IN JUNE 2014, after Modi won the election, nearly 700 of his supporters
gathered at a Hindu temple in Atlanta to celebrate and plan their path forward. To mobilize their community, the speakers laid out a plan that included a call for donations to Gabbard’s re-election campaign. They described the Hawaii Democrat as an “American Hindu” who “has fought against the anti-Modi resolution introduced recently by some members” of Congress.
The event was organized by the Overseas Friends of the BJP, the American chapter of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Gabbard had landed on the group’s radar as one of America’s few pro-Modi lawmakers. In December 2013, she had voiced her opposition to
House Resolution 417, which chided India to protect “the rights and freedoms of religious minorities” and referred to incidents of mass violence against minority Muslims that had taken place under Modi’s watch. Gabbard later
told the press that “there was a lot of misinformation that surrounded the event in 2002.”
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Dozens of Gabbard’s donors have either expressed strong sympathy with or have ties to the Sangh Parivar — a network of religious, political, paramilitary, and student groups that subscribe to the Hindu supremacist, exclusionary ideology known as Hindutva, according to an Intercept analysis of Gabbard’s financial disclosures from 2011 until October 2018. We cross-checked the names of Gabbard’s donors against open-source materials linked to Sangh organizations, such as event announcements and the groups’ websites.
According to our analysis, at least 105 current and former officers and members of U.S. Sangh affiliates, and their families, have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Gabbard’s campaigns since 2011. Gabbard’s ties to Hindu nationalists in the United States run so deep that the progressive newspaper Telegraph India in 2015 christened her the Sangh’s
American mascot.
Since 2013, Gabbard has attended conferences across the United States organized by Sangh affiliates, like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, whose counterpart in India has been
linked to advocating violence against Muslims in India and was
classified last summer as a “militant religious organization” in the CIA World Factbook. (The BJP has hotly
contested this classification.) The Sangh organizations in the U.S. reportedly
provide social and financial support for their Indian counterparts. A
2014 study by the South Asia Citizens Web found that between 2001 and 2012, five Sangh-affiliated charitable groups allocated more than $55 million for program services, funds that are largely sent to Sangh groups in India.
