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Welcome to the Cast podcast, where we assemble scholars, activists, community organizers, artists and others to make sense of what caste is, how it works, how it's experienced, and how it has traveled and taken root both inside and outside of South Asia. What have people done to perpetuate, transform, and even attempt to abolish caste? I'm your host, Ajantha Subramanian, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, and joining me today are Prachi and Ram and who are both organizers with Savera United Against Supremacy, a multiracial, interfaith, anti caste coalition of Indian Americans and partners standing together in the fight against the rise of the transnational far right. In 2024, Savera published three exhaustively documented and illuminating reports on Hindu supremacy. The first two reports focus on the ideological, organizational and financial links between the Indian and US branches of the Hindu supremacist organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council. And the third report focuses on a newer entity, the Hindu American foundation, in order to illuminate its role as a key node in the global Hindu supremacist movement. We're going to provide links to these reports in the show Notes And I strongly, strongly recommend that listeners who are alarmed by the rise of the far right take, take the time to read them. So, welcome to the podcast. Rachi and Rang, thank you so much for having us.
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C
Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.
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B
All right, awesome. So let's start with a question about the coalition. When and why did Savera come together?
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A
Yeah, thank you, Ajinta, for having us here. I can start with. Well, Saveda, the groups that are part of SAVADA have been around for many years and in some cases actually decades. And some have worked on tracking Hindutva's transnational finance, student organizing of the Sangh, anti caste legislation, and a range of other work. But Saveda itself came out of a sense, first, that we needed to work together in a coalition proactively and consistently rather than in an ad hoc way. And second, because we began to see the struggle against Hindutva and also caste as something much bigger than an intra community skirmish, but in fact part of a broader fight for a just multiracial democracy. So Savira came together three years ago as a multiracial, interfaith, anti caste coalition to push back against supremacist movements in all forms. And our belief was that while fighting the far right most crucially involves a challenge to white supremacy, progressive movements within communities of color and religious minorities within the US Must also confront supremacists and reactionary strengths within our own communities too. And many of these cases, like the Hindutva movement, far right alliances are both transnational and then the United States manifest as a multiracial right. And I will talk about that soon. But these often go unnoticed by most Americans who look at these tendencies as kind of POC groups within a superficial idea of multiculturalism. And so CIVETA groups within it who founded it felt that we needed to intervene here to make the dangers posed by Hindu far right clear to also progressive actors who are challenging the emergence of far right ideologies in the US So the core coalition as it stands now includes Hindus for Human Rights and the late Solidarity Forum, aksc who's grad that you have spoken to them already, Indian American Muslim Council, Sikh Coalition and India CEBLabwatch International, as well as Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And because the Hindu rights emergence and those of other immigrant communities will have a bearing on the US far right and the future of progressive politics. So, you know, we know all of these groups, we've talked about how we all have a stake in this fight. And so our coalition is, that's why it's intentionally Multiracial, it's interfaith, it's anti caste. So we have organizations like Movement for Black Lives and Standing up for Racial justice and Political Resource Associates and Diaspora Alliance. These are groups that we've been kind of together, standing and working with through their guidance, based on their own struggles, and also advising and working together and walking together. And this reflects really our core understanding that struggle against Hindu supremacy is intrinsically linked to the broader fight against the rising multiracial right and all forms of supremacist thought as well.
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C
Yeah, I think I would just add that what Prachi is describing it, when I think of it now, it sort of sounds almost axiomatic, like, of course, fighting the Hindu right is part of this sort of broad pro democratic struggle. But I think when Savira was coming to being, we actually sort of encountered and observed tendency in, in a lot of our own spaces to think of Hindutva as only a foreign policy issue, only something restricted to India. And of course, you know, that is fundamentally true in the sense that Hindutva is, you know, deeply, deeply involved in the destruction of democracy in India. But I think in doing so, we would often, or the sort of groups and the approaches that preceded Savira would often come across this sort of contradiction where the harms of Hindutva were very far away. And so we would constantly be deprioritized as a sort of foreign policy issue that would always be made secondary to geopolitical concerns. And so we would get sort of sympathetic conceptual nods like, yeah, we agree that this is concerning, this ideology and these movements pose a threat, but it's far away, it's not in our backyard. And so I think what we've really succeeded in doing in sort of driving up the salience of this question is perhaps moving from a frame of sort of abstract solidarity to actually one of shared interests that when we are speaking to progressive groups in the US we aren't asking them just to offer abstract solidarity with a faraway question, but actually suturing together different struggles and showing that the work against the Hindu right, or indeed a sort of multiracial right, is fundamental to building a stronger democracy and to fighting the far right in the US itself. And I think something like the 2024 elections, where you had so many groups of color move to the right, really made that quite visible.
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B
That's really helpful. We're going to get into all of that. But I wanted to first start by asking to define two key terms for our listeners. The first is Hindu supremacy, and the second is American sangh Both of these terms appear across the three reports. And we've already mentioned Hindu supremacy. Right. As a concept. So could you just lay out these two terms for us?
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Yeah, so let. So I think we understand Hindu supremacy, or Hindutva as we call it, as the political ideology promoted for over a century that tries to redefine Hinduism as a racial and political category based on caste, racial hierarchy and political power. So in this regard, a lot of the core tenants of the Hindu supremacy are drawn from and with inspiration from European fascist movements and how they sought to produce racialized ethnostates. And so I also think that it's important here to draw a critical distinction that we need to establish between Hinduism and Hindutva. So we view Hinduism as a set of expansive traditions, geographically philosophically diverse collection of spiritual practices that have never been really centrally organized. And then Hindutva is a modern political project to systematically consolidate and instrumentalize that tradition into like a single aggressive and exclusionist. Exclusionist kind of channel. It is not particularly interested in the substance of those traditions that it's seeming to kind of consume under it, but it cares only about that they are ethnically or racially coded as Hindu. So the danger is kind of here is a homogenization project. It seeks to erase internal debates, historical resistance, and really the pluralistic floor of what's happening in India in terms of these spiritual tendencies, and really attempting to impose a singular hierarchical Brahminical narrative as the only authentic form. So this is an aggressive political effort to seize this cultural and spiritual identity and repurpose it really as a weapon for state power. And the supremacists and Hindutva folks, they're trying to establish a Hindu state based on a very narrow interpretation of what they think is Hinduism. And also they pose it that only Hindus as they define them, of course, are the real Indians. And other religious minorities are second class citizens. And, you know, they can exist in India, but they have to be second class and then subject them to discrimination and mass violence. So their political agenda really necessitates that subordination of Muslims and sometimes expulsion of Muslims and Christians and other religious minorities. And then also intensifies. And we've seen this a lot in the last decade, oppression of Dalits and Adivasis, even as they attempt to consume them. They also the increase in violence and oppression against Dalits and Adivasis has continued. And then they also reject a secular, pluralistic India which is also trying to define the boundaries across Asia itself. So not just India, but other parts of Asia as kind of these based on these ancient Hindu scriptures that they're looking back to. And I just wanted to mention here because rss, which is Rashtriya Sabano Soyam Sayya Baksang is a Hindu nationalist volunteer organization that was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. It was attempted to promote, propagate Hindutva and this ideology. And it's seen by many. And there's the world's oldest and perhaps the longest running fascist movement. And it has been entirely dedicated to preserving this structure of Brahmanism. So we're talking about caste and its connection to Hindutva here. And so it's by extension, it is preserving caste hierarchy. And this commitment is really core to the ideology. And so if you look at RSS itself, the leadership even now is consistently Brahmin, even while the frontline fighters are recruited from lower caste and oppressed caste communities. So the hierarchy isn't just like a side effect. It is a very foundation of the supremacist movement. And the other thing it's important to note is that if you look at the emergence of the RSS through especially the lens of anti caste formations, RSS arose in reaction to a massive surge of anti caste sentiment. So you had Jyoti Bafule Satishodok movement and various non Brahmin traditions gaining real ground within lower caste Bahujan and Dalit masses. And so we also have to recognize that the creation of RSS itself was a direct response to these anti caste movements that were finally challenging Brahmanic hegemony and their kind of traditional and political societal dominance. So this origin story is important in understanding why caste question has been always central to the Hindu supremacist project.
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B
That's great. Of course, all of this is part of remaking the Indian state and remaking Indian society. How does this project then link up to the other term, Right, which is American Sung? What is the American Sung?
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C
Yeah, I can try and take that on. And I think in one word or in one sentence, the American Sung is the sort of segment or offshoot of this movement operating in the us And I think in these reports we use these terms, while drawing on a lot of both new and old work on the Sang that identifies it as a networked entity rather than a single organization or a single ideology. In that the RSS has consistently written about how it understands itself as sort of diffuse and variegated, but ultimately a singular network, in that its basic purpose is not just, I would say, to bring together all Hindus into a commitment to Hindutva, nor is it simply to achieve state power in India. But something a lot deeper, I think, which is to sort of cure Hindus from the effects of what it sees as millennia of weakness and emasculation. The RSS uses sort of sort of immunological language quite often to describe Hindus as a nation that requires organization to be quote unquote unified and quote unquote harmonized. And a lot of this is what we could call a sort of organicist ideology in that they see the Hindu nation as a single organism. And in that sense, this is sort of where ideology and material organization actually overlap in that the network is sort of envisioned as pre figurative for the ideology. And so the network is something that will touch each organ within this organism, including if those organs leave the sort of motherland. And I think organicism is really, I find it a really useful way to think of the Hindu far right because you actually see that both caste and Islamophobia are prefigured in the idea of organicism, because the idea of organicism proposes that society is a sort of natural, integral and systemic unit. And it would that inevitably implies a sort of binary of people who are natural or unnatural to that society, people who are internal and external to it. And so the Muslim, the Christian, and often the Sikh, when they don't conform to that organicist idea, are seen as foreign and seen as worthy of expulsion. But I think we also know that the sort of history of Hindu society being imagined as a body has a long history, and that history is fundamentally rooted in caste. And with the rss, this becomes a sort of material, ecological organizing principle, in that the RSS consistently talks of harmony and unity. But what they mean by harmony and unity, I think are really key to understand where they see any conflict within Hindu society, including what I would say is a sort of just conflict of fighting caste oppression as aberrations. And if they understand Hindu society with its fundamentally caste nature as natural and sort of divine, any attempts to fight caste are seen as aberrations, and most often not just as aberrations. They have to be described as the conspiratorial projects of these outsiders. And so very often you'll hear the VHPA or the Hindu American foundation describe anti caste work as colonial projects, as ploys to divide Hindus. And in that sense, the American Sangh is an extension of this work where this sort of concept of organicism extends into the diaspora, because they see the Hindu nation as having extended beyond the boundaries of India itself. And I think Prachi mentioned the ways in which they're not particularly committed to sort of 1947 Borders of India in the first place. I think in saying this also, the one point or the one clarification we would also want to make is that when we use the word American sung, we don't mean that every entity in this network is sort of remote controlled by. By some RSS executives sitting in Nagpur or Delhi, but that it emerges very clearly, genealogically from this network has the same, not just commitment to ideology, but the same commitment to this sort of ecosystem, this idea that we are all different nodes of a network, that we all have different purposes within this broader organizing project. And in that sense, I would say even more than an ideological commitment, there is a certain organizational commitment to this network. In many ways, it follows not conspiratorially, but actually from the social networks that are produced by sort of concerted organizing. And many of those social networks, I think, map on very closely to caste, and we can get into that as well.
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B
Great. So what I'd like to do now is walk us through the elaboration of this network and how it has shifted over time, both in terms of its composite parts, but also its tactics. Yeah. So from the reports, I got a clear sense of three distinct phases of the development of the American song. Right. And the first phase is the period from the 1970s through the end of the 20th century when, yes, it's not remote controlled, as you put it, jam by the sun in. In India. But in some ways it is in its kind of organizational structures. It is a kind of direct extension of the way the Sangh in India is organized. Right. There's a kind of mimicry of institutions and also the use of organizational diffusion as a strategy. Right. So can you just say more about how this strategy played out in the US in that first phase? And also, if there were some early goals of the movement in the diaspora that. That are worthy of note.
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C
Yeah, I can get us started. And I think your three phases is really on point as a division. And they actually sort of map on quite well to a generational understanding of our diaspora more broadly, in the sense that the first generation are some of the first immigrants after the 1965 Immigration Act. They are predominantly upper class and upper caste. And as you pointed out, they are quite directly, genealogically, and materially and organizationally connected to the rss. It is, in fact, on the instructions of the second RSS Supreme Leader Kolwalkar, that Aprachara Mahesh Mehta made his way to the US to basically birth the sort of American version of this banyan tree. And I think what's interesting is that for the first two and a half, three decades, this movement is quite fundamentally apathetic to politics in the US it's very concerned about politics in India. And almost all of its work is. In that sense, it's the work and the organizing of a first generation immigrant that still sees themselves far more tied to their motherland than to their new territory. And the way Sangh actors would rationalize this was that they have left their janmabhoomi or their homeland and they found a new Karma Bhoomi or sort of land of work. But that Karma Bhoomi is fundamentally or their work in that Karma Bhoomi is fundamentally in service of the motherland. A lot of that changes with the second generation. And I think Prachi can speak a bit more about that. In some sense, Prachi is of that generation as well.
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A
That's right. I mean, yeah, I think, I think the 2002 Gujarat programs and the visa band, which many of some of the groups that are maybe connected.
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B
Can you say more about the. About both for the listeners? Oh, yeah.
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A
Oh yes.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So in 2002, in the state of Gujarat, which Modi at the time was a chief minister, there were, there were programs that really targeted and extreme violence against. Against Muslim communities. And he, he in many ways can, can be held accountable, but both for allowing the violence to happen. And so a lot of the diaspora at the time that was in the United States was trying to call attention to what was happening and what had happened in Gujarat. And so the first time when as a chief minister, Modi was coming to the U.S. people mobilized many of these groups who are part of Savada, were part of different formations then to get the visa banned. And it succeeded. Right. And then the diaspora also entered the second generation that Ram just mentioned. That's the second generation that many of us were part of. I mean, I came from India, I was born there, but many of the other ones who were actually born in the United States and were part of progressive kind of South Asian organizing were getting attuned to what was happening because of Gujarat. So while the American song mobilized to kind of defend Modi and then also attack his critiques in the United States, the younger generation of leaders began maybe just pushing for a more sophisticated domestic strategy on behalf of that ideology because they also recognize that the overt Hindu supremacy was not going to fly in the United States. It was a public relations liability. So they had to engage also with the US Politics because the second generation was concerned about the US Politics. What was happening to them as Hindus in the United States was given that, you know, in some ways they're also facing racism or xenophobia in the United States. And so the failure to acknowledge that for the U.S. sung or American Sung was preventing them informing that distinct Hindu American identity in the US and so among the second generation of Indian diaspora, that kind of establishing this Hindu American identity was very important. And I think with a conscious strategic choice which was designed to appeal to these US Raised generation and also deflect kind of this growing criticism that the entire network was just a foreign operation or foreign proxy operation to support Modi and Hindutva and its agenda. So this kind of transition from an extremely focused support system only to support the work and the politics of the Janmabhoomi in India to now domestically embedded political force in the United States, which was also given that the wealth and the growing kind of wealth of the Indian and Hindu community in the US was there was a lot of opportunities there to become that political force. So during that period is when organizations like Hindu America foundation are formed and they are offering a way for second generation communities to come into their fold. So these groups establish this unique Hindu American identity by appealing to the second generation of Indian Americans who, you know, who are seeking really a cultural connection of Hinduism. They want to know about what this religion that their parents are part of, they want to connect with that and have pride in that. Right. So this wasn't just kind of a cynical ploy. It was also an attempted to really genuinely construct this fusion of milquetoast American liberalism and right wing homeland conservatism as well.
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B
It seems like the Hindu American foundation is a kind of key marker of this transition. Right. So HAF is founded in 2003. It identifies as a US civil rights organization. And that seems that self definition seems critically important. So what is, what is significant about this claim to being a US Civil rights organization? And how is it different from the public stances of, you know, of the predecessors, you know, whether it's the Hindu swine Sevak Sangh, which is modeled after the RSS or the Vishwa Hindu Parashad of America, which is modeled after the Vishwa Hindu Parashad of India or, or the Hindu Students Council, which is also modeled after the kind of student wing of the movement in India. So what, what is it that the HAF is signaling through this claim to being a civil rights organization? And why is it significant?
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C
Yeah, I can try and take that. I think the starting point is just that the VHPA or HSS did not see themselves making representational claims to start. They didn't see themselves as an American constituency in this sort of multicultural fabric that we thought she was talking about emerging. Obviously, I think the Hindu American foundation describing itself as a civil rights group was something that they could do and have that self definition received with a degree of deference, as Prachi described, because there was no one else on the table, so to speak. And so by default, they sort of anointed themselves and then had that anointing sort of accepted by the sort of rest of the civil rights world as sort of the representative of not just the Hindu American, in fact, but the Indian American community or even the South Asian American community more broadly.
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B
So, I mean, one thing that's quite striking is that the, the cracks in the Hindu American Foundation's facade, I'm going to go ahead and call it a facade of, of progressive advocacy, emerge very soon after the organization is founded. One of the co founders of the haf, Asim Shukla, comes out against Human Rights Watch report on the Gujarat pogrom. Right. Accuses Human Rights Watch of character assassination, blames Muslims for the violence. So it seems like, yes, they're sort of projecting themselves as this kind of civil rights group that is principally about, you know, minority religious and cultural rights, that they're very much aligned with sort of progressive American values. But, you know, very soon after they start taking these public positions that seem antithetical to progressivism. My sense is that that double speak doesn't really sort of explode into the open and become consequential until the 2010s when there's a more overt alignment with, with the far right. So tell us a little bit more about this kind of middle period. Right. The from 2003 to the 2000 and tens, when they're trying to have it both ways.
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C
Yeah, I think, or one way to put it is that this facade or the reality behind that facade was always visible, internal to the community. I would say my elders and mentors have always seen HAF for what it is. And I think along multiple axes, whether that's caste, whether that's the way in which groups like HAF understood the relationship between the Hindu community and sort of sibling communities like the Muslim or Sikh American communities, and indeed their relationship with sort of foreign politics and their continued defense of the Hindu right in India on all of those axes, I think, think HAF made its colors Quite clear. We've documented a pretty extensive record of anti Muslim speech, of hosting or defending or collaborating with anti Muslim actors, and a sort of continuous attempt to influence policy in Washington, D.C. in a way that cannot really be justified as protecting the interests of a domestic minority. The only consistent pattern we found in that research, and we documented quite extensively in the report, was its fidelity, I would say, to the RSS BJP project and its need to defend them by instrumentalizing this sort of language of civil rights and minority representation. To say, and it's quite powerful, I think, when you are able to claim this defense in the language of the rights of your constituents as Hindu Americans. And I think that sort of connection is quite pernicious. It sort of weaponizes the genuine need for Hindu Americans and all minorities to have representation and sort of weaponizes it for this quite pernicious purpose.
- [34:25]
B
So this third phase, 2014, Modi becomes Prime Minister. 2016, Donald Trump becomes president. So would you say that this is the period when the true face of the Hindu American foundation comes to be seen not just for internal critics, but also to the larger landscape of progressive organizations in the United States?
- [34:52]
C
Yeah, and I think this accelerates, especially after 2019, I would say. And what I think is quite a landmark moment is the co or the honorary chairmanship of the Republican Hindu Coalition by Steve Bannon. And it sort of sends a signal, I think, to the Hindu right that the sort of most avowed white nationalist is willing to build a multiracial coalition and willing to work with you. And so I think what you see then is the category of the Modi Democrat that I think had been quite active and live for the decade before 2019. Let's say you see that start to collapse and you see that start to collapse out of both the push and a pull in that there is this pull coming from segments of the American far right and the MAGA coalition that are trying to bring in non white groups. And this is really accelerated by the two events with Modi and Trump that you have in September 2019 and then February 2020 in Houston and Ahmedabad respectively. But I also think it's important to mention that there is a push as well in that within the Democratic Party and then within the sort of progressive landscape and then within the Indian American community, there is more and more opposition to HEF and less and less of an ability for it to walk into those sorts of spaces and be accepted as the sole representative of the community. And so more and more hef's position in these spaces is challenged. I Think that's visible, for example, in the way the Hindu right responded to quite limited mentions of the abrogation of Article 370 in Joe Biden's manifesto or his concern over the CANRC. Those are the types of things that make the Hindu right feel more and more that if Joe Biden is saying this and if all of these progressive actors are critiquing us or showing our true face in these spaces, why not go to the right who's really welcoming us in an unprecedented manner? And after that, Republican Hindu coalition? I think the number of groups that fuse a Republican and a Hindu identity really mushroom. And I think where we are today, it's obviously much more difficult to be analytical when moments are so. When the moment we're in is so crazy. But it does feel like the sort of Modi Democrat has cracked in a way that is probably likely to be irreplaceable. I don't think we're going to come back to a type of liberalism that can hold that right wing coalition. And this is even though there are pretty deep contradictions that have emerged between the MAGA coalition and the Hindu right. But I don't think the people who are finding discomfort with MAGA are necessarily going to fall comfortably into being progressives or Democrats. And so for a lot of us, I think the question of what happens is still unknown, but I don't think we're just going to return back to where we were 20 years ago.
- [38:30]
B
I want to talk about Hindutva and Zionism because I think that there's very similar processes underway in terms of the increasing inability to hold that contradiction right between claiming a progressivism in the United States and defending the emergence of a kind of ethno nationalist far right in one's putative homeland. I want to get to that a little bit later, but want us to focus just a little bit more closely on the role of caste. So in. In 2010 the Hindu American foundation published this report, right, entitled Hinduism Not Cast in Caste, Not C A S T in C A S T E. Right. And that report acknowledged caste based discrimination as a serious issue, one that needed to be addressed. Etc. A year later it reissued the report with major revisions. I wonder if you can say something about what these revisions were and what they suggested about the organization's shifting stance on the relationship between Hinduism and caste.
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A
Yeah, it's a really good question and I think it gets to the heart of hafs kind of evolving of caste positions and also the limits of its ideological flexibility within the Hindu far right. 2005, two years after its founding, HAF first teamed up with other groups and other Indo supremacist groups in California to aggressively push for public school textbook revisions. And the central demand then was deleting the references to caste or benignly reframing it as mere kind of social classes or this innocuous division of communities. And they tried to remove the term Dalits, which is a term that's a chosen political self definition of groups that's previously called untouchables. Right. This is important term that comes from the community. So they wanted to remove the term. They also made attempts to frame Hinduism as the single monotheistic religion, or overlooking its kind of diverse and non standard interpretations and effort to depict Christians and Muslims as foreigners. So that was part of what they tried to do within that too. And this established their initial goal to systematically kind of erase and whitewash caste based discrimination and understanding of what caste looks like from the public narrative in the United States. And then you go to 2010, HA publishes this not Caste and Caste report. And on the surface it was an outlier. It acknowledged, like you said, caste discrimination is a serious civil rights and human rights issue. So this document perhaps existed at the peak of HF's attempt to present itself as this liberal alongside their effort on kind of queer rights, environmental justice, as, you know, be standing with these issues as well. So then 2011, haf, I think, because it got serious pushback from Hindu far right siblings or organizations they were truly connected to, then they capitulated and then produced this kind of update. So I think, you know, really, this, it shows that, you know, acknowledging the existence of caste would have meant to existentially disturb the edifice upon which the entire project of us Hindutva is based on. Right. So claim to a homogeneous kind of ethnic identity without talking about the internal differentiations. I think, in short, the 2010 report was an intellectual engagement that angered its political base. And then 2011 revision is kind of a political corrective that maintained their broader project, which is to secure a sanitized, monolithic, historically oppression free narrative of Hinduism of, you know, cast as these benign division of different people existing, you know, equally within the communities. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's strategic, really.
- [43:10]
C
Yeah. The one thing I would add is that this whole incident I think also speaks to the ability of the song to sort of discipline the groups within it, that if HAF was as committed to civil rights as it was to its partners in the American sung, it would have perhaps been able to stand by the 2010 report, but it was not. It was embedded in these networks and it were their donors and their fellow Hindutva organizations that spoke out against it. And I think the other quite interesting parallel, I think, is that if you look at sort of reform or Hindutva's emergence from 19th century reform movements, many of these reform movements emerge from a similar encounter with the West. And at least a minority of these movements in moments sought to dismantle caste. But a majority of them did precisely what Prachi mentioned, which was were more interested in protecting Hinduism and Hindu pride and the image of Hinduism than actually addressing the scourge of caste within them. And the RSS and the Hindu right, we know, emerges from that specific strand of, I don't think you can call it reformism anymore, of a sort of wounded chauvinism. And it added onto it this sort of militant outlook and a desire for organized power. And so I think what you see is that, and I think in thinking about Hindutva and caste, I wouldn't say that the Hindutva movement is always the most explicitly casteist force around. There are more casteist forces out there, I think. But the way in which, as Prachi mentioned, the Hindu right has this sort of reactionary response to anti caste activism through the organs and the appendages of the RSS is I think, quite unparalleled. And I think it goes back to understanding the ways in which their ideas of harmony and unity that that lower caste oppressed caste groups have to stay within the hold of Hinduism. I think that's sort of core to this. And if anything, it's more. It's sort of especially virulent in the diaspora simply because of the sort of demographic dominance of upper caste groups where, if you looked at the Hindu right today, the Hindu right in India is much more wary and seeks much more to appear conciliatory along lines of caste. And that's really not the case. And both this incident and the type of politics we have in 2026 speak to that.
- [46:14]
B
Yeah, there's been concerted efforts to mobilize against caste protections in U.S. law. Right. That's the most sort of recent iteration of this effort to deny the salience of caste and to conflate redress with anti Hindu sentiment. Right. So I don't know whether you want to say something about that. I was also curious about their stance on affirmative action and the partnering of certain factions of the American Sung with Edward Blum in his effort to dismantle affirmative action in the United States. I mean, one could see this as an offshoot of opposition to the reservation system in India. Right. But is there something specific to the diasporic context that's worth noting?
- [47:22]
A
I mean, I think in the United. In the US HF is. And the Hindu right has always. Anytime there is a conversation about caste discrimination, they have mobilized their base and mobilized their base with funding. They do see it as kind of an attack against Hindutva and Hinduism. The very conversation about the fact that caste exists and discrimination exists within the communities and that there is a connection to the religion itself, they see that as a challenge. Right. And they see that as also an attempt to take communities and base away from their mobilization. I think more and more people from the second generation are shifting and understanding kind of the race and caste parallels. And so there is a lot more support from second generation, I think, because of the fact that many are mobilized through the Black Lives Matter movement to support for organizing for almost anti caste movements in many places. I think Ram can speak a little bit more about the affirmative action component. There are certain parts of our communities that are saying that we're this model minority and embrace that. Right. And within that we don't need affirmative action. We can do this without all of that because by merit we are there. And that again, connects to Brahminism as well and connects to how they. The Hindu right also has positioned itself in India in terms of reservations.
- [48:58]
B
Ram, do you want to add anything?
- [48:59]
C
Maybe I'll just try and answer your question of like, what is different about caste in the diaspora? And I think you find a sort of toxic combination of sort of accumulated caste power and American neoliberalism. And I think the affirmative action case is a good example where it's not just the Hindu right that is loped into that effort, but actually various segments of sort of elite, conservative Asian immigrant communities. Right. And I think it's both good to see what happens to caste specifically in the diaspora, where this sort of concentration of caste power becomes something to protect and to reproduce, but also to maybe de exceptionalize the Indian American community and show that it's sort of happening across Asian American diasporas, for one. And I think that draws on the fact that the 1965 immigration reform wasn't just a product of the civil rights movement. It was also a product, for example, of the Cold War and the fact that there was a real priority for stem immigrants, for the sort of elite layers of various Asian communities. And I think that's maybe why caste takes on this very specific form, this Sort of heightened form where it's sort of associated so firmly with sort of ideas of merit.
- [50:35]
B
Do you think that the, the anti caste mobilization that is now picking up speed in the United States is that due to a demographic shift, like do more sort of caste oppressed communities sort of making their presence felt in the United States? And so that same kind of dialectic of caste power and opposition that you see playing out in India is now also present in the United States. Or is it more, you know, the same, the descendants of the very same kind of elite migrants of the 1960s just becoming newly politicized?
- [51:18]
A
Yeah, I think it's a combination of all of those. I think definitely in the last couple of decades we have seen more caste oppressed people come into the United States. And that shows in the formation of many different organizations. So the Dalit Solidarity Forum has been around for a long time. There's Ambedkirk International center and International Mission have been there for a long time. A lot of the work of these organizations that have been present in the United States, their work also had been connected to what is happening in India. But more and more their work is also concerned with the harm that their communities are facing in the United States as well. So that's why you see the Cisco case and the efforts by many of the organizations that are newly forming and have been around for a while to kind of, of take a more concerted effort into mobilizing communities here. And I think it coming into kind of head with the fact that many of the communities here who have been here from the Indian American community have been upper caste. So there is, you know, a friction that's happening there because the communities here have been used to talking about what Hinduism looks like, what India is to the rest of the Americans, right. This kind of, of spiritual place with no, you know, with harmony and no caste issues. Right. When you talk about vegetarianism, you equate that with India. But now people are saying, oh, vegetarianism is actually upper caste, Brahminical, and that not many people, not most people in India are not vegetarian. So that those, even the cultural pushback against the idea of India, idea of Hinduism is coming from, you know, these communities who are now here who are showing a different way of being Indian and being. And also the fact is that there are many kinds of, not just oppressed caste and lower caste Indians, many Muslim and other communities are coming here. Sikh communities are coming here and they're showing a different way of being. You know, what, what India looks like and what communities there represent and so all of, I think all of those are kind of coming together to kind of show what is happening in terms of friction. And then the just political changes in the last couple years also are important, important to know, right? The last, last couple of decades are important to note because then in the right is shifting how they're being in the public. And then there's a response to that as well.
- [53:50]
C
So,
- [53:52]
B
so maybe we can turn to that as our kind of last big topic. I mean, we've talked about how something like the effort to dismantle affirmative action has reduced an alignment between Hindu supremacists and white supremacists in the United States. But I'm very curious about how you see this sort of increasing intimacy between Hindu supremacist activists in the US And Zionists. The Severa report on haf, you know, points to this sort of combination of a claim to model minority status and support for long distance ethno nationalism as two sort of key ingredients that have sort of allowed for this suturing right between Hindutva and Zionism. And for listeners, this is also something that we covered a little bit in the second episode of the podcast with the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective. But I, I want to hear a little bit more about this, so I'm just going to read a quote from the Severa report. Even though their constituencies are significantly affected by white supremacy and Christian nationalism, both Hindutva and Zionist movements have downplayed such concerns. Instead, by sleight of hand, they have weaponized a bad faith claim to victimhood that intentionally conflates racism from the right with political opposition from the left. In the absence of critical context, their specious arguments have often been misread as the legitimate grievances of a minority community rather than a reactionary response to a political critique of ethno nationalism. Can you just walk us through that argument?
- [55:45]
C
Yeah, I'm happy to. And I think it, the jump wave point is actually precisely what Prachi outlined, which is that I think these moments of political polarization to the right are most accelerated in moments of progressive critique and challenge. And in the case of the Hindu right, I think there was nothing more radicalizing towards the right than the anti caste movement. And I think similarly the way in which pro Israel forces have move to the right is significantly a response to the type of momentum that has been built on the left. But I think, I don't know, I both want to affirm the value of these comparisons, but also maybe point to some of their limits in that I think both The Hindu right and the pro Israel sort of movement lobby are they have a few things in common in the sense that they sort of try to bring together a sort of geopolitical alignment with an attempt to play with the boundaries of race making, I think. And those two are really connected in the sense it's not the ability of Jews to become white or the ability of Hindus to be white proximate or Indians to be white proximate, that it's not just a domestic process. It is really produced geopolitically. And I think a good example is just a couple weeks ago we had a visit of the RSS General Secretary and that was done with the Hudson Institute. And as we were looking through, what really became apparent was that the Hudson Institute's interest in the RSS came fundamentally from its desire, its sort of hawkish politics towards China, in that it had calculated that India needs to be built as a counterweight against China. And the best way to do that is to work with the Hindu right. So all of this, I think, bears a lot of similarities to the way Israel is seen. And I do really want to emphasize the other point you made, which was that the type of victimhood that both of these projects try to articulate is one that fractures solidarity. They take things like antisemitism or xenophobia that are pretty fundamental to the right in a structural way, not just an episodic way, and describe them and conflate them with critique from the left. So these are are a bunch of similarities. And now I want to complicate that a little bit in a few ways. First is that we try really hard in severa to move from the frame of comparison to one of interconnectedness, in that it's all well and good to point out that different ideologies look similar. What we really focused on is showing that they're actually materially connected. Did that. These analogies don't just exist in the air, but they're actually being used by those actors themselves. And for example, that the Hindu right set up this group called a social media page called Hindu on Campus. And Hindu on Campus was explicitly modeled and learned from a similar page called Jewish on Campus. And so I, I say this to say that these analogies are not just being used on the left to understand ethnonationalist movements. They're being used by actors in these movements themselves. And then I also want to say that these analogies are have slippages and they're actually aspirational analogies, I think. And I think we have to pay attention to how the people making these analogies are trying to override the slippages between them, them. And it's actually precisely the incompleteness of these analogies that makes them useful to those actors. Which is to say the Hindu right is far more interested in this analogy than the pro Israel right. I think we've repeatedly seen that the Hindu right is a bit of an unrequited lover in this case, that there is far more interest amongst the Hindu right in working with the pro Israel right than vice versa. And that is, for example, I would say, comes from the fact that I don't think we can symmetrically look at terms like Hindu phobia and antisemitism in that antisemitism has a much longer and a much more frightening and legitimate history. I think xenophobia, I think sort of Christian, anti Christian sort of of bigotry or suspicion towards what they see as pagan religions, I think acts of anti Hindu racism, those are all common. But there is no equivalent to anti Semitism that can be captured by a term like Hindu phobia. And Hindu phobia has only existed as an articulation of the Hindu right. All of this is also to say that I think it's almost, it's almost key to describe this as aspirational in the sense that the Hindu right would like to amass that type of power. I don't think they've got there. And I think there are things that are quite unique to Zionism and its role within American politics that the Hindu right might never get to, although I think they are really trying and they really hope they will.
- [61:40]
A
Yeah. And I would just, you know, add to that that, that I think in this moment there's a shift, right? There's both a shift towards support for and critique of Zionism, like you said, and what Israel is doing in the US society in general, but also in a real rise in anti Semitism at the same time. Right. And coming both from the right wing, especially from the right wing actors, and that you're seeing that play out. And then also at the same time, even though, like Ram said, we don't think that, you know, Hindu phobia as a term is really, it comes from a weaponization from the Hindu right. There is also increasing anti Hindu bigotry and racism and xenophobia that is sometimes targeted actually at Hindus as well. And so when you're seeing that, I think for a group like ceda, we are also in a position where we want to acknowledge that fact that there is growing anti Hindu bigotry, there's growing racism against Indian Americans. There are certain incidences that have happened at Hindu temples. And so as progressives who want to stand against all with all communities, we have to be able to acknowledge that that does exist without with also at the same time saying that doesn't necessarily mean it's Hindu phobia as a systemic issue the way that antisemitism is.
- [63:19]
B
I wanted to ask a final question. To what extent should Hindu supremacism be seen as part of a global white supremacist formation? I mean the, the, the Severa report on HAF sometimes speaks of this kind of global alignment of the far right forces in terms of a multiracial far right, but sometimes in terms of multiracial white supremacy. And I just wonder what do you see as the kind of race making side of the, of this phenomenon? Is it what is the umbrella term that is most appropriate? What is the umbrella term that is most appropriate to think about this diverse differentiated coalition? Is it white supremacy? Is it multiracial far right? Is it international ethno nationalism? Can you reflect on this kind of choice of terms and whether you see one as more salient to this kind of emerging global politics than another?
- [64:43]
C
Yeah, I think the first thing I would say is that some of these semantic questions are relatively minor for organizers and that we actually don't need to use any of these terms. None of these terms are particularly legible to everyday people. But we'll take the question seriously as an analytical question to say that certainly race is pretty fundamental to understand what happens to Hindutva on American shores, to think of how caste and race sort of fuse together to think of how diasporas sort of remake themselves in the United States. But I don't know. I think we are in far too global and interconnected a world to be understanding a multiracial right or transnational ethno nationalisms around a single sort of, especially a sort of Atlantic idea of race. Like I think what good conversations between caste and race are doing is. Should be doing is also not subsuming caste is sort of an appendage of race either. For example. And I do think it's a little reductive to attribute all right wing people of color activity to simply a desire to be white proximate. For example, I think the biggest determinant we saw in the 2024 elections was actually gender. Right. So there's in terms of the sort of most predictive category that decided sort of Trump's election was whether you were male or female at least along to according to voting data. So you could call this multiracial male supremacism. You could use all sorts of other terms, I think, broadly. And our friend and colleague Dan Hosang, I think there's a lot of good work on this to show that I think we really need to reckon with a broader collapse and transformation of institutions, a sense of a widespread sense of precarity that is pulling people towards the solutions or at least the sense of either insurgency or camaraderie that the far right offers. And I don't think that's reducible just to race at all, but race has to be a key part of understanding this. And so I think it's actually some combination of all of these terms have some analytical value, and we're not particularly attached to one or the other.
- [67:39]
A
White supremacy helps us understand the power that operates in the US and where, despite the complex landscape of racial identities, the fundamental logic of the state remains anchored in white supremacist ideology. So we have to. If you. To look at the US Context, you have to understand that. And also the fact that it's a racialization. Right. Like, how are the different communities in the US Being racialized in proximity to that power? And I think South Asian and Indian communities fit somewhere within that proximity, closer than black communities or indigenous communities, just because of the racialization and the history of. Of, you know, enslavement and genocide. So I think we. Those. Because those core values persist, those. That does inform a lot of, you know, it does inform a lot of organizing in this country. People do talk about white supremacy as a framework, and when they're talking about organizing multiracial communities together, multiracial left communities together. But I think, like Ram said, reducing Hindu supremacy to that would be a disservice to understanding the history of Hindu supremacy in the. In India.
- [68:57]
B
Yeah. So why don't we end on a positive note by just hearing about how groups like yours are fighting back against these aligned supremacisms. Are there sort of particular strategies that are. That are worth foregrounding for the audience?
- [69:19]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think we just. We can talk about today's kind of political landscape in 2025, where they're just, I think, a contradiction right now because there is this palpable chill of repression affecting all communities and all civil society. And it is a moment and a charge for organization like Saveda that is trying to kind of form an alliance that just kind of multifaith intercalation and a multiracial alliance to work with and in solidarity with all of the communities that are affected by immigration repression around immigration, transgender repression, and all of these kind of targeted attacks that are affecting big swaths of our civil society. And at the same time I think we're seeing that a campaign like the Zoran Mandani's campaign to New York was able to mobilize. It's a perfect case study for kind of what we at Saveda call the new diasporic majority. Right. That this is a majority of diasporic communities are actually represent multiple caste categories, multiple religions, multiple political ideologies. And that if that majority is mobilized, we can actually form a unity that goes against more the right wing ideologies that seem to be stronger. And so a campaign, Lizor and Mandani's campaign that wasn't just about having a South Asian face in the race, but it was also about a progressive Hindu Muslim unity focusing on workers rights and housing rights and taxi workers struggles and a firm stance against kind of reactionary policies, politics of Hindutva and at the same time kind of being proud of this kind of rejuvenated South Asian second generation communities. And I think that is something that for us, you know, is also at the core of what Saveda is about, where we see our victory really in line with the victory of the multiracial left as well. Well, if mother racial left wins, then Saveda can also win. And so for us, this is also the reason to kind of work in kind of multiracial alliance with each other and join in the kind of specific wider struggles that go hand in hand in terms of our struggle against Hindu supremacy as well.
- [72:03]
C
Yeah. I'll just emphasize two quick things. Prachi said. The first is that that we don't believe a majority is something we have to struggle and hope for in the future, but actually that a majority exists. And I think if you look at survey data from the Carnegie survey, 77% of Indian Americans believe that support protections against caste discrimination. Two thirds of Indian Americans agree that Hindutva is a concern, including 64% of the Hindus. Super majorities above 80% believe that white nationalism and white supremacy are a problem. And all of those tell us, I think that even though the Hindu right appears large and dominant, that there is a wide swath of our communities that are aligned with democracy and justice. And that in many ways crisis is also always an opportunity. I don't say that sort of cynically as much as to say that in moments of crises, campaigns like Zorans or efforts that push back against the zero sum approaches of the right and foreground real collective solutions to the problems we're facing. Moments of crises are moments where our efforts can, I think, distinguish themselves from those of the Hindu right. And I think we see the ways in which their project is rather narrow and uninspiring. And I think the moment, the politics of today will only make that more and more visible. And we have to continue to bring those 77 percents and those 64 percents and those 80 percents into a sort of visible expressive force. And that's something that we're really excited to be doing every day with Savita.
- [74:04]
B
Fantastic. Thank you for the work that SVEA is doing. It's critically important. I mean, I found the reports just so helpful to think with. I mean, the, the analyses are trenchant, but quite apart from the sort of analytical force of what you're doing, I think the kind of mobilizing effort is, is incredibly crucial. And it's, it's wonderful to know that this is, this is a kind of, this is such a broad based effort. Right. It's not, it's by no means contained within a single kind of ethnic formation, which is as it should be. Right. I think one needs a broader coalition in this moment. All right, thank you so much.
- [74:51]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [74:52]
A
Thank you. Thank you.
- [75:03]
B
Thanks to all our listeners for joining us. The cast pod can be accessed through our website, thecastpod.org and through our partner, the New Books Network. Sound editing and website design are managed by Siddharth Ravi. And the opening and closing theme music is from the song Combat Breathing, written by Vijay Iyer and performed by Vijay Iyer. Linda May Han. Oh, and Tishawn Souri. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to share it on social media and send us your suggestions for Future episodes@thecastpodmail.com this is Ajantha Subramanian signing off. Until next time,