by USHA KUMAR
Pause to survey the composition of Trump 2.0 cabinet, and a striking pattern emerges. Alongside the regular staple of anti-immigrant hawks, Wall Street libertarians and Christian nationalists, we find what seems like a surprising degree of ethnic diversity. Until one takes a second, closer look, to find that it is in fact a specific type of brown person highly represented. From Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy to Usha Vance, Jay Bhattacharya and Sriram Krishnan, the new “multiracial” MAGA appears significantly dominated by the presence of so many Indian – and Hindu – Americans.
This detail is no mere statistical oddity. The presence of so many Hindu Americans on the far-right is not a coincidence; neither is it a familiar story of a few elite pro-business conservatives that all non-white communities contain. Rather, they are a mirror – a mirror into a broader attempt to reposition where Hindu Americans fit into US society. To understand this phenomenon, we must understand the role played by the Hindu supremacist, or Hindutva movement, whose influence threads together the trajectories of many of these nominees, and whose Americanization – and Trumpification – is a critical part of this puzzle.
Hindutva, which is distinct from the Hindu faith, is a century-old political movement inspired by Nazism and Italian fascism, that aims to reshape India’s secular democracy into a Hindu ethno-state. Like white Christian nationalism, Hindutva has a history of targeting religious minorities, including through lynching. Over fifty years ago, the movement established its first U.S.-based organization: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHP-A). Across these five decades, the movement erected a vast network of organizations on the backs of the financial success of the Indian American community, building large charitable, cultural, religious, and advocacy fronts, as well as a network of PACs.
One of these PACs, in fact, helped launch Gabbard’s political career with extensive donations, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for her first Congressional races. The movement’s other champions were also Democrats, and its path initially steered clear from the older stream of Indian American Republicanism, exemplified by figures like Dinesh D’Souza or Bobby Jindal, who had to eschew a public identification with Hinduism to advance their political careers.
It is in fact in contrasting the new figures in the cabinet with this older strain of Indian American conservatism that revealing details emerge. Consider the profile of Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s pick to co-lead a government spending department with Elon Musk. Ramaswamy, who has consistently consorted with Hindutva groups as well, headlining two separate VHP-A galas, where he credited a VHP-A leader with teaching him Hinduism, has not hid his Hinduism; rather, he has sought to ground his very support for “Judeo-Christian values” in his Hinduism, grounding it in caste pride and positioning it as proximate to whiteness. His colleague, Kash Patel, who is slated to run the FBI under Trump, has similarly defended the Hindutva movement’s leadership and agenda in India, speaking conspiratorially of their being targeted by the media and the “Washington establishment.”
While these figures are the most visible signs of a convergence between Hindu supremacy and MAGA, they are but outcomes of broader changes within the far-right, and within the Indian American community.
The story, as Gabbard’s own trajectory points to, begins with a note of devastating Democratic misjudgement and complacency. After all, for decades, Hindu supremacist organizations were primarily welcomed, like other immigrant communities, by liberal institutions and a Democratic Party that largely failed to recognize their racist underpinnings and that uncritically accepted its claims to represent a minority group. In this phase, organizations like Hindu American Foundation sought to present themselves as interfaith champions and civil rights advocates, the group even joining the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. It was in her earlier avatar as a progressive Democrat, after all, that Gabbard became the movement’s first high-profile champion, for which she received at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations, what was a full quarter of her 2014 war-chest.
But the rise of Trump altered Hindutva strategy, helping the movement shed its liberal mask. Hindutva’s alignment with white supremacy is less paradoxical than it seems, given that its leaders have, across their history, openly sought to emulate white supremacist movements, from Jim Crow racism and Nazism’s treatment of Jews. Hindutva’s view that Hindus are a majority oppressed in their own country closely matches MAGA’s view that whites and Christians are oppressed in the United States, and the two movements have a shared hatred for Muslims, with VHP-A members having longstanding ties to prominent anti-Muslim figures in the MAGA movement, including Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Laura Loomer.
But the large-scale reorientation of the movement still took years, and its final direction was perhaps only set in place when Steve Bannon joined the Republican Hindu Coalition as honorary chairman in 2019, a moment that signaled MAGA’s openness to non-white far-right movements.
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