Hindu American Foundation

The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) was founded in September 2003 by Mihir Meghani, an emergency care physician; Aseem Shukla, an associate professor in urologic surgery; his wife, Suhag Shukla, an attorney; Nikhil Joshi, a labor law attorney; and his wife, Adeeti Joshi, a speech therapist. Describing itself as a human rights and advocacy group, it emphasized upon the "Hindu and American ideals of understanding, tolerance and pluralism". Vinay Lal, a professor of South Asian history at the University of California, Los Angeles noted that the organization appeared to have banked on the enormous goodwill created by Mahatma Gandhi in the West. Previously, in 1991, Meghani had founded the University of Michigan's chapter of the Hindu Students Council (HSC), a nationwide network of student societies affiliated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad America (VHPA). He went on to serve on the governing council of VHPA and authored an essay for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) comparing Hindus, a religious majority in India, with Jews, Black Americans, and colonized groups, whose bottled-up anger, for over a millennium, allegedly found a channel of outburst in the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Coalition Against Genocide (CAG), a platform established in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots against Hindu nationalist violence directed at Muslims, stated that the formation of the HAF has been the outcome of Meghani's parleys on the governing council of the VHPA and an effort to rebrand the Hindutva agenda as "Hindu rights" to suit mainstream American politics. They further note most of the HAF office bearers to have been drawn from HSC activists. The HAF rejected that their founders had any ties with Hindu Nationalist politics and accused CAG's "leaders and member organisations" of "espousing Marxist ideology or fringe Islamist positions, openly advocating anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-India views". == Activism ==

The HAF was the first American Hindu advocacy organization to have a professional organizational structure as well as full-time staff and is widely considered to be the most prominent organization in the Hindu advocacy field. The organization was heavily aided by Jewish advocacy groups during its development; it continues to work with the Anti-Defamation League. Highlighting Hindu persecution During 2004–05, the organization held events to educate legislators about issues of concern to Hindu Americans. These included the abuse of Hindus in the Muslim-majority regions of South Asia, including Kashmir, Bangladesh and Pakistan; since then, they have continued to publish regular "Hindu Human Rights" reports. The HAF critiqued Pakistan's treatment of Hindus and advocated for better assimilation and integration of Pakistani Hindu migrants and refugees in India. The organization also supported strong ties between India, Israel, and the US to create an axis of countries against Islamic terrorism. Advocacy for Hindu rights in the United States In 2004, the HAF unsuccessfully challenged the public display of the Ten Commandments in Texas, appearing as amici curiae in Van Orden v. Perry in the United States Supreme Court; they argued that the display represented an "inherent government preference" for Judeo-Christian religions over others and hence, violated the state's obligation to maintain religious neutrality. In 2008, the HAF, along with a coalition of other religious groups, filed a lawsuit and blocked the issuance of Christian-themed license plates in South Carolina. In 2015, as a part of the Hate Crimes Coalition, the HAF participated in the drafting and submission of edits to an FBI manual to track hate crimes against Hindus specifically. However, scholar Azad Essa has stated that the HAF has exaggerated the hate crimes faced by Hindus in America. Essa found the HAF's alarmist statements about a "rise" in Hinduphobic hate crimes in 2019 to not correspond with reality — out of the 7,120 hate crimes which were reported to the FBI in 2018, only fourteen concerned Hindus; the years before, this count was stable at eleven and ten. Pro-India advocacy In 2002, Gujarat witnessed a communal riot against Muslims under the Chief Ministership of Narendra Modi; the incumbent government, have been widely blamed for active complicity. In 2005, when the Asian-American Hotel Owners Association invited Modi for an address, activists, including John Prabhudoss, lobbied the United States Congress to introduce a resolution criticizing him for his role in those riots. Joseph Pitts and John Conyers introduced House Resolution 160 to such effects. The HAF opposed this resolution, deeming it "Hinduphobic" and criticizing the Congressmen for making India the "focus of a resolution condemning religious persecution in South Asia" while ignoring Pakistan and Bangladesh. Nonetheless, the State Department denied Modi a visa two days after the bill was introduced. In 2013, the HAF again opposed a fresh bill by Pitts that commended the 2005 visa denial, encouraged the federal government "to review the applications of any individuals implicated in religious freedom violations under the same standard", and urged for the repealing of anti-conversion laws in several Indian states. The HAF mounted fresh criticism, arguing that the bill ignored the impact of Islamist and Maoist terrorism in the country, and selectively targeted Hindus; a few Indian activist groups who supported the bill were denounced for supposedly being unpatriotic. In 2016, the HAF hosted briefings for legislators about Pakistan’s support for terrorism in Kashmir and raised concern about how US aid might be diverted against India. In August 2019, after the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, which took away the autonomy of the province and rendered it a union territory, the HAF published a "Reporter’s Guide" which emphasized about how the new regulations would ensure equal property rights for women, protections for the queer community, and better opportunities for Dalits in the region. The HAF dismissed the charges as motivated by "pro-Khalistan" groups. Anti-conversion laws and Hinduisation The HAF has been a vocal defender of anti-conversion laws enacted by several Indian states, contending that such statutes shield socioeconomically vulnerable populations which includes children, the poor, and the illiterate from being induced into changing religion in exchange for medical aid, education, or employment. In practice, these laws have been used overwhelmingly against Christians and Muslims; the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has documented their role in enabling vigilante attacks on pastors and the arbitrary detention of religious minorities. Critics have accused the HAF of asymmetric advocacy on the issue of conversion. Writing in Byline Times, columnist CJ Werleman noted that while the HAF actively promotes anti-conversion legislation in India, it has remained silent on forced conversions to Hinduism and on the "Hinduisation" or ghar wapasi (homecoming) campaigns conducted by affiliates of the Sangh Parivar, in which Christians and Muslims are pressured or coerced into adopting Hinduism. In November 2013, a bipartisan group of fourteen U.S. Representatives introduced House Resolution 417, which praised India's religious diversity but urged the Indian government to act against violence directed at religious minorities, criticised Narendra Modi's role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, and called for the repealing of state anti-conversion laws. The HAF mobilised against the resolution, lobbying every co-sponsoring office and pressuring several lawmakers to withdraw their support; a Congressional staffer told a journalist that the HAF was working to undermine the bill, and the resolution ultimately stalled. Investigations into the HAF's role within the broader U.S.-based Hindutva network have characterised the organisation as part of a movement that seeks to relegate Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, and Adivasis to a subordinate status in India. In its 2013 report, the Coalition Against Genocide described the HAF as part of a constellation of U.S. front organisations for the ideology behind the persecution of Christians, Muslims, Dalits, and other minorities in India, language that the HAF later sued to retract. Adjudicating that suit, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that statements characterising the HAF as supportive of Hindutva were opinions that could not plausibly be alleged to be "verifiably false", and dismissed the action. The HAF has additionally been criticised for defending actors associated with anti-Christian and anti-Muslim mobilisation in India. The Savera report, summarised in ''Harper's Magazine'' by Andrew Cockburn, documents that HAF leaders have defended Hindu nationalist figures implicated in communal violence and have publicly attacked human rights documentation by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of abuses against Indian minorities. Audrey Truschke, a historian at Rutgers University, has argued that this pattern reflects the HAF's broader function as an apologist for Hindu majoritarianism rather than a defender of pluralism. Particular emphasis was laid on the Hindu nature of yoga manuals across centuries to corroborate claims of yoga being a Hindu form of spiritual quest. Andrea Jain, a professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, located the HAF's claims within a polemical discourse of religious fundamentalism that unwittingly borrowed from and mirrored the West; while the HAF spoke about the inevitable Hinduization of anybody who chooses to practice Yoga in its "true essence", the Christian far-right had denounced Yoga as a satanic act which in their view took practitioners away from Christ into the fold of Brahmins. Furthermore, Jain found the HAF's essentialist discourse on Yoga to be ahistorical; according to him, Yoga was a fluid tradition made and remade by different socio-religious cultures across different times with different connotations. Other scholars reiterate Jain's observations; Christopher Patrick Miller, a professor of Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University, found it ironic that to defend against perceived Christian ingressions, the HAF had to borrow from Christian (and colonial) notions of what constituted a Yogic canon. Caste In 2010, the HAF issued a report titled "Hinduism: Not Cast in Caste" alleging that Christian missionaries were able to push their proselytizing agenda only because of the prevalence of caste discrimination in India; it went on to argue that caste cannot be considered to be an intrinsic definitional aspect of Hinduism due to a lack of theological sanction in its most sacred texts and urged for reforms led by Hindus themselves. This led to a flutter in conservative Hindu circles in India and the following year, the HAF toned down their report; they even cautioned against the trend of passing resolutions against caste discrimination adopted by various global organizations and held caste to be an internal affair of a sovereign India. The HAF has since portrayed castes as occupational guilds which had brought stability to premodern India before being reified under British colonial rule; it has vehemently opposed drawing parallels between caste-discrimination and racism — arguing that it belittles the brutality faced by African Americans — or even any depiction of the caste-system as a rigid birth-determined pyramid of hierarchy. In 2021, on the heels of prolonged transnational activism by Dalits, "caste" was added as a protected category to California State University's anti-discrimination policy. The HAF perceived such policies to have the potential to enable the malicious targeting of Indian Hindu academics and lodged stiff opposition; their office-bearers argued caste to be a "stereotype" that was imposed upon South Asians under British rule. In October 2022, the HAF provided legal representation to two University of California professors who sued their employer to prevent the implementation of caste-based protections. The month before, they unsuccessfully sued the California Civil Rights Department for allegedly misrepresenting caste as intrinsic to Hinduism in its submission to the Cisco caste discrimination lawsuit. Ajantha Subramaniam, a professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University, rejected the HAF's charges concerning anti-caste legislations and questioned their accusations of being discriminated based on religion; she and other scholars emphasized on the depth of scholarship that has held caste to be a reality of central significance from premodern South Asia to present-day India including in the diaspora. SB403 In early 2023, the HAF was among several Hindu-American organizations that opposed the SB 403 bill, which aimed to explicitly add caste into the definition of ancestry under anti-discrimination laws in California. The proponents of the bill insisted that an explicit ban on caste discrimination was needed to raise awareness of this bias, but the HAF contended that this proposal unfairly targeted Hindus; and may result in racial profiling against Hindu Americans. In May, the California State Senate passed the bill after a divisive debate. However, in October 2023, after sustained lobbying by the HAF, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, agreeing that "caste discrimination [was] already prohibited under existing civil rights protections". == Attacks on academic freedom ==

Audrey Truschke, a historian of South Asia at Rutgers University, notes the HAF to have "prioritized attacks on higher education". Truschke's view is widely supported by scholars and academics. Textbook revisionism in California In March 2006, the HAF filed a lawsuit against California's Curriculum Commission's decision to reject most of the edits proposed by the Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation, two groups linked to the RSS, a Hindutva paramilitary organization, to the textbooks taught in the state. The suggested changes had sought to downplay the salience of caste in Indian history, reject Indo-Aryan migrations in favor of Indigenous Aryanism, and not describe the declining status of women in ancient India, arguing that such portrayals would humiliate Hindu children in classrooms. Multiple Indologists, including Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Harry Falk, Robert P. Goldman, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Sheldon Pollock, Patrick Olivelle and Madhav Deshpande, and other South Asian activist groups opposed the changes. The court ruled against the HAF and chose to retain the textbooks; it found the HAF's accusations of a biased and negative portrayal of Hinduism unpersuasive. In 2016, the HAF lobbied against the replacement of the word "Indian" with "South Asian" in middle school history textbooks in California, arguing that the change was essentially an erasure of India itself. These efforts were protested by South Asian academics and activists belonging to India's minority groups, who said that those on the side of the HAF sought to whitewash California's history textbooks to present a nativist, blemish-free view of how the Hindu caste system was enforced in India. They also argued that the term "South Asia" correctly represents India's collective history with countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh. A letter to the California State Board of Education about this issue, which garnered thousands of signatures, was headed by the HAF. Censorship of Wendy Doniger In 2009, Wendy Doniger — the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago — published The Hindus: An Alternative History, to rave reviews in mainstream media. However, soon it drew ire from the Hindu Right who alleged Doniger's work to be stigmatizing of Hinduism. It alleged statements in two Al Jazeera articles that characterized the HAF as having "ties to Hindu supremacist and religious groups" and with the RSS as defamatory. On 15 March 2022, Judge Amit Mehta stayed the defendants' motions to dismiss the suit since he deemed one of their arguments about whether the HAF had satisfied the second requirement of invoking diversity jurisdiction, by proving the amount of monetary loss to have exceeded 75,000 USD, as a "substantial question" of procedure, that needed to be settled before adjudication on merits. Mehta accepted the HAF's new evidence to pass muster and ordered discovery. On 20 December 2022, he dismissed the suit since the HAF had failed not only to establish any cause of action, even assuming that their allegations were factually accurate, but also to provide any evidence that the court had personal jurisdiction over the defendants except one. In response, the American Historical Association condemned the attacks against academic freedom, and the Association for Asian Studies noted Hindutva to be a "majoritarian ideological doctrine" different from Hinduism, whose rise to prominence had accompanied "increasing attacks on numerous scholars, artists and journalists". The conference went ahead as scheduled and without any significant disruptions. The HAF has since complained to the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights against the University of Pennsylvania for violating Title VI requirements — they alleged that the University, co-sponsored a "one-sided" conference, promoted negative "stereotypes and slurs" about Hindu academics, and discriminated against them. However, multiple professors at the University who identify as Hindus rejected the accusations and highlighted how the HAF had weaponized Hindutva to stifle free speech. == Funding Controversies ==

The HAF's funding sources have drawn scrutiny in this context. In April 2021, Al Jazeera reported that the HAF was one of five U.S.-based organisations linked to Sangh Parivar networks that had together received approximately $833,000 in federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advances during the COVID-19 pandemic; the HAF received the largest individual share, around $378,064 in PPP funds and an additional $10,000 in EIDL Advance. The reporting placed the HAF alongside Sewa International, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation, and Rajiv Malhotra's Infinity Foundation,entities described in the article as having documented links to organisations that have been associated in India with violence against Christian, Muslim and Dalit communities. Writing in ''Harper's Magazine'', Andrew Cockburn observed that the HAF's pattern of advocacy has functioned to insulate the Indian government from sustained Congressional engagement on its religious-freedom record, even as the conflict in Manipur produced documented attacks on Kuki-Zo Christians and the destruction of more than three hundred churches. == Reception ==

Scholarly consensus is that the HAF purveys a politics embedded in Hindutva. Sailaja Krishnamurti, a professor at Saint Mary's University (Halifax) who specializes in religious traditions of the South Asian diaspora, summarized that the HAF has "earned a reputation" of being a conservative group purveying Hindu nationalist politics. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, a historian specializing in South Asian religions at the University of Vermont, qualified the HAF as a "deeply conservative" outfit. Sangay K. Mishra, an assistant professor of political science at Drew University, argued that the HAF had remolded Hindutva-leaning politics into the language of "Hindu rights" to be palatable in the American mainstream. Truschke finds the HAF to be an integral component of the "wider Sangh Parivar" and Hindu right in the United States. Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative found the HAF board member Rishi Bhutada to have also served as the official spokesperson of "Howdy Modi", a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-backed rally in support of India's incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi held in Houston, Texas in 2020. Academics and journalists have also investigated money trails linking the HAF to other Sangh Parivar groups via their donors. However, Arun Chaudhuri, an anthropologist of religion and politics at York University, cautions that such disavowals should not be taken at face value but rather as efforts at distancing the HAF from the overtly negative connotations of Hindu nationalism. Sonia Sikka, an academic specializing in the intersection of religion and politics, too rejects the HAF's claims of non-partisanship. == Notes ==