A video uploaded to YouTube by the Indian diaspora-focused news outlet India Abroad shows Pandit, alongside several other attendees, being interviewed by a bearded man in a white blazer. This man, whom Pandit addresses in the interview with the honorific “Krishnaji,” is none other than Krishna Gudipati — a local leader in the Hindu supremacist Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), who infamously waved an Indian flag among the crowd of rioters during the January 6 insurrection.

At first glance, this may seem surprising. As a damning 2024 report by the Savera: United Against Supremacy coalition and Political Research Associates details, HAF maintains extensive ties to the broader Hindutva (Hindu nationalist or supremacist) ecosystem in the United States. HAF’s founding leaders all cut their teeth in Hindu supremacist groups like the VHPA, and the organization continues to share key funding sources with other right-wing Hindu groups. However, as the report also highlights, HAF has historically sought to obscure these reactionary links by presenting an ostensibly “respectable” public face, couching its advocacy in the language of civil rights and multiculturalism and taking mainstream center-left positions on issues like climate change, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ rights. Given this ostensibly liberal positioning, the fact that a senior HAF leader appeared alongside a January 6 insurrectionist at Trump’s inaugural ball to enthusiastically declare that “we as Hindu Americans are very excited about the Trump 2.0 administration” may, on its face, strike many as incongruous.

Closer examination of the facts, however, reveals that the Hindutva movement and the MAGA movement are hardly strange bedfellows. In fact, Pandit’s appearance at Trump’s inaugural ball is the natural culmination of a years-long process of convergence between the Hindu supremacist ecosystem in the United States (of which HAF is one key node) and the broader American far right — a convergence that has intensified in recent years — particularly in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, as Hindu supremacist groups have grown increasingly vocal in championing Trump as an ostensibly reliable ally of so-called “Hindu interests.”

Still, as recent controversies over immigration policy under the new Trump administration highlight, the alliance between Hindu supremacists and the MAGA far right is a fraught one. And given that the MAGA movement’s vision for America is ultimately a project of white Christian nationalism, this shortsighted alliance poses a serious threat to the safety of all communities in the South Asian American diaspora — Hindu and non-Hindu alike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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