When one of the world’s largest far-right groups, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, held an event celebrating its 100-year anniversary at Madison Square Garden last weekend, its presence was met with protests and criticism from Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
But some prominent progressive faith leaders say they unwittingly found themselves in the center of the controversy, too. And at least one of them landed on the event’s main stage.
Several of the leaders said they had been invited to speak at a breakfast at the Pierre Hotel as well as “a special community gathering” at the Garden on Saturday afternoon. But they said they expected to discuss unity among religious groups and were not told that the events would honor the R.S.S. and its polarizing leader, Mohan Bhagwat.
“I feel kind of betrayed,” said Imam Shamsi Ali, the director of the Jamaica Muslim Center of Queens, who attended the breakfast.
Imam Ali was one of several faith leaders who issued statements on social media on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, apologizing and explaining their appearances aside a far-right leader that espouses the kind of religious supremacist ideology they had spent much of their careers speaking out against.
The New York Times reviewed a dozen emails sent to the faith leaders between July and August, and the organizers made no mention of the R.S.S. or Mr. Bhagwat.
The Rev. Adriene Thorne, the senior minister of Riverside Church in Manhattan, said she spoke about unity at the event at the Garden without knowing its ties to the R.S.S.
On Wednesday Ms. Thorne said she expressed her frustrations with the person who invited her, the interfaith organizer Bawa Jain. She said she was told that the full list of speakers, namely Mr. Bhagwat, could not be included in invitations because of security concerns.
“That’s not a reason to hoodwink people,” she said.
Mr. Jain, the secretary general of the World Council of Religious Leaders, said he was sorry that the faith leaders had felt misled, but not for choosing to honor Mr. Bhagwat.
Mr. Jain said that he had been approached by Hindu groups last year, alerting him to the R.S.S.’s centenary and Mr. Bhagwat’s visit. But it was only after a conversation with Mr. Bhagwat last Friday that Mr. Jain decided to make the R.S.S. chief the guest of honor at the breakfast the next day.
“I wanted the world to hear directly from his mouth,” Mr. Jain explained.
In India, the R.S.S. has long sought to remake the secular democracy into a Hindu-first nation. In 1948, the organization was implicated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, after which it was banned and became a pariah for decades. Today, its members often characterize the country’s roughly 200 million Muslims and Christians as foreign invaders.
On Saturday, when addressing the faith leaders at the Pierre Hotel, Mr. Bhagwat said that “diversity is a decoration for our innate unity. It has to be accepted, it has to be respected, it has to be protected.”
But glimmers of the R.S.S.’s divisive ideology were visible — at least among some of the 5,000 people estimated to have attended the event at the Garden.
On Saturday, about a hundred protesters across faiths gathered outside the venue to demonstrate against the event. Hindu and Muslim groups carried signs that called the R.S.S.’s ideology “fascism.” Keffiyeh-clad protesters led chants of “R.S.S. out of N.Y.C.!” A group of Sikhs, demonstrating alongside them, ripped up and stomped on an Indian flag.
One of the protesters, Safa Ahmed, a 29-year-old board member of the Indian American Muslim Council, said that the R.S.S. event at the Garden was “a very clear attempt to whitewash their bloody history in India.”
Ms. Thorne said that her attendance at the events had been largely met with concern and dismay from fellow faith leaders rather than personal criticism. She said she was in communication with some of her Hindu and South Asian counterparts about future programming that would educate more people about Hinduism and the rise of Hindu nationalism.
The confusion around the events also underlines the precarity of interfaith spaces, particularly in a city of more than a dozen different religious groups and denominations.
“It’s always been a really tricky space, and I’ve always been very careful because of my identity and who shows up,” said Rev. Winnie Varghese, the dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, who is a South Asian member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and attended the breakfast gathering. “It’s very, very hard to vet these things, period.”
After leaving the hotel, Ms. Varghese did go to Madison Square Garden, but to protest.
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