Comrades in Ethnonationalism: Why the Israel lobby is supporting U.S. politicians friendly to India’s far-right

Since September 2023, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has poured over $96,000 into the campaign coffers of U.S. Representative Shri Thanedar (D-MI).

It’s an odd choice considering that Thanedar, as a state legislator in 2021, co-sponsored a Michigan House resolution describing Israel as an “apartheid state.” After launching his congressional campaign, Thanedar quickly retracted his support as an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC poured millions into backing his primary opponent.

By August 2023, the newly-elected Congress member was on an AIPAC-funded trip to Israel to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Immediately after, Thanedar jetted to India to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He had just escorted Modi, in June 2023, to address a joint session of Congress in Washington, DC. That Modi was previously banned from America for his role in a 2002 pogrom against Indian Muslims apparently gave the Michigan representative no pause.

In just his first seven months in office, Thanedar circled the globe to meet both the leader of “the world’s largest democracy” as well as the leader of “the only democracy in the Middle East.” While his flip-flop on Israel may reflect how politicians — especially those, like him, who are accused by Huffington Post of holding “malleable political beliefs” — react to the power of the Zionist lobby in America, his dual embrace of Netanyahu and Modi reveals another aspect of the current geopolitical landscape: the Hindutva lobby. 

Over the past year, Shri Thanedar has been repeatedly criticized by Indian diaspora coalitions for his support for the Hindutva lobby’s agenda as he pockets donations from Hindutva-aligned PACS, launches a controversial “Dharma Caucus,” and even introduces a Hinduphobia resolution reminiscent of the recent “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” which defines anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

Both Zionism and Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) — the ideology pushed by Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — are related to the same family of “fascist movements” that are “seeking to establish ethnonationalist ‘homelands’ in which religious minorities have no place or are subjugated,” Aparna Gopalan, the news editor at Jewish Currents, explained to Mondoweiss. “Both movements are devoted to a project of race purity. In the case of Hindutva, this comes as a specific emulation of Nazism.”

Highlighting “organic connections” between the two movements, Dr. Ather Zia of the University of Colorado (Boulder) told Mondoweiss both are predicated on “the common enemy being the Muslims,” but notes, “The interesting thing to watch is how the two ideologies tide over the contradictions they share, especially Hindutva’s idealization of Nazi ideology.”

Beyond their shared ideological roots, they seem to be finding much common ground in propping up the same American politicians. Shri Thanedar is a prime example. He is not, however, the only member of Congress benefiting from correlated Zionist/Hindutva support while championing the ethno-nationalist regimes of both India and Israel.

Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Ami Bera (D-CA), for example, are also beneficiaries of dual Zionist/Hindutva funding. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), who pulled in over $72,000 from AIPAC since October 2023 alone, not only invited Modi to address last year’s joint session of Congress but also joined Thanedar on the ensuing trip to meet the prime minister in India. Meanwhile, challengers to frequent congressional critics of Hindutva have enjoyed funding from both Zionist and Hindutva elements.

Raja Krishnamoorthi has raked in over $77,000 from AIPAC since 2022. Yet criticism of the representative’s funding has focused on his massive financing by leaders in the American Hindutva family of organizations spawned by the parent organization of the BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) paramilitary. In 2022, for instance, Krishnamoorthi’s Democratic challenger, alluding to the RSS, accused the Congress member of “taking money from donors associated with radical extremists persecuting millions of people in India.”

Krishnamoorthi, the Ranking Member of the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, spearheaded the campaign to ban TikTok in the U.S. on the premise that the social media app is being used by China to disseminate misinformation, in particular by cultivating American outrage against the genocide in Gaza. Krishnamoorthi also recently cosponsored Thanedar’s Hinduphobia resolution while Ami Bera, for his part, joined Thanedar in voting for this year’s “Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism” bill. 

While taking over $52,000 from AIPAC since 2022, Bera has also taken tens of thousands from Hindutva-linked donors, including Ramesh Bhutada (vice-president of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the U.S. branch of the RSS); Bharat Barai (who works with Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, or VHPA, which is the U.S. wing of India’s VHP and which is, itself, the religious wing of the RSS); Suhag Shukla (the executive director of Hindu American Foundation, which has been accused of lobbying to block anti-Modi legislation). All three — along with a host of others active in American Hindutva — are generous joint donors to Krishnamoorthi’s campaigns.

From 2015 to 2016, Bera also served as co-chair of the House India Caucus. That role was formerly held by Rep. Gary Ackerman who, notably, talked about Israel being “surrounded” by millions of Muslims while millions more lived within India and described “strong India-Israel relations” as “crucial” to preserving “ancient civilizations” which, supposedly, “share strong democratic beliefs, traditions and values.”

The India Caucus was formed in 1992 around the same time as the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party (OFBJP), which was formed in the wake of a Hindutva-led mob demolition of the historic Babri Mosque in northern India and ensuing massacres of Muslims.

As the international body of the BJP, the OFBJP (which is now registered as a “Foreign Agent” in the U.S.) was founded to “project a positive and correct image” of the party abroad. Meanwhile, Indian political scientist Ashok Sharma reports the caucus was similarly dedicated to ensuring that there are no “adverse comments” on India’s “human rights conditions” offered in the U.S. Congress. Bera, with funding from the Hindutva lobby, saw that agenda through, including by spearheading the invitation for Modi’s 2016 address — his first — to a joint session of Congress.

Mike Waltz is now vice-chair of the India Caucus. Bankrolled by AIPAC, Waltz has apparently been paying off the Zionist lobby by maintaining that a cease-fire in Gaza is a “disastrous path,” describing calls from the International Criminal Court for Netanyahu’s arrest as “absurd and ridiculous,” and even, in the past, defending Israel’s denial of entry to Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). Meanwhile, he is a lead co-sponsor — along with Krishnamoorthi — of a bill to “fast-track U.S. weapons sales to India” even as India remains Israel’s top weapons purchaser, with over $2.9 billion in arms sold over the last decade.

“In this moment, the two movements are finding organic connections in both being ethnonationalist supremacist movements, which is also predicated on the closeness that India has historically forged with Israel way before BJP,” Dr. Zia told Mondoweiss about Hindutva and Zionism. “Anti-Islam sentiment is quite a tangible commonality which fulfills that adage that the enemy of enemy is my friend.”

Such seemed to be the case in 2020 when intersecting Zionist and Hindutva lobbies tried to knock out Rashida Tlaib, one of only two Muslim women in U.S. Congress who is also an outspoken critic of both the regimes in Israel and India. The lobbies poured out millions in their attempt — more so from the more monied Zionist side, but in the thousands from the Hindutva side.

In 2023, a U.S. Senate candidate was reportedly offered $20 million by AIPAC to drop out and instead run against Tlaib in the Democratic primary for Congress. He declined. In 2022, AIPAC earmarked well over $100,000 in donations to Tlaib’s Democratic challenger. Previously, in 2020, Tlaib’s primary challenger, on the eve of the primary, received nearly $10,000 from American Hindutva leaders like the Bhutada and Barai families and others. Simultaneously, Zionist donors dug deep to support the same challenger.

Rashida Tlaib is one of a handful of lawmakers who publicly boycotted Modi’s June 2023 joint session speech in Congress. She is also the sponsor of 2019’s House Resolution 724 condemning human rights violations in Kashmir and an original co-sponsor of 2022’s House Resolution 1196 condemning violations of human rights and of religious freedom in India.

In 2022, Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI), another vocal critic of Hindutva, was unseated by Democrat Haley Stevens with plenty of help from the same pro-Zionist and pro-Hindutva groups. Levin, who spent his teenage and university years in India, was known for his vociferous criticism of the Modi regime. In his retirement speech on the House floor, Levin warned that India “is in danger of becoming a Hindu nationalist state.”

Levin later said, “We just can’t sit around and let Narendra Modi, no matter how popular he is, turn this pluralist, democratic state into a religious nationalist — ethnonationalist — state.”

Andy Levin, a friend of Tlaib, was also targeted by the Zionist lobby. They reportedly sank around $8 million into unseating him and, despite his self-identification as a Zionist, painting “him as an enemy of the Jewish state because he has spoken up for the Palestinians.”

In contrast, Levin’s replacement, Stevens, described by Detroit Metro Times as “a staunch ally of Israel,” has broken ranks with Democrats on issues such as backing crackdowns on pro-Gaza university protests and supporting the Republican-led $17 billion arms package to Israel.

Similarly to Tlaib, the Zionist lobby poured at least $350,000 in 2022 into unseating the only other Muslim woman in Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). While Omar’s opposition to Zionism has drawn global attention, she also remains one of the most outspoken critics of Hindutva.

For instance, not only did Omar join Tlaib and others in boycotting Modi’s joint session speech (even hosting a competing congressional briefing about human rights in India during the same time slot), but she also sponsored H. Res. 1196.

Going further in opposition to India’s Hindutva regime, Omar quizzed a top U.S. State Department official during a 2022 hearing, asking: “Why has the Biden administration been so reluctant to criticize Modi’s government on human rights?”

Continuing her line of questioning, Omar asked, “How much does the Modi administration have to criminalize the act of being Muslim in India for us to say something? I ask you again: what will it take for us to outwardly criticize the actions that the Modi administration is taking against its Muslim minorities in India?”

“From its inception, the Hindutva lobby in the U.S. has looked to its pro-Israel counterpart as a gold standard,” Gopalan told Mondoweiss. “Hindutva groups have tried to emulate the political power Zionist groups wield, and Zionist groups have actively encouraged this by teaching the leaders of the Hindutva lobby. The foremost goal of both lobbies in U.S. politics is to stifle criticism of their respective ethnonationalist homelands, Israel and India.”

Some American politicians who either endorse the mirrored ideologies or benefit from whitewashing ethnonationalist regimes are cashing in more than ever on both the “gold standard” Zionist lobby and its Hindutva understudy.