Back in 2022, four years before the US rejected President Donald Trump’s politics of hate in last week’s midterm election, academic Akhila L. Ananth wrote a poignant confessional piece in the Los Angeles Times titled: “As a Hindu, I can’t stay silent about injustices in India—committed in the name of our faith.” She reached this conclusion after years of wrestling with a contradiction in her life.

Akhila’s Brahmin family had instilled in her the idea that her observance of Hindu religious traditions would make her a proud Indian. She learned South Indian classical dance and attended Hindu Sunday school. Her upbringing had also taught her to value progressive ideas, inspiring her to join multiracial groups to advocate for them.

The conflicting pull of tradition and modernity on Akhila would play out at community gatherings in California. Akhila would smile at “uncles and aunties” with feigned warmth, apprehensive of engaging them in conversations over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies, particularly those targeting Muslims.

One fine day, Akhila decided to break her silence on the happenings in India in the name of her faith. She explained in the Los Angeles Times piece, “How can I speak about injustice in the US while ignoring India?”

Akhila’s awakening was shaped by her experience of being a religious minority in the US; a minority that is the majority community in India. Religiously and racially targeted since Trump made immigration the pivot of his politics of polarisation, America’s Hindus have rejoiced at the reversals his Republican Party suffered in the midterm election.

Equally gleeful was the Hindu middle class in India. Its members looked upon the results as Trump’s comeuppance for his immigration policy that threatens to curtail the stay of their children working or studying there—and exposes them to abuse, discrimination, and violence. They hope Trump’s setbacks will persuade him to temper his policies.

Yet this is also the moment for a large segment of the Hindu middle class, in the US and India, to introspect: should they not, like Akhila, speak out against the relentless demonising of religious minorities by Modi and the BJP? Religious minorities whose forefathers, unlike much of the Indian-American diaspora, came to India or were converted from Hinduism centuries ago.

Along with this lesson from the midterm election results comes another: Hindu politicians in India can’t trump the BJP’s politics of hate unless their homilies on religious tolerance are underpinned by an inclusive, radical economic programme. This is what enabled Abdul El-Sayed to win the Senate seat in Michigan and Nithya Raman to be elected as the Mayor of Los Angeles.

Why the term Hindu

It is a conscious decision to use the term Hindu instead of Indian in this piece. Muslims and Sikhs in the Indian diaspora have been targeted since the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center—the former for their Islamic identity, the latter for being mistaken, because of their turbans, for the Taliban or Afghans. Their Indianness was seldom foregrounded in the assaults on them, either by their assailants or even by the media reporting these incidents.

Likewise, media reports mostly do not emphasise the Indianness of Hindus who have become new victims of hate in Trump’s second presidency. This is understandable, for discrimination against them involves disparaging or attacking Hindu religious symbols and identity.

A case in point is the widely reported story of a 19-year-old American who had planned to carry out a mass shooting at the Sri Venkateswara Swami Temple, roughly 40 miles west of Chicago. He failed because his gun jammed.

In addition to this incident, Nils Adler’s report for Al Jazeera—“US teen held over Hindu temple attack plot: Is anti-Indian racism rising?”—cites two other incidents from last year: an estimated 20 to 30 rounds were fired at a Krishna temple in Spanish Fork, Utah; and a break-in and vandalism occurred at a Hindu temple in Santa Clara, California.

When Trump imposed a fee of $1,00,000 on those seeking an H1-B visa in September last year, MAGA supporters launched an attack online against a 90-foot statue of Lord Hanuman in Texas. Republican leader Alexander Duncan tweeted, “Why are we allowing a false Hindu God to be here in Texas?” The storm over the statue goaded perturbed Hindus into declaring that they were Americans, enjoying the right under the Constitution to follow their religion. Their assertion didn’t dissuade rightwing activists from disrupting a Diwali event in Seattle on November 7.

Trump’s policy of discouraging migration has given a fillip to nativism, with his white American supporters claiming Indians are stealing their jobs. Yet in attacking them, they bring the Hindu identity into their crosshairs, perhaps because Indians who head major corporations are almost all Hindu, such as Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and Arvind Krishna… The list is long and impressive.

Add to this the growing presence of Hindu Americans in the political arena—FBI Director Kash Patel; Vivek Ramaswamy, who lost the election for Governor of Ohio; Pooja Sethi, who became the first South Asian woman elected to the Texas House of Representatives last week; and even Usha Vance, the US Vice President’s wife. The visibility of Hindus has led to the spawning of baseless conspiracy theories.

Conspiracists, for instance, claim that there exists a “Brahmin Organised Government”. This theory was parsed by Prasiddha Sudhakar, a board member of the Network Contagion Research Institute, New Jersey, for the NPR, a nonprofit media outlet: “This is the idea of, oh, there’s like this elitist group of people that are of high class, high privilege that are sort of occupying the entire government, that this is all like some sort of secret ploy.”

Politics of polarisation

Such canards wound Hindus in the US. Their demonisation creates conditions for discrimination, vilification, and violence against them. Their bruising experiences of being a religious minority in Trump’s America should have them reflect on what Muslims and Christians have been undergoing since Modi came to power in 2014. Like Trump, Modi has resorted to the politics of polarisation through divisive laws and inflammatory speeches.

Muslims have been vilified on a daily basis, assaulted for their religious identities, their places of worship dubiously claimed to be temples, lynched on the suspicion of consuming beef, accused of changing the country’s demography by encouraging illegal infiltration, systematically disenfranchised by deleting their names from electoral rolls, their sense of belonging to India doubted and their citizenship questioned… The list is long and depressing.

Those in the Hindu middle class who are enchanted by Hindutva should, based on the harrowing experiences of their kith and kin in the US, unequivocally oppose its politics of hate. This would be an act of atonement for including a bulldozer, a symbol of oppression for Muslims, in the 2022 Independence Day parade in Edison, New Jersey. On the same day, in Anaheim, California, they were hostile to a group protesting violence against Muslims in India.

Their introspection should make them ponder over what civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr said decades ago, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” It’s an irony that the Hindutvawadis’ hatred of Muslims made them support Trump’s presidential campaign, believing he’d torment them as none before, only to discover he has turned Americans against Hindus.

Undoubtedly, hate can’t merely be banished by speeches. Zohran Mamdani earlier and Abdul El-Sayed and Nithya Raman last week showed that religious identities become incidental when people are united by issues of wages, jobs, affordable healthcare, and education. This is even more true when they take on, to quote El-Sayed, Michigan’s Senator-elect, “corporations and billionaires, special interests who’ve rigged the system”.

Hate is both an ideology and a political tool to pre-empt a democratic uprising against the oppressive, wealthy elite. This is as true of the US as it is of India. The Hindu middle class, in India and the US, needs to take the leap of faith that Akhila took.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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