by HAMZA RAO
A Washington-based outfit is quietly spreading Modi’s Hindutva by weaponising lawsuits, lobbying, liberal discourse
As the political air around India is thick with the threat of increased minority persecution at home and murmurs that Delhi is turning rogue abroad, an unexpected frontline of Hindutva is taking shape thousands of miles away: the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a US-based organisation that has mastered the art of cloaking a majoritarian project in the language of American liberalism.
The HAF has emerged as one of Hindutva’s most diligent custodians on foreign soil, quietly and at times leaping at its critics’ throats to fortify its ideological frontiers and assert an Islamophobic narrative, often in alliance with the American far-right.
Its leadership and founding personnel trace roots to older Hindu-right organisations, some of which are linked to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), such as the Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu Education Foundation (HEF).
More recently, the organisation openly rebuked Western media outlets, including the New York Times, for “whitewashing” the Pahalgam attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir, calling them out for ignoring the “religious element” of the attack.
Suhag Shukla, executive director of the organisation, even suggested a better framing of the attack: “Hindus massacred in Kashmir by Islamists in a terror attack by Pakistan-backed group”.
A 68-page investigation produced by Rutgers Law School in New Jersey earlier this year offers a stark assessment of how the organisation does this.
The report, “Hindutva in America: A Threat to Equality and Religious Pluralism”, traces how these groups have strategically ridden the currents of post-9/11 Islamophobia, leveraging the political and cultural climate generated by the so-called “war on terror” to normalise and advance an ethnonationalist project within American public life.
“By couching their rhetoric within the mainstream narrative that Muslims worldwide are presumptively terrorists and violent, Hindutva organisations join the chorus of other anti-Muslim right-wing groups.”
The study further identifies two core objectives guiding Hindutva’s diaspora strategy in the US: the systematic construction of Muslims as perpetual outsiders and security threats, and a sustained effort to curtail academic freedom by intimidating scholars, policing curricula, and narrowing the space for critical inquiry.
On one side, HAF keeps a polished, liberal-friendly exterior, borrowing the vocabulary of pluralism and progressive inclusion while scrumptiously smuggling in Hindutva’s conceptual DNA. On the other hand, it lashes out at scholars, journalists and activists who try to expose the toxin hidden beneath its rhetoric.
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