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.
Given the movement’s cultural and economic advantages – the Hindu American community, even in contrast to other Indian Americans, like Muslims and Sikhs, are positioned as the ’softest’ immigrant community in the US, the ultimate model minority – the political metamorphosis of Yankee Hindutva into Trumpism did not prove difficult. Elite operators within the community have found it strikingly easy to make a leap from liberal technocracy into a new, vengeful, MAGA avatar.
Following Bannon’s endorsement of a Hindutva-MAGA alliance, and Trump’s embrace of Modi at the September 2019 “Howdy Modi” event that followed, groups like HAF and VHP-A began to adopt Trumpian idioms with gusto. The Hindu American Foundation joined anti-ethnic studies coalitions attacking progressive education. VHP-A members launched a number of pro-MAGA PACs, including Americans4Hindus, which is explicitly aligned against the Progressive Caucus. One VHP-A official participated in the January 6 insurrection. Hindutva leaders have since rubbed shoulders with the who’s who of MAGA, most recently at the 2024 National Conservatism conference.
In addition to these moves in US politics, Hindu supremacists continued attacks on the Indian American community itself. In recent years, Hindu supremacist organizations have spuriosly linked Indian-origin Muslims and Sikhs to terrorism; raised money to demolish churches in India; and opposed protections against caste discrimination as a “DEI excess,” embarking on a series of failed legal challenges against them. Such acts would often be buried as skirmishes internal to a community, but in this new MAGA-adjacent form, reactionary positions often smoothly extended from intra-community contestations to broader inter-community political questions. Manga Anantatmula, a VHP-A member, joined efforts to end affirmative action in college admissions in 2015, and VHP-A has sought to separate Indian Americans from other immigrant communities by claiming they skipped the “ghetto stage” of immigration (this ignores undocumented Indian Americans, who are the third-largest undocumented population in the U.S.).
Not all of the movement toward MAGA, as such, has been voluntary. It is also true that Hindutva has grown increasingly exposed in liberal circles, with sections of the Democratic Party beginning to see through some of the lies peddled by Hindutva outfits. Democratic Party leaders, including both of New Jersey’s senators, condemned the parading of a bulldozer, a prominent Hindu supremacist symbol, at an India Day parade. California Democrats voted overwhelmingly to pass SB403, a bill protecting Californians against caste discrimination, despite tremendous pressure from HAF (the bill was later vetoed by Gavin Newsom after extensive lobbying by Hindutva-aligned donors). California’s AAPI legislative caucus condemned HAF’s sister PAC’s use of “dangerous rhetoric” to “mischaracterize” a bill that sought to protect Americans against transnational repression—including assassinations—by the Indian state (in addition to Russia, Iran, and China). Given its long list of harms, it appears increasingly difficult for the movement to genuinely find its way around pro-democratic spaces.
Increasingly, it appears willing to abandon the facade of liberalism it had previously pursued. And why not? Given its massive resources, favorable geopolitical winds, and a growing set of shared perceived enemies (Muslims, "woke" leftists, undocumented immigrants, etc) with the MAGA movement, the US Hindutva movement might see a way to build a significant degree of influence in the far-right despite its lack of demographic heft. In the process, this small set of Hindu American leaders can not only overcome any tensions with being a brown, Hindu face for Trumpism, but actually fit into and accelerate it.
Despite these pull and push factors driving it, the convergence between MAGA and Hindu supremacy will not be without tensions. The evangelical core of Trump’s base views Hindus as pagans, and figures like Ramaswamy have faced open bigotry. Recent tussles over the H1B visa have exposed another fault line. But the question that surrounds Ramaswamy, Patel and Gabbard, and the Hindu supremacist project more broadly is whether representation at the top will succeed in breaking the longstanding liberal commitments of the Indian American community – Hindu or otherwise – and erase the painful and ongoing history of white supremacist and racist attacks by those within the MAGA coalition.
That Hindu supremacists have still found such prominence attests that, under Trump, much is flexible and negotiable so long as you endorse MAGA’s vitriol against liberals and buy into similar moral panics. This was only more visible around November’s election, where the Hindutva movement received targeted outreach from Trump himself, including a notable tweet prompted by the founder of Hindus for America First, a pro-MAGA Hindutva PAC. Now that Trump has won again, Hindu supremacists have fallen over each other in cozying up to the new administration. Every major Hindu supremacist group has endorsed or congratulated Trump on his victory. HAF—still a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which is leading the pushback against Project 2025—described its reactionary policy platform as a “Hindu American Project 2025.”
Evidently, groups like VHP-A and HAF, with figureheads like Gabbard, Ramaswamy, and Patel, are embarking on an ambitious challenge: pulling Indian Americans into the MAGA far-right. This is likely to prove difficult. Nearly half of Indian Americans are non-Hindu, and most Indian Americans have consistently taken positions against MAGA on issues including reproductive rights to climate action. Even among Hindu Americans, Hindutva’s appeal remains limited, as many reject its divisive politics as a betrayal of their faith’s pluralistic traditions.
What happens next depends on how liberal institutions and the Democratic Party respond. Will they recognize the complexity of immigrant communities, and counteract the far-right fringes within them? Or will they continue to overlook this threat, risking further division within their own base? And will the majority of the Indian American community, who have little truck with this supremacist alliance, reject this move? The stakes are high, and the time for decisive action is now.
For comments write to: kumar.usha@proton.me