For more on the series, go here.
- Sunita Viswanath and Ram Vishwanathan
- Pranay Somayajula and Safa Ahmed
- Roja Singh and Prachi Patankar
- Biju Mathew and Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Sunita Viswanath and Ram Vishwanathan
Speakers: Caleb Kieffer, SPLC; Sunita Viswanath, Executive Director, Hindus for Human Rights; and Ram Vishwanathan, Senior Campaign Coordinator at India Civil Rights Watch International.
Caleb Kieffer
I can dive into the questions here. So again, just of notes, this is kind of going to be looking to be the second interview of the series. So in the first interview session, I think that we really provided some historical context around the Hindu or Hindu supremacist movement, and kind of reframed it more in the context of it being an ideology of racial superiority rather than an expression of religious faith. So we’re hoping to kind of dive into that a little more, because I know that there’s some issues that overlap when thinking about this. So maybe just to start us off, if you both will, maybe just tell me your name, your preferred pronouns, if you care to share them, and then also maybe your role at the organization and how you got involved in this work. If that works.
Sunita Viswanath
Yeah, I think I can go, I’m Sunita Vishwanath, and my pronouns are she/her/hers, and I’m a co-founder and the executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, which is five years old, and my whole life has been spent working in human rights organizations.
Ram Vishwanathan
Thanks, Suni, yeah. Ram here. Ram Vishwanathan, they/them pronouns, I’m with ICWI, India Civil Watch International. I’m the senior campaigns coordinator. How I got into this work is a long story, but maybe the quickest and crispest way I could say it is that I have sort of seen the rise of the far right globally as part of my adulthood. I haven’t sort of experienced an adulthood outside of Trump and Modi and then Modi again. And I think that’s very much …
Caleb Kieffer
Great. So thanks so much for that background. So, yeah, just to kind of dive into the questions then, if that works for folks. So the first one that I want to touch on is, really, why would you not characterize Hindu supremacy primarily as an expression of faith, and so if we’re not characterizing it in those forms, what would you say the key tenets are?
Sunita Viswanath
I think we often take from any book or teaching, religious or secular, what we’re looking for, all religious traditions, by their nature, have multiple meanings and tested meanings, layered meanings, and the meanings aren’t fixed. They’re in flux. For example, the way I read the Bhagavad Gita, an important text to me, to live as though my life is an offering to the world is diametrically opposite to a close friend of mine who’s in the same reading group right now with me, and he says that the Gita teaches him to take what he needs from the world and as much of it as he wants to live a happy life. And then consider the fact that Hinduism, which encompasses thousands of traditions, thousands of languages, deities, you know, ways of practice and text, way beyond the Gita, is so diverse, and we see how especially true this is in this case. Hindu supremacy, or Hindutva, is just 100 years old. It’s a 20th-century political ideology, a recent attempt to win that battle of contested meanings, to choose and enforce one amidst the complex collection of faith traditions that have taken many forms across thousands of years that we call Hinduism. Hindutva is exclusive, violent and hierarchical. It spreads and preys on fear, arguing that Hindu well-being is only possible through the subjugation of non-Hindus. And so, of course, it reads faith differently. Let’s think of the question of gender, for example. To tease this out further, Hindutva representations of gods are hypermasculine. They don’t, for example, have goddesses by their side, which is how they always were depicted as I was growing up. The gods of my childhood were androgynous, delicate, chubby, smiling, and now they are hyper-masculine, angry and boring. This has a reason. Hypermasculinity is promised as a solution to what Hindu supremacists and Modi in particular, in his speech to U.S. Congress, called “1,000 years of slavery.” It’s seen as a way to uphold past and racial purity, to show Muslims and Christians their place in a Hindu ethnostate, which they are in the active mission of bringing to existence, this Hindu Rashtra, or ethnostate. These depictions of these angry masculine gods are significant because they underlie the notion that Hindus are under threat and must be warring like these deities. In essence, fear has become central to their faith.
Caleb Kieffer
Great, thanks so much. Ram, do you care to dive into that question? I think you might be on mute.
Ram Vishwanathan
Oh, sorry, sorry. Thanks, Suni, and thanks, Caleb, for the question. I would just want to add that you know, if you ask, you know, Christian nationalists, if their anti-LGBTQ politics, if their opposition to abortion, if that’s grounded in faith, I’m sure they’d say yes, right? And so if you ask that question of Hindu supremacists, they would also say, yes, our politics is grounded in our faith. And when they say that, they’re being genuine at some level, right? And I think the anthropologist Scott Atran used the term “devoted actors” to describe these people in India. The term often used is bhats, or devotees. That’s often used as a pejorative term, as an insult, but I think it’s actually useful analytically, right? Because something, something like Hindu supremacy, is not captured very well by secular rationality, and we need to have space in understanding a movement like this, for people thinking beyond rational reasons. And I don’t say that to cast them, to cast proponents of the movement as beyond the pale. I actually think, if anything, it makes them and it makes us all more human. And so I can’t say that they aren’t being motivated by some conception of faith when they act, although personally, I think it is an intellectually and spiritually poor understanding of faith in the sense that the faith that drives them, I would say, isn’t spiritual. It isn’t transcendental, it isn’t thinking about the divine, but it is probably some form of faith. And just because Hindu supremacists or Christian nationalists or any type of supremacist movement act on the basis of faith, that doesn’t make them correct. Across history, people have done terrible things for faith. And even more than that, I want to say this right, that if we take statements from Hindutva supporters attesting to Hindutva as a matter of faith as face value, at face value, we also have to take at face value a whole set of other statements they make, where Hindu supremacists, and indeed, all supremacists, they’re not just trying to express faith. They’re trying to actively reshape what that faith means. And so they’re in a constant struggle to ensure that faith isn’t a universal expression of humanity and fraternity and connection. It’s instead, fundamentally grounded in maintaining a hierarchy of power. And so people are acting out of faith, but they’re not acting out of faith alone. They’re acting out of hate and fear. They’re acting to preserve their power, and they’re acting because people in their circles are acting too, because it’s empowering to feel part of a political project. It’s empowering to have the power to define who constitutes the in group and who is outside it. And in this sense, it’s like a negative nationalism. It’s a negative faith. I mean that word “negative” specifically, right? It’s, it’s, it’s less about setting the positive content of the faith. It’s more about setting boundaries and tests for who’s in the race, who’s in the nation, who’s in the in group. And really, I think if we take faith as contested, if we take faith as non-monolithic, then we realize that there’s also a struggle within the faith of people who want to claim authority to speak on behalf of it, and as soon as we do that, we might see that something like religious violence in India isn’t a timeless phenomenon of Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs and Christians fighting because their faith differs. It’s perhaps actually that pitting these communities against each other, pitting them as inherently adversarial, it serves a purpose within that internal contestation within who gets to speak for Hindus. And this is very, very true and very, very visible in the case of Hindu supremacy, which for a century has been in an active attempt to reshape what it means to be Hindu, and to take that term out of a religious question about how do we connect to each other, or how do we connect to the divine, and instead, to shape the term “Hindu” into a racial category. And in doing so, they draw on theories of race and caste and supremacy far more than a concept of spirituality. And I think it’s actually important to go and look and quote these figures in their texts where they’re doing that. So for example, the VHP of America in their editorials — VHP of America, by the way, is the oldest Hindu supremacist group in the U.S. — they write, I think this was in 2018, that emphasizing Hindutva from Hinduism becomes imperative. Those are their codes, right? And you see this across the movement. You see this in India as well, where the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh], the sort of mothership of the movement, has systematically been trying to erase and replace hundreds of heterodox, syncretic, sort of problematic for them, folk traditions, and to replace them with equivalents that maintain a certain caste hierarchy, that maintain a sort of hatred towards Muslims, right? And so when we when we think of Hindu supremacy, we’re struck by the hate speech, by lynchings, by ghettoization, by the fact that, you know, this year after India’s elections, India has the lowest share of Muslim members of Parliament in six decades. And we should think of that because it’s morally grotesque, but we shouldn’t forget, and Hindu supremacists certainly can’t forget, because they have to deal with it every day, that they don’t just have to contend with the civil resistance of Muslims and Christians and Sikhs or of Dalits and Adivasis who want to be outside the Hindu fold, but they also have to simultaneously deal with another problem, right? And the other problem is simply that the faith of a billion people is not easy to homogenize the hundreds of millions, billions, of billions of people, the billion people who are ascribed as Hindu who the Hindu supremacist movement seeks to build a theocracy in the name of they actually represent a whole array of diverse traditions, many of which are fundamentally opposed to the conservative, hierarchical, patriarchal, casteist, orthodox reading of Hinduism that the Hindu supremacist movement seeks to promote. And so I think it’s understanding the relationship between what Hindu supremacy says about the other, about the Muslim, about the Christian, about the Sikh, with what they’re actually trying to fight for within Hinduism, and the fact that those two struggles are actually in a dialectic relationship with each other, that’s really, really key. And to also answer the question about the key tenets of the movement, I think you know, in Savera, and this is not coming out of nowhere. It comes from decades of academic work and the lived experiences of people. We describe Hindu supremacy as a supremacist movement, as a fascist movement, and it has all the tenets that every scholar of fascism describes as part of fascism, whether that’s the sort of myth of civilizational renewal, a particular reading of history that is necessary to, in their eyes, be a Hindu. Right? In their eyes, to be a Hindu means to feel, as Sunita mentioned, that you have been oppressed and enslaved, and that the only way out of that emasculation is a sort of violent resurgence, right? And so what follows from that as well is that it’s a deeply illiberal ideology, liberal freedom just must be crushed, because it’s sort of automatically seen as the enemy. And what you also have that follows from this worldview, this reading of history, is that the movement sort of desires a monopoly over violence. It revels in the ability to take up arms, and it actually does so beyond the state, right, which is why the Hindu supremacist movement, in keeping with other fascist movements, is so grounded in militarism and in setting up these paramilitary institutions in sort of a reading of masculinity, of hypermasculinity, as Sunita sort of so thoroughly described, right? And this relationship with race and militarism and supremacy, it’s very, very evident in the history of the movement, in its main ideologues, and in the fact that these ideologues, when they were sort of writing up texts that became doctrinal texts for the movement, they didn’t turn to an understanding of faith. They didn’t turn to a sense of spirituality. They actually turned to the West. They turned to what were at that point, contemporaneous movements of fascism, right? And so just as the VHP of America says that emphasizing Hindutva over Hinduism becomes necessary. The person who coined the term Hindutva, he was an atheist, and he was far more concerned with a sort of “blood and soil” conception of what being Hindu is. And so, I mean, the parallels are really striking, and I think it’s important to actually draw them out, right? So I think in the mid-1940s an American journalist was traveling through India, interviewed Savarkar and asked him what would happen to Muslims in his vision of India. And Savarkar just looked at him and said that they would be “in the position of your Negroes,” right? I mean, I use that term directly quoting from the historical actor. It’s not my preferred term. And literally, I think, on Page 3, if I’m not mistaken, of Savarkar’s 1923, book, he says, “Hindutva is different from Hinduism,” and in distinguishing between the two, Savarkar was drawing from these European ideas of nationalism and of race, and was trying to change the definition of a Hindu from one following a faith to one being part of a racial category, someone who understood India as both their fatherland and their holy land. And so because, because Savarkar claimed that Muslims had loyalty to Mecca and, say, Catholics had loyalty to the Vatican, they could never be full Indians or full Hindus, in his term, and also what he did in the process, and this is where that sort of dialectic between the inside and the outside is really key. He also really threw in a whole bunch of other faiths that have their origin in the subcontinent, right? So, Buddhists, Adivasis, India’s indigenous people, many of whom have animist practices, gens and Sikhs. For Savarkar, they’re all Hindu, and that’s a categorization that most of them would object to, right? And so I think someone like Savarkar really pulls out the way in which Hindutva is drawn from a concept of race and not from a concept of faith.
Sunita Viswanath
I’m really struck by the inside/outside picture that you’re drawing, and I think that all of us are coming together as people, organizations and a movement that is fighting hate, that is fighting fascism — I completely agree with the use of that term for what we are talking about. I think it’s important for us who are fighting the hate to have in our imagination the possibility that people of faith can be part of this movement against hate, and sometimes we fall short of that. For instance, by thinking that the word “bhakt” describes Hindutva proponents, leaves out the possibility that there are Hindu bhakts like me who absolutely with every bone in my body and every part of my being opposes Hindutva. I think that we, if we are talking about faith, then the imagination on our side needs to extend, to include people, also to everything that you were saying. It’s worth adding that one of Savarkar proteges, naturae Godse was the RSS member. RSS is the ideological sort of origin of this ideology of Hindutva. So Nathuram Godse was a member of the RSS, and he was the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. And Gandhi’s politics were perhaps the most shaped by a deep faith of India’s freedom fighters and reformers. And incidentally, this is another space where Gandhi’s very different expression of his own gender, his embrace of femininity, deeply troubled Hindutva proponents, Hindu supremacists — and Godse in particular was plagued throughout his life by deep anxieties over gender. And Godse is openly named as a national hero by some contemporary Hindutva leaders today. Gandhi is not only the figure who stands in the way of the Hindutva project — he’s not the only figure. There are countless movements throughout history who fought past and other systems of discrimination from a religious perspective, and who are understood as Hindu today, and there’s a long list. And here are just some of these radical reformers. There’s Thiruvalluvar in the second century B.C., there’s Thiruvalluvar in the sixth century, Andal in the seventh century, Basavanna in the 12th century, Mahadevi Akka at the same time as vasavanna Ramananda, 15th century, Kabir Das, 16th century, Ravidas, 16th century, Eknath, 16th century , Tukārām 17th century, Aya Vaikundar in the 19th century, Narayana Guru in the 19th and 20th century, and our own beloved friend who passed away a couple of years ago, Swami Agnivesh, they all spoke of human brotherhood and the equality of all before God, and they devoted themselves to fighting caste. So it shouldn’t be very hard for our imagination to extend to include Hindus as part of a movement to fight Hindu supremacy. We locate ourselves as part of a legacy of these traditions within Hinduism that are anti caste, syncretic and egalitarian Hindutva. In contrast to these traditions and many more, finds readings of faith that promote a supremacist and casteist narrative. For them, it’s about power, not faith. And the extent to which this is true is visible as soon as you start to scratch the surface of Hindutva organizing — for example, Hindu supremacists are happy to bastardize Hindu texts and teaching and even the most canonical texts. For example, the Gita, for their ends, Gandhi used to quote the Gita regularly, and the quote Gandhi picked, which appears over two dozen times in the Gita, is “Ahimsa parmo Dharma,” or nonviolence as the highest moral virtue. Hindu supremacists have, especially over the last decade, repeatedly spread the lie that Gandhi only quoted the text partially, and that the text actually reads, “nonviolence as the highest virtue, but violence in the defense of religion is also a great virtue.” This phrase, written out in Sanskrit, is now being sold on T-shirts as a mark of identifying with Hindutva. The core tenets of Hindutva, of Hindu supremacy, therefore, are to violently impose this Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu ethnostate, on India’s minorities. Brutal violence targeting India’s Muslims has been fomented by Hindu supremacists repeatedly, and in everyday form of that violence, public lynchings of Muslims and Dalits are happening with horrific regularity. Dozens of Muslims have been lynched in the two months since Modi was elected for his third term. In the U.S., the task of Hindu supremacists has been to defend and justify this violence, with notable Hindu supremacists in the U.S. defending the brutal massacres and rapes in the 2002 Gujarat pogroms, as well as in the 2020 Delhi program.
Ram Vishwanathan
Also Caleb, I actually want to quickly add another point now that we’re talking about Hindutva as sort of a fascist movement, in the sense that I think a lot of people use that term as a pejorative term, but in this case, it’s, it’s a term that at least I use as an analytical term, right, in the sense that Hindu supremacy is, in its conception, in its self-conception, fascist. And I just want to tease that out a little bit in the sense that we mentioned Savarkar, sort of drawing from ideas of sort of blood and soil. But you also had another ideologue, B.S. Moonje, one of Savarkar’s contemporaries who traveled to Italy in the early ’30s. He met Mussolini. His purpose there was to study the fascist movement, and the influence of that visit, for example, is visible in the uniforms they use, the sort of paramilitary training they use, their understandings of masculinity, their sort of focus on catching people young and sort of indoctrinating them at a young age. And M.S. Golwalkar, who’s the sort of longest-serving leader of the RSS, between 1939 and 1973, he expressed his open admiration for Nazi Germany as a model worthy of emulation. And I think it’s actually useful. This might come out in other interviews, but I just want to read a sort of paragraph that he said: “To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races — the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh-impossible it is for races and cultures having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole. A good lesson for us in Hindustan [Hindustan being India], to learn and profit by.” I mean, these are the lines of a man who led the RSS for third of a century. This is the man on whose orders the movement came to the U.S. I mean, that’s deeply, deeply chilling. And in saying that, I also want to make sure that, in attempting to prove that the Hindu supremacist movement is bad, we don’t let ourselves get so overwhelmed by the horror of that statement and forget to fully comprehend what the Hindu supremacist movement is, because when I say that it is fascist in an analytical sense, it’s also that the movement has a sort of concerted organizational strategy that borrows from fascists, that is totalizing in its approach, that seeks to establish total control, right, and in both these ways, the movement is fascist — first in that they’re not just playing on existing identities, they’re fundamentally reshaping them. And there’s, as I mentioned, this sort of reading of history that requires you to sort of be gripped by this overarching anxiety that the Hindu race, at some point in history had been a glorious, harmonious, united whole, but is now wracked by degeneracy and weakness, and that can only be returned to glory by an assertive Hindu resurgence that sort of claims its place by showing its neighbors, by showing Muslims and Christians their place, right? And we have to really contend with the sheer rupture between this vision and between the older understandings of Hinduism that don’t serve the RSS in this goal, right? And so to do that, the RSS has sort of built a network and an imagination that stretches across the diaspora to the U.S. that is like hegemonic in a way, or aspirationally hegemonic in a way that goes beyond the pursuit of state control or government overthrow or policy resort in that people within the RSS always say our goal is to absorb and replace society itself and what scholars of fascism call this corporatism, organicism, right. Organicism is like a, sounds like a fancy term, but it basically means that the movement sees the nation as a single organism, organism, and it sees itself as a set of organizations that will reach and mold and resocialize and control every part of that organism. Again, this is very, very reminiscent of German nationalism, right, of the Nazi party, where you had a military wing, an educational wing, a charity wing, etc. And so I just say that to point out that if, when we invoke the RSS’s fascination with European fascism, we should see it not just as ideological, but also organizational. And maybe I’m going on quite a bit of a history lesson, but I just want to reiterate another point, maybe the last point of before we switch, which is that Golwalkar and Hedgewar and Savarkar and all these folks in the RSS, they are defined not by their religiosity, right, as I mentioned, but also by their caste. They’re all Brahmin men, and they’re all a specific subcaste, Chitpavan Brahmins in particular, which were a caste that had enjoyed a lot of power in, up to the 18th century or so, but had sort of lost power since. And these folks are writing in the 1920s and ’30s, and so they’re following European fascism, but they’re also responding to very local circumstances, right? They’re responding to the anti-colonial movement and the promise the anti-colonial movement had made for universal adult franchise. And so in that moment, the premise of democracy scared them, right? The premise of democracy would mean that a sort of upper-caste elite that got to speak in the name of Hinduism, that therefore got to speak in the name of the nation, that was being contested, and so that’s sort of why they looked to Europe and looked to fascism in Europe as a way to navigate those anxieties. And maybe having just clarified that, we can stop with this answer and say we’ve taken half an hour.
Caleb Kieffer
Yeah, no, this was all super interesting. And thank you so much Sunita and Ram, I mean. So the next question was, kind of how faith is used to kind of support this kind of racial caste and religious supremacy. I think you both covered that a lot in the questions already. I mean, did you have any other fine point to add on that? Or do you want to kind of shift focus to maybe, like United States and talk about some of the trends here?
Ram Vishwanathan
Yeah, I would definitely want to answer that question in the context of the U.S., but maybe Sunita will have something to add, too.
Sunita Viswanath
I think it’s useful to bring it to the U.S., but we start in India before we get to the U.S. And I think it would be good to give a concrete example that will illustrate this question of faith and how it animates this Hindu supremacy. So the example that I wanted to share was the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. It’s a campaign which, on the surface of it, is all about faith. Ram Janmabhoomi means the place of birth of the Lord Ram, one of the central gods in Hinduism and to Hindu supremacists — the God that they are making, transforming into the supreme god of the religion. For unaware readers, the campaign alleged in contradiction with historical and archeological evidence that a 15th-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, lay on the site of a raised temple, raised by Hindu supremacist activists, by the way. The VHP and its international wings, including the VHP of America, mobilized around this myth. They went door-to-door, spreading this falsehood, asking devout Hindus to donate a single brick for the temple. In 1992 a VHP-led mob illegally and violently demolished the mosque, sparking riots that killed thousands. The mobilization certainly tapped into people’s faith. But of course, this faith was leveraged alongside a much broader political project to convince Hindus that the best way to practice their faith is to defend it against its alleged attackers, specifically Muslims and Christians. It’s fear that leads so many faithful Hindus to support Hindutva, and that’s why conspiracy theories are so ripe in the far right. For example, the VHP has long spread the absolutely unfounded idea that Muslims will outnumber Hindus in one or two decades, and the Hindu faith itself will perhaps cease to exist. And you will all realize that this is an eerie equivalent of the great replacement theory. As Ram mentioned, the Hindutva project is also about homogenizing power around a single leader, single organization, and indeed, this single deity, Lord Ram. The campaign was also framed around making Lord Ram the supreme God, and that appeal extended to the diaspora. And as we’ve described in Savera reports, Hindu supremacist organizations here in America and other countries in the diaspora played active roles in this campaign. The arc that began with the destruction of the medieval mosque the Babri Masjid in 1992 ends with the consecration of a new, glistening, glorious temple built under the BJP government this January, and it ends with a bit of a karmic twist, even if full justice is so far away. In time for his election campaign this year, Narendra Modi rushed to consecrate the new temple, even though the temple was incomplete. This consecration was roundly condemned by Hindu faith leaders, even mainstream Hindu faith leaders, and indeed the people of India saw through it as well, especially those who are actually residents of the city of Ayodhya because this gaudy new temple was actually built by destroying hundreds of local homes and shrines as well. Modi’s party even lost the election in the district where the Ram temple was constructed. It’s important to note here that these issues are absolutely not contained to India — far from it. Just this spring, the VHP of America hosted Ratha Yatra, or Chariot March, to celebrate the consecration of this new Ram temple on the land where the Babri Masjid once stood, driving to hundreds of temples across the country to share holy offerings from the temple. This was an effort to polarize our communities here in America, one of many such provocations. And yes, that Chariot March and that whole campaign is therefore, of course, working in the name of faith, but it’s also trying to redefine what faith means. That if you tie up faith with fear and a lust for power, it becomes justified to tear down a mosque, start deadly riots and build a temple in its stead. That in doing so, we’re making a central shrine of Hinduism, and asking Hindus in the diaspora to see it as akin to a Mecca or a Jerusalem or the Vatican. We reject that, of course, on two premises, because our inclusive, pluralistic Hinduism is far less monopolized by upper-caste orthodoxy, and because no temple built on the site of such violence that such an overt ode to supremacy can represent my faith or the faith of those in my community.
Ram Vishwanathan
Thanks. Suni, yeah, I’ll just jump to the to the U.S. I because I think that’s the focus of our Savera campaign is to look at Hindu supremacy in the U.S., and the question of faith itself becomes a slightly more vexed question, right? In the sense that Hindus in the U.S. are a minority. They’re a minority in religious terms, and they’re almost overwhelmingly a minority in racial terms and so, and not only that, they’re often victims of white supremacy and of Christian nationalism. And so, of course, they’re not trying to aspire to a Hindu ethnostate here. But I think if we look at the question of what Hindu supremacy in the U.S. actually looks like, it’s more this: It’s that Hindu supremacy recognizes and accepts a hierarchy of power here in this country, namely white supremacy, and it seeks to work alongside it, rather than contested, right, in the sense that its acceptance of white supremacy is an intimate one, because supremacist movements reflect and even enable each other in deep ways. And so even though Hindus and Indians and all South Asians and all people of color do and will face the brunt of white supremacy, Hindu supremacy, sort of seeks accommodation within that structure, aspiring to whiteness, rather than joining in solidarity with the oppressed. And so I would even say that it’s not just comfortable with white supremacy, but it sees the U.S. itself becoming a white supremacist state, or a Christian ethno [state] or Christian theocracy, as confirming evidence that India needs to become one too. And so this means that as Hindu supremacy grows in the U.S., it becomes closer and closer to other forces on the far right, building what we and other experts have been calling an emerging multiracial far right and so to actually, like sort of hone in on this question of faith, what we see that follows from what I just said is that Hindu supremacist groups deploy faith in ways, in strategies that borrow directly from the Christian right. I would even put it as this, that the fundamental premise of Hindu supremacy in the U.S. right now is that an advance of civil rights for other communities is an attack on us. It’s a violation of our faith. And we can name them, right. So when oppressed caste communities in the diaspora push for the recognition of caste as a category that should be protected, Hindu supremacists respond by saying, this is anti-Hindu. This is Hinduphobic. This is the state entering in and trying to decide our religious rights. And what you see again is that the enemies that the Hindu supremacist movement is choosing aren’t just Dalits or Adivasis or Indian Muslims, Indian Sikhs, Indian Christians. It’s not restricted to the Indian diaspora, because the U.S. Hindutva movement is sort of imbibing and trying to get closer to the MAGA movement. And so in the process, in that process of mimicry, they’re trying to choose the same targets, almost as a way to gain acceptance. So immigrants, queer people, Black people, they’re all made targets, too. And it’s part of this accommodation with white supremacy that generates a type of, I mean, the technical term is, it’s like a political schadenfreude, right? Where you’re encouraged to make targets of other communities, just encouraged to demonstrate that you’re a good minority in contrast to a bad minority, and to sort of distinguish yourself as more deserving. And so in that way, you can see that there’s a line from the model minority myth to the multiracial far right to being a sort of ally or appendage of white supremacy. And that line, unfortunately, is pretty direct, and is sort of moving very quickly. And I think a lot of the strategies will be, you know, all of you folks at SPLC who spend time combating Christian nationalism, you’ll recognize this. I think, the way recent struggles over caste have played out, and the ways in which Hindu supremacists have recognized in the process that other opponents of civil rights are their allies has really, really sort of concretized and crystallized that sort of mutual recognition between two far-right groups. And I think the funny thing when it comes to faith in these cases is that, let me actually mention what one of our colleagues, Karthik Shanmugam, who wrote, he mentioned this in an article on the Cisco case, if I’m not mistaken, was that the complainant in that caste discrimination case, it basically involved a lower caste employee in a Silicon Valley company, Cisco, alleging caste discrimination. And the funny thing was that the lower-caste person was actually a devout Hindu, and the upper-caste person, the accused in the case, was an atheist. But a lot of these Hindutva groups, the Hindu supremacist groups, they axiomatically chose the atheist upper-caste person as the person they had to represent, right? And I think that’s again revealing about the extent to which faith matters, as opposed to the preservation of power. And I think really in that sense, in the encounter between these two movements, you’re seeing that the basic fundamental premise of Supremacy is sort of coming out right, that your advancement is a threat to my existence. This sort of very fundamentally zero-sum idea at the basis of supremacy, I think that’s been coming out again and again in the ways in which Hindu supremacist groups could, they could join us in combating white supremacy. But instead, they’re sort of setting in these wedges, and I know we’ll talk about that later, so I’ll maybe stop there.
Sunita Viswanath
And they’re very successful, the Hindutva forces here in the diaspora, in the U.S., and I think part of the reason they’re this successful is that the inroads they’ve made and the resources they have invested in, at the cultural level, in mainstream, you know, Indian diaspora community. The VHPA, which, as we’ve already said, was founded on the orders of RSS and Golwalkar, started and control the Hindu Mandir Executive Conference, which organizes temples and brings them to serve the Hindutva agenda. They have, in many ways, enjoyed a three- or four-decade head start over all of us, and so we have our work cut out for us, because they started this work when the diaspora was much smaller, much more scattered, and they tapped into very real challenges of being an immigrant, a new immigrant, being alienated with the idea that orthodox conservative expressions of faith were the best way to preserve culture. So throughout the U.S. and the larger diaspora, Hindutva organizations and proponents have managed to spread this fear and hate. You’ll find it on college campuses, in children’s Hinduism classes, in cultural institutions like dance and music schools, in organizations that come together on the basis of shared language — they’ve tried to convince their constituencies that their community is under threat, that so called Hinduphobia is rampant, that love and peace are for the weak, and that any of us who speak up for pluralism and justice are called Hinduphobic. For instance, in that Cisco case, those of us who argued, you know, for the rights of the lower-caste person whose labor rights were violated — and it’s ironic that he was actually a faithful Hindu — we were all called Hinduphobic. But the other thing I’d say is that as the diaspora changes — we are seeing Indian Americans rise in size and prominence and influence the new generation — the young are going to be looking for something else from their Hinduism. How is our faith going to guide us as we tackle climate change? How will we respond to white supremacy? How will we show common cause with immigrants, with African Americans? How will we build a liberatory tradition of Hinduism that is open to an expansive reading of gender and sexuality? How will we provide economic justice in a world that’s growing more and more unequal? This is what younger Hindus are asking already, and will be asking more and more, and Hindus for Human Rights is well positioned to reach them.
Caleb Kieffer
Great, thanks so much for that, Sunita and Ram, really appreciate it. So I know that you mentioned that the Hindu supremacist movement are comfortable working alongside white supremacy, and that they are kind of quick to kind of deploy these terms of Hinduphobia and everything, wondering if in your research, in your advocacy, you are seeing these groups show up in progressive circles, and if there’s a tactic to kind of insert themselves into these kind of U.S. progressive movements, co-opt the language of victimhood, which I know you kind of touched on a bit, and kind of drive wedges between certain communities, wondering if you’d want to talk on that a bit.
Sunita Viswanath
Yeah, they certainly have, because Hindustan has been so successful at convincing Hindus that we’re in danger and that discrimination against us is rampant. They consider Hinduphobia as a systemic challenge on par with Islamophobia and antisemitism, and so in progressive spaces, people want to be against every kind of discrimination. And because the Hindu right has so successfully placed Hinduphobia alongside Islamophobia, antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, they’re in — they’re in that space for sure. The premise of the effort is to claim a unique victimhood status that is distinct from these other social justice movements. And there, and you know, there are, of course, incidents in the U.S. of discrimination against Hindus. It isn’t rampant. It isn’t systemic, and very often the discrimination is motivated by racism or anti-immigrant sentiment, or by how all Brown people were racialized in the years after 9/11. But, you know — an aggressive victimhood is so necessary for the Hindutva project that these groups insist that any discrimination is necessarily and purely coming from a pervasive fear of Hindus. So for instance, if I as a Hindu American face an act of discrimination, a hate crime, because I’m a woman, because I’m an immigrant, because I’m Brown, the Hindutva forces will say that this was an act of Hinduphobia. The question is not of whether Hindus face discrimination. The question is this: We have two options. We can fight against all forms of oppression as part of a united struggle for a just multiracial democracy for all with the underlying commitment that the liberation of one is necessary for the liberation of all of us, and that fight can be grounded as it has been in the past in Black and Jewish communities, the recognition that white Christian nationalism is fundamentally structured by anti-Blackness, antisemitism, and through that, we can learn to see our siblings’ struggle as our own. That framing was critical because it emphasized that both sides had skin in the game in the same civil rights movement, not separate efforts. But rather than identified racism or xenophobia or discrimination within this lens, Hindu supremacist groups, they’re trying to wedge our coalitions by insisting that Hinduphobia is an altogether new category, hermetically sealed from these other structures of discrimination, these other inequities in power, and critically, they are trying to flip the question of who is actually responsible for discrimination and violence in this country. It’s a sleight of hand that reveals the central logic of the movement in the U.S. They say it’s not the far right, but progressives, people of color, Muslims, Dalits and Hindus standing against Hindutva and caste. They are the problem. We are the problem. By contrast, you almost never see Hindutva groups actually articulate a critique of the far right. Think of how useful the MAGA movement is going to find this in the months and years to come, a nonwhite group that refuses to name and shame white supremacy and instead claims that progressives are the problem — that will be the ultimate wedge for them. This has been explicitly written out by organizations like Hindu American Foundation in this past year. Let me actually quote Hindu American Foundation’s Matt McDermott on this, who wrote that racism and xenophobia are, and I’ll quote, “more slowly simmering background issues and need to be deprioritized.” But that “the biggest challenges specifically faced by Hindu American advocacy groups stem from two main sources. First, advocacy groups and activists whose primary focus is minority religious communities in India, and second, the progressive movement in the U.S.” It’s incredible. And to make their point, they conflate genuine anti-Hindu expressions on the right, such as those of evangelical pastors, with legitimate political critique from the left. And to say that it is in fact South Asians who are the biggest threat to Hindus, there’s no clearer way to turn us against each other, rather than uniting us to combat the far right, and that’s clearly preferable for the Hindu right, as they set their camp up alongside the MAGA far right, including extremist Zionists.
Ram Vishwanathan
Thanks, Suni, you put that really well. There’s not much I want to add, except that I actually want to maybe disagree a little bit and contest the idea that they’ve been successful with the push to sort of establish Hinduphobia. And I’ll, sort of, I’ll sort of say that in sort of explaining that in my head, their turn to the far right, Caleb, is actually, I think, on one hand, you know, people see it as a sign of strength. Oh, they’ve got organized money and power. But I actually see it as a sign of weakness, in the sense that it’s a sign that this, that their effort to embed themselves in liberal and progressive spaces, it’s failing. And so yes, they are seeing a sort of new block of power in MAGA that’s very attractive to them, that they sort of recognize in the mirror, so to speak. But I think the effort is failing because very few groups sort of take them very seriously in this movement. And I think, you know, one way to do that is to sort of look at the moment after 9/11 as an example. You know it was. It was such an extraordinary moment for us, for us as South Asians, because I think until then, we had enjoyed the privileges of middle-class life without the same degree of racialization as those faced by Black communities. And 9/11 sort of changed that in the sense that we were racialized in whole new ways. And I remember hearing these stories from my parents of how pervasive this sort of surveillance was, of how they felt cut off from society, how they felt fear. And I think very powerfully, the responses to those, though, were incredibly heartening. You know, a lot of social movements, I can think, within this, the South Asian community, of a group like SAALT, South Asian Americans Leading Together, they built these responses that were grounded in solidarity and collective liberation. And so I think now if, if you see that, that you know, the DOJ, for example, has a group like BAMEMSA or MASSAH, right, which is Black, Arab, Middle Eastern, South Asian, or MASSAH is, I think, Muslim, Arab, Sikh, South Asian and Hindu, these sort of unified categories were very, very important, because they recognized that whether we were Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, if we faced a form of racism or discrimination, it probably came from a very similar source, and that we had very similar challenges, right, in the same way that historically black and Jewish groups sort of recognized the fight against white supremacy as united. A lot of the frames post-9/11 really did this work well, but there was an exception. The exception was Hindu supremacists. And Hindu supremacists in the years since 9/11 actually did something else, right? They became the loudest and most consistently virulent anti-Muslim set of groups. And I think, yes, you can understand it in part as an imported phenomenon. It’s sort of the hatred of Hindu supremacy that, you know, people carry it. But I actually think it was more than that. It was trying, in that moment of severe racialization, Hindu supremacists trying to point out to white people again and again that we’re not Muslim, we’re Hindu we’re the right type of Brown color, right? And so that’s why you have this effort to proclaim louder than ever that we’re a part of the counter-Jihad movement. And I think starting with a moment like that, their misalignment with a collective politics, with the politics of civil rights, it became very, very painfully visible. And I think sort of starting in that moment all the way to today, where Hindu supremacists are sort of exposed. They’re contested. A group like Savera has a very, very diverse majority, right? We call ourselves an Indian American majority because we have Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Sikhs and Dalits all united in this effort, right, and so I think the way this wedge, this effort, of these efforts of wedges are being pushed. They’re very scary. They’re very dangerous. But I think the template in terms of how to defeat them, how to articulate a more positive effort has worked. And in this regard, I think you know when we come and talk about this, we are not, you know, for example, we say that Hindu supremacy, Hindu supremacists, play on white guilt. They are sort of instrumentalizing the very liberal tenets that gave them a seat at the table. But when we say they’re playing on white guilt, we’re not saying that in a cynical way. You know, Hindus, are constructed as racial minorities, as we all are, and that does give them a place at the multicultural table, so to speak. But the question then is, what do you do when you have a seat at the table? Right? If everything that they do is illiberal, we need to reckon with that. We need to figure out that one’s position as a minority does not preclude your politics being itself discriminatory. And so I think the way Hindu supremacists have played their hand in this moment is changing. And I think I would even sort of, actually, you know, if we have a bit of time for speculation, I would say that their presence in the liberal, progressive world isn’t going to last. It’s not stable, and politics is changing, and the speed at which Hindu supremacists are moving to the right — I mean, I would even go far as to say that Hindu supremacists are trying to carve out Hindu as a racial category that is entirely separate from South Asians. I mean, it’s like a, it seems, on the face of it, a ridiculous idea, but just look at the disdain that Hindu supremacists have for that term, right? And it’s by insisting that we need a unique form of victimhood to talk about ourselves. It’s actually a way in which whiteness is contested by distinguishing yourself from other people around you, from other Brown people around you. And I mean, historically, you’ve often had that, you know, you had sort of wealthier Jewish communities, looking at sort of new immigrants from Eastern Europe who are much poorer, and being like, oh, who are them? They’re not Jews like us. And what you’re having here is something very similar, except it’s almost a conversation between supremacist movements going full circle, right? Which is that this is an idea that came up 100 years ago informed by Western ideas of supremacy. And even in that moment, in 1923 upper-caste Indians had made a claim, made claims that their caste bestowed upon them whiteness. There’s this infamous legal case, right, Bhagat Singh Thind versus the state of the U.S., where he made that claim. And so basically, what we’re seeing 100 years later is that this project is coming full circle through this alliance, through this encounter with the white supremacist movement. And maybe, just to make sure I back that up, that point up with some quotes, let me just mention one or two, right? One, I think, was very recently when Suhag Shukla, the executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, was asked about Usha Vance, she made this quote, right? “I think it’s quintessentially an American story, right? Every new group that comes in, whether they were Irish, whether they were Italian, whether they were Jewish, whether they were Catholic, they’ve had to punch above their weight and fight to get their place at the table. We’ve done that, and we’re seeing that now it’s our turn.” And I actually found that quote very striking, because on one hand, it’s an ode to multiculturalism, but subconsciously, it’s actually a perfect example of the ways in which Hindu supremacist groups are comparing themselves in this sort of subconscious slip to all the groups listed there being groups that were sort of quasi-white and then became white, right? Italians, Jewish, Irish and so I think we also need to understand that, like, race is a much more malleable category than we might think of it being in the moment. And I mean other groups say this much more explicitly, right? The VHP of America says that they “skipped the ghetto stage” that was typical to other immigrants. And so there’s this constant effort to position themselves as separate from other Brown people. And in fact, I think, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy is a really good example of that, in the sense that he grounded his support for white Christian nationalism, not by hiding his Hinduness, but by actually articulating his support for the MAGA movement in the language of his Hinduness, which, you know, it was this remarkable contortion, right? He claimed that Hinduism is very simplistically monotheistic. He emphasized his caste pride. He repeatedly aligned with Judeo-Christian values, and he’s repeatedly taken on the talking points of the far right, whether that’s trans kids, the anti-woke agenda. And basically what that shows is that nonwhite actors, if you buy into those moral panics, you can at least make an attempt to be considered white. I mean, I think all of us think that that’s going to fail. You can see in Vivek Ramaswamy’s own candidacy that ultimately the evangelical right didn’t accept him. But yet these groups are trying it anyway. And so we’re actually at a phase where they are trying to push these wedges in liberal spaces while simultaneously making a claim for an alliance with the far right. And I think the internal contradiction between those two things, it isn’t going to hold and it shouldn’t hold, and it’s the responsibility of progressives and other liberals to recognize what they’re doing and to make sure that Hindu supremacists and these attempts to divide us, the strategies that Sunita described, that they aren’t successful.
Caleb Kieffer
Thanks so much. Yeah, that’s super-helpful context. So I think just in I know you all kind of provide some examples of some of the groups that kind of fit within those who are kind of pushing this agenda and trying to drive these wedges. Did you want to kind of give any more examples about which groups, kind of be on the lookout, or do you think it would make sense maybe shift and talk about what kind of advocacy looks like to responding to the challenges posed by Hindu supremacy in the United States?
Ram Vishwanathan
I mean, maybe one question, Caleb is, did you, do you ask this question in another interview? Because if so, I think in the interest of time, we can, we can skip it, because in my head, I have a long answer to it, but depends on how much time we have.
Caleb Kieffer
Um, yeah, so we should be getting into it and do a separate interview. So, yeah, maybe if we just jump into just closing about kind of what advocacy looks like, might be the best way in the interest of time. So yeah, I guess, what does the kind of advocacy look like in responding to the challenges posed by Hindu supremacy in the United States and abroad?
Sunita Viswanath
I can jump into here and first of all say to Ram, you know, especially with this very explicit alignment and positioning adjacent the MAGA white Christian movement in this country, the Hindutva forces in this country are becoming, you know, more and more sort of visible to the larger Hindu community with their true colors, and so I agree with you that and that there more of that in this election season. I’m sure that, and the not a victory, but a step away from the abyss in India, in the recent elections in India, I think, give us space to do the advocacy that we do. And to your question, Caleb, the advocacy of a group of coalition like Savera, bringing Indian diaspora communities across our diversity together, because the far right’s mission is to divide us, actually coming together in a coalition that includes Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, Christians and leftists, itself is a radical act opposing the far right. And then to make, to bring that movement in further coalition with progressive movements, other progressive movements that aren’t related to India in this country really is, I think, a force that we’re building, and I think it’s very exciting. Within the Indian diaspora community, I think it’s very important that we create alternative spaces for people to peel away from these Hindutva organizations as they begin to realize what they actually are, to express their true views. If we don’t, then Hindutva will indeed have successfully entrenched all the spaces where Hindus gather. And I’d like to just in that, in that spirit, offer up the work of Hindus for Human Rights. We are a five-year-old advocacy organization working to organize and build a movement in the Hindu community to be aware of the history of Hindutva, the danger it presents to democracy and unity here in the United States, and the importance of standing against it, standing against it as American citizens, as people who care about democracy and human rights, but also of standing against it as Hindus. We do this work in the political realm, educating elected officials and staffers about Hindutva actors, spreading their hateful ideology under the guise of protecting the community against Hinduphobia. We do this work in the media, correcting the lies of Hindutva with evidence about the fascist history and present-day atrocities being committed, and building a voice and presence of Hindus motivated by love rather than fear, and for whom justice means justice for all. And we do this work at the grassroots level. This, I believe, is the most important work of all to bring people together in community with interfaith siblings and secular siblings together addressing matters of justice that affect all of us, and having difficult conversations and creating interfaith and secular community spaces to celebrate our various festivals from each of our communities. And finally, we do this work, and this is also very important: We do this work in the religious arena. We platform priests and theologians who offer an alternate understanding of Hindu faith, tying back to the legacy that I described earlier of radical reformers, a Hindu liberation theology. We have a growing network of Hindu religious leaders in the U.S. and around the world who are opposed to caste categorically and are able to serve the community with religious education and spiritual guidance. And many families seek this service. They can perform progressive and inclusive rituals for all the important life events, like births and deaths, weddings, naming ceremonies, housewarmings, any time that a family, religious or secular, seeks out a ritual to mark a life transition. And so please check out Hindus for Human Rights. We are a part of the solution as we fight the Hindu far right.
Ram Vishwanathan
Thanks. Suni, Yeah, Caleb, I’ll just jump in and sort of quickly answer by sort of laying out the two ways in which we’re working to combat the threats we’ve described. One of them, I think, is just — we’re making space within the community, as Sunita mentioned, through this coalition for a sort of new, expansive, positive vision of Indian American identity, one that is sort of multi-faith, multiethnic, multi-class, multi-linguistic. And in fact, you know, I would even say this, right, that what Hindutva groups are offering is this idea that you can be proud in your history, proud of your history, proud of your culture. And what we’re trying to demonstrate is that there is a way to do that without responding to racism with racism of your own, so to speak, right? And I think if we look at Indian American history, there’s a very rich tradition from the Indians who inspired the Civil Rights Movement, the Indian Americans who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. As a queer person myself, to someone like Urvashi VEDA, I mean, we have the history in front of us. We have the legacy in front of us to draw upon and to sort of articulate a very different understanding of Indian American identity. And when I say that we are the Indian American majority, I don’t mean that just as a sort of passing statement. Let’s actually deal with a bit of numbers, right, which is that 54% of Indian Americans are Hindus, 31% are Muslim, Sikh or Christian, and I think 15 or 16% are not affiliated with any particular faith. And given the type of work that HFHR are doing, and that ICWI is so proud and happy to support HFHR in that effort, if you take the section of Hindus who oppose Hindutva with this 31% that is Hindu Christian or Sikh, with those who are unaffiliated with the faith, you already have the basic formula of what a new Indian American majority can look like. And so what the Savera coalition represents is an effort to actually build that, right, to build a sense of unity, to build genuine interfaith and cross-caste alliances and partnerships, and then the other half of what we’re doing is just recognizing that if the far right is uniting, then those opposed to them must do the same, right? And so as part of our work, we are — when we talk to people about Hindutva, we don’t talk about it as something that is just limited to India. It’s something that threatens the struggle for a just, multiracial democracy in the U.S. And so when we talk to people, we’re emphasizing that this is not an abstract question. This is integrated with the struggles and the causes that you all hold so deeply. It’s a question of shared interest. It’s not a question of sort of abstract, distant alliances. And so what Savera has done in our reports and in our statement, where we have over 125 [or] 130 signatories, is emphasize that. And I think the type of support and the type of solidarity we received has come out of the fact that we are willing to fight all supremacies in a sort of integrated struggle, because that’s the need of the moment, and maybe I think I would stop there.
Pranay Somayajula and Safa Ahmed
Speakers: Caleb Kieffer, SPLC; Prachi Patankar, Senior Program Officer at Foundation for a Just Society; and Dr. Roja Singh, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at St. John Fisher University.
Caleb Kieffer
So to start off, if maybe you both will share your names, your preferred pronouns and your role, or how you occupy this space. And Pranay, do you maybe want to kick us off?
Pranay Somayajula
Yeah, yeah, for sure. My name is Pranay Somayajula. I use he or they pronouns, and I’m the director of organizing and advocacy at Hindus for Human Rights, which is one of the core members of the Savera coalition.
Safa Ahmed
I am Safa Ahmed. I am the associate director of media and communications for the Indian American Muslim Council. And my pronouns are she/her.
Caleb Kieffer
As mentioned, this specific interview, we want to go into the overlaps between the U.S. far right and Hindu supremacy, unpack what ideological overlaps there are, and what makes the Hindu supremacist movement unique, and then how it fits into this time. So yeah, we really want to look at how this movement exists within, and also look at how it exists within overarching kind of white supremacist power structures, specifically in the U.S. But any other insights you want to provide, that is good. So why don’t you first start off by maybe telling me about your advocacy in your, in this role, in your space, in this space.
Pranay Somayajula
Yeah, I can jump in on this, and then Safa, please do come in with anything that I missed or to add to the response. So, yeah. So the Savera coalition is a coalition that formed late last year, kind of beginning of 2024, and it’s, you know, building on relationships and organizing work that has been going on between our various organizations in various ways for a few years now. But we really felt the need to, I think, coalesce into a more established entity in the form of this coalition, in order to really bring together a coalition that hasn’t existed, I think, in U.S. civil society or in the Indian American diaspora before, and that is a coalition that brings together really a number of different communities that make up the full diversity of the Indian American diaspora. I think oftentimes you end up having these conversations take place in silos, where you have a Sikh group talking about Sikh issues, or a Muslim group talks about Muslim issues, and so on and so forth. But this is happening at the same time that Hindu nationalists and Hindu supremacists are trying to, claiming that they speak for the entire Indian American community. So, what the Savera coalition — which is made up of sort of five core organizations, as Hindus for Human Rights, Indian American Muslim Council, Dalit Solidarity Forum, Ambedkar King Study Circle, and India Civil War International, as well as sort of an outer ring of non-South Asian allies and partners — what we’re trying to do is produce research and provide education and advocacy within U.S. civil society on the presence and the nature and the structures of the Hindu supremacist movement in the U.S., but very importantly, going beyond just saying that this movement or this ecosystem exists, and really pointing out the really alarming ways in which it is converging with broader strands of the far right, not just here in the U.S. but around the world. Although our focus is on the United States context. You know, because our founding orgs all emerged from within the Indian diaspora, we’re uniquely positioned, I think, to take on this supremacist movement that’s gained a foothold in our communities, but is also collaborating with other far-right movements on a global scale in ways that don’t really get noticed by most American civil society organizations or in American media. And so we’re trying to raise awareness and advocate on these issues through a number of ways; the most, sort of the highest-profile way in which we do that is releasing research. So we’ve released two reports so far this year on the VHPA, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, which we really see as the central node of the Hindu supremacist network in the United States. But sort of to support or to amplify those reports, we’ve been producing, fact sheets, one-pagers, social media infographics that we’ve found have received quite a favorable reception and often reach quite large audiences on social media and elsewhere when we share them. We’ve also been doing workshops, teach-ins, private education sessions for groups within U.S. civil society as well, both in person and virtually, to really make these connections between Hindu supremacy, white supremacy and other forms of far-right politics here in the United States. And yeah, our goal really is to try and build an awareness that these are overlapping issues and overlapping challenges among civil society, and to build a strong kind of, like, unified coalition to respond to those challenges as well. I’ll pause there to — or actually, I guess I’ll add, I’ll add one more thing, which is that I think a narrative that we really are trying to push back against is the narrative that you often see in media coverage of these issues, to the extent that they are covered in the media, which frames Hindu nationalism or Hindu supremacy as a foreign policy issue that really only is of relevance to India. This is a far-right movement that has power in India and is framed in the, you know, foreign policy lens, but isn’t really talked about as an American issue, and to the extent that it is talked about as an issue affecting the U.S. is often framed as an intracommunal issue, like something that’s dividing the South Asian American community but doesn’t have broader effects. And you know, as our reports and our advocacy has really highlighted, this, in fact, represents a much larger far-right convergence that threatens American democracy and multiracial justice on a much more fundamental and wide-ranging level. And so that’s a really key aspect of the narrative we’re trying to push back, which is why things like our civil society joint statement that we released earlier this year, with over 100 different organizations signing on from all different sectors of advocacy and civil society, is so important. That’s the first time that you have such a broad cross section of South Asian and non-South Asian organizations signing on to a statement about the danger posed by Hindu supremacy. And I think that that really encapsulates the core of what we’re trying to do with our advocacy here. I’ll stop there and Safa, pass it over to you, if you have anything to add.
Safa Ahmed
Yeah, I think the only thing I’ll add here is the fact that Savera is really built around bringing to the forefront what we call this new diasporic majority. And that is a phrase that we’ve been using to show that, hey, this movement exists. It is a supremacist movement. It does have power in multiple different spaces, but at the same time, they do not speak for all Indian Americans — certainly not all Hindu Americans — and that is a huge part of our messaging, due to the fact that they have, for a very long time, tried to claim that they do speak for the entire diaspora, or that their views are the majority Hindu views. And that is certainly not true, based on how much traction we’ve gained in such a short amount of time. That’s the only thing I wanted to add.
Caleb Kieffer
Great, thanks. So as you both kind of alluded to, there appears to be evidence that Hindu supremacist groups are gaining a foothold in the United States. Who are the key players comprising this U.S.-focused efforts?
Safa Ahmed
I can take on that one. So, there is a largely interconnected network of Hindu supremacist groups that are operating in the United States. And in many ways, it does mirror the Hindu supremacist movement in India and the way that’s structured, which is with some large groups, or like one large group at the top kind of spawning all these other — not just like organizations that are devoted to like cultural initiatives and advocacy, but also like charities and some educational initiatives, and in the U.S. case, even foreign agents like the Overseas Friends of the part of the agenda party, or the BJP, which is the ruling party in India today. So in India, this grouping of Hindu supremacy groups is called the Sangh Parivar, or the family of the Sangh, which is named after the group that kind of headlines the Hindu supremacy movement in India. But in the U.S., we call it the American Sangh. And the mothership of Hindu supremacy in the U.S. is the Vishwa Parishad of America, or the VHPA, which is the American wing of the VHP, which is an Indian Hindu militant group with a very extensive history of violence and anti-minority rhetoric, hatred, whatever you can think of, the VHP has, like, played a role in spreading some sort of anti-minority disharmony. But again, when we say mothership, we mean that it’s the organization that was founded on the orders of the highest levels of the movement in India. So it is connected directly to the Indian Hindu supremacist movement, and it remains closely connected to the center of power there. And nearly every other Hindu supremacist group in the U.S. was like, either informally or formally, founded by the VHPA. Yeah. So for example, the VHPA has spawned several projects dedicated to lobbying for Hindu supremacist interest in civic and educational spaces, such as HinduPACT, HinduACTion, Hindu student council. So you can see there’s like the range of advocacy, education, cultural groups there. Other organizations in the network that are pretty high up in the ranks are Hindu American Foundation, which more leans toward talking about domestic issues — not so much, you know, involved in the India side of things. And it is not, in fact, an offshoot of any Indian militant groups, but it does kind of push these same narratives that are kind of the center ideology of American Hindu supremacist groups. There’s also Coalition of Hindus of North America, abbreviated as CoHNA, and the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the American wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the largest and most powerful Hindu militant group in India. And yeah, those are, I would say, the main players who are furthering the Hindu supremacist movement in the United States, and we’ll talk about this more later. But they occupy different spaces. Some of them are more blatantly far right. Some of them are trying to straddle that line between liberal, acceptable civil rights spaces, but also at the same time holding onto their supremacist politics. But yeah, we’ll touch more on that later. Pranay, do you have anything to add?
Pranay Somayajula
No, I think that was pretty comprehensive. And I think, you know, definitely will, I think, come up in other questions as well.
Caleb Kieffer
Great. Thanks so much. So, yeah, I guess, how are Hindu supremacist groups mobilizing support in the U.S. at the moment?
Pranay Somayajula
Yeah, I’ll take, I’ll take this one. I think a sort of good way to answer this question is to kind of like look back and sort of briefly trace the chronology of what this, how this movement has developed here in the U.S. So unsurprisingly, as always, the story starts with the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in India, which, as Safa mentioned, is like the center of this movement in India. And from the very beginning, the RSS had nativist goals within India, but always saw its strategy as being transnational. The organization’s sort of most prominent and most significant leader, M.S. Golwalkar, who was also one of the key ideologues of Hindi supremacy ideology, oversaw the expansion of the RSS in Southeast Asia and East Africa, shortly after India became independent, and then the 1960s onward, started sort of turning his focus towards developing the presence of this ecosystem in global north and, you know, Europe, and particularly in the United States. And so this is especially given, sort of, I think, developments in U.S. immigration laws, like the Immigration Act of 1965 that opened up more opportunities for Indians to immigrate to the U.S. And that’s sort of where you see the story of this movement beginning. So on Golwalkar’s advice and encouraging, a man named Mahesh Mehta, who was the founder of the VHPA, traveled to the United States, and established the VHPA as an organization. He himself had been a lifelong RSS member, a close sort of mentee or acolyte, you might call him, of Golwalkar. And so, yeah, he really established the VHPA, which, as we said before, is the mothership of this movement in the U.S. He established that organization on the explicit orders and encouragement of the RSS senior leadership. And I think that what we really have seen over the development of the VHPA and its affiliated organizations is the sort of transient ties between the VHPA’s early members and the United States. They often sort of speak about India as the homeland or the land of their birth, but the U.S. as their, the land of their work. And they really had this instrumentalist idea of trying to build this network in the U.S. so that it can support the movement back home in India. And so, you see this sort of cultivation of an influential set of dominant caste Hindu Americans, often who do have backgrounds in the Sangh Parivar in India, whether that’s for the RSS or other organizations, who then have come to the U.S. and have sort of transposed those skills of organizing and movement building here in the U.S. So they organized, for example, tours and conferences in the U.S. for their Indian counterparts. You would have leadership from the RSS or the VHP of India and others would come to the U.S., tour the country, meet with local chapters of these organizations in the U.S., meet with local Hindu Americans, go to temples, do photo ops and so on. And this especially took place at like crucial junctures when the Sangh felt marginalized or under threat, such as during the emergency of the 1970s when the RSS was really targeted by the Indian state, among other organizations. And so — and then where this really ramps up is in the late ’80s and in the ’90s, when you have the movement for the Brahma Mandir in Ayodhya really kicking up steam, which culminates, of course, in the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. During this time, the American Sangh network, the VHPA and other affiliates, offered really important political, moral and financial support to the cause. You often had leaders of the VHPA, Mahesh Mehta and others, would fly back to India to go partake in these rallies, to partake in these campaigns and this canvassing to advocate for the Brahma Mandir. And then in the late ’90s, the number of organizations operating under this umbrella in the U.S. really starts to flourish. That’s when you see groups like the Overseas Friends of BJP get established, as well as charitable fundraising wings like the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation and others that kind of establish this network for funneling money to India under the guise of charitable donations, often for things like school construction or medical clinics in rural, deprived and tribal parts of the country. And so — and in, you know, the 2000s after the 2002 Gujarat pogroms, which saw over 2,000 Muslims killed under the watch of Narendra Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, the Sangh in the U.S. really mobilized to protect Modi, just sort of launder his image here, attack people who were criticizing him for his role in the violence and for also attacking anyone who was speaking out about Hindu supremacy in the U.S. You saw them talking about this being anti-Hindu sentiment and so on. But you also see this, like a shift, I think, in the leadership of this movement, where you have a new crop of second-generation leaders who were born and raised here in the U.S., who don’t have these direct ties to India, who are advocating for a more sophisticated organizational strategy. And if you look at some of these old, like, listservs and emails that have been made public, you can see these conversations playing out where they argue that this kind of blatant, overt Hindu supremacist orientation was causing [public relations] problems, to put it frankly, and that there is a need to sort of ground the movement more in a diaspora focus, more on a focus of U.S. issues, and talk about a Hindu Americans who have been sort of like operating as the center of this, of this movement. I know this is kind of a long timeline, but I’ll close this up by really saying that I think the main way that we see this movement operating, not just Hindu American Foundation, but others in this network operate by gaining a foothold through invoking minority status, particularly in sort of interfaith spaces, liberal civil society, Democratic Party spaces, and so on. They posit themselves a civil rights group. They weaponize the language of social justice and victimhood and so on, and that sort of allows them to play both sides in a very opportunistic way.
Safa Ahmed
One small thing to add. I think one thing that kind of illustrates how well these groups have been able to garner support is through their activities, which often do have, like, you know, some heavy impacts. So building off these, like, anti-Muslim narratives, but also the narratives that, like, Hindus are an oppressed minority in the U.S., which there is truth to, and then there’s also an inflation of it in a way that serves Hindu supremacist interests. Kind of combining these things into fueling activities like coordinated harassment campaigns. Like there was a very large harassment campaign against a number of American and British universities for co-hosting this conference, known as the “Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference.” And this was simply an academic conference that was just aimed at talking about Hindutva. However, the response that it gained from American Hindu supremacists, who in partnership with Indian Hindu supremacists as well, resulted in a harassment campaign that resulted in death threats and I think at least one bomb threat, and a number of slurs being sent to the organizers, to any speakers or perceived speakers, there were a number of rape threats given [made]. So yes, these narratives do garner a lot of support that takes the form of some very reactionary, very vile campaigns, and I think we can talk more about that later. Just wanted to give an example of what that might look like.
Caleb Kieffer
Great, thanks so much for that. Appreciate those answers. So, moving along. How does the current U.S. political landscape provide inroads for Hindu supremacist opportunists?
Pranay Somayajula
Yeah, I’ll take this one again, and please, Safa, do jump in. I think the use of the word opportunist in this question is an important one, because that really is the best way to describe the way this movement operates. I mentioned before that these — that, you know, groups like the Hindu American Foundation kind of defend themselves by cloaking themselves with this, like, ostensibly liberal position on a lot of domestic social issues. And the reason for that is that Indian Americans, in particular, are a very liberal community on a lot of issues. You know, reliably Democratic voters hold liberal views on most of these domestic social issues but tend much more conservative or right-leaning on India issues, have higher approval ratings for Modi and the BJP and so on. And so, like, there is a sort of opportunism that naturally emerges, I think, within this movement of working within the Democratic Party and with Democratic political leaders when and where necessary. You often hear this term Modi Democrat getting kind of thrown around. But also now, as you have this rising far right here in the U.S. that is capitalizing on anti-“woke positioning,” talking about “critical race theory,” you know, making it seem like it’s discriminatory to talk about discrimination, that those are rhetorical narratives that also are useful for Hindu supremacists. And so we’ve seen an increasing embrace of that. And a good example of this is a group like the VHPA, many of who, you know, like it has — many of its, like, leaders or high-profile members have been involved in the campaign to overturn affirmative action through the Supreme Court. And you also have, like, you know, this alignment, which I know Safa will talk about later, but with other far-right and anti-Muslim extremists too, who are able to sort of push this “counter-jihad narrative.” And so it really — the rise, I think, of this MAGA influence, Christian nationalism influence, [and the] far right in the U.S. that has provided inroads as well for these opportunists, I think are actually a really good example to highlight. You have a growing number of sort of high-profile South Asian Americans on the right, whether that’s Nikki Haley or others. But I think the most kind of prominent example of this phenomenon in particular is Vivek Ramaswamy, who, when we look at sort of the rhetoric and the tone of his presidential campaign, was really, you know, leaned into the rhetoric of white Christian nationalism, white supremacy, talking about America as a Judeo-Christian country. But then also invoked Hindu supremacy when it was valuable to him. He spoke at multiple VHPA galas, for example. He has openly supported Modi, and he talks about his own Hindu faith when on the campaign trail as a mirror to Christianity. That’s something that Hindu supremacists in India would be deeply offended by, but opportunistically, it serves a movement’s goals in the U.S. because it allows them to make inroads with the far-right movement that’s gaining steam. Obviously, he’s not running for president anymore, but he now has a national political profile that could go in any number of directions in the coming years. And I think that he really represents the sort of convergence of that, of that phenomenon in a really interesting and quite disturbing way.
Safa Ahmed
I think that was a perfect answer. I had nothing to add.
Caleb Kieffer
Awesome. Thank you for that. So yeah, just move along. It’s been reported, I know, including by the report put out by Savera about these Hindu supremacist groups having ties to already established U.S.-focused anti-Muslim groups, including groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as anti-Muslim hate groups, including Jihad Watch, which is run by Robert Spencer, a longtime, prolific anti-Muslim figure. So I guess, what do you believe are the kind of ideological strains that connect these two movements, and on what issues do these two movements find common ground?
Safa Ahmed
So I’ll start by saying that Hindu supremacy as an ideology, at its core, is a genocidally anti-Muslim ideology. And I don’t say that lightly. There have been very explicit calls for a Muslim genocide in India, and so Hindu supremacists do seek alliances with groups and movements that similarly seek to drive anti-Muslim hatred to further their own agendas. And I think this is encapsulated really well in a quote by one of the founding ideologues of Hindutva, which is Vinayak Savarkar, and in a book called Essentials of Hindutva, which was published in 1923, Savarkar refers to Islam as this alien adulteration and asserts that Muslims are incapable of showing loyalty to India, which mirrors a lot of the same rhetoric that we see from American and European far-right leaders. And inherent to Hindu supremacy is this positioning of Islam and Muslims as the dangerous, primitive, violent, treacherous other, which then justifies violence and discrimination against Muslims, which again parallels white supremacists and, like, even Zionist narratives that rely heavily on this dangerous Muslim framing, often through the lens of the specter of jihad, and that leaves plenty of room for opportunity to collaborate in furthering anti-Muslim propaganda. So of course, there’s like an irony here, which is that white Christian nationalists and Zionists, and also Hindu supremacist groups, have very long histories of using violence and in what could be classified as terror to achieve their means. But it should also be pointed out that this is also an opportunistic relationship for Hindu supremacists, which is used to further establish their proximity to whiteness. And this is a behavior, or a pattern of behavior, really, that became particularly clear after 9/11, where you had the American Hindu, right, kind of doubling down on their Islamophobia and urging the spread and proliferation of Islamophobia. There is this one article written by Hindu American Foundation’s Aseem Shukla, and you have this think piece on why a mosque shouldn’t be built near Ground Zero, where he relies heavily on anti-Muslim stereotyping tropes, the whole nine yards. And this was a response to the racialization of Brown Asians as Muslims with a broad brush, and this was what Hindu supremacists wanted to push back against by saying almost, “Don’t target us, we’re the good Brown people. Target them instead.” And I think what’s important to point out is that this is in very stark contrast to how much of the Sikh American community, which was also racialized as Muslim, responded to Islamophobic hate crimes with solidarity instead of this proliferation of Islamophobia. All that to say that there is a very solid ideological basis for why these Hindu supremacist groups do collaborate with American anti-Muslim groups. So there’s a number of groups that SPLC has designated as hate groups that have collaborated with the VHPA specifically and its leaders and its affiliates. That includes Jihad Watch, American Freedom Defense Initiative, ACT for America, Stop Islamization of America, The United West, RAIR Foundation, Glazov Gang and also collaborations with the Middle East Forum (Editor’s note: SPLC does not list Middle East Forum as a hate group) and Robert Spencer, I want to point out specifically, because he is a key player. He regularly amplifies Hindu supremacy propaganda, appears as a guest speaker on platforms affiliated with the VHPA and has written for the Indian propaganda website OpIndia. So it’s not just American Hindu supremacists. He is actively in collaboration, or in conversation, at least, with Indian Hindu supremacists. And he’s said things that directly appeal to his Hindu supremacist audience, regardless of where they may be in the world. There’s one quote where he says [on X], “Hindus: don’t hesitate to defend your religion and culture against those Muslims who want to destroy them. This is no time for Gandhi-style cowardice & appeasement that invariably embolden the aggressor.” So going back to my point about this relationship being opportunistic for Hindu supremacists, I think it’s accurate to say that this is actually a two-way street. Robert Spencer began his career mostly appealing to white Americans about the dangers of Islam. But in recent years, his audience has significantly shifted more Indian, more Hindu nationalist. So this is, in a way, kind of fanning the flames of a career that is slowly, slowly losing its relevance. And it also backs our broader point about how the Hindu far right is growing to be such a large partner in the anti-Muslim ecosystem. They are actively collaborating with these well-established anti-Muslim groups. And there is a study that was done by the Islamic Council of Victoria, which found that between 2017 and 2019 — so kind of like the budding stages of the MAGA movement, and also like when the Hindu supremacist movement in India really started ramping up in its aggression and its discrimination against Muslims — over half of all anti-Muslim posts on Twitter, X, between that time period originated in India. And in 2023, Al Jazeera reported that Indian social media users, mostly Hindu supremacists, including verified users, fueled anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim disinformation campaigns featuring hashtags such as #IslamIsThe Problem in response to what Israel was doing in Gaza. So the Hindu right is so deeply embedded with the global anti-Muslim ecosystem, to the extent that any mapping of that ecosystem is really incomplete without Hindu supremacists.
Caleb Kieffer
I know you kind of touched on this somewhat in your remarks already, but Hindus are a minority in the United States and face forms of racism and bigotry. How do you see the Hindu right capitalizing on this history and our current white supremacist culture that exists in the United States?
Pranay Somayajula
I think it’s important for us to understand the ways in which fear really plays a central role in the politics of the Hindu right, and this is true in India as well as here in the diaspora. In India, that manifests in the form of this, what you might consider the equivalent of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory among white nationalists here in the U.S., where you have this fearmongering about demographic rates and Muslims supposedly taking over the Hindu population in so many years. And that’s a really central part of how Hindu supremacist ideology is able to spread in India through that fear, stoking that fear. And I think here in the U.S., it looks slightly different, where it’s not this, like great replacement conspiracy theories. Rather, you get this, you know, there’s a very real threat posed — not just to Indian Americans or Hindu Americans, but to all minorities in the U.S. — by white supremacy. And that threat and the fears about that threat get weaponized by the Hindu right wing — which has proven, I think, quite adept at instrumentalizing language of civil rights, the language of diversity, the language of multiculturalism, really, in order to whitewash, and I would say, to sanitize, a fundamentally supremacist agenda. And the way they work isn’t to build a united front or to build solidarity with other communities of color — the sort of solidarity, for example, that was built between South Asian and Arab and Muslim and Sikh and Hindu communities after 9/11 when we were all being racialized, othered and targeted. But rather than building that united response, the way these groups work is to instrumentalize this language and these issues in order to play on white guilt and to insist that our communities can only be defined by victimhood and are, like, because we are a minority community, cannot ever ourselves be capable of causing harm or perpetuating bigotry or prejudice, so we must only ever be the victims of it. And what that manifests in is the sort of, like, construction of this narrative about widespread and systemic “Hinduphobia,” which is really used by groups like the VHPA, the Hindu American Foundation and others. And this is this idea that there is this systemic, pervasive current of anti-Hindu bigotry that runs through the United States, and that they weaponize that idea of Hinduphobia against anyone — including other Hindus — who criticizes Hindu supremacist ideology, or who criticizes even the current Indian government under Narendra Modi and the BJP. And this is really insidious because it conflates genuine bigotry and prejudice and hate from white supremacists, from racists, which absolutely exists against Hindu Americans and against Indian Americans. But that gets conflated with legitimate political critiques being advanced by progressives, by activists, racial justice advocates and so on, and that sort of like flips this reality and puts the blame on other people of color who are calling out hateful ideologies. It’s bad faith, it’s damaging, but it also reflects this opportunism that we’ve been talking about. It reflects the fact that Hindu supremacists would rather align themselves with the far right than ally with other communities to challenge the actual forms of white supremacy that are, you know, threatening our community’s safety. Because the reality is, Hindus absolutely face discrimination and prejudice in the U.S. We’re a religious minority, and Indian Hindus are also a national and ethnic and racial minority, and like any other minority community, there is prejudice or bigotry, discrimination, there are hate crimes, even specifically on the basis of someone being Hindu. Oftentimes, these cases that are held up as examples of Hinduphobia are cases where it really is actually a sort of, it really, actually is Islamophobia or general xenophobia that is sort of like misapplied to someone who is Hindu, but sometimes it is a very cut-and-dried case of anti-Hindu sentiment. But that’s not, I think, in and of itself, evidence of this widespread and systemic problem that they claim, and we know this to be true because Hindu supremacy leaders have really gone on the record as saying, as taking credit for inventing — or rather, for constructing this narrative. We only really saw the word Hinduphobia being used in any widespread way in the last few years among the Hindu right wing in the last few years, since the 2021 Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference, which then was followed up with an Understanding Hinduphobia Conference that these groups organized at Rutgers University, and that conference created a working definition of Hinduphobia that’s closely modeled off of the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism and that, of course, you know, which has been used very controversially to target pro-Palestinian activism. Very similarly, we see the use of Hinduphobia ideas to target anti-Hindutva activists and anyone who speaks out against Hindu supremacy. And, you know, there’s one figure in particular named Rajiv Malhotra, who’s sort of a major, I would say, ideologue, writer, public intellectual on the Hindu right wing in the U.S. His foundations have will often insert themselves into fights over school textbooks, have funded, you know, academic departments, various universities, and he’s very much aligned with the Hindu supremacist movement. He’s gone on YouTube channels, on talk shows hosted by various Hindus, right-wing Hindu groups, and taken credit for essentially coining, or at least for popularizing the term Hinduphobia. So this is a constructed right-wing narrative, and it’s one that very intentionally follows the playbook of right-wing, Zionist, pro-Israel groups of weaponizing antisemitism accusations against activists, including Jewish activists who are criticizing Zionism or criticizing the state of Israel. In both cases, you have these right-wing actors that instrumentalize these very real histories of discrimination or bigotry against a minority group, but they instrumentalize those very real phenomena to promote a reactionary political agenda. That’s not just deeply concerning, it’s also, I think, deeply offensive. And these similarities between the weaponization of antisemitism and supposed Hinduphobia, that’s not a coincidence. There’s an investigation in the magazine Jewish Currents that came out last year, written by Aparna Gopalan, which really highlights the ways in which this tactic of weaponizing bias claims, weaponizing discrimination claims, that tactic was explicitly copied by the Hindu right from the playbook of the pro-Israel movement here in the United States. And I think it’s really important that we be able to sort of toe this line of condemning anti-Hindu sentiment, anti-Hindu bias and prejudice and hate, and standing against it forcefully while not validating the weaponized narrative of Hinduphobia. It’s a difficult line to sort of walk, but it’s really important one, and that’s what groups like, you know, Hindus for Human Rights, who I work for, try to do as a Hindu organization. Because, yeah, you know, we see, I think, the analysis that we at HFHR, but also at Savera, are trying to really highlight is that discrimination, prejudice, bigotry against any minority community, these don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re connected to all other forms of oppression and discrimination and hatred that are structurally part of white supremacy that is very real in this country. And so the only way we can combat, you know, hate against Hindus or hate against Muslims or hate against Sikhs is by combating these larger structural forms of racism and white supremacy, and that requires solidarity. It requires coalition building. It requires building connections with other communities. And that’s the exact opposite of how the Hindu supremacist movement tries to respond to this issue. And again, that’s reflective, I think, of the opportunism that really lies the heart of this movement.
Caleb Kieffer
Safa, anything to add on that question?
Safa Ahmed
No, I think that was great.
Caleb Kieffer
OK, perfect. Well, I know, actually in your remarks earlier, you mentioned the MAGA movement. How do we kind of see the rise of this Make America Great Again movement factor into the strategies and tactics of the Hindu right?
Safa Ahmed
I’ll, I think I’ll walk that back a little bit and start off with some ideological framing here. So M.S. Golwalkar, who is another one of Hindutva’s founding ideologues, and actually the second chief of the [RSS], once wrote that the foreign races in India must either adopt Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture. And if minorities wanted to stay in India, he goes on, they must be, quote, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizens’ rights. So we can compare this to how scholar Frances Lee Ansley defines white supremacist ideology, which is a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and nonwhite subordination are daily, reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. So with this in mind, you can start to see the ideological convergences between Hindu supremacy and the white supremacy that so strongly defines the MAGA movement. So like Hindu supremacy, white supremacists in the United States seek to erode or dismantle democracy in favor of a fascist state that reduces minorities to second-class citizens and walks back women’s rights, walks back educational protections, etc., and both ideologies — sorry, one second. Got a spam call, got to put that away. Sorry, I’ll reiterate the last thing I said. So both ideologies — like they want to reduce minorities to second-class citizens — both ideologies share common enemies, so that could be Islam, Muslims being demonized as threats to their civilizations. Black and Brown people being characterized through unfavorable stereotypes in contrast to the wealthy, model -minority Hindu American community. Jewish people are painted as masterminds behind plots to discredit India and the U.S. Wokeness as a means to discredit civil rights protections for minorities and so on. So there’s a lot of those same convergences in the ideological causes picked up by American Hindu supremacists. So what happens when these groups realize these parallels and see each other in the mirror, in a way of speaking, they begin to form alliances, and American Hindu supremacists have adopted many of the white-supremacist-rights causes in that sense, which again includes dismantling affirmative action, pushing back against critical social science education. Like critical race theory, they have their own equivalent on critical caste theory, curbing academic free speech, supporting Israel and its occupation of Palestine, promoting hate speech and far-right propaganda, and also working to unseat progressive politicians. And at the same time, white supremacist and Hindu supremacists also paint themselves as victim groups, as Pranay mentioned, and white supremacy, again, as Pranay mentioned, also goes hand in hand with Christian nationalism, which kind of raises the question of why American Hindu supremacists like Vivek Ramaswamy, like Nikki Haley, Usha Vance, choose to ally with them. And in a way, it is partly pandering to white supremacists and the Christian far right, and that is a way of advancing their own far-right ideals while gaining proximity to whiteness in this model-minority category. But if you look at the broader picture as well, you start to see that American Hindu supremacists have always kind of walked this fine line between holding on to their supremacist politics while at the same time trying to position themselves as being pro-civil rights and pro-minority groups. So the balancing act is a doomed one, as we can clearly see, especially in recent years. So they can never really be fully at home within liberal or Democratic spaces, which would require them to strongly denounce forms of bigotry like caste discrimination and anti-Muslim hatred. And the MAGA movement has kind of come in to show these American Hindu supremacists that there is a new political landscape being formed, one where they can superficially flaunt this model-minority status and take up other far-right or moral panic causes that both align with their politics as Hindu supremacist, like Modi-aligned individuals, but also allow them to push their own causes, again, like with regards to U.S.-India relations, demonizing protections for caste, oppressed groups, etc. And they can really legitimize these causes through American conservative spaces and the American conservative consciousness. And there’s already a good example, or actually several good examples, of this alliance playing out in real time. So a big one would be in 2019, Steve Bannon became the co-chair of the Republican Hindu Coalition, which sort of kicked off this formation of other conservative Hindu PACs and projects. Before I mention what those are, I’d also like to mention that there was this very big display of this Republican Hindu convergence, and brought, more broadly, the Hindu supremacist right in India, along with the American right in the United States through the “Howdy Modi” event held in 2019 in Texas, where over, I believe, around 50,000 Indian Americans and others attended to see Modi and Donald Trump walk on stage having, you know, having a great time together. So, yeah, this is like, a more I want to like, I guess, a more visual representation of what that convergence looks like. But then there’s also these PACs and projects like the “iExit” movement, which is headed by the VHPA affiliate Purnima Nath, which encourages Indian Americans to leave the Democratic Party and embrace the far right. There’s Americans for Hindus, which is a pro-Trump super PAC that lists its concerns and like places of advocacy as Hindu hate, Hinduphobia, immigration, education and Indo-U.S. relations. There is Manga Anantatmula, a VHPA affiliate who joined the Republican Party and now campaigns for far-right causes such as overturning affirmative action and pushing Hindu Americans as a group more towards the Republican Party, away from the Democratic Party. There’s also a number of media platforms, whether it’s self-created YouTube channels or online forums, websites, etc., where these Hindu supremacists will collaborate with MAGA actors or MAGA-adjacent actors, such as Vibhuti Jha, another VHPA affiliate. He has a show called The Jaipur Dialogues on YouTube, and he has platformed Indian Hindu supremacists who have directly called for violence against Muslims. But he’s also parroted far-right American talking points. There’s this one quote he has where he says, “so many illegal people have come to America.” So again, like this, pretty direct parallel in language used by both ideologies. And he’s also hosted guests like Robert Spencer, etc. And I think in a nutshell, just to wrap this all up, these convergences illustrate, again, the need to map out these far-right movements in a way that places them closer in strategy, in alliance, more than ever before. I think maybe Pranay, if you want to talk a little bit about this, there was recently NatCon, that platform BJP leaders for the first time. Let me just hand it over to you to talk about that, because I believe that’s also really important to mention right now.
Pranay Somayajula
Yeah. And I think actually that’s a really good note to end this question on too, because it highlights the internationalized dimension of this, which is to say that last — early, yeah, I guess now it’s August [2024] — so beginning of last month here in D.C. was NatCon, which is the National Conservatism Conference, took place in D.C., and this is a conference that happens every year in the various cities around the U.S. and Europe. This has been going on since I think 2019 and it is really a gathering place for these so-called national conservatives, this sort of new generation of far-right nationalist leaders — you know, the Steve Bannons, Stephen Millers, Marine Le Pens of the world, Nigel Farage and so on. And it’s sort of every year the speaker's list is kind of a who’s who of the authoritarian populist, nationalist right wing around the world but focusing primarily on the U.S., Europe and oftentimes Israel as well. But this year was different. This year, for the very first time, you had Hindu supremacist leaders, specifically the BJP parliamentarian, Swapan Dasgupta, and the RSS national executive committee member and leader Ram Madhav, invited as honored guests. And Ram Madhav in particular was a featured speaker at the conference. And you know, I had attended the conference to sort of observe and see what was going on. And a recurring theme you saw throughout that, not just in Madhav’s speech, but around across the board, was this theme of right-wing internationalism, wanting to build connections with conservative and far-right movements in other countries. And these are many of the people who are, for example, affiliated with Project 2025 who might be senior administration officials if there were to be a second Trump administration. And these people at this conference were talking very openly about the need to learn from and coordinate more closely with other far-right movements around the world. And Ram Madhav’s speech really emphasized that as well. In fact, he closed it out by saying, I’d be happy to host you all for next year’s [NatCon] in India. And I think that that really highlights this, also, convergence on an international scale as well, which, again, really drives home the ways in which this is not just an issue about India. This is not just an issue about Indian Americans. The far right is seeing itself increasingly as a global movement, and the way that manifests in a microcosm here in the United States is the far right is increasingly seeing itself in multiracial terms. It wants to bring in minority communities. It wants to bring people of color over towards the far right, in particular groups that it can drive a wedge between a given group and other communities of color. So Asian American groups and South Asian American groups are very prime targets for that, because there is this room for this anti-woke positioning, for this fearmongering about affirmative action and different ways to fracture solidarity that otherwise might exist between our communities and African Americans, our communities and Latino Americans and so on. And so this is a really important — and I think, I think, yeah, the rise of the MAGA movement is really fueling this, and this is a really important trend for us to not just recognize and acknowledge, but to actively work to combat.
Caleb Kieffer
Awesome. Thank you so much. So I think just kind of to wrap things up, so I know I kind of gave space in the document I sent around about any last things, but so is there any last insights you want to add? Or also, if you kind of don’t mind me asking, what, I guess, can we do to come together to kind of challenge this Hindu supremacist ideology?
Safa Ahmed
Can I go, Pranay?
Pranay Somayajula
Sure. Well, I think you know, in terms of what can we do? I think conversations like this one that we’re having right now are actually a really important first step. It’s not just because of getting the information out there, which is great, and I’m glad that it is, but I think to have a group like the SPLC that is really seen as a respected authority on tracking the far right and highlighting connections between various segments of the American far right, to have a group like the SPLC taking notice of Hindu supremacy and highlighting it in various ways as a threat to democracy and multiracial justice here at the United States, is really important. I think it’s crucial to being able to draw these connections between the Hindu supremacist movement and other parts of the far right. So I think this is a really important first step. And I think that, like, the main thing that we can be doing at this juncture, you know, it’s incumbent on groups like mine, like Hindus for Human Rights. We’re working within the Hindu American community. We’re organizing within our community. It’s incumbent on us to be doing really intensive and intentional organizing work to try and combat the normalization of these ideas within our community, within our family dinners and our WhatsApp groups and so on. And that’s a difficult task, but it’s an important one. And I think, more broadly speaking, I think the most important thing we can be doing right now is really educating civil society groups, particularly groups that are in the advocacy space, nonprofit organizations, groups whose work touches on issues of justice and rights and democracy, but who might not be thinking about Hindu supremacy as an issue that is relevant to sort of their purview. And I think that what we have found at Savera — and you know, I think Safa, you can certainly echo this as well — that like in pretty much every conversation we have had with sort of mainstream civil society groups, the reaction has been along the lines of, I did not know enough about this before, and I’m glad you told us about this. Because I think people are realizing when we’re able to lay it out in really clear ways, like the connections between this and protecting democracy at the ballot box, between, you know, this issue, and defending affirmative action and so on and so forth, and so I think that civil society education and really just general, widespread political education is really important, whether that’s through teach-ins, whether that’s through workshops, podcast appearances, op-eds, whatever it may be, I think, you know, we should leave no stone left unturned in that regard.
Safa Ahmed
I’ll just add to say that I’ll echo what Pranay said about the need for education, not just in civil society spaces but among the broader American public. Because I think there is this understanding — and it’s not necessarily rooted in any sort of, you know, it’s not rooted in any like, you know, bad ideology or bad framing — but a lot of people will assume that people of color, minorities, are, by default, drawn to support each other, drawn to support more progressive liberal causes, and that is absolutely not the case. And I think that ignorance is leading to a lot of room for these ideologies to spread and to grow. And there’s also this reluctance — which is, again, like it’s well intentioned — this reluctance to look at a minority group that does suffer from forms of bigotry and oppression and say to them, “Hey, we don’t like the way that you are kind of framing your own politics.” Like there is a very real reluctance to accidentally marginalize or push out groups from minority backgrounds. However, I think that education becomes so important here, where we need to have these conversations and talk about, OK, supremacy comes in all colors, unfortunately, supremacy, and this includes white supremacy. White supremacy has a lot of foot soldiers among people of color, and that becomes very important to recognize, especially as we’re nearing this upcoming election where we see figures like Vivek Ramaswamy. In North Carolina we have a person like Mark Robinson, who is very clearly parroting far-right MAGA white supremacist talking points, and he’s lieutenant governor. And there’s so many cases where you see — including in the January 6 insurrection, where there was a VHPA affiliate out there storming the Capitol, there were Latino Americans involved as well. I think all of that is important to take into consideration when we have these conversations about, how do we build a more robust, more inclusive progressive movement that is inclusive of all identities, all backgrounds, but also at the same time is very careful to recognize where supremacist movements have kind of like slipped under the radar and kind of made like spaces within liberal spaces, and they absolutely do not belong there. They only serve to fracture these positive movements and movements for a more inclusive, more democratic America. So yes, education in that sense and conversation is incredibly important.
Roja Singh and Prachi Patankar
Speakers: Caleb Kieffer, SPLC; Prachi Patankar, Senior Program Officer at Foundation for a Just Society, and Dr. Roja Singh, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at St. John Fisher University.
Caleb Kieffer
For the first question, wondering if you both can situate Hindu supremacy within the context of broader white supremacist culture like that that’s baked into the United States, and also talk about how they might mirror each other.
Prachi Patankar
Okay, so I’m going to take the first section of this and then we’ll pass it on to Roja. So I think, well, first we need to understand what Hindu supremacy is, and then we can connect it and situate it within kind of the white supremacist culture in the U.S. So the Hindu supremacy, or Hindutva, as some call it, is a100-year-old far-right, ethnonationalist ideology, and it’s a political movement. It explicitly draws inspiration from European fascism, and is furthered by an organization called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is RSS for short, that has been in continuous existence since 1925, so that makes it the oldest existing fascist organization in the world, really, and you know, making it the wealthiest also and the largest. The movement seeks to achieve the absolute cultural and political hegemony of Hindus in India through really, the violent subordination of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and oppressed-caste communities and indigenous communities in the country, turning them into kind of second-class citizens. And like white supremacy, Hindu supremacy also believes that a single social group should have political dominance in the nation state and in the government, which is ruled by, you know, Hindu — it’s a Hindu nation ruled by dominant-caste-Hindus Hinduism centered cultures and laws. So it has many features that will be familiar to those setting supremacist movements, including the U.S. as well. So similar to white supremacy, Hindu supremacists promote tactics like vigilante violence, including lynching targeting India’s religious minorities and oppressed-caste groups. There is panic around conspiracy theories, including their own version of “great replacement” theory, where Muslims and Christians are kind of, in their version, plotting to replace the population of Hindus, where Hindus are, in fact, victims of the Muslim domination, as they see it. And there’s also promotion of the notions of racial and blood purity that seeks to reinforce these concepts by preventing inter-caste marriage, interfaith marriages, its own, kind of main parent organization that we said, RSS, has an elaborate program to become indistinguishable from society, in their words, by taking over the bureaucracy, taking over the military, and by placing RSS members all over these different institutions. And they also promote this narrative of, you know, “victimhood” and “Hindu grievance,” that demonizes them, these, these Muslim communities, these Christian communities, who they see as kind of more Abrahamic religions. And so they therefore, they’re outsiders. They’re not part of India, but they’re also at the same time attempting to kind of consume other spiritual traditions that are part of India, part of the region, or inherent, kind of indigenous to the region, Buddhism, Jainism, even Sikhism, and often turning violently against those religions that they try to seek — you know, Sikhism, for example, is trying to seek its own separate existence, and so it’s turning against Sikhism as well. If they can’t absorb it, they turn against it. So Hindu supremacy promotes this kind of monolithic concept of Hindu and identity and practices and denies kind of internal diversity of spiritual traditions as well. Secondly, I think what’s important to understand is that Hindu supremacy, you know, the Hindutva, is a concept that they’ve invented — it translates to kind of quote, unquote, “Hinduness.” So just as whiteness is something that even nonwhite Americans can aspire to, they can, they can aspire to quote unquote “Hinduness” as well. Its founder of Hinduness, or Hindutva, [Vinayak Damodar] Savarkar, explicitly separated it from Hindu religion to claim that people of other faiths, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, could also have quote unquote “Hinduness,” but not Christians or Muslims, because they’re outsiders. So this is very, you can see this as a theme throughout. Hindutva is primarily, therefore, a political project that imagines this new category of quote, unquote, “Hinduness” in order to maintain the hegemony of a very small section of dominant-caste Hindus in service of this, and so they’re aiming to reduce many diverse faith traditions into a militant and exclusionary and really inherently casteist form of Hinduism. And this is not unlike the way the white supremacist [unclear] will instrumentalize religion to further their political projects. And in reality, also, Hinduism is a modern creation. It was assembled in the 19th and 20th century in reaction to British colonial realities, where dominant- and upper-caste Hindus were happy to collaborate with British in shaping a sanskritized, unified Hinduism under their own hegemony. So the dominant, or core, perhaps the more essentialist religious philosophy within what we know as Hinduism today, which is a new phenomenon in relative terms, actually, the core philosophy is what is called Brahmanism. It’s a thousands of [years] old spiritual philosophy and Brahmanism was in historic contestation with Buddhism and other religions, and it began to develop in opposition to Buddhism, opposition to Jainism, and became hegemonic. Started developing process of co-optation, absorbing local customs, and then also created the caste system. It created the caste system and gave it sanction in terms of religious spiritual grounds, and divided people into the social stratification, into hierarchical occupation-based groups, where they defined, where caste is assigned by birth and maintained violently, almost, through endogamy, through marriage. Then caste boundaries are policed by allowing intermarriage between castes, and honor killings are routinely done in India. And this is also the case in rural areas, where, when oppressed caste tried to acquire land, which are they’re not historically allowed to, they’re violently punished and discriminated against because caste structure is a graded hierarchy, and it’s, you know, determined one’s occupation or a social status, it’s religiously kind of informed and given status of purity. So if you belong to a lower caste into the hierarchy, you are subject to discrimination and humiliation, and this can stretch to being left out of social status or financial capital, and it’s seen today across all of the different places and across different fields as well. So in this, Brahmins occupied the topmost level of caste hierarchy and supposed to, by birthright, perform the most quote, unquote, pure or intellectual form of labor. And Dalits, who are the most lower-caste, or actually, outside of this four-caste system, are known as untouchable because Brahmins considered their occupations as polluting, because they are the ones who, Brahmins are the ones who delegated Dalits to quote, unquote, “unclean” occupations, like cleaning human waste. So Brahmanism has maintained the suppression of different castes, different kind of castes. And so for Hindu supremacists, true Hinduness, going back to Hinduness, it really comes down to maintaining this Brahmanism. And therefore, in line with Brahmanism, this means maintaining the structure of caste and hierarchy. And this is existing throughout thousands of years to this day. And so caste hierarchy and Brahmanism, therefore, is at the core of Hindu supremacist ideology. So a very long explanation, but this is kind of how we see both, kind of the way that the political Hinduism, Hindutva, Hindu supremacy, works, but it’s at the core, very much caste hierarchy and Brahmanism is maintained, so I’ll pass it to Roja now.
Roja Singh
Thank you, Prachi. I think you really provided a great framework right here. So and also thanks for the good definition that you’ve provided for the various ways in which we understand Hindu supremacy and its operations here, but I do want to sort of use your framework that you’ve provided in definitions to answer the second half of Caleb’s question here. So which is, what form does Hindu supremacy take in the U.S., and in what ways does it mirror white supremacy and so on? I would like to believe that Hindu supremacists are obviously not trying to build a Hindu ethnostate in the U.S., but the way things are going, I could probably revisit that statement. So whether or not any theology, right, gets expressed in terms of supremacy, violence, it definitely, you can say that it is a function of power, right? So violence definitely is an expression of power, and in any form, doesn’t have to be just physical, but the underlying ideology, the concept of supremacy itself, the natural hierarchy, right? So this is, this is what I’m entitled to. So, and that kind of deep desire to preserve that entitlement hierarchy, and the power that that entitlement offers, right, which makes one see the assertion of civil rights of other communities as inherently zero-sum, that doesn’t matter at all and a threat. So that is the same for Hindu supremacists in the U.S. If you are familiar with the poet Adrienne Rich, she basically says she used the term “white solipsism” to refer to the process of thinking, imagining and speaking as of whiteness described the world, right? Resulting in a tunnel vision which simply does not see non-white experience or existence as precious or even significant, like it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t even like exist, right? Kind of dismissive. So, it’s the same way in which Hindu supremacy actually operates in terms of a Hindu fundamentalist ideology and identity, right? So which is to say, yes, Hindu supremacists in the U.S., they often work to support their allies in India, but their influence is significantly domestic as well, as we’re talking about the U.S. here. So the RSS, which Prachi already referred to before, through a series of frontal organizations numbering in the thousands across India and hundreds in the chapters of the overseas version of the RSS and the HSS (Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh) in the U.S., you will find that there are over 172 such versions or centers of the RSS in the United States alone. So the relationship with white supremacy is that once, I would say nuance, but also once you see it, quite simple as well. So these organizations that recognize the hierarchy of powers I already mentioned here in this country, namely white Christian supremacy, and even though Hindus and Indians and South Asians and all people of color, they do and will face the brunt of that hierarchy, it definitely seeks accommodation within that structure, rather than solidarity with other communities, right? Who find themselves victim to it. So this basic underlying fact, the foundational fact that Hindu supremacy is comfortable with white supremacy, means that as Hindu supremacy grows in the United States, we are seeing it shift closer and closer to other forces on the far right and building what we and other you know, experts you’ve spoken to probably, will call an emerging multiracial sort of far right that we are seeing. So it’s not a dualism anymore. It’s not right this or that anymore. So we see very, very similar forms of victimhood, similar kinds of moral panics, using very similar arguments and discourses. And we can flesh out a number of examples actually over the course of this, you know, of this interview also, and I think you also mentioned in your website too certain similarities that I can bring up, but I would point to that in a little bit. But at this moment, the fundamental premise of Hindu supremacy in the U.S. is that the rights of some communities are seen as inherently harmful, inherently harmful to the rights of Hindus. So it’s a zero-sum logic, as I’ve already mentioned, that is at the core of how it operates and how it divides our communities and tries to punch down rather than build togetherness and fighting for a just, multiracial democracy, and it will do anything in order to spread, and, you know, spread and continue the propaganda of Hindutva in in the United States. And you mentioned, you know, that the KKK has or had training centers in this country, right? So therefore, you know, they are very clearly and starkly, you know, a hate group. They have training camps to train people to learn the fundamentals of the holy mission of the white Christian revival, with the goal of becoming leaders in a new crusade for race, faith and home lives. A very, very similar manner [for] RSS, right? In India also hosts several training camps. But in the United States also, as I mentioned already, so to it basically, to educate and train people in the fundamentals of what Hindutva stands for, right? So that, I mean again, the continuing narrative of India should be a Hindu country, this whole thing about, you know, Hinduness and so on. But just as how, you know, you all sort of really view Christian, you know, white fundamentalism as hijacking Christianity for what it really is, the same way Hindutva and Hindu supremacy hijacks Hinduism and totally exploits that, that whole identity for their political and economic gain. And the other, you know, other things that we can see is also when you look at the ways in which right after the Freedom Riders attack in 1961 you hear, you know, Henry Lyons Jr., who’s, you know, quite prominent figure in the white supremacist Christian fundamentalist arena, where he says, “If we stand 100 years from now, this will still be a white church.” right? And he says, “I am a believer in separation, the difference in color, the difference in our body, our minds, our life, our mission upon the faith face of this earth is God-given,” is what he says to So, the same, you know, the same kind of principle is what operates with Hinduism in terms of caste hierarchy, like, you know, the Brahmins are the chosen few and so, so we do have the situation where, yes, you know, that sort of Brahminic, sort of declaration to superiority is at the center of what we see today as Hindutva, Hindu nationalism. It’s at the center of caste hierarchy. With caste hierarchy is what is basically used by Hindu supremacists to sort of justify violence against Dalits and other caste groups and religious minorities as well. And if you look at, in the, I think it’s the Loving v. Virginia case that happened in 1959, the Virginia Circuit Court Judge Leon Bazile basically says, “Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents.” And the police officer who actually handles this case of an interracial marriage basically says a sparrow is a sparrow, robin is a robin for a reason. So this is the same premise under which Hindu supremacy operates, that they are entitled to certain religious and dominance in society because that was how it was ordained, right? So that is their dharma. That is the religious duty that needs to be carried out. Yeah. Anything else you want to add, Prachi, or are we good to move on?
Prachi Patankar
We can move to the next question.
Caleb Kieffer
Great. Thank you so much for that context, those definitions and setting the stage. So, just kind of continuing speaking about these kind of ideas of supremacism and racial superiority, how would you say Hindu supremacy is a political movement? What are its sources of power and the social constituencies that it seeks to mobilize, and also, how do concepts like proximity to whiteness factor in within this movement?
Roja Singh
I can, you know, respond to the first part, I guess. So, Hindu supremacy is a political movement similar to how Christian nationalism is, and I think it’s playing itself out right in front of our eyes as we speak. You know, using a sort of a Christian nationalist ideology to, again, to rationalize, to justify, right? Why? Why it is okay to say that Mexicans are criminals, right? So it is not, you know, it’s not about religion, but an ideology that draws from religion and tries to redefine what it is that gets large numbers of people to buy into it, and that’s what Hindu supremacy is all about, and trying to politicize a religious identity and caste identity, also. So one of the very conniving things that has happened with Hindu supremacist goals is that they are now trying to sort of erase, or sort of blur the lines between the different, you know, dominant-caste identities, to sort of form some kind of a pan-caste identity, in order to sort of strengthen their numbers, also. So it is accurately described as a type of fascism, a mass movement. And the RSS holds true to this in the oldest sense of that term, because it borrowed European fascist ideas of an organization that could achieve total, total control, complete control over a country, and, in the words of the RSS, literally come to replay society itself. So it has thousands of wings, as I already mentioned. And most of the people who rule India today under the BJP government are all active participants, and active, you know, alumni of the RSS, and most of whose leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are also RSS members. Now, the sociological sort of complexities of Indian politics, they’re a bit beyond the scope of this interview, but you know, we can try and respond to this in the context of the U.S. now. In the U.S., Hindu supremacists, like I said, have a number of organizations all closely connected to each other, to the RSS in India. Now, the oldest organization, the VHP of America, which is VHP-A — and then there’s the HSS, which organizes grassroots branches like the RSS, focusing on physical educational training into Hindu supremacy. There are lobbying wings like the Hindu PACT and the Hindu Action, student wings like the Hindu Students Council, fundraising wings like the Sewa International, even higher-education institutions like the Hindu University of America. So I could go on and on with this list, but it’s probably useful to specifically ask ourselves the question of who are the people being brought into these institutions. So Indian Americans, as you are well aware of, are the largest Asian group in the U.S., more than 4.9 million people, and about 1.35% of the U.S. population, which is more than our Native American population. So I would say that Hindu supremacists draw their political power from the fact they have one-thirds of this community on their side. In other words, you can say it’s a small number of concentrated, densely organized, largely what we refer to as upper-caste communities. But even though they are a demographic minority, we know that a well-organized and well-funded minority can capture a lot of power. So to delve into this, I think we need to really get into how patterns of immigration shape the Indian diaspora, and how it’s related to caste, because Indians and South Asians are not being racialized for the first time, right? When we reach the U.S. as immigrants, I think we’ve come with our own form of racialization, our own form of social stratification, which is caste, which is why, you know, in my opinion, which I will further explore later on, also, is how the early immigrants from India to here, you will find that they were the cream of the crop, right, mostly from the Brahmin communities. And then they come here, and they find a perfect soil right to continue their practice of hierarchy, because they’re finding partnership with white supremacy. I think probably Prachi can take it on from here.
Prachi Patankar
Yeah. Thank you, Roja. So yeah, I think I’ll take on many of the threads that Roja’s mentioned here, because if you want to understand how certain section of Hindu Americans are attempting to kind of have proximity to whiteness, we have to understand those two historical factors that Roja has mentioned. One is the history of immigration and their subsequent racialization, the history of immigration of Indian Americans, and then how they were racialized when they got immigrated, when they immigrated into the U.S, and two, caste hierarchies that are entrenched in Indian and Hindu social structure and people and communities and how they brought here when they have immigrated. With regards to immigration, one important factor that I think we all know is that the majority of them, Indian Americans, even though there were certain waves before 1965, actually the majority of Indian Americans came to this country following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. And most of these immigrants post-1965 came from dominant-caste communities. They were Brahmin and other upper-caste professionals. And this factor of who has historically, kind of made up the Indian community in the U.S. is important, because we need to have a more complex understanding of racialization of different communities, as opposed to just kind of there’s white people and then everybody else, even though, you know, we know that white supremacy does kind of lend itself to that, right, because white supremacy means white people are superior and everybody else is inferior. Yet, there is a certain way that different people are racialized. The way in which Black communities are racialized and face deep structural racial oppression and violence and exploitation is deeply connected to their history of enslavement. Similarly, the genocide of indigenous communities in the U.S. and their continuous structural oppression is deeply connected to that history. So similarly, Asian and South Asian communities have a different historical context of racialization, and even though they’re coming into the same white supremacist culture of superiority and inferiority. So for South Asian communities, many of whom historically have come from dominant-caste communities, they came here as professionals, benefited from victory against colonialism in India, and then they came to the U.S. when Black communities and other communities had already won some really hard-fought civil rights struggles. So they were coming into that kind of an environment post-1965. And they’re also, you know, as we talked about, Indian Americans are one of the wealthiest communities in the U.S., because, and it has to be connected to this part, is because they have come from dominant caste communities already, right? They’ve been benefited from all of what’s happening in the U.S, in this particular context. And, you know, I think there is this. There’s a book by Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur and Nirvikar Singh, which argues that — it’s called The Other One Percent: Indians in America, which argues that Indian Americans succeeded because they’re quote, unquote, “thrice-selected” because most have come from dominant-caste communities. So because of this, caste systems, millennial-long practice of marriage and endogamy and selection gave these individuals and families of coming from dominant caste a multigenerational advantage, right? That multigeneration advantage is important to understand when we want to think about how racialization happens, and so that advantage gave them access to certain kind of education, because that’s dominant caste, we’re supposed to be learning and have access to education and knowledge and power, and other people from different oppressed castes were not supposed to have access to knowledge and power and wealth. So second, you know, because of that, these dominant cast people have come here. They were selected through highly competitive exams in India, they were entering these educational institutions, and then American schools were tapping into those. And so people were already being selected from these places. And third, you know, U.S., immigration policies favored these skilled professionals. So they, you know, it’s not just anybody coming here. They were inviting skilled professionals. So they were already creating a filter, a certain kind of candidate coming here into the American competitive job market with H1B visas and lottery since the mid ’90s, also. So you see this in the background of most prominent Indian Americans, right? We’re talking about today. Look at what we’re talking in terms of technology and media, but also politics. You’re seeing Usha Vance, who has degrees from Yale and Cambridge. Her parents also had degrees from prestigious universities in India, and had very kind of professional backgrounds in terms of what their professions were. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Harvard. He met his wife there, and Vivek’s parents were Tamil-Brahmin community, and his father also worked as an engineer and his mom was, is a psychiatrist, right? So they have generational wealth and generational knowledge. Even Kamala Harris, Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was also born into and raised by Tamil-Brahmin community. And this background likely afforded Shyamala Gopalan this status akin to white privilege in Indian society. And so because of this Brahminical advantage, families like what we talked about Shyamala’s or Vivek’s and Usha’s often boasts multiple generations of kind of college graduates coming into this country striving for, you know, universal literacy and numeracy. And so these are, so you know, as progressive Americans might view these figures, many of these, as BIPOC communities, which could mean that, you know, by definition, people of color are more disenfranchised, they’re coming from more disadvantaged backgrounds. But many of these Indian Americans, actually coming from India, are not coming from that kind of disadvantaged background, and they’re coming into a system in the U.S. that is putting them into white and BIPOC kind of duality. So I think simple white and BIPOC analysis, which is not rooted in the historical understanding of racialization and caste kind of background is — it’s hard to kind of, we’ll miss this. And if we only go through a set, then we’ll miss this kind of other background that we’re talking about, in terms of caste hierarchies. The supremacy groups kind of benefit from that, right? Because it allows them to use this multicultural race framework to be considered as a minority, while also holding powerful, wealthy positions, and they’re also holding supremacist ideologies, and it allows them to be considered into these civil rights spaces, which they are doing — Indian American Foundation and other groups like that are trying to find ways into these civil rights spaces, and that needs to be challenged. And it also confuses well-meaning white liberals also who want to embrace like a multiracial coalition, but may not have understanding of this real caste and religious supremacist ideologies that are existing into the South Asian community. So I think that is a very important factor. Second to immigration again, going into caste, we have to understand how Hindu supremacists have seen themselves, right? They have seen themselves as close to a kind of Aryan race, historically, Hindu nationalists have promoted in India historically, also, many theories that say that they’re actually Aryans coming to India, and therefore of superior race. So this notion of Aryan conquest was widely accepted at some point, and then at other points, Dalit and oppressed-caste movements going up against that and claiming a non-Aryan identity that was indigenous, and saying, then, okay, if you’re Aryans and then you’re outsiders, then you should go out. And then Hindu supremacists went back and tried to take that kind of movement away because they didn’t want to be considered as outsiders anymore. So this is there is a reason that RSS takes inspiration from [Adolf] Hitler and from this kind of ideology and models their organization based on a Nazi party. And we have seen this Aryan race embraced by dominant-caste Indians in the U.S. as well, going back to the 1920s where there was a case of Bhagat Singh Thind, who argued that by being of high caste, of full Indian, high-caste blood and Aryan blood, that he should actually be considered white, and should be allowed, be eligible for citizenship. And this goes back as far back as 1920s, and so under white supremacist ideology, Indians may, and South Asians, may be considered inferior. Yet there is Hindu supremacy, and dominant-caste Hindus are still trying to get as close to white supremacy and white people as possible, and, you know, because of their own notion of superiority, Hindu supremacy recognizes this, like I just talked about, this hierarchy of power that’s maintained and proposed by white supremacy, and it continues to seek this accommodation within that structure, rather than seeing Hindus, namely, the dominant-caste Hindus, you know, they’re seeing them as close to white people. That’s how these people, Hindu supremacy, are putting them along. And here, the kind of caste plays a significant role. The deeply entrenched caste system and its inherent hierarchy has meant that disadvantaged jobs historically have been held by marginalized caste and well-advantaged jobs, these kind of white-collar professions, medicine, finance, engineering, that all of the Usha Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy and all their parents and their grandparents have held, they’ve been monopolized by dominant caste always. And so because most Indians who have migrated to the U.S. in the 1960s and after that came from these communities, and when other kind of oppressed-caste communities started coming to the to the U.S., Dalit communities and other oppressed-caste communities started taking these jobs, finance and academic jobs and other technical jobs, the people who’ve already come here from dominant-caste communities started feeling, “Oh, these are jobs that are actually spiritually ordained to us. How can these communities take those jobs?” And so this is how you’re seeing discrimination play out in many of these sectors, right? And a survey by Equality Labs in 2016 found that actually, two-thirds of South Asian Americans who identified as oppressed-caste reported discrimination in the workplace. Even in 2021 we saw this Hindu sect known as BAPS was accused by hundreds of Dalit and Adivasi workers of labor trafficking and sexual servitude and exploitation. They were brought to the U.S. to construct a temple and were paid $1 a day and kept captive. And that lawsuit and FBI is involved in this is going on still to this day. And then in 2020 Cisco was the first U.S. company that was sued for caste-based discrimination. So we’re seeing these kind of ways that is playing out, where Hindu supremacy lives strongly in India, but it lives strongly in the U.S. diaspora as well, and it kind of continues to, in the U.S. as well, provide kind of this religious justification for caste. It embraces caste as this cultural, benign division of labor. That it just, you know, it’s a division of different people in different groups. It’s nothing wrong. But it then, it denies this deeply hierarchical, oppressive exploitation and gender-based forms of control and violence that it actually is, that caste actually is and Hindu supremacy constantly attempts to conflate Indian or immigrant with Hindu American, and exalting this Hindu identity and differentiating also it from Indian and South Asian. It attempts to approximate Hindu identity with whiteness, and so it sees this kind of rights of oppressed-caste communities, particularly Dalits, and I think we’ve just talked about this, as inherently kind of harmful to the rights of Hindus. Every time the issue of caste discrimination is raised, Hindu supremacists say, “That is attacking Hinduism.” Anytime, you know, a law is proposed to protect people from caste discrimination, they claim “Hinduphobia.” In fact, in the Hindu America Foundation, you know, sued the California Civil Rights Department after the Cisco case, you know, claiming that the discrimination case filed by Dalit workers violated the religious freedom of Hindus by linking caste to Hinduism. And this is aligned with the U.S. far-right effort to attack civil rights institutions, claiming a reverse victimhood. The lawsuit was actually recently rejected by the federal court. So in large part, you know, because of this lot of mobilization by the Dalit communities and anti-caste movements, we’re seeing a mobilization against that. And, you know, Hinduphobia, as they claim this kind of Hinduphobia victimhood within their Hindutva logic, this is because discriminatory Brahmanism is a core part of their ideology, and that must be really understood. And so, yeah, I think, you know, Roja’s really talked about, kind of the zero-sum game. Or, you know, we’ve talked we’ve also seen Heather McGee has argued this in her book. Some of us were, you know, that the people in the U.S. have also been fed a long time, this white supremacist narrative that any progress that people of color will take away from progress of white Americans. Hindu supremacists see the same thing, where anytime you talk about progress of the communities or discrimination of the community, they see that as a very — a threat to the Hindu, Hindu communities’ very existence. So yeah, I think these are some of the ways that we’re seeing kind of this interplay of white supremacy similar to Hindu supremacy, I think.
Caleb Kieffer
So moving along, Roja, I know you mentioned earlier in your remarks about Hindu supremacists moving closer to far-right forces. And just putting this question out to both of you: How do you see the Hindu supremacist movement orienting itself to other far-right actors in the United States and beyond? And kind of what other particular supremacist movements do you think it sees eye-to-eye with?
Roja Singh
Thanks, Caleb, for that question, and thank you, Prachi, for providing such a fact- and evidence-based information for us to understand, right, how this whole idea of hierarchical superiority operates in the United States within the Hindu supremacist movement. And you know, on just looking at how Hindu supremacist politics tries to really, you know, so cleverly insert itself and, you know, tie the knots with already existing, you know, narratives and ideologies in the United States. So they have become very vehemently, right, openly, anti-Muslim, right? So, so they have sort of embedded themselves within the U.S., in the anti-Muslim ecosystem, which was a very, very natural and, you know, much-desired fit, right. So I think it would not be a stretch to say that they are now the largest players in this anti-Muslim ecosystem, the U.S. and other countries in the Global North. And so this is both an ideological alignment, but also a mark of a lot of converging incentives, right, for people if they use the anti-Muslim rhetoric. So I think the most recent example that comes to mind — not in the U.S. — it’s the recent riots in the U.K., right, where Tommy Robinson and another far-right militia, spread anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant conspiracies and went on a rampage, which has happened here too with many people. The point I want to mention is that someone like Tommy Robinson, as that was happening, has been showing up on Indian TV, right, simultaneously for multiple feature interviews, some of them as long as even, like, you know, 12-hour conversations, he kept using his support for Hindus to emphasize that he’s not a racist, that he only opposed Muslims, that the right type of immigrant. He was totally fine with them. This is Trump rhetoric, also. So he’s now announced plans to travel to India. And so what does that tell us? On the one hand, it’s part of a pattern. It’s a pattern where, you know, in the U.S. sort of sociological imagination, where the Indian far right, the Hindu supremacists, are consistently putting their resources at the forefront of anti-Muslim actions anywhere, whether it’s in Europe, U.S., Australia, Israel, Palestine, research is consistently showing that the Hindu supremacists’ online infrastructure is amplifying hate speech and disinformation, spreading all kinds of poisonous rhetoric out there, using international events to promote their fearmongering, domestically building a set of transnational alliances. So they’re, you know, so, they are going global with not just the presence as VHP-A or any other forms of Hindu supremacist organizations, but just on the grounds of fundamentalism, right, fundamentalist ideologies globally, trying to, you know, aligning themselves with that, but it also tells us that there are ways for the right type of non-white community to try and find space within the far right. If you punch down on someone else, so if you buy into the same moral panics. So for Hindu supremacy in the diaspora, it is again a way to mark yourself in contrast to others as a right type of immigrant. So the model minority sort of example that they want to sort of exemplify and go with. But this example also tells us that someone like Tommy Robinson seems to have a very deep interest in associating with a Hindu far right, because there are a lot of, you know, incentives, but the foremost one is financial incentive and a huge online audience that is not constrained by borders, that they can monetize. And there’s also a form of political cover to be able to point to Brown people supporting you and say, you know you’re not racist. So we’re seeing the same thing in the U.S., of course. So our recent report tracked half a dozen figures that SPLC has named and labeled as hate actors, and they’re all working very closely with the with the Hindu far right. So if you look at what happened in the Delhi riots in India in 2020 that sort of coincided with President Trump. At that time, President Trump’s February 2020 visit to the city. They made very violent and proactive speeches against peaceful sit-in protest against such a Citizenship Amendment Act, which Hindu supremacist mobs attacked, and this is clearly reported in the Savera report that has been provided with the VHP activities and how it is linked to the United States. But the most important point to remember here is the connections that these people who are involved in those riots have with the VHP and the Hindu supremacist branches globally. So in December 2021 [Yati] Narsinghanand and was the chief organizer of a religious summit in India that featured several clarion calls for genocide. And he even said things like, you know, ”We have to make preparations. There is no more time. The case is now. Either you prepare to die now or get ready to kill.” You know, all kinds of this kind of violent, hateful rhetoric. Now, during the Delhi riots, the VHP-A, right, the American version or presence of VHP members in United States, they were not just, you know, to quote Savera’s language, they were not just distant apologists for the VHP violence, but they played very key roles in sort of inciting and carrying out violence and hatred and providing all kinds of financial support to people like Kapil Mishra, Yati Narsinghanand and other far-right leaders, and the Houston-based VHP member Sachin Chitlangia, who was active on Twitter, also was a known associate of Kapil Mishra. I’m sure that you know these details, but overall, you know, Chitlangia raised a minimum of 115,000 U.S. dollars through Facebook fundraisers for charitable causes supported by Hindu supremacist groups. So including funding for the Ram Mandir being built, which now is built on the site of the demolished mosque of the Babri Masjid. And, you know, maybe later on we can talk about the New York City parade as well, where this Ram Mandir was used again as a hate symbol. So it’s not merely, you know, one of the members of VHP, but the entire organization — starting fundraisers for this and the other, but then the amount and the money basically goes to supporting all kinds of these, you know, hate-oriented, hate-targeted activities of the VHP-A and VHP globally as well. So again, you know, we do see how regularly the VHP platforms extremists in the United States continuing to support the presence of and the voices, anti-Muslim voices like Uma Bharti, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sadhvi Rithambara, Subramanian Swamy, and so many other people as well. So a lot of examples we can give you, but what we are seeing is that the ways in which this logic of punching down works right, that the U.S. Hindutva movement is trying to make itself more and more, not just palatable, but standing on an equal platform with the MAGA movement, right? So it’s taking punches, not just at Muslims, but spreading antisemitic rhetoric also that was traditionally restricted to white supremacists, but spreading hateful rhetoric at other immigrants, queer people, Black people, and many of our colleagues have even been called puppets of George Soros, members of a globalist cabal, etc. But many Hindu supremacy have started speaking of a “woke” virus. And I think this kind of reference to trans kids, that wasn’t the case 10 years ago, but now that these far-right groups are seeing each other in a mirror, learning from and mimicking each other, this language has become sort of clearer and clearer, as we see the Hindu supremacist movement taking very strong roots in the United States. And even if you look at, right, the thriving tradition of what can be, I think, loosely called […] eventually called, Hinduism. So, the names that I’ve mentioned now, they are the Pat Robertson and Billy Grahams of modern Hinduism. So it is really, really important for us to realize that organized Hindu nationalism is gaining its popularity because it’s found ways to align itself with the threads, and already created platforms for white fundamentalist ideology in this country and we see these kinds of cases moving from, you know, just peripheral concepts in Hindu supremacy to more constitutive ones, because the movement is seeking this kind of accommodation or even approval, I would say, with white supremacy, where Hindu supremacists are encouraged to make targets of other communities and creating this kind of dichotomy in terms of good minorities versus bad minorities, good immigrants versus bad immigrants, and so on. And if I may add, I know that Prachi made strong references to how caste is playing itself out in this country. And one of the threats I want to pick up on, what Prachi so powerfully stated, is, if you take the, you know, the [Senate Bill] 403 case in California, I mean Gov. Newsom himself, right? So this whole idea of playing upon this some kind of, you know, white sort of feel-good emotion as to, “I need to save Hinduism,” right? So, any anybody who speaks against caste immediately is branded as being Hinduphobic, right? So, playing on the white consciousness here to say, like, “Oh, we need to save Hinduism, because it is the Brown person’s religion.” So that is really what they are tapping into, unfortunately, and I’m hoping that our intelligent leaders and others in the United States will wake up to this and say like, “No, this is this is not what we stand for as a country. This is not about sort of joining arms with somebody who’s trying to play into some kind of white guilt conscience here.” So, yeah, so I think I’ll stop there, and I think Prachi will have a lot to add to this topic as well.
Prachi Patankar
Yeah, thank you, Roja. I mean, I think it is in terms of going back to the question around how the Hindu supremacy movement is orienting itself to the far-right actors and their ideology. I don’t know if you recently saw the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism posted this article about how members of the India’s BJP joined the far-right transnational conference circuit. So there you have it. But I think the anti-equal opportunity ideas that are very common in the multiracial far right, you can see that within Hindu supremacist politics as well, where they align with the dominant-caste politics, where in India, they attack the, kind of the reservation system, which is similar to the affirmative action system policies here. They have chauvinistic ideas about, you know, very much similar to where they support kind of citizenship laws in India where they may not transfer that to themselves here, but they support that in terms of good immigrant/bad immigrant kind of sentiment in the U.S. as well. So you know Hindu supremacists are really comfortable with white supremacy in the U.S., whereas now, this means that as Hindu supremacy grows in the U.S., we’re seeing that shift closer and closer to other forces on the far right and building what we and many other experts are calling kind of this emerging multiracial far right
And over the past decade, we've seen in the Indian American communities that have slowly, steadily shifted towards the Republican Party, even though they are still, you know, majorly supporting Democrats. But we have to watch this trend, right? Data suggested there has been a 12 point shift from just 22,008 to 2020 presidential elections where, you know, for example, 84% voted for Obama in 22,008. Survey recently showed that 46% looking were, you know, when Biden was still in the running, they were looking to vote for Biden. Or that support for Trump went from 15% in 2016 to 28% in 2020. So these shifts are important to follow and, and that has a lot to do with how Hindu supremacist movement is growing in the US as well.
So the desire for proximity to whiteness and inherently supremacist ideology means that in reality, we're also seeing that Hindu supremacist are trying to get closer to the MAGA movement by mimicking kind of similar supremacist attitudes towards immigrants and also black people. They mimic MAGA political stances also on affirmative action abortion, promoting kind of tropes like “good” minorities or “bad” minorities, “good” immigrants versus “bad” immigrants by distinguishing Hindus as superior and good citizens of this country and more deserving like Roja mentioned.
Hindu supremacy in the diaspora also provides you know, we've talked about this material support and lobbies that be on behalf of Hindu far right and often makes alliances with actors like Steve Bannon and Robert Spencer. They have given vocal support for actors like Vivek Ramaswamy and other dozens of right wing Republican candidates who are actually taking money from the supremacist networks and groups, including super PACs like the Hindu PACT is coming up now.
There is now a Republican Hindu coalition which is launched in 2015, which believes that government should discourage single parenting and abortions and that combating radical Islam should be the center of the US foreign policy. And groups like VHPA that that we have mentioned before and Hindu PACT have actually also opposed affirmative action claiming kind of racial quotas in education are will adversely impact Indian American students and including is supporting the case that resulted in the 2023 Supreme Court decision around affirmative action.
So all these things are very connected to the flight fight to deny caste protection productions as well. So as the anti-affirmative action position of Hindutva groups, like Hindu PACT, the sentiments against caste based education quotas parallels among upper caste Hindus in India, so they're trying to also now in the US, Hindu supremacists are borrowing this MAGA-led far right efforts to attack critical race theory by now creating their own version where they calling it critical quote unquote “critical cast theory.” And this is something that they're promoting in the US as well.
So I think in general, the reality is that even as their ideologies are closely aligned with Republican and white supremacist politics, the Hindu supremacist networks and their organizations, through various variety of their formations, will attempt to make sure that their influence and presence is felt in both sides of the aisle. They will try to make sure that they are, even though the ideologies closely match and align Hindutva, white supremacist, and MAGA, they will also try to maintain their ideological base and influence in the Democratic Party as well, because they want to maintain that influence in many, many places in the US. So that's something to, you know, understand and also continue to challenge because we are seeing that it is we can be harder to challenge that within the Democratic Party. So I think those are some of the ways that we need to kind of think about how what needs to be done in the US and I think we can talk about that towards the end as well.
Caleb Keiffer
Great. Thank you both so much for those insightful answers. So just moving along, Prachi, I know that you mentioned that Hindu supremacists are finding ways into civil rights spaces and are pushing back against any challenges to caste and discrimination. Kind of what I'm hoping to talk about is how are Hindu supremacist groups attempting to insert themselves into US progressive movements and drive wedges in progressive and civil rights spaces. If you see that is something that's happening in the country?
Prachi Patankar
Yeah, I know this is a good segue.
Roja Singh
Hindu supremacist like the organizations like Hindu America Foundation would be a good example of this since they were founded in 2003 and they have created a space in the Liberal Democratic field which, you know, generally greatly values multicultural and representational frameworks. Where HF or HAF has tapped into the desire among second generation Indian Americans who want to connect with their culture, who want to have a sense of pride in it, right? This is important when especially when you're faced with the more white supremacist and white dominant culture in the US.
So HAF, Hindu America Foundation, you know, launched a campaign in 2010 called Take Back Yoga, where they made a mark by launching this campaign among the second generation Hindu Americans. Because I think they, you know, many of the these second generation Hindu Americans may feel a sense of frustration from the kind of microaggressions or feelings of cultural appropriation that they feel from white Americans who are, you know, being interested in this India's spiritual Hindu culture, including yoga. And which I think we can debunk that whether you know, how what the Hindu culture is and how spiritual and how far back it goes and how it plays into this white understanding of that. But at the same time, you know, we've seen how HAF, you know, organizations like HAF have used that towards a certain supremacist ideology, right? Used this kind of take back yoga campaign to do that. The signs were there in that campaign. Some of this rhetoric of yoga belongs to our culture and Hindu culture are dangerously rooted in the Hindu supremacist ideology that claimed yoga is a homogeneous culture in the ways that obscure caste, class and religious diversity in similar ways that you know, Hindutva has tried to do that.
Soon after that, HF launch the 2010 campaign, in 2014, Narendra Modi also announced the creation of International Yoga Day at the UN. So, central to this discussion of Take Back Yoga or promoting yoga as an international holiday, the Take Back Yoga campaign of the Hindu America Foundation claims that yoga must be only credited to Hinduism. HF has cleverly used this deceptive appeal to white liberal guilt in order to get major play in the mainstream U.S.
media. And through the campaign and others like that, HF has built influence and multiculturalist legitimacy which has been used for the real agenda of supporting really the their Islamophobic and casteist Hindu right support. And claiming that Yoga belongs to Hinduism or even India or South Asia for that matter, assumes that origin and evolution of yoga is monolithic because as we talked about, neither contemporary yoga nor Hinduism is age-old or is homogeneous. And actually both were assembled in 19th or 20th centuries in interaction with the British.
And early on HF took positions in favor of religious liberty and pluralism and introduced [a] resolution commemorating Diwali in the House of Representatives and sought to communicate and represent Hinduism to an often uninformed public and also government. Interfaith and civil rights coalition seeking more diverse representation welcomed HAF right. Which became like HF's executive director Suhag Shukla put it, they wanted to become the quote unquote go to group on a Hindu perspective.
So HAF has was actually founded with that language that, you know, really astute overt supremacism in favor of advocacy and civil rights and human rights.
So it’s very playing this game for a long time, but even as it claimed mainstream legitimacy, have continued to work with and received funding from other American Hindu supremacist groups, aggressively defended Modi’s regime as soon as Modi came to power and even before that. When Modi came to, has come to the U.S. and been at the joint session at Capitol Hill, they have supported and came to the defense of Modi and his government and advanced kind of the Hindu supremacist movements, casteism and anti-Muslim bigotry in many places. And they have actually supported fascism in India. They claim victim minority status here, but they have supported and participated in majoritarian victimization when it comes to directly to India. HF’s, strategic moderation has allowed the organization to emphasize a minority identity while downplaying its kind of far-right ideology, and it’s allowed HFto claim kind of representation of all Hindu Americans, a claim that’s often conflated with representation of all Indian Americans, while it relied on Hindutva movement for financial, and continues to rely on it, for financial, logistical and political support, and in the process, HAF developed a specifically American articulation of Hindutva that is publicly moderated and grounded in a rights-based language, and all the while framed it in opposition to other communities’ civil rights. For example, one of HAF’s first major actions in consort with other supremacist organizations like the Hindu Swayamsevak Sanghin 2005 involved an effort to oppose education on caste, education around caste in California textbooks, so they played into this politics of victimhood, where Hindus as victims, where they said they, you know, including a certain language around caste, is actually harmful to Hindus, and that was a big fight in 2005 and much later, also in California. And it was this liberal multiculturalism and kind of victimhood play which allowed them to rewrite the textbooks in California and remove references to caste. So this is very harmful to oppressed-caste communities, which are there in the U.S. In the foreign policy sphere, also, HMF worked in similar manner, where they organized annual Advocacy Days, hiring full time staff and authorized reports on rights of Hindu minorities across the world, but its commitment to minority rights and international religious freedom is selective. They will say they will support Hindus in Bangladesh and Hindus and other parts, but will support a very discriminated policy in India, was called the citizenship Amendment Act, that includes only support for Hindus coming to into India, but not people, not other immigrants coming from other religions, like Muslims, right? So this is very problematic, and HF is repeatedly proved unwilling to apply the same principles to India and the BJP, and attacking efforts as anti-Hindu and conflating legitimate political critiques of Hindu supremacy with a violation of Hindu American rights. And because the nuances of such intra-community conflict are hard to understand outside this community, which is what we’re struggling with and why we’re doing this interview, HF has often received a pass from, you know, not just from the right wing, but confused liberal observers as well. And then now there’s other groups that are playing some similar roles, like CoHNA, which is Coalition of Hindus of North America. So this ideology and orientation is common across communities, and we hear multiple anecdotes from second-generation, progressive Hindu Americans who are grateful that their parents are supporting Democrats, but frustrated that their parents have full and enthusiastic support for Modi. And there’s now this new political category of Modi Democrat that is actually emerging, and these Modi Democrats, you know, don’t see their support for Modi and voting Democrat or being liberal in the U.S. as mutually exclusive political identities, and even while they demand diversity and multicultural equality in the U.S. sphere, these same Indian Americans, these Modi Democrats, show public and enthusiastic support for Modi and BJP’s Islamophobic policies, their rhetoric and hardline citizenship laws and adherence to a violent and ethnonationalist and ethnoreligious politics in India, and all of which actually closely more aligned with MAGA, Trump and white supremacist politics. So I think it’s important to understand and expose this contradiction that Hindu supremacy, as it manifests in the U.S. and Indian diaspora, is actually a key ally to white supremacy, but it’s a contradictory and unstable category because, you know, Modi Democrats have brought into the politics of victimhood, has allowed them to rewrite these, you know, really important sections that are important to oppressed-caste communities, like rewriting the textbooks in California, denying existence of caste as a structurally oppressive form that is now transported and migrated into the U.S. So the leap from this, including the spread of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories of hate, and supporting anti-affirmative action policies in the U.S. is, you know, we need to kind of understand those aspects. And you can see that many Modi Democrats supporting former Republican candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy and getting excited about that and getting excited about […] Usha Vance, too. So this is where the exposure of some of this stuff is happening as well. I’ll end there.
Roja Singh
Yeah. Thank you, Prachi. I think to sort of elaborate a little bit more, I think you’ve just provided a really, you know, huge list of things that we can identify here as to only say why this is so problematic, right, in the United States. One thing I want to mention is the fact that, you know, what Prachi also mentioned earlier on, how the early immigrants from India, right, all from so-called, quote, unquote, dominant-caste communities coming here. So they’ve been here for several decades. So they’ve built a good infrastructure, good supportive, you know, support system. They’re placed in all kinds of top positions in the U.S. and so on. But it’s only in the past decade, right? Or, I mean, I’ve been here 30 years, and I consider myself probably as one of the, you know, few early immigrants who identified themselves as Dalits, who came here. But I think only in the past 10, 15 years or so, you have increased number of Dalits coming, you know, into this country. And so there is an isolation, the Dalits feel, whether you’re a Dalit student, whether you’re a Dalit professor, like, I’m a professor, whatever, in the tech field, right? So that’s the whole Cisco thing. So the infrastructure support system, right? Is not there. It’s not well entrenched or accumulated as much as the other caste communities, the caste communities have. So that’s why, you know, when we move into the advocacy part, the role that, you know, that Savera does, that our organization does, is really important. I mean, using my own personal example, like I can say that because of this field, because the caste communities know that Dalits are isolated here, they think they can do anything to you, right? So I have personally experienced a lot, you know, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, verbal abuse in different spaces in the United States. And now that we have a coalition working, you know, against this kind of action, that’s why it’s important to sort of, you know, bring into policies, laws and so on. But however, going back to that fundamental principle, I just want to quote Abby Ferber in their essay “What White Supremacists Taught a Jewish Scholar About Identity.” They say the identity of white supremacists and the white racial purity they espouse requires the maintenance of secure boundaries, and that’s exactly what Hindu supremacy is doing, because the rights of some communities are seen as inherently harmful to the rights of Hindus. So this is borrowed very directly from white supremacist views, Christian Right views, but it finds traction and creates confusion in different ways because it comes from a group of color. So sort of strategically using this Brownness, right? So that is why they’ve been able to set up wings that masquerade as charities, cultural organizations, interfaith organizations, even civil rights organizations. But reports show how their interfaith organizations demonize other faiths and the civil rights organizations, opposing civil rights legislation, as well as their educational charities being used to spread hatred among children in India, grooming them for future participation in their paramilitary organization now. And sadly, even you know, leaders like Rev. Jesse Jackson have been bought into this whole thing of you know, oh, this is interfaith, right? So we need to celebrate this interfaith Hinduism and the interfaith sector and so on. But Americans need to know where this is coming from, that they are a fascist movement that seeks to exert influence over liberal spaces, including, as Prachi mentioned, within the Democratic Party and Hindu supremacists weaponized their status as religious minority to curry favor with all kinds of liberal organizations and politicians who think they’re supporting a minority group, but who are actually ending up unwittingly aiding a supremacist project. Now, the Ram temple, example. Most recently, there was a press conference in New York City because they wanted to parade this — you know, they did — this replica of the Ram and there. And opposing that, again, was called as Hinduphobic. So therefore attacks on this kind of, you know, expression of how we are seeing evidence right in front of our eyes that hatred is being paraded in the streets of New York City, you know, is being pushed, you know, pushed down. And then attacks on academic freedom. A lot of professors who teach, who want to expose this aspect of Hinduism are being targeted, are being punished, are being forced to, institutions are being forced to punish such kind of teaching, and so this is really getting out of hand. And yeah, so that’s what I wanted to add to what Prachi had just stated.
Caleb Kieffer
Great. Thank you so much for those answers. So I know you provided just so much context and information on this movement. Just hoping to wrap things up, I’m hoping that maybe both of you can tell me about your advocacy work in responding to this movement, and yeah, maybe give an idea about what can be done in this moment to respond.
Roja Singh
Yeah, I think you know, just even the fact that we’re here talking to you, Caleb, I think, is really part of the advocacy work. So, so thank you for making this happen. So Hindu supremacist organizations, they were first established in the U.S., like, 50 years ago or so, and they have many decades of advantage over us, and they have the advantage of having a lot more financial resources than those of us who are really building this, you know, this anti-caste [movement] at the same time, wanting the United States public to know how this has become a breeding ground for such extremism. Things are changing a little bit — we are, in some ways, more widespread now. Our work is to educate people about caste, about anti-Muslim bigotry, about supremacy, but also articulate a positive example of what the Indian American community, in all its diversity can look like. And I am part of Dalit Solidarity Forum, which was founded in 1999, and we continue to hold workshops and awareness programs and so on. But now it’s just, you know, the presence of such organizations which need to be really very explicit about the caste-based hatred and language and religion-based hatred and language that is becoming widespread in the United States. We need to take this up. And that’s why we have this coalition, right, so drawing on the legacy of the anti-colonial movement, the civil rights movement, the way those legacies are actually so deeply intertwined. So we have coalition movements here in the United States now, and you’ve spoken to a few of us who are part of those coalitions, and you speak to more as well. But in this regard, I want to say that Hindu supremacists have shifted rightwards now, because they’re in a position of crisis and precarity, right, not just trends. So they’re losing control of dominant representation, so therefore they really did not expect this kind of, right, organization amongst us to oppose to oppose them. So they see us as a threat, and because the diaspora itself has become much larger and much more diverse, the structural advantages that Hindu supremacy sought to capitalize for themselves, I think, is slowly eroding. So, Indian migration in the U.S. has become more diverse across class, caste and religion, as evident in the growing presence of Dalit communities and in the fact that Muslim, Sikhs and Christians together make up 31% of the diaspora, so significantly more than the equivalent figure in India. So meanwhile, the opposition to Hindu supremacy among Hindus themselves has grown, most notably on generational lines. We’re seeing that and these groups have developed more expansive articulations of the Indian American identity, building bridges with other communities of color, with various racial, gender, economic and climate justice movements. Now, Hindu supremacists have been unable to see these movements as anything but an existential threat, as I mentioned. So it troubles the edifice on which the U.S. Hindutva was built: the assertion of a homogenous ethnic identity without internal differentiations animated solely by a claim to minority victimhood. So therefore, that’s because they realize that Democratic politics, or politics of true representation, is not going to work for them anymore, because its demographic hegemony is not challenged, right? It needs to embrace a politics that is pursuant of minority rule. So even in India itself, you will see that, you know, it’s no longer like more of the Brahmin presence in politics. It’s this kind of the pan-Brahmanism as an ideology that has spread across. So therefore we are seeing this now in terms of how major Indian American groups have noticed the Hindu right shift and are less interested in giving them patronage. Again, especially among the younger generation. So the Hindu supremacist movement was quite up in arms about this, the very fact that, you know, confident and articulate Sikhs, Dalits, progressive Hindus and Muslims are having a seat at the table is extremely, extremely troubling for them that we are in the forefront of calling for, right, the fact that anti-caste policies need to be in place, the fact that so many universities, other higher education institutions, Seattle and other places are now introducing this [anti-caste] laws including caste as a protected category, and people like from the Black community, especially scholars like Michelle Alexander, who openly says right in her NPR interview, she says, “It is very easy to brush off the notion that our system here in the United States operates much like a caste system,” right? She says, “My experience and research has led me to the regrettable conclusion that our system of mass incarceration functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control.” Dr. Cornel West and so many other Black leaders are on our side. I mean, professor Angela Davis was a huge supporter of Dalit rights when a young Dalit woman was gang-raped in India. So this kind of coalition is seen as a threat for the Hindu supremacist groups here.
Prachi Patankar
Thank you Roja for that. I mean, I think to wrap this up in terms of, what is the advocacy work that we are doing in responding to this movement. Savera responded with this idea that Hindu supremacy is not a unique phenomenon, that it is connected to [other] supremacist movements and other authoritarian movements growing and emerging in so many other places, including the U.S., and that we need a multiracial, multi-faith, multi-caste, cross-caste movement to be able to confront this. Because if there is a multiracial far right, then the challenge to that must be multiracial and multi-faith and multi-caste. So that’s something that we need to do, and that’s kind of the basis and the core of the advocacy and mobilization and movement building that we do. Concretely, I think we want to ensure that we advocate for legislation that can protect oppressed-caste communities, from caste-based discrimination that exists in the U.S., especially in places where there are growing numbers of South Asians. We already have examples like the city of Seattle passing a law that will prohibit this caste discrimination in employment and housing and in retail and transportation and in many other fields, and this law really recognizes the pervasiveness of caste-based injustice and marginalization in the U.S., and it also is an acknowledgement of the fact that this Indian American population grows in the U.S., that the deep-rooted divisions that have migrated with them also are growing and are being entrenched here as well. And so the same effort, you know, was there in California, but it failed even though it passed through both houses. The bill SB 403, would have banned caste-based discrimination in the entire state of California, but was vetoed by the governor because of lobbying from wealthy members of the Hindu supremacist network who have donated to the Democratic Party. So that is something that we need to think about. And this is where we’re talking about kind of the Hindu supremacist inroads, both in the white supremacist and Republican sphere, but also keeping their influence into the Democratic Party and the liberal spaces, is important to challenge. Because of things like this. We also have a Hinduphobia resolution that Hindu supremacist groups in the U.S. are currently pushing for. There is a congressional resolution on Hinduphobia started by the Democratic U.S. Congressman Shri Thanedar, which has mostly Republican sponsors now, but this needs to be challenged, because this could be a dangerous precedent if it’s not opposed. You know, we need to be, we need to have policymakers to be clear about what this means, to allow this kind of movement to flourish and permit it to become important in legislation spaces as well, because single supremacy has already fomented violence in the West. It’s not only in India, right? It has, we’ve seen instances in rioting in, you know, in U.K. We have seen the, you know, the Ram temple thing paraded in New York City. We’ve seen hate symbols like the bulldozer, which represents kind of bulldozing, and Muslim homes in India paraded as symbols of dominance in India, parades in New Jersey. This is playing out here, and the hate has been playing out here. So it’s not something that is a harm that is caused only in India, but is harm that’s causing to people in the U.S. So this ideology has to be recognized and actively delegitimized. And I think in across policy and society, we need to be doing that advocacy. And in terms of foreign policy, the U.S. should hold the Modi government account to these increased caste-based and religious based violence in India and deteriorated human rights conditions and criminalization of dissent in India, but also targeting of Indian communities on the U.S. soil, like the assassination attempts of Sikh Americans showed, you know, that it’s not just remaining in India anymore, Also, you can’t, you know, if you don’t defend activists from surveillance and [unclear]in India, the state will be emboldened to assassinate U.S. citizens too on this soil. So this is something that is very important to make links to. And we need to also build digital advocacy, right to counter disinformation and hate that that is playing out, there is huge amount of money into poured into kind of Hindu supremacy IT cells that they have that pours daily hate and violence that, you know, transfers not just to — and that’s not just remaining within the borders of Indian soil right there. This digital hate and violence that is incited is transferring everywhere, across the countries and across the globe. And that needs to be that digital advocacy needs to happen where, you know, characterizing Hindu supremacy is really toxic, and the troll army that they’ve built as very toxic and harmful to all communities in the U.S. as well. And there’s been visa cancelations of U.S., you know, people who coming from, going from India into the U.S. You know people like us. This is, you know, not necessarily on the record, but you know, we have to be careful when we go back to place into India. Many activists who are, you know, openly resisting and talking about what is happening in India, have to be careful when they enter the U.S. to visit their families, because their visa might be canceled. So these are the things that U.S. also needs to be paid attention to. And we need to kind of advocate around, you know, and we need to just understand that communities of color can have complex politics, and that we are now a state staring at a creation of a multiracial far right, and that we believe that this fight against this kind of Hindu supremacy is deeply connected to a broader fight against fascism, and that our advocacy efforts must therefore be led by this kind of multi-faith, anti-caste coalition that has a strong alignment with a multiracial coalition. So, yeah, I think that’s part of our advocacy, and that is what needs to be done.
Karthikeyan Shanmugam and Biju Mathew
Speakers: Caleb Kieffer, SPLC; Karthikeyan Shanmugam, Convener at Ambedkar King Study Circle, and Biju Mathew, Executive Director at India Civil Watch International.
Caleb Kieffer
Well, thank you again, both, so much for joining this. So just to dive into the interview, so can you maybe each tell me about your advocacy work when it comes to responding to Hindu supremacists and Hindu networks.
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Thanks. Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKC) was founded in 2016 by individuals involved in addressing a California textbook issue. Let me offer some background on that issue. That is the California textbook issue. Since the mid-1990s California public schools have included caste as part of their curriculum on the history of different nations. And that was introduced because America was seeing lot of immigrants coming into the U.S., especially from India and other South Asian countries. In 2005, Hindu supremacists demanded the removal of caste from the curriculum, claiming that education about caste discriminated against Hindus, and it was their client, represented the term in bad light and left them [some Hindu students] susceptible to being bullied in the schools. They also tried to edit textbooks to include other Hindu supremacy myths, but they of course were rejected. So along with this one, they included other mythology into the history, and that got rejected by the state board. But this was a notable moment for two reasons: First, it was pointed to the fact that Hindu supremacists were anxious about the danger posed by the caste-oppressed to their power, and in particular, how dangerous the knowledge of caste was to their power, and yet the very discussion of caste evidently posed a threat to U.S. Hindu supremacist movement that could not be treated as anything but existential. To acknowledge the existence of caste privilege in the U.S. would fundamentally challenge the monopoly over the representation of Hindu supremacist groups have tried to preserve in the U.S. And second, that they were comfortable using the strategies that have now become key tools of the far right in rewriting the history — that is, suppressing critical thinking and pushing reactionary cultural wars. This issue of content of public textbook resurfaced in 2016 because it will be reviewed for once in every six years, the California State Board will come over to the new book during the next cycle when the Hindu supremist mobilized around 1,000 people to testify in favor of them, to remove caste in their textbooks. In contrast, we were able to gather only around 100 people to oppose their edits. Eventually, none of their edits were accepted, which are major. There are some minor edits were accepted, which, which is not very significant, but the matter of fact, they went on celebrating that it as if they won this round. […] Then I would like to continue that example taught us a few things: First, that caste-oppressed communities face some challenges in the U.S. because the Hindu right wing had their head start. Early migrants to the U.S.A. were primarily from the so-called upper caste, and able to organize in large numbers. They have been able to capture representation. They need the presence of any contestations within the Indian Americans, because they monopolize the narration of the cultural and social lives of the Indian Americans in the U.S. because of the fact they were early migrants, and do whatever necessary to protect that power. Second, the newer generations of the diaspora are very much diverse, and that there were many of us from the outside of dominant caste who needed to see each other, support each other, learn about the civil rights organizing and coming together. And that was the outcome we got from the California textbook issue. And the formation of AKC is directly linked with the California textbook issue because we learned a lesson that they, the Hindu supremacists, are able to mobilize large in number because of the fact that we lacked it. We don’t have an organization to work on the continuous basis to mobilize the anti-caste forces. AKC form to organize and support the caste-oppressed providing a platform for them to discuss their issues. What we understood is whether how we address caste is but before that, the caste-oppressed people should have some platform to freely discuss their issues because they do not have any other platform because of the fact that caste is not understood outside South Asians. Our first annual conference was held in 2008, and our fifth took place [in September 2024]. […] Despite the so-called upper caste groups misleading the American public by portraying caste as a harmless cultural practice, cost-based exclusion and discrimination persists. In 2020, the Cisco cost discrimination case gained attention in the U.S., and AKC launched a campaign to educate the public about the realities of caste. We continue to fight Hindu supremacy, as those who practice caste are often emboldened by the Hindu supremacist ideology. Hindu supremacists even opposed Cisco case and attacked the victim on social media. And finally, AKC is a support group for the caste-oppressed. Educating non-South Asians about Hindu supremacy and caste practices is essential to eradicating caste. Following the Cisco case, AKC gathered around 60 testimonies highlighting how caste manifest in the U.S.A. This example we took from Dr. [Bhimrao Ramji] Ambedkar because Ambedkar also faced the same issue: How to educate the foreigners about caste. Can he write a big thesis or treatise and theories? And he came to the conclusion the best ways to explain the life of the untouchables, and he wrote his own — sort of an autobiography. So we took the same path and collected the testimonies from the people, how they face caste in the U.S. These stories include incidents such as teenager being questioned about her caste due to an artificial mark on her forehead. The Indian girls and women have a habit of putting marks on their head, what we call bindi. We have women being asked directly about her caste and then excluded from the social gatherings in the community, the scrutiny of somebody’s caste based on their dialect. And finally, yeah, a third-grade child being bullied for eating pepperoni pizza in school.
Biju Mathew
Wow. I think that’s a very comprehensive and well laid-out description of the kinds of situations around which advocacy on the question of caste becomes important, and I’m going to say a couple of things here to kind of also frame it a little bit. So we are in the midst of a presidential campaign in the United States where on both sides of the aisle, so to speak, on the Democratic side, you have Kamala Harris, who is of Indian origin, or at least one part of her family comes out of India. And the other side is the vice presidential candidate’s wife is Usha Vance, who is also of Indian origin. So in the 2024 presidential campaign, you see the emergence of quote, unquote, two people from the Indian immigrant community showing up on either side of the aisle. But the unknown fact will be that both of these people will, if you trace their caste origins back, you’ll find that they come from the upper castes. And so it’s people of color, so to speak, in terms of how it gets recognized in the American framework of multiculturalism, right? Kamala Harris is — both her parents are people of color. She’s a person of color. Usha Vance, clearly, both her parents are Indian. But if we — only if we complicate this a little bit — and I’m not saying that the complication in the context of the presidential candidacy itself is a humongous consequence — but sociologically, it becomes important to show that both Harris as well as Vance retrace their caste origins, both of them hail back to upper-caste families. So how does an immigrant community show up on both sides of the aisle in a presidential election as one of the first immigrant communities to actually show up at this level of power in the United States? I think that’s a testament to caste — while it remains unnoticed in how people stand here right in the presidential election, there’s no mention of caste. As a matter of fact, I think it’s fine not to mention caste because the issues that we’re battling over is entirely different. It’s white supremacy, it’s a lot of very important things in the United States. So I’m not saying that we need to bring caste into that, into that immediate discussion. But I’m saying that if you figure out that both sides of the aisle, the first set of immigrants to show up at this level of power are both people of upper-caste origin, then you know, the power of caste immediately as it manifests and emerges as it travels 10,000 miles from South Asia into the United States. The power of caste is precisely that. When the Kennedy Immigration Act opened up, as Karthik mentioned, the wave of migration, especially the professional classes that came across was so exclusively upper-caste. And that points to what happened in India over the previous 25 years, which is that everything, including the education system, was structured in a way to maintain those privileges. So all advocacy in that context has to be connected to that history. And I’ll simply say that the struggle in the United States is precisely — the advocacy struggle in the United States is precisely the question of turning something that largely remains invisible and making it visible, and in making it visible, producing the challenge to Hindu supremacy because caste is integral to Hindu supremacy. Otherwise, Hindu supremacists live and survive under the aegis of multiculturalism, wherein they all keep positioning themselves as victims of white racism, as part of the larger logic of race in the United States, and therefore purely a positioning along the axis of victimhood. Whereas I’m not saying that an upper-caste Indian in the United States does not face this. They do. But at the same time if you recognize the reality of caste, I think this becomes important to note that you’re carrying certain privileges that are mostly hidden, and those privileges especially play itself out within the Indian American. So the central thing to advocacy in the United States is to make American civil society entirely cognizant of caste and understand caste in its pernicious forms, in how it operates. I’ll just end with one story. Caste as it exists within the Indian American diaspora, it exists, and we all face up to it on a daily basis, but it — very often, we can see that it’s beginning to extend outside the Indian American community. I have a very good friend of mine who is here on the East Coast, in New Jersey, and she works for — she comes from a caste-oppressed community, and she works for one of the big banks, and is in their R&D department. And so one of her superiors, one of her managers, who’s a white person, came up to her in the context of a bunch of interviews, and said, “Okay, we have a whole bunch of CVs. Can you help sort through them? There are a lot of Indians who applied, and I believe you can look at the last names and figure out their caste.” I mean, he had no clue that she come from a caste-oppressed community, so she turned around and said, “What do you mean? And why is that important?” And then his next line said it all. He said, “Oh, I’m told that certain caste communities in India are better at finance.” So you see the way in which is beginning to enter, you see the reason why it’s really important that caste becomes something that we understand to a significant degree within American civil society, immaterial of your origins. I think that’s really, really crucial, and that’s the goal of advocacy. That’s what we’ve been trying to do for the past 20 years. I started out in the United States back in the late ’80s, early ’90s, when B.R. Ambedkar, the person who comes from caste-oppressed community, and is one of the key figures behind the Indian Constitution’s progressive framework, was not even known in the United States, even though he got his law degree out of Columbia and got his higher education here in the United States and was deeply influenced by American jurisprudence. In spite of it, he was barely known. And so I remember back in the early ’90s, beginning to create archives of the works of Ambedkar, putting it out in the early versions of the World Wide Web. So right from that moment to now, I would say that my organization’s trajectory has been, how do you bring this question of caste into American civil society so that it’s understood and its power is really understood.
Caleb Kieffer
Great. I think you both provided just a lot of background on caste and how it’s showing up in the presidential campaign in 2024 and how it’s already making inroads and showing up across the country. So I guess, is there anything that you want to add about how caste and socioeconomic class divisions factor or overlap with white supremacist ideology that permeates almost every U.S. institution and our culture. If there’s anything else you want to add about the overlap that you see with caste and white supremacy?
Biju Mathew
Karthik, you want to go?
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Yeah, I can start with providing some background, then try to unpack the economical or class question within class, in the U.S., despite we have very less data. Whenever we bring about the discussion on caste that is rejected by the Hindu supremacists by various means. They will say that the term caste itself is not an Indian term. They say it is derived from the Portuguese term, and the caste is introduced by the British, though always they are in the denial mode on caste despite their practicing. So let me unpack that little one, little bit, then get into the economical how the caste and economics are linked. Jati refers to caste in India, and the caste are grouped into broader categories called varna. So jati and varna are Indian terms. While varna literally means color — the literal meaning of varna is colored — also it refers to the social classes. So we can understand jati is caste and varna is social classes. There are four main varnas encompassing 4,000 caste. It remains debated whether caste formed as social classes, or the social classes, that is, varna split into caste or jatis. Dr. [Bhimrao Ramji] Ambedkar supported the later view. However, he maintains varna and caste are identical in their de jure connotation — both connotate status and occupation. Caste is a birth-based system, despite claims that it is based on character and work, for which no concrete evidence exists. So this is another point of rejection from the Hindu supremacists saying it is not based on birth. Anybody can become anywhere now. Well, there is no historical evidence [of that]. Also, there is no evidence in the recent, like 200 [or] 300 years, a person of one caste become a person of another caste. The four varnas included Brahmins, that is a prestige class; Kshatriyas, what they call the rulers or warriors; Vaishyas, traders; and Shudras, those who are doing the manual work or manual labor. So here, there is an interesting fact. Original Hindu or the Vedic system, had only four varnas. The Dalits, who were referred as untouchable, are considered as a part of a Shudra varna, but faced social exclusion, so they are the one part of the fourth Varna, but sort of considered a fifth who are outside of the varna system. So Dr. Ambedkar theorized that fifth class formed during the Gupta period during the sixth century, and the reason for the formation of untouchability inside the varna system is those who oppose the varna system itself was outcasted from the society. The critical thing to know is what the Indian and Indian Americans can discern and are conscious of caste, with many people subtly identifying with each other’s caste. And what Biju has clarified now is now it seems that the Americans also know, but from the wrong side of it, in ways that are often unintelligible to the non-South Asians in the U.S. Upper-caste individual frequently disclosed their caste status, leading to silencing of the upper-caste members in office and community settings. Caste is scrutinized through positions on policies like affirmative action and various political positions, also. This caste dynamic is often invisible to the non-South Asians, who cannot easily perceive it. The so-called upper-caste individuals in the U.S. maintain caste rituals and fight to remove caste from textbook revealing the double standards. On the one hand, they are beneficiaries of the very caste system which led them to power, as Biju explained some time back with the example of Kamala and Usha, but they’re denying that what they benefited from it. So now let me unpack the economical question with respect to the cost. In terms of economic divisions among the Hindus in the U.S.A., the 43% earn over 100k annually, while 9% make 30k and lesser than that and others fall in between. As far as education is concerned, 11% have some college education, 31% hold a college degree, and 38% have post-graduation. There is no caste-specific data within this one, but there is a noticeable dominance of so-called upper caste in hiring and firing position and occupying public offices. This is what I believe what Biju a minute before shared, how someone’s manager from the white on the non-South Asian, asked to shortlist the resume based on caste. So this is, this is how it works because they assume that most of them in the managerial position are maybe from the so-called dominant caste. So it is necessary they are caste-biased. Meanwhile, deliberate silence on caste is hugely problematic for the caste-oppressed in their workplace. This is what we are repeating, echoing again and again — the so-called progressive, I very consciously use the “so-called,” because they are telling they are against caste when they come out of the office and do campaigning, but when something is taking place inside the office, they in our experience, the so-called dominant caste people, those who call themselves as a progressive, are also silent in offices. There’ll be different reasons, but what they discuss in the community spaces they are not able to discuss in the workplace, which is very unfortunate. Finally, the Hindu supremacist have historically aligned with the global racism. This is where I would like to link the Hindu supremacists and the other supremacists: During the World War II, the Syrian Hindu supremacists supported the Nazis and advanced for treating — and advised Indian Muslims to be treated like how the Jews were treated by the Nazis. Today, the same supremacists in the U.S. backing the Zionists against the people of Gaza. There are substantial evidence of so-called upper-caste Indians identifying with the white people, especially on immigration issues. It would be valuable if Biju could definitely explore this more. There are some examples like how the early Indian immigrants tried to appeal for the citizenship based on their racial superiority, and they considered themselves equally as white, that they claim that they are so distant from the Caucasian origin. But how they, how they, the Hindus are increasingly aligned with the conservative political position as for the emerging multi-racial right. So the Hindus of America, mostly, they were the support of the Democrats, now they are slowly moving towards Republican as a matter of fact.
Biju Mathew
I’ll try to be fairly brief to kind of just open this up a little bit more for further exploration. So here are some numbers. I mean to begin with, in terms of fact that we must remember that the dominant framework within which a lot of this politics is playing itself out and the chips are happening is happening within the framework of multicultural America. Multiculturalism itself is a particular kind of what one might loosely characterize as a very weak resolution to some of the contradictions that still emerge both the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the ’70s. So it’s a way to resolve all of the unresolved issues of this, of the post-Civil Rights moment, wherein, you know the African American communities, for instance, in the light of the fact that they had gained a particular kind of legal equality, began to push for an economic and social equality, rather than simply a legal equality. And in that context emerged multiculturalism as a kind of a very deep kind of a resolution, particular framework wherein this notion of diversity is ever framed, where hierarchy is buried, where hierarchy is ignored. But a kind of a particular diversity immaterial of hierarchy is kind of framed as the answer, is framed as kind of the golden rule of American civic life. It’s in this context that we must understand that the Indian American community, the Hindu American community, all of them fit into this as people of color, and in that sense, that part of the spectrum which is experiencing racism. And within that context, whatever be their ideological positions on the question of caste, I mean, they neatly fitted into the Democratic Party, kind of as a surrogate. If you had to express, if you had to think about liberalism as kind of the surrogate, as the Democratic Party as surrogate, to understand people’s liberalism, etc., then that’s where most of the Indian Americans fit in. So I’ll take a particular moment, the moment when the first-ever African American person of color emerges as a president of the United States, the election of Barack Obama. In that election, numbers suggest that about 84% of the Indian American community voted Democrat, voted for Obama. By the time we come 12 years later, 2020, the numbers are down to about 70%. And so this shift of over 10%, 12 to 14% shift from that liberal positionality to a quote, unquote conservative positionality is the first marker of a broader shift in the Indian/Indo-American today. But we should not leave it there. In exactly the same time frame, if you look at the period between 2008 and 2020, you’ll see that this is exactly the moment when the word Hindu and the word Republican begin to come together. Again, I don’t mean Republican as a simply a party formation, but as a surrogate for, you know, certain conservative position. The emergence of, for instance, the Hindu Republican Coalition, various formations, there was nothing that would have brought together. The numbers were so minimal that it was almost impossible to form something that was Indian and Republican, Hindu and Republican, in that simple sense of the word. But post-2008, post-2010, this begins to emerge. There are, of course, earlier traces of this. Hindu supremacists start lining up with Islamophobes, with the Islamophobic right immediately after September 11. There’s a complete lineup with the Pamela Gellers and [Robert] Spencers etc. But if you really look at the kind of institutional formation emerging with the surrogate standing in then you really see it happen post-2010. And the interesting part is that these formations are, of course, coinciding with the emergence of white supremacy into the middle of Republican politics, right, which is with the emergence of the Tea Party. And once the Tea Party emerges and becomes somewhat hegemonic, the emergence of a white right, along with a Christian right, you know, that coalition emerging within the Republican party and beginning to take over the part from the traditional conservative Republican formations. Now, if you notice what happens with the Hindu supremacists who begin to create these institutional forms like the Hindu Republican Coalition, etc., you see that they pole-vault right over the Hindu older guard of the Republican Party. Again, I want to insist that I mean the Republican Party as merely a surrogate. But they pole-vault over them and go straight to the MAGA [Make America Great Again] folks, right? Their alliances that they’re creating is with the MAGA folks. So in the context of the current American election, for instance, the largest set of formations have pole-vaulted right over, and for instance, their launch event was an event at in October of 2022 at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s mansion, which was redesigned as a Rajasthani palace for the day and presented 180-odd Hindu leaders were brought in by this Republican Hindu Coalition there. So they pole vault over the traditional Republican bloc and go straight to the hard right. And it’s in this context that we must understand that there’s an emergent multiracial right. That’s information where multiple immigrant communities, their split-away right wings are headed towards that corner with the white right. And I’m not saying that that corner is going to be free of contradictions. It’s going to be full of contradictions. I’d love to see what the Hindu supremacists do with the Christian right, how they, how that interaction develops. But as of right now, you’re beginning to see this pole-vaulting over even traditional conservatism and the kind of alliance building that’s going on with the ultra-right in the United States. I mean all of this. I’ll end here, all of this in the context of fact, I always tell that the upper-caste migrant coming out of India. I mean, I’ve said this many times in public forum, that the Indian American who is white before they leave the shores of Bombay, in the sense that they’re imagine what they are going to in the United States, the imaginary United States that so dominates upper-caste and middle-class, upper-middle-class communities in India is so dominated by an entirely white framework. It’s the two-car garage, suburban home. It’s a particular set of values. It’s an entirely white America. I mean, it’s almost like, and I’m not saying that’s surprising. It’s like, I mean, I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s watching, you know, really bad Hollywood films where the white guys were the good guys, the Black, Black folks were represented as criminal or with mental challenges. That’s how the portrayal was in those films. Clint Eastwood being the guy with a dangling cigarette would do this number on weapons, etc, right? So we grew up on a culture that was, that framed whiteness and America together as a certain kind of superior thing, and it fit well with a particular version of the Hindu right in India already, which had, through the colonial movement, you know, sided very often with the British. They had tried to compromise with the British against the Indian nationalist movement, also. And so in that sense, it was a tradition that they carried through. That is, how do you come to the United States and immediately kind of agree to be in a particular kind of alliance with the powers of this, of this, of this nation which is white, and how do you, how do you, how do you build that relationship and hold together? That’s the problematic [values] that they came here with, and they’ve continued to build.
Caleb Kieffer
Great. Yeah. I mean, thank you so much for that helpful context and framing. So just to kind of keep the conversation moving, and you both have touched on this already some, but kind of want to dive into it a little more. So is there any analysis that you can provide on the overlap between caste and economic-based discrimination and Hindu supremacy and the Hindu supremacist movement — is, is there kind of a connection? Do you want to kind of go more into kind of where the overlaps between between these two and where these issues might meet?
Biju Mathew
Can I just quickly jump in, Karthik?
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Yes, Biju, because I already covered as part of the previous one, how the education and the income level, yeah. You can go.
Biju Mathew
At this moment in the history of the United States, Indian Americans have emerged as the single most prosperous diaspora population immigrant community in the United States. And they are, in that sense, way ahead or way past most of the diasporic communities in terms of just sheer wealth. Now the question is, what is it that makes for these really unique formations? How is it that the United States can have a policy of migration into the United States for the last 60-odd years and end up with a situation wherein one specific community really moves fast and is so dominant? The model minority myth, all of this is what is reported out. But we all know that the translation of something into economic status of this variety cannot happen without a kind of a base and underlying foundation of privilege, right? So it’s what I said a little while ago, the first 40 years of migration from the 1960s and ignoring the first-wave migration in the early 1900s because really, in terms of its continued impact on something called the Indian diaspora is really minimal. It was largely California, some in New York, in spaces like this. This is from undivided India, colonial period India, the larger subcontinent. And it’s peasant families in California and working-class families of, especially connected through maritime trade on the East Coast. So it’s really small communities, not much of an impact there. So the real bulk of the diaspora emerges post-’60s, post-Kennedy Immigration Act, and the first 25 to 30 years of that, is all middle-class professionals, urban elite educated professionals. I think we just need to be very clear about it. That is, in India, for instance, there’s something called the IIT, the Indian Institute of Technology, which trains and produces an elite cadre of engineers, of technically educated individuals. Most of them come from the upper caste. Most of them come from not just simply an upper-caste formation, but from urban privilege of at least two or three generations. And that’s who enters those colleges. That’s who graduates out of those colleges. And when they graduate, almost entire classes of that just move to the U.S. to do their master’s [degree] and from there on to establish themselves as part of the early Indian diaspora here. So the class, caste nature of the post-’60s migration is very well documented. There’s no confusion about it, that it’s largely upper class, largely middle class, and upper middle class. This begins to fragment a little bit in the mid-’80s to the early ’90s, where first the trading community begins to enter. And this trading community begins to enter, both from mainland India, but also out of other diasporas, including out of Africa as Uganda closes up, out of Hong Kong, as the end of British rule and the kind of slow emergence the Chinese party in Hong Kong begin to happen. So in that context, you begin to see a migration of a trade, a set of trading classes into the United States. But in caste terms, even though, in economic terms, these are small traders, these are marginal traders, not big capitalists, right? Even though that’s who it is, in cost terms, they remain largely upper-caste. It’s the varna system that Karthik described a few minutes ago. It is only by the mid ’90s that you begin to see a working class emerge in migration, and that working class is mixed. And then a software-working class that begins to come in, that is, and that has, again, a mixed-caste component to it, and that’s where you begin to see the public kind of emergence of the question of caste in American politics begin to happen. So it’s very late. It’s only in the early 2000s that you begin to see a sizable enough migration of quote, unquote, the lower caste coming into the United States. Otherwise the diaspora is entirely dominated by upper class, right? I think that we just need to be very clear about it, that that’s the history of the United States, and that’s the history that we need to recognize and, you know, deal with and change in terms of both, you know, creating and opening the spaces for a much more significant migration of underpresented castes here, but simultaneously also just recognizing what that privilege means and how it’s going to shape American politics going into the future.
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Yeah, I will quickly add — I understood this question as that you are looking for some data, rather than this explanation Biju has given — I will just add […] The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India by Ajantha Subramanian explains this well, how the caste played a role which enabled the so-called Indian upper caste, as we saw, for their entry into the U.S. And just to substantiate Biju’s point, I will tell only one example from that book. So IITs were predominantly, they were considered, only the Brahmins will go. And usually the Brahmin boys, they will have some thread around their shoulder. And this is what took place in the IIT Madras hostel, where one person did not wear that one who is who is not a Brahmin and got an admission into IIT. And his roommate was asking him that, where is your thread? So the other person responded, no, I am not. I won’t put it. But the other person don’t understand that he was a non-Brahmin and don’t put it. He assumed that he was a Brahmin and he forgot to put it. And that was the situation in ’80s, in ’60s and ’70s.
Biju Mathew
I think that what you’re saying needs a little bit of context. So Brahmin men wear what’s called a sacred thread,[unclear] , which is worn from your shoulder downwards across the chest, right? So this is called the sacred thread. It’s, it’s kind of, sort of, is the rite of passage, it happens, wherein there’s a ritual process through which that is put. And so by the time they are teenagers, all of them are wearing it and walking around. And so when they enter some space, like an IIT hostel room, wherein you’re sharing a room, you know, you’re bound to notice each other’s sacred thread, so to speak, etc., etc. So I think that’s the context that Karthik’s example, just needed for an audience.
Caleb Kieffer
Thank you for that context. Moving along. I know that you both kind of alluded to this already how caste is showing up in the United States. But I know that we are seeing legislation in states like California, New Jersey and Illinois to challenge caste discrimination. What do you see as being the implications of this type of policy, and also how are Hindu supremacists responding to this type of legislation showing up?
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
Some education institutions introduced policies to include caste as a protected category. But these protections are so often challenged in the court by the Hindu supremacists. Meanwhile, Seattle became the first city to pass legislation adding caste as a protected category last year, February [2023]. This too was challenged in the court, and the court order came in favor of the city. The court recognized that adding caste as a protected category is not violating any religious rights of the Hindus, at least as it is alleged by the Hindu supremacists, and they are challenging these legislations in the court. Casteists often exploit non-South Asians’ ignorance to practice caste discrimination, as seen in the Cisco case. When “John Doe” reported caste discrimination to Cisco’s HR [human resources], Cisco’s HR failed to understand and dismissed the complaint. When the Civil Rights Department sued Cisco, the company argued that caste discrimination is not illegal — that is, in their response to the complaint, which is available in the court documents. Hindu supremacists attempted to join the case, but it was rejected by the court, and HAF [Hindu American Foundation] tried to represent Cisco, which was rejected by the court. The Hindu American Foundation, a supremacist organization, sued CRD [Civil Rights Department] for filing the caste-discrimination case. Since they were not accepted in the case, they went and filed another case in the federal court on the ground the CRD filed the case against Cisco does not hold grounds because it is violating the religious rights and intervention of the freedom of expression and all sort of things. And still that litigation is ongoing litigation. The Hindu supremacists also campaigned against caste-related legislation, and now they’ve followed another tactic that falsely labeling it as profiling, Hinduphobic, and violation of religious freedom, and they misleadingly equate caste with an attack on Hinduism. And with this one, they took this issue to the city council, especially Fremont and Cupertino [city councils], where the Fremont passed a resolution on Hinduphobia and Cupertino went a step ahead, and it passed a resolution not to enact any law to add caste as a protected category. And they are trying to influence the policy through the city councils where they have the predominant presence, especially the Bay Area. So we feel that it is essential to educate the American civil rights organization on the destination between the criticism of caste and criticism of religion. And one of the reasons the Hindu supremacists starts so successful, so able to reach the city council, is that the they were not challenged by the fellow American civil rights organization, those who are fighting for the equal rights.
Biju Mathew
So I’ll quickly add here. So in other words, what Karthik just described shows, should show, our audience something very simple: that there is a veritable battle going on out there to do something very simple, which is take caste and add that as a protected category in American law at every level, all the way from, you know, universities, all the way to states, and hopefully soon at the federal level. That there’s a battle going on to make that happen. And in this battle, there should be no two sides. If you are a person who stands for justice, social justice of any sort and every sort, then there should be no two sides in this battle. The wealth of documentation, scholarship, knowledge, data, that caste discrimination is one of the most horrendous things that we’ve inherited from the past, and we continue to struggle and suffer because of caste discrimination, and caste-oppressed communities are widespread all across India, but also now, more and more in the diaspora, is so well documented, so complete a truth that there should be no contestation of this. I mean, to contest it is to kind of try and deny the existence of race. It’s the equivalent of that. And yet, we see that’s exactly what’s going on. I mean, the reason why in many places to start a legislation of this sort — a legislative effort of this sort — is not a problem, right? I mean, many of us, Karthik, me, many of the organizations that we are all connected to, have been behind and helped with the kind of attempts to get these legislations passed at all levels. And when we start the process, very often, when we go to legislators and propose this, there’s absolutely no resistance. Many of them welcome it because it’s an easy slam dunk. They get credit for doing something on the side of civil rights, adding one more category of a historically oppressed community. And many of them start thinking that it’s an easy one. Who will stand up and say, “No caste discrimination we cannot add as a protected category, caste cannot be added”? Who will say that we need to perpetuate caste and not protect caste-oppressed people? Right? So they expect there’s going to be an easy one, and yet suddenly, from within the depth of a multicultural frame, waving its hands wildly, emerges a community that claims it’s a victim of racial prejudice in the United States, the upper-caste Hindu community, and claims that any attempt to legislate caste is going to be discriminatory against them. I mean, this is the equivalent of, you know, what emerges as a kind of a center pin of white supremacist argument that they are discriminated against, right? So this, but the peculiarity of the Indian American community, or the Hindu American community doing it, is that they claim already to be victims of prejudice, and that this is going to further victimize them. So it’s fascinating how this is built, and is built entirely on ignorance, and that the liberal premise that anybody who’s of color is going to be automatically only a victim. And that premise, that simplified premise, is what they depend on. Now I just want to end this by saying, you know, if you take caste and class together, you’ll begin to see why these legislations are important, but why they’re not sufficient. I mean, what we are seeing, for instance, is in New Jersey, the case of the Robbinsville temple, where, you know, there’s an ongoing case of labor trafficking. And the understanding that we have from limited contact with the workers who were entrapped within the temple is that almost all of them were of oppressed-caste groups, and they were entrapped within the temple. Their labor was forced. There’s an ongoing criminal case of labor trafficking and a wage case that’s filed in New Jersey. […] The worst kinds of formations of [caste] practice are beginning to happen with things like the Robbinsville temple case and such cases. So legislation, no question about it, is important. But as you can see, the way that legislation is being fought. The only way to really take this on is not just through legislation, but a direct confrontation with Hindu supremacists, and taking that message into the depths of American civil society. Really, American civil society has to begin to recognize the Bhakt supremacist, Hindu supremacist communities, their alignment with upper -caste, protecting upper-caste privilege, and their alignment with white supremacy and the MAGA forces, if you only begin to see all of that within American society, only then will we really begin to gain space.
Caleb Kieffer
Yeah, that’s super helpful. So yeah, like, I know you both just touched on the importance of social justice advocates and civil rights organizations showing up in support against caste and class discrimination. So anything else you’d like to add about kind of what can be done to raise awareness about caste issues in the United States and abroad? I mean, I know that you mentioned kind of the shortcomings of legislation. Is that our policies like this in other states the answer? Or is there more that can be done? And I know that Biju, you just kind of touched on that a bit, but anything else you would like to add on that?
Biju Mathew
No, I mean, it’s what it’s what Karthik said we need. I mean, it’s what Karthik said, it’s what I said, which is the depth of education within American civil society. But civil rights organizations, civil rights formations, have to recognize that there is something called Hindu supremacy, that there is something called caste, and that there is a close correlation between Hindu supremacy and caste, and that the way forward in the continued battle for civil rights in the United States must include this issue, and we must not let upper-caste communities of Hindu supremacists hide behind quote, unquote, racial victimhood and concepts like that to derail these efforts. So you know, every civil rights organization needs to recognize that.
Karthikeyan Shanmugam
[…] I’ll tell an example in 2022 when AKC passed a resolution urging the companies to serve both vegetarian and meat options at the Indian festival gathering, the Hindu supremacists attacked the group, our group, on Twitter by calling it Hinduphobic. It would be great if the non-South Asian civil and social justice organizations organize a special conference on caste. That will unpack lot of questions, lot of experiences, rather than we are repeating within our echo champers. So basically it has to go out of our circle, and it has to get attention of the civil rights organizations in the U.S. And as I touched upon early, the Hindu supremacists often sponsor solutions on Hinduphobia and oppose anti-caste legislation, as seen in the Fremont and Cupertino, where the civil rights organization should be super aware of. Their influence is significant, evident in the back-door veto of SB 403, despite SB 403 is overwhelmingly passed in the Senate and the Congress, and by record, it was vetoed because of the Democratic donor influence which, which is very unfortunate, but there was no follow-up on that after it was vetoed. The caste-oppressed cannot fight for the legislation, state by state, which is very we don’t have that capacity in terms of resource and numbers to do so. So the American civil rights organizations should sponsor or support a federal bill against caste discrimination at the federal level. That will definitely create a wholesale free workspace for the caste oppressed among us. Thank you.
