RSS counters minority rights criticism

NEW DELHI:

A powerful Hindu group from which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party emerged claimed on Tuesday it had organised foreign visits, including to the US, to counter perceptions that it is a paramilitary outfit involved in attacks on minority communities.

The outreach by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Organisation, came after the US Commission on International Religious Freedom said in a report in November that it "has been involved in acts of extreme violence and intolerance against members of minority groups for decades".

The commission is a bipartisan body of the US federal government that monitors religious freedom around the world and makes policy recommendations to the president, the secretary of state and the US Congress.

Modi joined the RSS in his youth, and the rise of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to near-national dominance is widely attributed to the RSS' vast network of volunteers, during a period marked by a hardening Hindu-Muslim political divide in the officially secular country where Hindus are a majority.