During her confirmation hearing last week, as Tulsi Gabbard sought to beat back doubts over her ties to authoritarian leaders and her commitment to the rule of law, she turned to a particular line of defense: that the various critiques against her represented “religious bigotry against Hindus and Hinduism.” For most observers, this line was likely forgotten as an opportunistic retort that hardly answered the various questions posed of her. But for the small but influential Hindutva lobby in the United States, Gabbard’s passing invocation of Hindu victimhood in the halls of the Senate sparked something of a mini celebration.
Her choice of words was not accidental. Constructing exaggerated narratives of Hindu victimhood has arguably become the movement’s primary endeavor, one in which Gabbard has long been a willing participant. And a few weeks prior, six members of the movement, one of whom is registered as a foreign agent of the Indian government, shared the stage with Gabbard at a high-profile appearance at a Hindu temple in Robbinsville, New Jersey.
Nor was Gabbard the only protagonist the Hindu far-right could cheer for that very same day. Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, has spoken conspiratorially of the Hindutva movement being targeted by the media and the “Washington establishment,” and has become something of a poster boy for the hard-right convergence between MAGA and Hindutva.
The likes of Patel and Gabbard are no exceptions. From Vivek Ramaswamy to Usha Vance to Jay Bhattacharya to Sriram Krishnan, Trump 2.0 is replete with a number of high-profile Indian—and Hindu—Americans. Yet it is not the mere fact of representation, but rather the context it is occurring in, that requires interrogation. Indian Americans—especially those of the Hindu faith—have long positioned themselves as the ultimate model minority, and are now well-represented in most federal administrations (Joe Biden’s, for example, had more than 130 Indian Americans). But how have Indian and Hindu Americans—immigrant, non-white, and non-Christian—transitioned so rapidly from liberal technocracy into this new insurgent far right, so animated by cultural backlash and anti-immigrant sentiment?
Trump 2.0 is replete with a number of high-profile Indian—and Hindu—Americans. Yet it is not the mere fact of representation, but rather the context it is occurring in, that requires interrogation.
The salience of this new moment is only made starker when compared with older streams of Indian American conservatism. Historically, nearly every Indian American that sought to join the Right, from Nikki Haley to Bobby Jindal to Dinesh D’Souza, had to fold in part of their identities. Haley and Jindal both even converted to Christianity. These precedents contrast sharply with Gabbard’s and Patel’s public (and choreographed) utterances in the Senate, or Ramaswamy’s own attempt to ground his support for Judeo-Christian values in his Hindu (and Brahmin) identity. A rather different project is now underway, one that seeks a different form of accommodation with White Christian nationalism, with no less a goal than to reposition where Hindu Americans fit into US society, and to make a particular right-wing reading of Hindu identity compatible with the insurgent angst that defines the MAGA project.
At the base of this project, seeking to provide the political glue that might stitch the right-wing of the country’s wealthiest ethnic group into the MAGA coalition, is the US Hindutva movement. Its influence threads together the trajectories of many of these nominees, and its Americanization—and Trumpification—is fast becoming the defining trend of its third generation on US soil.
Yankee Hindutva
Inspired by 20th-century European fascism, organized around a sprawling organizational network known as the Sangh, Hindutva aims to reshape India’s secular democracy into a Hindu ethno-state.
Hindutva, also known as Hindu supremacy or Hindu nationalism, is a century-old political movement distinct from, but that claims to speak for, the Hindu faith. Inspired by 20th-century European fascism, organized around a sprawling organizational network known as the Sangh (simply, “The Organization”), the movement aims to reshape India’s secular democracy into a Hindu ethno-state. Like other far-right movements, the Sangh has an ethos of all-male paramilitary organizing at its core, and has a history of targeting religious minorities with violence, including through lynching.
Over fifty years ago, the Sangh established its first U.S.-based organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (World Hindu Council of America, or VHP-A). The VHP-A erected a vast network of organizations (known collectively as the US Sangh), building large charitable, cultural, religious, and advocacy fronts, as well as a network of PACs. Those PACs first built up the career of Tulsi Gabbard, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for her first Congressional races. Gabbard, as such, was Hindutva’s first high-profile champion. For example, she worked with a high-profile advocacy and lobbying wing for the movement, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), to oppose a 2013 Congressional resolution that condemned Hindu supremacist violence in India. Afterward, donors from the US Sangh contributed a full quarter of her 2014 campaign funds—one of many moments that, in hindsight, foreshadowed her transition to a MAGA firebrand.
The US Sangh’s other champions have also traditionally been Democrats, and the movement was once infamously cynical in its bipartisan opportunism. But like Gabbard, the Hindutva movement in America has followed broader political winds and increasingly taken on a distinctly Trumpist hue. That reversal leaves behind tough questions for a liberal establishment whose deferential politics of multiculturalism have only ended up midwifing another adversary, with the Hindutva movement now seeking a niche within a far-right coalition with whom it does enjoy some natural ideological affinities.
The Hindutva movement in America has followed broader political winds and increasingly taken on a distinctly Trumpist hue.
These affinities are embodied by figures like Gabbard and Patel, as well as Ramaswamy, who was speaking at VHP-A galas well before he was known nationally. They also speak to the reality that Hindutva’s alignment with white supremacy is less paradoxical than it seems. Hindutva leaders have, across their history, openly sought to emulate white supremacist movements, including Jim Crow racism and Nazism’s treatment of Jews. Hindutva’s view that Hindus are a majority oppressed in their own country closely matches MAGA’s view that whites and Christians are oppressed in the United States, a similarity that lends itself to shared conspiratorial visions and internal enemies, generally involving liberals and leftists. And anti-Muslim rabble-rousing has been the oldest glue between these movements, with VHP-A members holding longstanding ties to prominent anti-Muslim figures in the far right, including Robert B. Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Laura Loomer in the US, and the likes of Geert Wilders and Tommy Robinson across the Atlantic.
By the late 2010s, as the Indian American community grew more diverse, and questions of caste began to be hotly debated, this alignment began to extend to questions of racial equity. Manga Anantatmula, a VHP-A member, joined efforts to end affirmative action in college admissions in 2015. Hindu supremacists have worked hard to position themselves as distinct from other racial minorities; the VHP-A, for example, has boasted of how Indian Americans skipped the “ghetto stage” of immigration.
By the time Steve Bannon joined the Republican Hindu Coalition as honorary chairman in 2019, the political metamorphosis of the US Hindutva movement was complete. Bannon, notably, joined hands with Shalabh Kumar, a figure who had remained on the fringes of organizations like the HAF and the VHP-A. Alliances with MAGA, in that sense, were also a way for emerging voices on the margins of the Sangh to outflank more established groups, forcing them to adopt a MAGA aesthetic or face being left behind. Indeed, within a few years, shifts were visible across the movement. VHP-A and HAF members helped launch a number of pro-MAGA PACs, including Americans4Hindus, which explicitly defined itself against the Progressive Caucus. HAF joined anti-ethnic studies coalitions attacking progressive education. One VHP-A official participated in the January 6 insurrection. RSS and BJP leaders from India have since rubbed shoulders with the who’s who of MAGA, most recently at the 2024 National Conservatism conference.
Today, US Hindutva’s animating narratives, long focused on intra-community fault lines, have increasingly found new articulations. For example, the movement’s long opposition to protections against caste discrimination, which have prompted a series of failed legal challenges, are now being hastily re-articulated as opposition to “DEI excesses.” Terms like “Critical Caste Theory,” borrowed from “Critical Race Theory,” and “Hindu in Name Only” (HINO), a riff on RINO (Republican in Name Only), have proliferated.
That they reveal a whiff of desperate mimicry also points us to an important truth: not all of the movement toward MAGA has been voluntary. The Sangh’s propensity to adopt a red MAGA hat appears directly linked to their own waning influence among a younger, much more diverse Indian American community, and their corresponding loss of power within liberal civil society, which has increasingly—if belatedly—grown vigilant to their incompatibility with democratic values. In that sense, the Hindutva alignment with MAGA is reactionary in the true sense of the word.
Stuck in MAGA’s Orbit?
With significant resources, favorable geopolitical winds, and a growing set of shared perceived enemies, the US Sangh has built a significant degree of influence in the MAGA coalition.
With significant resources, favorable geopolitical winds, and a growing set of shared perceived enemies (Muslims, “woke” leftists, undocumented immigrants, and so on), the US Sangh has built a significant degree of influence in the MAGA coalition for its comparatively small demographic heft. For Trump, having an array of brown, non-Christian faces for MAGA is uniquely convenient—something that Vivek Ramaswamy has tried to make an explicit selling point, arguing that his own identity “actually puts me in a better position” to stand for MAGA “without anybody accusing me of being a Christian nationalist or whatever labels one might use.”
But will Trumpism accelerate Hindutva? This question is a much thornier one, since despite the push and pull factors driving it, the Hindu supremacist embrace of MAGA has its tensions. The evangelical core of Trump’s base views Hindus as heathens, and figures like Ramaswamy have faced open bigotry. Recent tussles over H1B visas, which suddenly positioned Indian Americans as the most visible face of immigration, have exposed another fault line. But Hindu supremacists have been unwilling and unable to distance themselves too far from MAGA, making stark the hierarchy of power between the two movements.
Take, as an example, the behavior of groups like HAF in recent months. In the lead up to November’s election, the US Sangh threw their weight behind Trump, but the reciprocation received in return, in the form of a notable tweet from Trump, went not to established Sangh organizations, but to new grifters in the movement entirely beholden to Trump, like Utsav Sanduja, the former COO of Gab who has seemingly adopted the Hindutva movement as his next project and founded Hindus for America First, a pro-MAGA Hindutva PAC. After Trump’s victory, every major Hindu supremacist group endorsed or congratulated Trump on his victory. HAF, desperate not to be outdone, announced its policy platform as a “Hindu American Project 2025.” HAF’s entire raison d’être has been to position itself as a mainstream voice for Hindu supremacy, rebranding the movement in the language of minority rights, so such an open expression of affinity with MAGA was striking.
Weeks later, after Sriram Krishnan’s appointment to the Trump 2.0 administration as “AI czar,” Indian American communities were subject to intense vitriol from the online far right. HAF urgently moved to position itself as advocates for an embattled immigrant community, showing the rhetorical flexibility that has often typified its Janus-faced approach. But this strategy appears to be increasingly circumscribed. A mere fortnight later, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, HAF leader Rajiv Pandit was present on the stage with Krishna Gudipati, a VHP-A member and Jan 6 rioter, for a gala celebrating Trump’s incoming Presidency. With an unctuous amnesia, Pandit stated that “we as Hindu Americans are very excited about the Trump 2.0 administration.”
The Hindutva movement is now fundamentally tied to MAGA, hitched to being an obsequious satellite. It can and will, in this orbital course, diverge to some degree, but that divergence now has hard gravitational limits.
This three-part snapshot reveals some hard facts: the Hindutva movement is now fundamentally tied to MAGA, hitched to being an obsequious satellite. It can and will, in this orbital course, diverge to some degree, but that divergence now has hard gravitational limits. In the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy and Kash Patel, it has figures who might take Hindutva catchphrases into spaces of unprecedented power, but the extent—and price—of this influence now seems to hinge upon total surrender to MAGA priorities, much like Gabbard, Ramaswamy, and Patel’s influence hinges upon the extent to which they remain loyal, and servile, to the President.
The fundamental site of contestation, as such, might not be Gabbard herself, but the many Gabbards that remain within the Democratic Party, from Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois and Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan to the Lt. Gov. of Maryland, Aruna Miller. As Hindutva grows increasingly inextricable from Trumpism, how will liberal institutions and the Democratic Party respond? If their complacent patronage of the Sangh continues, the latter might continue to cannibalize liberal institutions even as they provide a convenient brown face for MAGA. But if Democrats instead recognize who Hindu supremacists really are, reject their influence, and platform other movements within the community, the Sangh’s power might well reveal itself to be more brittle than ever.
Usha Kumar is a researcher and political commentator based in New York City. She can be reached at kumar.usha@proton.me
