madison Square Garden.

The RSS. The paramilitary that tore through the streets of Gujarat 24 years ago — your father's Gujarat — dousing families in kerosene and burning them alive inside their own homes, gang-raping Muslim women in the road, hacking children apart with swords. They came with printed lists, names and addresses identifying which houses were Muslim so that they could hunt them down from door to door.

And in one of those houses they tore a three-year-old girl out of her mother's arms and crushed her skull against the ground. Her mother was five months pregnant, and they stripped her and gang-raped her and massacred fourteen of her family in front of her and then left her naked in a field to bleed out among the dead. She woke up hours later, alone, still lying there with the corpses.

Two thousand butchered in three days.

And the man speaking at the Garden was second-in-command of that organization while it happened.

You already know what this movement is.

In 2024, when you were still in the Assembly, you told journalist Pieter Friedrich that this was personal — that your father's people are Gujarati Muslims, that your very existence is something this movement would love to deny, and that when you tell people what you are they are shocked, because after what was done in Gujarat they don't believe there are Gujarati Muslims anymore.

That's what they did in Gujarat. They didn't just slaughter people. They turned Gujarati Muslims into a rumor.

Six years ago you stood in Times Square and called it a vile spectacle of fascism, and you have ratcheted it up every year since — that the man who runs India is a war criminal, that Hindu fascists are puppeteering politicians in this country, that what is being done to Muslims there is an attempt to strip them of their citizenship and erase them from the country they were born in.

And you told Friedrich what sits underneath all of it: that for these people India's Muslims aren't just an obstacle to what they want but are anathema to their definition of the nation, that they use violence against whole communities, often Muslim, sometimes Christian, as a tool to mobilize their base, and that what they are building toward is an India purged of its Muslim heritage.

Purged. That was your word.

The man the RSS still calls its guru wrote their founding text, and he wrote it about people like you.

He said Indian Muslims and Christians are foreign races and internal threats living inside the body of the nation, and that they get two choices — dissolve into the Hindu "race" and surrender their religion and their culture and their separate existence entirely, or knuckle under, relinquish every privilege down to the rights of citizens, and accept quitting the country at the "sweet will" of the national race.

Then he told his uniformed units what to do to the minorities who stayed: set their teeth in grim determination and wipe them out. And he pointed at Nazi Germany, praised its purging the country of the Jews as race pride manifest at its highest, and called it a model to follow.

The RSS's guru gave three choices to India's minorities: stop existing, become exiles, or get wiped out.

The man speaking at the Garden this month is the torchbearer of that supremacist tradition. He gives his speeches standing under a garlanded photo of the guru who praised Nazi racial policies.

They seized the country on the back of his ideology.

They have been at this for eighty years, rampaging through neighborhoods with swords, burning families alive in their houses, torching churches, hacking Christians apart in the road, slaughtering Muslims by the thousands. More than a dozen pogroms.

Six million men in uniform who answer to nobody, follow Mohan Bhagwat as their Supreme Leader, keep no rolls and no bank accounts, and now they own the government of India. The Prime Minister was handed to them at eight years old and made a full-time worker by that same Nazi-adoring guru. His Home Minister was similarly spawned, and now he stands on stages calling Muslim men and women and children infiltrators and termites while the crowds cheer him.

Termites. That's the word from the RSS-trained, second most powerful man in India, and that word gets worked — men dragged from their homes at night, boys picked up off the streets and beaten for hours, people handed over to the mobs who came for them.

And the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ranks India fourth in the world for where the next mass killing starts. Fourth, out of a hundred and sixty-eight countries.

On the twenty-ninth of August, that organization takes Madison Square Garden.

They're calling it the Universal Oneness Celebration. Five thousand people. Mohan Bhagwat on the stage. People bussed in from four states.

Five months ago, a United States federal commission recommended sanctioning the RSS and barring it from this country — entry bans on its people, its leaders, on Mohan Bhagwat.

The last time Bhagwat came to America, five elected officials pulled their names off the event he was speaking at, including a sitting member of Congress who had agreed to chair it.

Three weeks ago, forty organizations in Canada wrote their government demanding that Mohan Bhagwat be turned away at the borders.

But nobody here in the United States has said anything yet. Not one elected official in the largest city in America has made a peep.

So here is what we are asking you to do.

One. Say something. On the record, before the twenty-ninth.

Two. Call on Madison Square Garden to cancel it. A foreign paramilitary that took its inspiration from the Nazis should not get to occupy the most famous stage in America.

Three. Remind them that the permit that lets that building stand where it stands comes back to this city in 2028, and that the last Council gave them the shortest one in the building's history.

You once said you were waiting to see whether the mayor would put his thumb on the scale of bigotry or his thumb on the scale of inclusion. You said you still had no answer.

You're the mayor now. Stop the RSS from poisoning the Big Apple.

SOURCES:

USCIRF 2026 Annual Report, 4 March 2026 — https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2026-03/USCIRF_2026_AR_3326_NEW.pdf

Early Warning Project, US Holocaust Memorial Museum — https://earlywarningproject.ushmm.org/countries/india

"Cultural Malware: The Rise of India's RSS," The Polis Project — https://thepolisproject.com/read/cultural-malware-the-rise-of-indias-rss/

Maktoob Media interview with Zohran Mamdani, August 2024 — https://maktoobmedia.com/features/why-a-float-at-indian-independence-day-celebration-in-new-york-city-whipped-up-a-whirlwind-of-protest/