On April 24, 2026, Ram Madhav sat on a panel at the Hudson Institute’s New India Conference in Washington and said what India’s foreign policy establishment had been carefully not saying for months. India had agreed to stop buying oil from Iran. India had agreed to stop buying oil from Russia despite domestic political criticism. India had agreed to a 50 percent tariff without significant protest. “So where exactly,” he asked the assembled American strategists, “is India not doing enough to work with America?”
Within hours he retracted the statement, calling it factually incorrect and apologising publicly. The retraction was swift and comprehensive. But the retraction should not be allowed to perform the function it was designed to perform: closing the question.
Ram Madhav is not a careless speaker. He has been a full-time RSS pracharak since 1981. He served as the RSS’s national spokesperson from 2003 to 2014. He was National General Secretary of the BJP from 2014 to 2020. He has headed the RSS’s strategic operations in Jammu and Kashmir and the northeastern states — regions that India has always viewed primarily through the lens of national security and strategic affairs. He is, by most assessments, the person within the RSS most qualified to speak on matters of foreign and strategic policy. His appearance at the Hudson Institute was not an accident of scheduling. He was there in his capacity as President of the India Foundation, the RSS-aligned think tank that describes itself as a curator of Track 1.5 and Track 2 diplomatic initiatives.
A person of this profile does not accidentally reveal that his government has been making concessions it publicly denied making. The retraction was the diplomatic necessity. The original statement was the message. And the message was directed not at the Indian opposition — who seized on it immediately — but at the American strategic community in the room: we have been a compliant partner and you have been treating us badly.
To understand why this message was being sent, and why it represents something more significant than a diplomatic miscalculation, it is necessary to examine the worldview from which it emerged.
The Hierarchy as Strategy
The RSS is the world’s largest far-right organisation by membership — a characterisation it disputes but which the scholarship broadly sustains. Founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, it began as a cadre of predominantly upper-caste Maharashtrian Brahmins dedicated to Hindu nationalist ideology. During the independence movement it adopted, as Wikipedia’s entry on the organisation notes with unusual directness, “a policy of collaboration with the British colonial regime” and played no role in the struggle for independence.
This is not an incidental historical footnote. It is the key to understanding the RSS’s instinctive relationship with imperial power.
The caste order that organises the RSS’s social imagination is a hierarchy of dharmic function — each jati performing its prescribed role, the hierarchy maintained by the recognition of each element’s ordained place. Within this order, the formula of power for subordinate groups has been consistent across the centuries of external domination: accept the superiority of the ruling power, serve faithfully within it, and use that service to consolidate position and power over those below you in the hierarchy. The Brahmin who served the Mughal administrative apparatus. The upper-caste Hindu who flooded the British colonial bureaucracy and produced the comprador class that administered extraction while maintaining domestic social dominance. The RSS that collaborated with the British and opposed Gandhi’s mass movement against them.
This is not craven opportunism in the conventional sense. It is the caste order’s strategic logic applied to the relationship between civilisations. The hierarchy is not something to be abolished. It is the ontological structure of a properly ordered world. The question is where you sit within it — and how you use your position relative to the superior to consolidate your position relative to the inferior.
The RSS’s rejection of Nehruvian non-alignment follows from this logic. Non-alignment was the Congress’s attempt to assert sovereign equality — to refuse the hierarchical positioning of the Cold War by remaining uncommitted to either bloc. For the RSS, this was ideological confusion at best and strategic weakness at worst. The world has a hierarchy. You choose your place in it or the hierarchy chooses a place for you. The strategic alternative to non-alignment, from this perspective, is not multi-polarity or sovereign independence but the conscious choice of the right superior — the power whose patronage will most effectively underwrite your consolidation of dominance within your own region and your own society.
The United States, successor to British global power, is the natural choice within this framework. Not because the RSS has independently calculated that American patronage serves Indian national interest in the liberal internationalist sense — the framework does not think in terms of liberal internationalism. But because the US is the civilisational continuation of the British imperium, and the pattern of collaboration with the dominant Western power for the consolidation of domestic Hindu nationalist power has been the RSS’s consistent practice since its founding.
The Israel Exemplar
Into this hierarchical worldview, Israel fits with a precision that goes beyond strategic convenience.
Successive generations of Hindu nationalists — from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who coined and elaborated the Hindutva concept, to Modi today — have professed a deep affinity for Israel. Savarkar praised Zionism as the perfection of ethno-nationalist thinking. The way Zionism seamlessly blended ethnic attachment to a motherland and religious attachment to a holy land was precisely what Savarkar wanted for the Hindus.
This is not merely ideological sympathy. It is the recognition of a successful model. Israel has achieved what the RSS dreams of achieving: unconditional patronage from the American superpower, operational military dominance over its immediate neighbourhood, and the construction of an ethno-religious state whose demographic anxieties about a Muslim minority are managed through formal and informal structures of differential citizenship. The structural grammar was identical in both cases: a majority of people constitutively besieged by Islam; a state that is the avatar of the civilisation; and minorities who must accept subordination or leave.
Golwalkar wrote in the late 1930s that the Zionist movement exemplified his own “five unities” framing of Indian nationhood: “The Jews had maintained their race, religion, culture and language.” The model was not merely admired. It was studied as a template for what Hindu nationalist consolidation should look like.
The practical expression of this ideological affinity has deepened steadily under BJP governance. In 2015, BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav compared India’s diaspora strategy to Jewish lobbying for Israel: “We are changing the contours of diplomacy and looking at new ways of strengthening Bharat’s interests abroad. They can be Bharat’s voice even while being loyal citizens in those countries.” Cooperation has extended into controversial areas. The Pegasus spyware, developed by Israeli firm NSO, was deployed in India against journalists, activists, and political opponents.
The intelligence relationship became a primary interface — bypassing the traditional Foreign Service officers whose institutional culture still carried the residual non-alignment orientation of the Nehruvian era. The RSS-aligned security establishment’s preference for the intelligence channel over the diplomatic one is not merely a question of operational efficiency. It reflects a deeper ideological preference: the practitioners of hard power and covert operations are ideologically trustworthy in ways that career diplomats are not.
Israel thus functions as what can only be called the ideal senior client — the entity that has successfully navigated the hierarchical relationship with the American superpower and extracted from it the unconditional support and operational latitude that the RSS’s strategic vision seeks. The relationship with Israel is therefore simultaneously ideological affinity, operational model, and diplomatic intermediary — the channel through which the RSS-adjacent security establishment understands how to be a good American client.
The China Exception
If the US is the natural superior in the RSS’s hierarchical world order, China is its necessary rival. The hostility to China is not primarily strategic in the liberal sense — not the measured assessment of competing national interests that might in different circumstances produce accommodation. It is ontological.
The ancient schism between Brahminical Hinduism and Buddhism — between the ritual hierarchy of the varna order and the radical egalitarianism of the Dharmic challenge to that hierarchy — runs beneath the contemporary geopolitical conflict. China is understood, within the RSS’s civilisational imagination, as the great successor civilisation of the Buddhist heterodoxy — the tradition that challenged the caste hierarchy’s cosmic legitimacy from within the subcontinent and then survived and flourished outside it. To accept Chinese dominance would not merely be a geopolitical concession. It would be a civilisational capitulation to the tradition that has always represented the most fundamental challenge to the hierarchical order the RSS embodies and defends.
This makes China uniquely unacceptable as a potential superior. Every other external power — Mughal, British, American — could be accommodated within the hierarchical logic because none of them challenged the caste order’s cosmic legitimacy. They were external powers whose superiority was circumstantial and whose patronage was available without requiring the subordination of the Brahminical hierarchy’s self-understanding. China’s civilisational challenge is different in kind. Submitting to Chinese dominance would require accepting the superiority of the heterodox over the orthodox, the egalitarian over the hierarchical, the challenger over the established order.
The rivalry is therefore eternal in a way that no other geopolitical rivalry can be — not because national interests are permanently incompatible, but because the civilisational self-understandings are.
The Broken Bargain
Ram Madhav’s admission at the Hudson Institute was the public expression of the RSS’s strategic panic — the recognition that the hierarchical bargain on which its entire foreign policy vision was premised is not delivering.
The bargain was straightforward. India would be a reliable, compliant, concession-making American client. In exchange, the US would provide the strategic patronage — the geopolitical cover, the diplomatic support, the military technology access, the benign oversight of India’s regional dominance — that would allow the RSS’s domestic consolidation project to proceed without significant external interference.
The Modi government’s relationship with Donald Trump was the personalist expression of this bargain. If the institutional relationship could be secured through the personal bond, the logic ran, the patronage would be more direct and more reliable. The investment in the Modi-Trump relationship — the Howdy Modi event in Houston, the Namaste Trump rally in Ahmedabad, the deliberate cultivation of personal chemistry — was the attempt to make the hierarchical patronage relationship work through personal diplomacy in an era when the American institutional framework was being deliberately weakened by the same person whose personal favour was being sought.
This was always structurally fragile. Trump’s foreign policy operates through personal grievance and transactional calculation rather than institutional consistency. The patronage that India sought — stable, reliable, underwritten by the bipartisan American institutional framework — was precisely what Trump’s presidency was dismantling. India bet on the personal relationship at the moment when the personal relationship was most unreliable.
The result is what Madhav’s admission described. India has made the substantive concessions of a client state — on Iranian oil, on Russian oil, on tariffs. But it is receiving the treatment not of a valued partner but of a transactional subordinate to be periodically humiliated. Trump’s description of India as a “hellhole” — shared on social media the day before Madhav’s panel — was not a diplomatic slip. It was the accurate description of how the Trump administration views India: a country with which transactions can be extracted, not a partner whose dignity deserves protection.
The over-investment in the personal Modi-Trump bond has simultaneously weakened the institutional, bipartisan leverage that India had spent decades carefully building. The American Congress, the State Department, the career national security establishment — these are the institutions through which reliable, long-term strategic partnerships are maintained regardless of which party holds the White House. By channelling everything through the personal relationship with one unpredictable president, India traded its durable institutional leverage for a volatile personal one. When the personal relationship soured, the institutional leverage was no longer available to fall back on.
The Missing Individual
Beneath the strategic miscalculation lies a more fundamental philosophical failure — one that the analysis of the RSS’s foreign policy framework makes visible.
The RSS universe has no conceptual space for the rights-bearing individual citizen. Its primary unit of political account is not the person but the collectivity — defined organically as the civilisation, the nation, or the Hindu Rashtra, and structured hierarchically through the caste order. This absence is not merely a theoretical limitation. It produces a specific and consequential incapacity in the domain of foreign policy.
A state that recognises individual citizens as the fundamental bearers of rights and interests calculates national interest as the aggregate of their wellbeing. Does this trade policy increase the prosperity and employment of individual Indians? Does this strategic alignment protect the mobility and dignity of individual Indian citizens abroad? Does this geopolitical positioning reduce the prices that ordinary Indian consumers pay for energy and essential goods?
The RSS framework cannot perform this calculation. It substitutes a metaphysical abstraction — the glory, strength, and civilisational purity of the Hindu Rashtra as a collective organism — for the tangible wellbeing of individual citizens. The result is a foreign policy that can enthusiastically accept substantial economic pain for its citizens — higher energy costs from reduced Russian oil purchases, higher tariffs on goods — while framing this as strategic sacrifice for civilisational greatness. The individual who pays higher prices at the pump is an acceptable cost in the civilisational balance sheet. He does not figure in the calculation as a rights-bearing citizen whose welfare the state is obligated to maximise.
This incapacity produces the specific incoherence that Madhav’s Washington admission made visible. The RSS cannot define what success in the American relationship would actually look like for ordinary Indians — because it has no framework for calculating success in terms of individual Indian wellbeing. Success is defined instead in terms of civilisational prestige, regional dominance, and the domestic consolidation of Hindu nationalist power. These are goals that are simultaneously undefinable and unmeasurable — which is why the foreign policy can absorb any amount of individual sacrifice without ever reaching a point at which the sacrifice is sufficient.
The humiliation of the Modi government — the “hellhole” insult, the tariff demands, the treatment of India as a transactional subordinate rather than a valued partner — is not merely a diplomatic setback. It is the revelation that the civilisational prestige the RSS’s foreign policy is supposed to deliver cannot be delivered by a patron who views India as a useful but dispensable subordinate. The bargain has failed not because it was poorly executed but because it was misconceived: the hierarchical patronage relationship cannot deliver the civilisational prestige the RSS seeks, because the patron who provides the patronage is also the one publicly stripping the client of the respect that prestige requires.
The Masterless Client
Ram Madhav left the Hudson Institute quickly after his panel, declining to answer questions from reporters who asked about the violence in Manipur and the persecution of religious minorities. The strategic communication had been delivered. The retraction had been issued. The panel had been completed.
What remained was the question his admission had made impossible to ignore. A client state that has made all the expected concessions of a client — on energy, on tariffs, on the suppression of its foreign policy independence — and is still publicly humiliated by the patron it has invested in so completely, is a client state without a functional patron.
The RSS’s strategic worldview is premised on there being a usable superior in the global hierarchy. The US under Trump is not playing the role of the benign senior patron who rewards compliance with protection and prestige. It is playing the role of the capricious and insulting superior who extracts the compliance and then delivers the humiliation.
And the alternative — accommodation with China — is, for civilisational reasons that run deeper than any strategic calculation, unacceptable.
The masterless client is the RSS’s strategic nightmare, now arrived. A foreign policy premised on finding the right superior, making the right concessions, and receiving the right patronage in return has produced a situation in which the concessions have been made, the superior has been chosen, and the patronage has not arrived.
What arrives instead is the “hellhole” insult. The tariff threat. The treatment of a country of 1.4 billion people whose ancient civilisation the RSS claims to represent as a transactional subordinate to be periodically reminded of its place.
India’s national interest — the aggregate of the wellbeing of 1.4 billion individual citizens, each with genuine needs for affordable energy, secure employment, dignified treatment on the world stage, and a foreign policy that serves their lives rather than the civilisational abstraction that has been substituted for them — was not well served by the bargain Ram Madhav described and then retracted.
The retraction did not change the arithmetic.
