What The Hell America!

The Hindu supremacist ecosystem, both in India and in the United States, has a long and sordid history of collaborating with white supremacists and other far-right actors. This history dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hindutva movement’s ideological founding fathers openly praised Nazism and the early leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] paramilitary traveled to Benito Mussolini’s Italy to learn from the ascendant Fascist movement.

A separate report released by the Savera coalition earlier last year, focusing specifically on the VHPA as the central nervous system of the American Hindu supremacist movement, examines this history in detail — from platforming notorious anti-Muslim extremists like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller to supporting the campaign to overturn affirmative action in higher education. The report highlights how the Hindu supremacist movement in the United States, with the VHPA at its center, has exploited the contradictions of liberal multiculturalism to launder its reactionary agenda, concealing these unsavory affiliations behind a paper-thin veneer of diversity and inclusion.

In recent years, however, the Hindu right’s mask has begun to slip, as the movement has increasingly abandoned even a superficial commitment to political liberalism in favor of an ever more vocal alignment with the most vitriolic segments of the American right. This has manifested most clearly in the Hindu right’s growing embrace of the far right’s dog-whistling crusade against “wokeness,” which has become a staple of contemporary reactionary discourse.

HAF in particular has played a key role in this embrace, most notably by constructing the bogeyman of “Critical Caste Theory” — a clear nod to the far right’s fearmongering about Critical Race Theory — in order to advance the spurious narrative that policies against caste discrimination are unfair to  Hindu Americans. In October 2024, HAF joined forces with the Coalition for Empowered Education — an outfit whose other partner organizations include straightforwardly reactionary groups like Parents Defending Education and the misleadingly named Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism — to attack ethnic studies programs and other examples of what the coalition claims to be “politicized instruction [in K-12 classrooms] . . . rooted in neo-Marxism.”

The alignment between the Hindu supremacist movement and the MAGA far right has only intensified in the last year, particularly in the weeks and months surrounding the 2024 US presidential election. Ahead of the election, Trump began making increasingly intentional overtures to court the Hindu American vote, most notably through a tweet posted on Diwali in which he claimed that “Kamala [Harris] and Joe [Biden] have ignored Hindus across the world and in America,” and promised to “protect Hindu Americans against the anti-religion agenda of the radical left.”

The post went viral, receiving more than thirty-four million views along with widespread coverage in Indian media outlets. It was later revealed to have been composed by Utsav Sanduja, the former chief operating officer for the alt-right social media platform Gab and founding chairman of Hindus for America First PAC. Following the tweet’s virality, pro-Trump megadonor (and possible ambassador to India) Shalabh Kumar launched a $1 million ad buy targeting Hindu voters in swing states. After the election, Kumar credited the tweet with contributing to a significant upsurge in Trump support among Hindu Americans.

When Trump won, Hindu supremacist groups were quick to congratulate the president-elect and share messages of effusive support for his MAGA agenda. After HAF shared its policy priorities for the incoming administration — a platform which notably invoked the specter of “misguided and excessive DEI initiatives” to attack policies against caste discrimination — the group’s executive director, Suhag Shukla, touted the document as a “Hindu American Project 2025.” Shortly thereafter, Utsav Chakrabarti — executive director of the VHPA’s policy wing, as well as of the VHPA spinoff group HinduACTion — appeared on a far-right Hindu talk show to discuss the “Top Five Reasons Why Indian Americans Voted Republican Donald Trump,” including “out of control DEI” in hiring and college admissions and a “growing perception” among Hindu Americans that George Soros was behind “anti-Hindu activism going on in America.”

Since taking power in January, Trump’s appointment of prominent right-wing Hindu Americans like Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel to high-profile positions in his administration has only served to bolster this support — as evidenced by HAF’s repeated defenses of Gabbard in particular, and its assertions that activists who have raised concerns about her extensive ties to the transnational Hindu supremacist movement are motivated by what it calls “Hinduphobia.”

What is driving this alignment? In order to understand why the Hindu right has sought to cozy up more and more explicitly to the broader far right in recent years, it’s important to understand the politics of victimhood that underpins the Hindu supremacist movement in the United States. By weaponizing claims of “Hinduphobia” against anyone, including self-identified Hindus, who dares to criticize India’s government or the Hindutva movement — a tactic copied directly and intentionally from the playbook of Zionist groups who use false accusations of anti-Semitism to smear pro-Palestine activists — the Hindu supremacist movement has constructed a narrative in which the real threat to Hindu Americans comes not from the far right but rather from the Left, who “endanger” Hindus every time they criticize Narendra Modi’s government or take a stand against caste discrimination.

The construction of such a narrative makes it easier for the Hindu right to align itself with the forces of white supremacy, leaning into a “model minority” stereotype that presents Indian Americans (and Hindu Americans in particular) as being inherently harder-working, better-educated, and more law-abiding than other minority communities. This position is exemplified by the VHPA’s claim that Indian immigrants, “deeply rooted in their heritage and blessed with a stable family structure,” were able to “[skip] the ‘ghetto stage’ common to most immigrant stories” — a position that could not be more emblematic of the Hindu supremacist movement’s approach to the politics of race and racism in the United States.

At its core, the Hindu right’s political agenda is about driving a wedge between Hindu Americans and other communities of color, reflecting a zero-sum vision of civil rights in which Hindus in the United States are told that their rights and safety must necessarily come at the expense of other groups. It is precisely this insidious wedge politics that lies at the heart of Hindu supremacists’ opposition to affirmative action as well as the Hindu right’s revealing engagement with the issue of immigration in recent years.

While groups like HAF and the VHPA’s policy wing both feature immigration-related issues in their respective platforms, the specific policies listed are limited to issues, such as H-1B visa reform and resolving the green card backlog, that primarily affect documented, so-called “highly skilled” and “highly educated” immigrants. Conspicuously absent from the Hindutva agenda, however, is any mention of the undocumented immigrants who stand to lose the most under the new administration — despite the fact that Indian Americans, including many Hindus, make up the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the United States, and members of this community have already begun to be deported back to India under abhorrent and inhumane conditions.

This glaring absence was abundantly clear in a webinar that HAF hosted in early February, titled “How can the Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration affect you?” Though HAF’s guest speaker, an immigration attorney named Akanksha Kalra, opened the webinar by claiming that its purpose was “to discuss the impact of these executive orders on our community and for all immigrants,” the concerns of undocumented immigrants — or, for that matter, the possibility that undocumented immigrants could even be part of “our community” in the first place — were all but entirely ignored.

Instead, the discussion focused almost exclusively on the impact that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown would have on documented Indian Americans. In one particularly egregious example, the webinar’s moderator asked, “If an ICE raid does happen . . . what are your rights as an individual Hindu American, whether you are here legally or on a temporary visa or a green card or are a citizen?” — sidestepping altogether the question of what rights an undocumented Hindu American might have in this scenario. Instead, when discussing the negative impact of anti-immigrant rhetoric, HAF’s moderator openly admitted the “validity” of “trying to crack down on undocumented immigrants.”

Clearly, the Hindu right has made the cynical calculation that it is in the best interests of the Hindu American community to align itself with the ascendant far right, particularly around the politics of immigration — despite the clear contradictions of a minority community pursuing proximity to a movement whose central pillars are white supremacy and Christian nationalism. As recent events demonstrate, however, cracks have already begun to form in this uneasy coalition.

In early 2024, a few weeks before the presidential inauguration, the MAGA movement became ensnared in a vicious “civil war” over the issue of H-1B visas for Indian tech workers, prompting a torrent of vile anti-Indian racism from far-right voices online. Within days after taking office, Trump signed a flurry of anti-immigrant executive orders, one of the most controversial of which was an order that revoked the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants — documented and undocumented — and which reportedly prompted an upswing in requests for preterm C-section deliveries among pregnant Indian women. Most recently, a staffer in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resigned after a series of racist Twitter/X posts resurfaced online, one of which read “Normalize Indian hate.” He was subsequently rehired, a matter on which Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, and Musk all agreed.

The Hindu right’s response to these developments has been at once thoroughly damning and entirely unsurprising. Rather than acknowledging the role that they played in cheerleading, normalizing, and otherwise enabling the rise of the same MAGA movement that is now fomenting such repugnant hate against Indian immigrants, Hindu supremacist groups like HAF have instead sought to beat a managed retreat toward an imaginary middle ground, presenting themselves as the victims of both the xenophobic right and the “Hinduphobic” left simultaneously.

On December 25, 2024 — one day after Trump’s appointment of Indian American venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as a senior advisor for artificial intelligence policy sparked the H-1B controversy — Shukla posted a tweet, which was later reposted by HAF with a supportive caption, declaring that “the nativist far right and radical progressive left hate us for the same reasons.” In February, after a racist tweet from MAGA commentator Josiah Lippincott defended the suspended DOGE staffer and claimed that there were “many justifiable reasons to profoundly dislike Indian culture,” Shukla responded by asserting that “this white nativist hate sustains itself on . . . tropes continuously pushed by the radical progressive left.” And when the American Academy of Religion announced a conference session on “Political Extremism and Rise of Asian American Religious Conservatisms,” HAF once again smeared the session as evidence of an “onslaught of [anti-Hindu] hate from the far left & right.”

Such hand-wringing, of course, conveniently obscures the fact that it was this same Hindu supremacist ecosystem that embraced the MAGA agenda in the first place, downplaying its extremism through whitewashing and false equivalencies and normalizing its divisive politics among Hindu Americans. The fact that the Hindu right is twisting itself into knots trying to backtrack on this alignment exposes the contradictions at the heart of the Hindutva-MAGA coalition. It also raises key strategic questions for progressive South Asians in the diaspora, Hindu and non-Hindu alike. In light of all the complexities and contradictions of this moment, how can we most effectively push back against the Hindu right’s efforts to drive a wedge between communities of color and embolden a growing multiracial far right, while simultaneously ensuring that this movement is not able to get away with claiming a  “middle-ground” position?

The answer is clear, though enacting it is far from simple. We must remain steadfast in our commitment to exposing the devil’s bargain that the Hindutva ecosystem has made with the MAGA far right, as well as how these bad actors, in the name of protecting Hindu interests, have sold out our communities to those whose vision for this country does not have any place for us in it. We must be relentless in warning of the growing threat posed by the multiracial far right, and in responding to each attempt at obfuscation or backpedaling with forceful reminders of the long-standing and fundamentally interwoven relationship between Hindu supremacy and white Christian nationalism. We must also be vigilant about countering the insidious narrative of “Hinduphobia” and refusing to allow the Hindu right to either demonize legitimate political criticism or mischaracterize instances of anti-Indian racism and xenophobia as being inherently anti-Hindu.

Above all, we must reinvigorate a politics of resistance to the far right that is rooted in an ethos of solidarity and collective care for all communities who are facing increased persecution in this dire political moment. We must refuse the politics of division and instead articulate a collective South Asian diasporic identity that honors the rich diversity of our communities across and beyond lines of religion, caste, language, and background. We must also reach across racial boundaries to build broad, multiracial coalitions with other communities who are facing the same bigotry and xenophobia. In this dire political moment, it is incumbent on all of us to remember and take to heart the crucial principle underpinning the solidarity that emerged between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in the aftermath of 9/11: when all is said and done, we are the ones who keep each other safe.