By The Public Eye, Summer 2024
In July 2024, hundreds of influential far-right leaders gathered to network at the “National Conservatism” conference, or “NatCon,” in Washington, D.C. While the event was headlined by prominent White supremacists and Christian nationalists such as Stephen Miller and Jack Posobiec, it wasn’t an all-White affair. NatCon4 featured several Indian American speakers,[1] including Saurabh Sharma, the then-Executive Director of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organized the event, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the former candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination.
Two leaders of India’s Hindu Right were also invited to speak at this year’s NatCon: Ram Madhav, a member of the National Executive of the Rashatriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the all-male paramilitary group that serves as the Hindu supremacist movement’s fountainhead,[2] and Swapan Dasgupta, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), one of the RSS’s many subsidiary organizations and India’s ruling party for the past decade. Now in leadership positions at the affiliated India Foundation, their presence at the event was strategic. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime has sought to emphasize India’s emergence as a world power, and in recent years, Hindu supremacists have staked a claim to leadership of the global Far Right. [3]
A few months prior to NatCon, Madhav authored an article with precisely this message, writing that “India should steer the global conservative movement.”[4] In his speech at NatCon, he exclaimed that he and Dasgupta “came here to tell you about the success story of conservatism in India—the defeat of the left-liberal-Marxist-radical Islamist cabal in India.”
This story was originally published in politicalresearch.org. Read the full story here.
