Hindu American Foundation Seeks Trump’s Endorsement of Its Sectarian ‘Hindu American Project 2025’

The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) lost no time in writing to President-elect Trump, seeking his endorsement of its Hindu American policy and issue priorities for 2025. HAF heralded the plan as the “Hindu American Project 2025,” an obsequious nod to Project 2025, whose implementation even in parts would mean disastrous consequences for millions of Americans, including Indian Americans.

As a Khabar magazine story noted, “This overarching right-wing manifesto, besides being a grave threat to American democracy, is also an oblique assault on all marginalized communities.” The author warned that Project 2025 could result in “Decreased enforcement and continued politicization of the civil service…[and] create an environment ripe for discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” 

It is deeply distressing that HAF, which claims to be a civil rights organization, would flippantly take the name of Project 2025, which threatens even its own constituency, instead of condemning it. 

In my view, HAF’s policies and priorities for 2025 are mostly about its own grievances and do not include any action aimed at defending the fundamental rights of all Indian Americans. While HAF frequently speaks for Hindu minorities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, it is shameful that it has absolutely nothing to say about the widespread hate and violence being perpetrated against Muslim and Christian minorities in India by the very organizations with whom it has had long-standing ties. This is sheer hypocrisy.

Take a look at some of HAF’s assertions:  

Hate Crimes: “Hindus have faced repeated incidents of state and federal law enforcement ignoring and dismissing clear, unambiguous crimes against Hindus and Hindu houses of worship.”

Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) has closely followed and condemned the recent series of vandalisms at several Hindu temples in New York and California and we note that local law enforcement has speedily identified the perpetrators in most cases. However, we have not seen any credible evidence to support HAF’s claim that law enforcement is dismissive of Hindus. 

The way the process works, the FBI defines what constitutes a hate crime; local law enforcement agencies identify and report hate crimes in their jurisdiction per those definitions; and the FBI consolidates the data to publish its annual nationwide Hate Crimes statistics. 

What’s revealing about the data for the past few years is that anti-Hindu hate crimes have been consistently at the bottom end of over thirty communities. In fact, hate crimes against Sikhs, Muslims, and Jews are many orders of magnitude more than anti-Hindu crimes. 

In my view, HAF’s grievance against law enforcement comes from its own anxiety to get more compelling statistics on anti-Hindu crimes in order to justify its claims of widespread Hinduphobia. Perhaps, its zeal to classify every act of vandalism or robbery at Hindu temples as “anti-Hindu” does not always comport with the FBI’s criteria, e.g. the attack on a Gandhi statue situated on temple property. 

In any case, it is important to note that this debate may be moot if Project 25’s recommendation to abolish all data collection on race and ethnicity is implemented by the Trump administration. 

Dual Loyalty: “Hindu Americans are increasingly accused of dual loyalty and being foreign agents of Indian Prime Minister Modi, the BJP, and/or the Government of India…“Hindu nationalism” or “Hindutva” is intentionally oversimplified and weaponized to demonize and marginalize Hindu Americans.”

All allegations against HAF are clearly laid out in a detailed research report, HAF Way to Supremacy, published by the Savera Coalition. There is absolutely nothing in that report to “demonize and marginalize” Hindu Americans, as HAF falsely claims. Nor does the report use the phrase “dual loyalty.”  

Clearly, HAF is projecting allegations against itself onto the entire Hindu American community — a tactic perfected in Gujarat by Modi to turn all accusations against him into alleged accusations against all Gujaratis. As Seema Chishti writes in The Wire, “It is a catchy hook to hold onto – in Gujarat, it was ‘six crore Gujaratis,’ to try and turn all criticism and concerns into a case of ‘hurt Gujarati asmita.’ Modi has translated that to ‘140 crore’ now.”  

Transnational Repression: “…pro-Khalistan sympathizers and even some Progressive advocacy organizations have perpetuated a narrative that Hindu Americans and Indian American immigrants are agents of transnational repression (TNR), purportedly endangering the lives of other religious minority communities…” 

HAF’s vocal opposition to proposed laws to combat transnational repression (TNR) is yet another instance of HAF putting its own paranoia and victim complex over the urgent need for state protection of citizens facing threats from foreign governments – in this case, threats from the Modi government against fellow Indian American activists (details here and here).

HFHR supports proposed TNR laws based on our own experience as a frequent target of the Modi government and its supporters in the US: A frivolous SLAPP lawsuit to shut us down; unfounded allegations by Modi’s IT Cell; a direct attack on our executive director, Sunita, by Smita Irani, a senior minister under Modi, who went on India’s national TV to deliver a blistering and baseless attack, brandishing her photograph and accusing her of a conspiracy with Rahul Gandhi and George Soros to “destroy India”; blocking of HfHR’s X account in India, without any explanation; and, more recently, hate mails and threats against our staff and management, including a direct threat against me, which is being investigated by the FBI (see below).

The TNR bill proposed in California, AB3027, would have assured activists like me of the state’s commitment “to protect individuals and organizations against transnational repression.” It would have also required the state to “develop transnational repression recognition and response training that would include how to identify different tactics of transnational repression…”

It is hard to see why HAF would oppose such efforts to discourage TNR. Blocking the passage of AB3027 in my view is tantamount to working against the safety of fellow Indian Americans who’re speaking the truth about the Modi rule. 

Caste: “Caste policies are among the most misguided and excessive DEI initiatives emerging on college campuses and at the state and local levels. These policies deny Hindu and Indian Americans equal protection under the law, codify divisive, false, negative stereotypes about them, and import divisive Indian caste politics and conflate them with South Asian Americans.”  

HAF packs so many allegations into one sentence that it is hard for anyone to untangle them to create a meaningful rejoinder. Nonetheless, I would argue that staunch opposition by HAF to simple and straightforward steps to clarify the current civil rights statutes is actually “denying equal protection” under the law to Hindu and Indian American Dalits. The fact is that everyone, including HAF, agrees that caste discrimination is covered under “ancestry” in our civil rights laws. But we also know that there is as yet no legal precedent for such an interpretation; hence no guarantee that a judge would accept someone else’s interpretation of the law not codified into the law. 

That was the very reason for SB403 in California, which was unfortunately vetoed by Governor Newsom. The bill would have merely clarified that caste discrimination is covered under discrimination on account of ancestry and would have added a clear definition of caste. 

HAF provided no proof of potential damage to “Hindus and Indian Americans” by merely ensuring that the laws provide minimal guidance to employers, universities, and the courts on how to handle caste discrimination complaints. This shows how important it is for HAF ideologically to oppose any mention of the word “caste” in our laws!

In sum, HAF’s 2025 priorities are all about self-serving grievances and nothing that speaks to any positive contribution to the lives of Hindu/Indian Americans. On the contrary, its seeming embrace of Trump and his Project 2025 is a betrayal of the inclusive and pluralistic values that most Indian Americans cherish.

But it’s not HAF’s self-serving priorities that irk me most, but the realization that over the years HAF has helped narrow what used to be collective advocacy for the common interests of all Indian Americans, into a purely parochial effort, as if Hindu Americans are a separate nation. As a result, HAF has been making every effort to divide Indian Americans along faith lines, to mirror Modi’s aim of creating an exclusive Hindu Rashtra. But in reality, HAF is merely representing Brahmanical interests and serves only the privileged, upper-caste, Hindu Americans.

To me, HAF’s mission is now clearer than ever: Its raison d’etre is to support and defend Hindutva forces in India, including the Modi government. Its modus operandi, in coordination with Hindu PACs, is to either convince or buy off lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to do their bidding; “Strategic Victimhood” is its preferred pathway to fund-raising, which exploits wedge issues in the community to continually portray Hindus as victims and HAF as the cavalry riding in to save them at every turn.

It’s a pity that HAF is so steeped in Hindutva ideology and requires a constant supply of Hindu victimhood to survive that it has no incentive to debate and resolve conflicts within the Indian American community.  

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Raju Rajagopal is a co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights USA, and a founding member of the Savera coalition.