Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu in the US Congress, on Modi, Hinduism, and linking Islam to terror
by MANU BALACHANDRAN
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seen receiving a copy of the Bhagavad Gita (one of the Hindu scriptures) from Member of United States House of Representatives Tulsi Gabbard during their meeting in New York in September 2014 PHOTO/PTI/The Hindu
Washington has no shortage of politicians struggling to be seen as a maverick. But Tulsi Gabbard isn’t one of them.
As one of the first two female combat veterans elected to US Congress and also its first Hindu and first American Samoan representative, she wears the label quite easily. And this week, the 34-year-old congresswoman from Hawaii reminded everyone of it, as she broke ranks with the Democratic party establishment and relinquished her post as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee on Feb. 29 to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. (Her role with the DNC, the party’s governing body, would have required to stay neutral in the election.)
Described last October by the Washington Post as “the Democrat that Republicans love and the DNC can’t control,” Gabbard offered a sample of her independent streak a year ago, when she spoke out of sync with her fellow Democrats and criticized US president Barack Obama’s handling of Islamic extremism—specifically over his unwillingness to brand ISIL an “Islamic” group. “[Obama] is completely missing the point of this radical Islamic ideology that’s fueling these people,” Gabbard told Fox News last February.
Her viewpoint on this subject is all the more notable given her military experience in the Middle East, where she served in a field medical unit in Iraq and was a trainer for the Kuwait National Guard.
But it also aligns nicely with the stance toward Islam held by India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi, with whom Gabbard shares a great rapport.
Gabbard was among the few to criticize the US government’s decision to deny a visa to Modi before he was prime minister, in the wake of accusations that his government in the state of Gujarat did not do enough to save Muslims during the horrific communal violence carried out there in 2002. The Gujarat riots claimed more than 1,000 people, including close to 800 Muslims. Gabbard had called the no-visa decision a “great blunder.”
And in November 2013, five months before Modi would win election as prime minister, Gabbard opposed a House resolution that called for “religious freedom and related human rights to be included in the United States-India Strategic Dialogue and for such issues to be raised directly with federal and state Indian government officials,” saying it would weaken the friendship between India and US.
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The curious Islamophobic politics of Dem Congressmember Tulsi Gabbard
ZAID JILANI
“Meet the Democrat Who’s Not Afraid to Criticize President Obama on ISIS,” intones a recent ABC News headline. The story describes remarks by Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D), who has for the past month been all over the media slamming Obama’s refusal to directly associate ISIS and other terrorists with the Islamic faith.
She’s particularly a favorite of right-wing media. Appearing with Fox’s Neil Cavuto last week, she lashed out at the White House for holding an extremism summit with Muslim Americans, saying it’s a “diversion from what our real focus needs to be. And that focus is on that Islamic extremist threat.” She criticized Obama for saying that “poverty, lack of access to jobs, lack of access to education” is contributing to radicalization. “They are not fueled by materialistic motivation, it’s actually a theological, this radical Islamic ideology,” she said, throwing red meat to Fox viewers.
To the media, Gabbard is a curious spectacle. She’s a Hawaii Democrat, coming from one of the nation’s most progressive and dovish chapters of the Democratic Party, but she’s also an Iraq war veteran, and she’s consistently tried to outflank President Obama and the rest of her party to the right on foreign affairs. Last month she openly mocked Secretary of State John Kerry during an appearance on CNN, saying that he thinks, “if we give them [Islamic extremists] $10,000 and give them a nice place to live that somehow they’re not going to be engaged in this fighting.”
To Gabbard, the fact that Syria and Iraq have been through years of brutal civil war, wrecked economies and massive displacement is irrelevant; the only reason they have an extremism problem is because of Islamic theology.
But the case of Tulsi Gabbard becomes less curious and more expected once you look at her links to a different set of ethnic and religious hardliners: the Hindu nationalist Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since her election to Congress, Gabbard has tied herself closely to this party, which has a history of condoning hatred and violence against India’s Muslim minority. Many of her stateside donors and supporters are also big supporters of this movement, which disdains secularism and promotes religious sectarianism.
Meet the Islamophobic BJP
In May 2014, the BJP swept the Indian election, and the man it made prime minister was then-governor of the state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. To say Modi is a controversial figure would be a considerable understatement. In 2002, huge riots broke out in his state, with primarily Hindu mobs attacking Muslim residents. Over 2,000 men, women, and children were killed, with many more injured; mass rape was also documented. Almost all of the victims were Muslim.
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