Hindu Supremacy and the Multiracial U.S. Far Right

However, the participation of Indian Americans—even Hindutva acolytes like Ramaswamy^[10]—in such an arena raises thornier questions, given their position in the U.S. as ethnic and religious minorities. One NatCon speaker, Doug Wilson, proposed a ban on Hindus entering American elected office just weeks prior.^[11] Ramaswamy was likewise pilloried by evangelical pastors, despite his strenuous attempts to position himself as a Hindu champion for Judeo-Christian values.^[12]

Despite such tensions, there is growing alignment between the Far Right and the Hindutva movement, which is helmed in the U.S. by a network known collectively as the American Sangh.^[13] From the participation of Hindu supremacists in the January 6th insurrection^[14] and the involvement of American Sangh leaders in the Edward Blum-led campaign to dismantle affirmative action^[15] to the creation of new Political Action Committees (PACs) like the Bannon-led Republican Hindu Coalition,^[16] evidence of this convergence continues to emerge.

These proliferating alliances reveal the need for a transnational understanding of the Far Right and the forces bringing various movements together. Examining the American Sangh’s convergence with the U.S. Far Right requires an analysis of Hindutva’s place in U.S. politics and the encounter between racial logics at this juncture. It also raises the specter of much broader developments: the American Sangh’s pursuit of power through proximity to Whiteness, the possibility that racial politics within parts of the U.S. Far Right might be less rigid than assumed,^[17] and, consequently, the signs of an emerging Multiracial Far Right.

What Is Hindu Supremacy?

Hindutva, or Hindu supremacy, is an ethnonationalist political movement that aspires to the absolute political hegemony of Hindus in India and the violent subordination of all minorities in the country.^[18] Although its proponents often conflate the movement with the Hindu religion to claim its legitimacy, Hindu supremacy actively seeks to reshape what it means to be Hindu, drawing more on theories of caste and race than faith or spirituality.^[19]

For over a century, Hindu supremacists have drawn inspiration from American and European fascism. M.S. Golwalkar, the long-serving Sarsanghchalak^[20] (supreme leader) of the RSS, expressed his open admiration for Nazi Germany as a model worthy of emulation.^[21] One of Golwalkar’s inspirations and a founding Hindutva ideologue, V.D. Savarkar, explicitly invoked the status of Black Americans while describing his desired positioning of Muslims in India.^[22] Another ideologue, B.S. Moonje, traveled to Italy in the early 1930s to study Mussolini’s Fascist movement—and its influence remains visible in the RSS’s paramilitary training, uniforms, and focus on youth indoctrination.^[23]  Such exchanges were formative in the movement’s early decades, which overlapped with late colonial rule, as Hindutva ideologues—largely elite Brahmin men concerned about their political fortunes in a nascent democracy—sought to define Hindu supremacy amid competing imaginations of what India was and could be.

In contrast to the (relatively) pluralistic visions of India’s founders, Hindutva was animated by a racialized understanding of Hindu identity as the basis of Indian nationhood. Anxious about the purported degeneracy and weakness of a Hindu race, the movement’s leaders promised an assertive and violent Hindu resurgence. As such, the RSS’s chilling fascination with European fascism was not just ideological but organizational in its desire to build totalizing organizations that would touch, mold, and eventually replace every layer of society.^[24] This “organicist”^[25] approach required nothing less than re-socialization through intense physical training, cultural organizing, and an assiduous fixation on Hindu “unity.” Once achieved, the RSS’s founders believed, political results would follow, like fruit dropping from a ripe tree.^[26]

The Origins of Hindu Supremacy in the U.S.

Given the RSS’s ambitions, it was unsurprising that its organizing extended beyond India’s borders. Shortly after India’s independence, Golwalkar oversaw the RSS’s expansion in Southeast Asia and East Africa.^[27] In the 1960s, as Indian professionals began to migrate in large numbers to the Global North, he turned his focus there.

On Golwalkar’s suggestion, Mahesh Mehta, an RSS pracharak (full-time worker), founded the VHP of America (VHP-A), the apex Hindu supremacist organization in the U.S., in 1970. ^[28] Mehta, whose father was an RSS worker, met Golwalkar at the age of 10 and considered him his guru, and built the American Sangh on Golwalkar’s explicit orders. ^[29]

However, even as Mehta went about building the VHP-A for many decades, the question of how exactly the movement would relate to U.S. politics remained unanswered. The VHP-A’s early members had relatively transient ties to their new country. They spoke of the U.S. as their karmabhoomi (“land of work”), and their efforts as ultimately in service of their janmabhoomi (homeland, “land of birth”).

Accordingly, organizations like the VHP-A and the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS)^[30]—the direct equivalent of the RSS, which similarly focuses on organizing members in “shakhas” or branches—cultivated an influential set of upper-caste immigrants who often had backgrounds in the Indian Sangh. ^[31] Familiar with Indian politics, they mobilized their time and resources to respond to the Sangh’s priorities in India and said little about U.S. politics.^[32] For example, the VHP-A and its affiliates orchestrated tours and conferences in the U.S. for their Indian counterparts, including at crucial junctures when the Sangh felt marginalized or under threat—such as India’s Emergency period.^[33] In the late 1980s, when the Ram Janmabhoomi movement^[34] propelled Hindutva into the Indian mainstream, the American Sangh offered political, moral and financial support to the cause.^[35] They traveled back to India to support the movement,^[36] and in the late 1990s, created lobbying wings like the Overseas Friends of the BJP,^[37] and fundraising wings like the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation USA.^[38] Following the 2002 Gujarat pogroms, which saw over 2,000 Muslims killed under the watch of Gujarat’s then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the American Sangh mobilized to protect Modi and attack critics of Hindu supremacy.^[39]

Caste and Whiteness

Even if the VHP-A did not name and acknowledge it, the American Sangh’s growth was shaped by social structures and policies that orient its current relationship to U.S. politics, and to race and White supremacy. This includes the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended decades of Asian exclusion under the 1924 Immigration Act and abolished the national-origins quota. Although the law was in part a hard-won outcome of the Civil Rights Movement, it also explicitly prioritized STEM professionals, structured as it was by Cold War logics.^[40]

The early decades of Indian American immigration were therefore dominated by Indian elites: Brahmin and other upper-caste professionals who satisfied the criteria of the new law, and who had the cultural and financial capital to avail of the opportunity to migrate. These immigrants often belonged to groups that were core to the Hindu Far Right’s base,^[41] and they came to the U.S. shaped by an imaginary of Whiteness.^[42] Consequently, they understood their migration and success within the parameters of neoliberalism and White supremacy, as expressed in how well they conformed to the category of the “model minority.” This pursuit of Whiteness had a precedent. In the early twentieth century, upper-caste immigrants from India made claims to Whiteness—and U.S. citizenship—in court based on their upper-caste or “Aryan” status.^[43]

After 1965, when these mostly caste-privileged Indian immigrants came to the U.S. in large numbers, they were accommodated within a nascent multiculturalism’s politics of representation. Because the first post-1965 Indian immigrants were largely upper-caste and Hindu, the norms they brought with them came to define “Indian” culture.^[44] This offered the Hindutva movement an easy entry point into U.S. society, and a source of cultural power it has struggled to protect.

Americanizing Hindutva

When a coalition of progressive, secular, and multi-faith groups pressured the U.S. government to deny Modi a U.S. visa in 2005 for his oversight of the Gujarat pogrom, the American Sangh had little recourse. Until this point, the movement had little engagement with U.S. politics.

However, years before Modi’s visa ban, second-generation American Sangh leaders had already begun to argue for a more sophisticated organizational strategy that could build power within American politics.^[45] They argued that the movement’s overt supremacism caused PR embarrassments,^[46] and that the movement’s failure to ground itself in U.S. politics prevented them from forging a “Hindu American”—rather than a Hindu or Hindu supremacist—political identity. The new identity would appeal to a new U.S.-raised generation and allow the American Sangh to claim domestic political representation while foreclosing accusations that they were proxies of a foreign network.^[47]

One key figure leading this critique was Mihir Meghani, a U.S.-born co-founder of the American Sangh’s student wing, the Hindu Students Council (HSC). By the late 1990s, Meghani was already a veteran of the VHP-A and HSS, and had returned from a stint with the RSS in India, where he attended its upper-tier training camp for overseas Sangh organizers, the Vishwa Sangh Shibir.^[48] Meghani and his colleagues’ call for a professionalized, PR-savvy instrument to advance the Hindutva cause in the U.S. eventually took shape in the form of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which was founded in 2003 with language that eschewed overt supremacism in favor of “advocacy” for “pluralism,” “civil rights,” and “human rights.”^[49]

HAF’s strategic moderation allowed the organization to emphasize a minority identity in the U.S. while downplaying its far-right ideology. Doing so allowed HAF to claim to represent all Hindu Americans—a claim often conflated with representation of all Indian Americans—even as it relied on the Hindutva movement for financial, logistical, and political support. Indeed, HAF continued to work with and receive funding from other American Sangh groups, aggressively defended the Modi regime on Capitol Hill, and advanced the movement’s casteism and anti-Muslim bigotry within the U.S.^[50]

In the process, HAF developed an American articulation of Hindutva that used rights-based language, all while framed in opposition to other communities’ civil rights. For example, one of HAF’s first major actions, in consort with the HSS in 2005, involved a campaign to rewrite California’s history and social science textbooks, particularly on the topic of caste.^[51]

In the foreign policy sphere, HAF’s commitments to minority rights and international religious freedom were similarly selective. HAF repeatedly proved unwilling to apply the same principles to India and the BJP, attacking such efforts as “anti-Hindu” and thus conflating political critiques of Hindu supremacy with a violation of Hindu American rights.^[52] And because the nuances of such intra-community conflict were illegible to those outside the community, HAF often received a pass from uninformed observers reluctant to choose sides.

The Hindutva Monopoly is Challenged

However, even as organizations like HAF grew, the structural advantages that Hindu supremacists had benefitted from were themselves eroding. Indian migration to the U.S. has become more diverse across class, caste and religion—as is evident in the growing presence of Dalit communities, and in the fact that Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and other faith groups together make up 31 percent of the diaspora,^[53] significantly more than the equivalent figure in India. Meanwhile, opposition to Hindu supremacy among Hindus has grown, most notably on generational lines.^[54]

These groups have developed more expansive articulations of Indian American identity, building bridges with other communities of color and with various racial, gender, economic and climate justice movements.^[55] Such exchanges have made internal fissures such as those of caste, class, and religion within the Indian American community more legible. For example, when Hindutva groups formed alliances with the anti-Muslim Far Right after 9/11,^[56] their Islamophobia alienated non-South Asian Muslim groups, making their misalignment with a politics of collective liberation painfully obvious. ^[57]

This was only made clearer by two further developments. While the American Sangh became more confident and assertive following Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014, his regime’s growing attacks on minorities also sparked opposition from Hindus, who began organizing against Hindutva grounded in a progressive reading of the Hindu faith. Moreover, those years also witnessed the rapid growth of anti-caste movements in the U.S., from efforts to recognize caste as a protected category in workplaces and universities to contestations over the content of social studies textbooks in California’s public schools.^[58] The American Sangh proved unable to see these anti-caste movements as anything but an existential threat. After all, even admitting the existence of caste would have disturbed the edifice on which U.S. Hindutva is built: the assertion of a homogenous ethnic identity, without internal differentiations, animated solely by a claim to minority victimhood.

The American Sangh’s responses to anti-caste activism revealed more of its true nature—and prompted its open alignment with the U.S. Far Right’s crusades against equal opportunity. Explicitly borrowing from White supremacists who opposed the Civil Rights Act and anti-LGBTQ+ bigots seeking bans on gender-affirming healthcare, the American Sangh’s rhetoric began to spread the narrative that instituting civil rights and protections for marginalized groups threatens the rights of Hindu communities.^[59]Just as the U.S. Far Right mobilized against “Critical Race Theory” by deeming it “anti-White,”^[60] U.S. Hindu supremacists have used the notion of “Critical Caste Theory”^[61] to manufacture a sense of victimhood by falsely claiming that the movement to ban caste discrimination is itself discriminatory against Hindu Americans.^[62]

In mobilizing such narratives, American Hindutva, first framed as an exclusionary defense of Hindu American rights, found its way to overt expressions of supremacy.

Toward a Republican Hindutva

In 2019, when Steve Bannon added his name to the Republican Hindu Coalition, it was a watershed moment. Bannon’s approval signaled that the U.S. Far Right was opening up to its Hindutva counterparts. It was likely the first time the word “Republican” was expressed alongside the identity “Hindu.”^[63]

The support of one of the country’s most well-known White supremacists inspired a range of Hindu supremacists to build power with the Far Right. U.S. Hindutva leaders, including staffers and affiliates of groups like HAF and VHP-A, joined efforts to support the Trump campaign, including formations like “Hindus for Trump.”^[64] It was clear which way the wind was blowing, and the VHP-A, which had been overshadowed by HAF for two decades, took the initiative in spearheading this shift.^[65]

For example, in 2019, a year ahead of the 2020 elections, VHP-A members helped establish Americans4Hindus, a PAC “set up in response to recent anti-India and anti-Hindu statements and actions by members of the Progressive Caucus (‘PC’) of the Democratic party that have aggrieved a large swath of the Hindu American community.”^[66] A4H platformed a range of White supremacist leaders,^[67] and although the PAC claims to be nonpartisan, it has consistently and almost exclusively endorsed and fundraised for Republican candidates for office, including Trump himself.^[68]

By the 2020s, Hindu supremacist leaders began to openly strategize ways to spark a wholesale shift of the community to the Republican Party. Vibhuti Jha, a VHP-A affiliate, ran for office on a Republican ticket in New York, and began to develop an online platform that called out “HINOs”—“Hindu in Name Only,” a riff on “Republican in Name Only”—who remained in the Democratic Party.^[69]

One of Jha’s close associates, Manga Anantatmula, another VHP-A affiliate, played a key role in the successful effort to end affirmative action at the Supreme Court, and has since used her profile to run for office in three Republican primaries. Many others have followed suit, with the more successful among them, like Vivek Ramaswamy, opening the looming possibility that more members of the community could follow his path into the Far Right. Between 2016 and 2020, Indian American support for Trump nearly doubled, from 15 percent to 28 percent.^[70] In 2024, this figure is only expected to grow, led by the Hindu Far Right.

Challenging the Multiracial Far Right

The Hindutva movement’s open embrace of the broader Far Right, while unsurprising, was not inevitable. More than a set of politics imported from India, the movement’s strategic turn emerges out of escalating crises and the Far Right’s growth globally.

Today, only 54 percent of Indian Americans identify as Hindu^[71] and support for Hindutva is contested among them.^[72] The American Sangh’s effort to couch Hindutva in the language of liberal multiculturalism appears both increasingly precarious—and, given the Far Right’s ascendancy, far less attractive than an overt politics of reactionary grievance and resentment. The American Sangh’s movement toward the Far Right is likely to accelerate, inspired by the model of the pro-Israel movement^[73] in its pursuit of a dual positioning: simultaneously White-adjacent and an aggrieved minority. Even if this rightward shift becomes unpopular among Indian Americans, it could be advanced by brute force, wealthy donors, and whatever structural advantages the Hindu Far Right retains. In this regard, the American Sangh looks poised to follow their far-right partners in an anti-democratic pursuit of minority rule.

The path ahead to contest these shifts may not be fully clear, but one thing is: challenging U.S. Hindutva cannot be seen merely as an internal struggle among Indian Americans. The history of the American Sangh exemplifies the ways in which far-right actors of color rely on the isolation of our struggles around lines of identity and the dismissal of some politics as esoteric or distant to burrow into the holes in our democratic coalitions. As events like NatCon offer clear evidence of a far-right convergence, anti-supremacist movements must connect to build power and develop an integrated fight against all forms of supremacy.