Manufacturing Legitimacy

How a Washington Post columnist laundered the Sangh's violent history

- / DHIRENDRA K JHA

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been on a spree, celebrating a century of its existence. Over this period, it has demonstrated its ability to patiently expand, mobilise and grow. Thousands of people, including the former president Ram Nath Kovind, attended the hundredth anniversary celebrations in Nagpur, on 2 October. But the most intriguing guests were not Indian. Among other international attendees was a small contingent of US journalists, showcased prominently as trophies of foreign validation. It included Jim Geraghty, a senior political correspondent at National Review and, since 2022, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post; Megan McArdle and Jason Willick, columnists at the Washington Post; Nicholas Clairmont, an editor at the Washington Examiner; and Lena Bell, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal's opinion page. All of them were proudly paraded on stage.

The RSS has, for years, invested in cultivating its image abroad, particularly in the United States. A recent investigation by the US-based outlet Prism revealed that the lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs had been engaged by another consultancy, One+ Strategies, to push Sangh interests in Washington. In June this year, Bob Shuster, a co-founder of One+ Strategies, visited the RSS headquarters with his brother Bill, a former Republican legislator, and the Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead.

“They all seemed happy sitting on the stage,” a reporter covering the event for an international news agency told me. “When their names were announced, they appeared more than willing to stand up and get introduced.” The Sangh’s PR seems to have worked, with some of them carrying forward many of the RSS’s oft-repeated lies. “To my American ears,” Geraghty wrote in a