# Hindu American Foundation

The Hindu American Foundation (abbr. HAF) is an American Hindu non-profit advocacy group founded in 2003. The organisation has its roots in the Hindu nationalist organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad America and its student wing Hindu Students Council.
HAF's areas of activism include protecting Hindu rights in the United States, highlighting Hindu persecution in other countries, pushing back against the cultural appropriation of yoga, and opposition to legislation of anti-caste discrimination laws. Scholars argue that HAF's activism aligns with Hindu nationalism and impinges on academic freedom.

## Establishment

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 University of California, Los Angeles noted that the organization appeared to have banked on the enormous goodwill created by Mahatma Gandhi in the West.

### Hindu nationalist origins

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 2002 Gujarat riots against Hindu nationalist violence directed at minorities — alleged the formation of HAF to have been the outcome of Meghani's parleys on the governing council of 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.

#### Response to claims about their origin

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

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. 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, 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, 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, HAF participated in the drafting and submission of edits to an FBI manual to track hate crimes against Hindus specifically. However, Azad Essa argued that the HAF has exaggerated the hate crimes faced by Hindus in America. Essa found 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.
In 2016, HAF along with Indiaspora and other organizations convinced the United States Postal Service to issue a stamp commemorating the festival of Diwali.

### Pro-India advocacy

In 2002, Gujarat witnessed a communal riot under the Chief Ministership of Narendra Modi; scholars blamed the incumbent government — including Modi himself — 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. 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, 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. 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 being unpatriotic.
In 2016, 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, 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.

### Take Back Yoga campaign

In 2010, HAF launched the "Take Back Yoga" campaign as a reaction to alleged cultural appropriation and secularization of yoga by popular press and neo-gurus who according to the HAF "abstained from discussing the origins of yoga in Hinduism and corrupted a Hindu philosophical practice to a mere collection of physical postures". 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 HAF's claims within a polemical discourse of religious fundamentalism that unwittingly borrowed from and mirrored the West; while HAF spoke about the inevitable Hinduization of anybody who chooses to practice Yoga in its "true essence", the Christian far-right denounced Yoga as a satanic act which 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, HAF had to borrow from Christian (and colonial) notions of what constituted a Yogic canon.

### Caste

In 2010, 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 HAF to have "prioritized attacks on higher education". Other scholars agree.

### Textbook revisionism in California

In March 2006, 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 Hindu Nationalist groups linked with RSS — 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 HAF and chose to retain the textbooks; it found 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 found Doniger's work to be stigmatizing of Hinduism.
The following year, as the National Book Critics Circle shortlisted her work for its 2010 annual awards, HAF protested the choice. They alleged Doniger's scholarship to be laden with numerous inaccuracies and an anti-Hindu bias. HAF also accused her of offering "offensive, shocking, and gratuitous deconstruction of some of the most important [Hindu] epics" and providing "pornographic depictions" of Hindu deities. Suhag Shukla, director of HAF and also an ex-student of Doniger, went on to criticize the American Academy of Religion for coming out in support of Doniger and supporting the academic freedom of scholars to "offer any interpretation" of any religion.

### Defamation suit against academics and activists

In May 2021, HAF filed a defamation lawsuit against Sunita Viswanath and Raju Rajagopal of Hindus for Human Rights, Rasheed Ahmed from the Indian American Muslim Council, Prabhudoss, and Truschke. 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. A diverse group of intellectuals and academics — Akeel Bilgrami, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Cornel West, Martha Nussbaum, Nandini Sundar, Noam Chomsky, Romila Thapar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Sheldon Pollock, and Wendy Doniger among others — condemned HAF's tactics as a SLAPP, designed to silence critics and push forward Hindutva. Shukla, in response, noted them to have a record of producing "anti-Hindu scholarship".
On 15 March 2022, Judge Amit Mehta stayed the defendants' motions to dismiss the suit since he deemed one of their arguments about whether 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 HAF's new evidence to pass muster and ordered discovery. On 20 December 2022, he dismissed the suit since 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.

### Opposing Dismantling Global Hindutva conference

During August–September 2021, HAF launched a protest campaign against a virtual conference, Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, organized by a conglomeration of American universities. It accused the conference of platforming activists with "extensive histories of amplifying Hinduphobic discourse ... [who] equate the whole of Hinduism with caste bigotry, deny the subcontinental indigeneity of Hindus ... and deny the resulting genocides and ethnic cleansings of Hindus".
Multiple academics and activists involved in the conference reported receiving death threats and being subject to other forms of intimidation. 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.
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 HAF had weaponized Hindutva to stifle free speech. Dheepa Sundaram, a religion and digital culture scholar at University of Denver, found the lawsuit to leverage "the rhetoric and tactics of social justice activists" in "pursuit of an oppressive ideology".

## Reception

Scholars, almost unanimously, agree that 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 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 HAF to be an integral component of the "wider Sangh Parivar" and Hindu right in the United States.
Sundaram found among the group's aims to sanitize the exclusionary nature of Hindutva, in part by borrowing from decolonial vocabulary, misleadingly portraying terms like "Hindutva", "Brahminism", etc. as oriental pejoratives. Chad Bauman, a professor of religion at Butler University, contended HAF's portrayal of Hinduism to be misleadingly monolithic and in service of a political agenda. Nishant Upadhyay, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, specializing in gender and sexuality studies found the group's queer-friendly portrayal of Hinduism to be embedded within a discourse of Hindutva homonationalism.
The BBC has noted that the HAF has lobbied support in favor of Narendra Modi, the incumbent Prime Minister of India, amongst the diaspora. Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative found 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. They — as well as several journalists — documented numerous anti-Muslim statements made by HAF board members, past and present. Academics and journalists have also investigated money trails linking HAF to other Sangh Parivar groups via their donors.

### Response

HAF denies these charges, claims to be non-partisan, and has unsuccessfully filed defamation suits against a wide range of organizations and individuals that alleged its links to Hindutva. 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 HAF from the overtly negative connotations of Hindu nationalism. Sonia Sikka, an academic specializing in the intersection of religion and politics, too rejects HAF's claims of non-partisanship.