As communities across the United States staged July 4 celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh USA — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit cultural organization headquartered in Rockaway, New Jersey, with more than 270 chapters across the country — coordinated a nationwide program of patriotic ceremonies, flag-hoisting events, and community parade participation that brought together hundreds of volunteers, families, and youth members for what the organization described as an expression of the dual identity that defines the Hindu-American experience. The events, reported in a press release issued from the organization’s Rockaway national headquarters on July 5, represent the most recent and highest-profile expression of an organizational mission that HSS USA has been pursuing since its founding: building a civic-minded Hindu-American community through values education, service, and active participation in the public life of the country its members call home.
The specific events that took place across HSS chapters on and around the July 4 holiday illustrate the geographic breadth of the organization’s national footprint. In the Pacific Northwest, 60 summer camp attendees gathered for a flag-hoisting ceremony accompanied by a ghosh — the traditional HSS band performance using percussion and wind instruments — with youth volunteer Pragna offering reflections on what she described as the enduring promise of the American Dream. In North Carolina, approximately 100 HSS volunteers — children, youth, women, and men dressed in the organization’s characteristic uniforms — marched in the annual Harrisburg Independence Day Parade carrying American flags and performing to HSS band accompaniment, their presence representing one of the more visible expressions of Hindu-American civic participation in a state whose South Asian population has grown substantially over the past decade. In Central California, 90 camp attendees assembled in formation for a patriotic flag ceremony featuring the national anthem and reflective addresses on the American story’s meaning for an immigrant-descended community.
Near Buffalo in upstate New York, 120 camp attendees heard from Sai Patil, Joint Director of HSS USA, who addressed the gathering about what she described as the natural alignment between Hindu values and American civic principles — liberty, duty, pluralism, and service — and their combined potential to strengthen communities and reinforce the foundations of the national experiment. Near Chicago, more than 120 participants, including 50 camp attendees and 70 community visitors, gathered for a flag-hoisting ceremony marked by the national anthem and speeches exploring the confluence of Hindu and American traditions. The through line of the day’s programming across all these locations was the same: participants gathered beneath the American flag, sang the national anthem, and heard speakers articulate what the organization frames as the complementary rather than conflicting relationship between Hindu cultural identity and American civic values.
The statement that HSS USA issued in connection with the July 4 celebrations articulates that relationship in its most developed form. “Independence Day reminds us that a diverse democracy is a living, breathing effort. Our dual identity is our strength. By weaving our timeless values of peace, duty, and community into the American experiment, we help build a more inclusive, vibrant, and more perfect union.” The framing reflects a broader organizational argument that HSS has made consistently across its American presence: that the Hindu-American community’s participation in civic life — through service, through education, through the kind of visible parade and flag-ceremony participation that the July 4 events represented — is a form of American patriotism rather than a departure from it, and that Hindu cultural values are compatible with and contributory to the democratic and pluralist ideals the country was founded on.
New Jersey’s specific place in the HSS USA organizational structure goes beyond providing a mailing address for the national headquarters. The state is home to one of the largest Indian-American populations in the country, concentrated in communities including Edison, Iselin, Woodbridge, Parsippany, and the broader Central Jersey corridor — a demographic fact that has made New Jersey one of the most active regions for HSS chapter programming since the organization’s establishment in the United States. New Jersey HSS chapters, known as shakhas, operate regular programming including the weekly physical and values education gatherings that define the shakha model, as well as community engagement initiatives including the annual Raksha Bandhan celebration — which the organization designates as Universal Oneness Day — during which youth volunteers visit local law enforcement agencies and other public service organizations to tie rakhi threads, the traditional symbolic expression of protection and mutual commitment. The Woodbridge Police Department has been among the local institutions participating in this tradition.
The July 4 events also arrived in the context of a separate but related moment for HSS-affiliated advocacy: Hindu Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill, held separately from the Independence Day events, which drew bipartisan congressional support and focused on what organizers described as rising Hinduphobia and hate incidents affecting the Hindu-American community. That advocacy effort and the July 4 community programming reflect the two dimensions of HSS USA’s organizational identity — cultural preservation and civic engagement on one side, and advocacy within the American political system on the other.
HSS USA operates in a political and community landscape that is not without tension, and any comprehensive account of the organization’s New Jersey presence and national activities should acknowledge that context honestly. The organization has been the subject of criticism from some South Asian American advocacy groups, most notably the Indian American Muslim Council, which has historically scrutinized HSS’s ideological connections to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist organization in India from which HSS takes its name and organizational model. The IAMC and similar organizations have argued that HSS USA’s civic programming and patriotic imagery should be understood in light of its parent organization’s political positions in India, and that the organization’s public parades and events in New Jersey communities deserve scrutiny from that perspective. HSS USA has consistently maintained that it operates as an independent American nonprofit focused on cultural preservation, civic engagement, and community service, and that its programming reflects the values of its Hindu-American membership rather than any political agenda. The debate between these positions has recurred in New Jersey political coverage for years, particularly given the state’s prominence as both a major site of HSS activity and a significant political battleground where South Asian American voters represent a meaningful constituency across multiple competitive legislative and congressional districts.
For the many New Jersey communities where HSS chapters are active and where the organization’s members participate in public life as business owners, educators, healthcare workers, engineers, and civic volunteers, the July 4 ceremonies and parades represent the ordinary stuff of community participation — the decision to show up, in uniform if that is the tradition, to march in a holiday parade and hoist a flag and sing the national anthem alongside neighbors who may share or not share one’s cultural and religious background, in the specific act of collective participation that Independence Day has always invited from every American community. Whether that participation is understood as a simple civic gesture or as something freighted with additional meaning is, as with most questions about identity and belonging in a diverse democracy, a matter that the participants and their neighbors are working out in real time.
HSS USA’s national headquarters is located in Rockaway, Morris County, New Jersey. More information about the organization’s chapter programming, service initiatives, and community events is available through hssus.org and the HSS New Jersey regional pages.
