(RNS) — Utsav Sanduja, born in Canada 34 years ago, has long admired the global power the United States wields, and couldn’t wait to become an American citizen. Not long after immigrating 14 years ago, he filed a lawsuit over what he judged an unreasonable delay in his visa application.
This November, his citizenship secured, Sanduja will be voting in his first U.S. presidential election. “Once you’re a citizen, my God, you just want to do everything in your power to be able to exercise your constitutional liberty,” he told RNS. “It’s not just an American election, it’s an election across the planet, really, and it’s just too critical to not get involved.”
Sanduja is more involved than most new voters. Earlier this month he launched the Hindus for America First PAC, intended to provide a “safe space” for Hindus, like him, who no longer feel the Democratic Party has Hindu interests at heart and plan to vote for Donald Trump.
“I am very concerned about religious pluralism, and I feel that there ought to be more disparate voices in our politics,” said Sanduja. “And what I noticed was that the Hindu voice, unfortunately, has been kind of hijacked by woke elements.”
From the appeal of lower taxes for the ultrawealthy, to job security against illegal immigration, to securing the nuclear family unit, Hindu Americans, Sanduja maintains, have more in common with the existing religious right than not. “This is our time to shine,” he said.
Sanduja’s views are shared by a growing minority of American Hindus, who are mostly first-generation Indian immigrants who have historically voted Democratic. Data from both the Carnegie Endowment and APIA Vote show Indian Americans’ support for Democrats has been decreasing since 2020.
Analysts suspect that November’s election results will show the pattern continuing.
“We’ve been so strongly Democratic that I think sometimes we’ve been taken for granted,” said Rishi Bhutada, a Houston native and treasurer of the nonpartisan Hindu American PAC. “The polling data is showing that a shift is starting to happen. It’s one of those things where, if you’re not paying attention to it as a political observer, it will surprise you.”
Bhutada, who primarily works in local elections, has followed the rise of Hindu American participation in politics over the past decade as lawmakers who openly profess their Hindu identity have cropped up across the political spectrum. This year, Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president as a Republican, countering the U.S. Congress’ so-called “Samosa Caucus” that includes Democrats Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois and Ro Khanna of California.
Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, March 3, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Non-Hindu politicians have also been paying more attention to the community as a rash of vandalism at Hindu temples and other hate crime incidents have made headlines, and caste discrimination has become an issue on college campuses and in the corporate world. Last year California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a caste discrimination bill that had been the focus of a year’s worth of sometimes volatile demonstrations.
Across the country, said Bhutada, elected officials are keeping a hand on the “Hindu pulse,” not simply viewing all Indian Americans as a single constituency. Politicians are appearing at temples and festivals more regularly and “understanding what the Hindu community’s needs are, as opposed to just going to like an Indian independent state celebration.”
HinduPACT, a project of the World Hindu Council, a 501(c)(3) organization, released a nonpartisan Hindu voter agenda educational guide this year, detailing how the presidential candidates and others approach various issues. According to Ajay Shah of HinduPACT, the most salient for Hindu Americans are visas, taxes and immigration, along with U.S. policy toward India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The latter has seen an increase in anti-Hindu sentiment that has gone unrecognized by the current presidential administration, Shah said.
Less discussed are abortion, gun control and LGBTQ+ issues, issues that Shah said may also affect how Hindu voters feel about a candidate. “When you look at Hindu dharma, very few things are absolutely black or absolutely white,” he said. “There’s a lot of room for gray area, and there’s no mandate as such.” That makes campaigning on these issues difficult. “You can’t really say, ‘OK, based on this Scripture, this verse, you have to vote this way,’” he said.
But it doesn’t make the issues any less important.”Our goal,” Shah said, “is for voters to see and decide how their personal values match up to this agenda.”
Most immigrant groups, Indians included, start out as Democrats because the party welcomes minority voting groups. Srilekha Reddy Palle, who moved to suburban Washington, D.C., from India as a young bride more than 20 years ago, considered herself a feminist who had left rigid social structures and small-town expectations behind. She was duly turned off by the word “conservative.”
Though still broadly liberal on social topics, Palle has become more critical of the sex education curriculum at her fourth grader’s school, and its “unfair” sliding-scale tuition for less wealthy families. She increasingly felt that the liberal left “pitted people against each other.” But it was “faith, family and freedom,” she said, that led her to the Republican Party. She is now a vocal advocate for Hindu American Republicans on social media.
Yet Palle said she still feels like a “foreigner” when she attends the Virginia Federation of Republican Women, and when she asked that the federation’s prayer meetings allow interfaith prayers, not exclusively Christian ones, she said, “That idea was definitely not welcome.
“For me, it’s like, do I want to be in a party that is ignorant because they don’t know any better? Or go to a party that pretends to be not racist, that pretends to just do sweet talk, but when push comes to shove, they will not support me?”
Sangay Mishra, a political scientist at Drew University who studies the connection between Indian American identity and voting patterns, has seen a new link in the last decade between religion and national affiliation.
“There are people that are much more oriented towards what’s happening in India and what the U.S .is doing vis-a-vis India, and particularly the Hindu nationalist project in India,” Mishra said. “They have resources, right? And so they want to frame the political conversations around who is in support of (Indian Prime Minister) Narendra Modi. If Democrats are occasionally criticizing Narendra Modi, criticizing religious freedom in India, for example, they are not friends of Hindus.”
According to Pew Research Center, more than 70% of Indians view their ancestral homeland favorably, regardless of which American political party they support. Many credit Modi with enhancing the standing of the Indian diaspora, including its influence on the tech, culinary and political sectors.
But Modi has largely been criticized by human rights watchers for boosting religious nationalism and discrimination against religious minorities, and some Indians haven’t forgotten that Modi was banned from the U.S. for more than a decade for his response as state governor to the 2002 Gujarat riots that killed 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.
This past week, Trump could be heard complimenting Modi on his “killer” attitude, celebrating the two allies’ reception at a 2019 “Howdy Modi” event that drew 80,000 people to NRG Stadium in Houston.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shows the indelible ink mark on his index finger after casting his vote during the third phase of general elections, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, May 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki)
“I get India is a flawed country,” said Sanduja. “I get that Prime Minister Modi’s record is not perfect, but you don’t lecture your friends and insult them in public about human rights and democracy. I see Trump’s friendship with him, a personal friendship, as indicative that Trump does respect what we value to be. I just think that four more years of Democrats and four more years of human rights lectures is going to push India further away from America.”
Palle agreed. “President Trump is different. He lets people rule their own places. He’s so focused on America, his own mess, I don’t think he has the time or passion to go through other countries. It’s very natural that I want to be aligned with the party that doesn’t interfere in my own home, and because I still have family there, I still want India to grow.”
But others discount U.S.-Indian relations as a factor in Hindu Americans’ votes. Manish Chand, an Indian national and founder of the Centre for Global India Insights, said the United States’ relationship won’t change based on who is in the White House. “This partnership has been building up for some time, and now it has acquired a robust bipartisan consensus,” he told RNS, saying the two countries’ “full spectrum relationship” extends to defense, energy, space, trade and investment and education. “So it doesn’t really matter who is in power.”
Anju Bhargava, who served on the White House Advisory Council on Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Obama administration, said Hindu Americans will vote along the same lines of generational and political concern as other immigrant groups. Older Indians may go for Trump because “most immigrant lenses are colored by the history of the land that they come from,” said Bhargava, who met Trump when she was a banker in the 1980s. But Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 election results and his demeanor toward women will not work with the younger crowd, she says.
Polls show that most Indian Americans are excited to see Kamala Harris become the first person of Indian American heritage to be nominated for the job. Yet identity is complicated, Bhargava added: Yes, Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Indian Hindu, but she chose to raise her daughters with an identity that might have been more accepted at the time.
“Kamala Harris has brought a whole bunch of energy and a new American profile, which is of not just being a person of color, but the New America, which is very mixed,” Bhargava said. “She’s at the forefront of what the future generations are going to be. So she’s like a role model for many people who are mixed and who are looking from an identity perspective.”
M.R. Rangaswami, investor and founder of the global forum InDiaspora, depicted Harris as someone Hindus admire. “Personally, I’ve known Kamala Harris for over a decade because she was my district attorney in San Francisco, and then our attorney general, our senator and now vice president,” he said. “I’ve seen her remarkable rise, and she’s a quick learner. She stepped up every time to do more and more, and she’s fully prepared, in my mind, to lead the country.”
What’s at stake, according to Sanduja, is not only what Hindu Americans want, but how they use their voice. “People talk about Indian Americans in general, but they don’t know that the Hindu community in particular is a very vocal community, a community that puts their money into their temples, into their schools,” he said. “They’re very proactive. If they got involved in politics, it would be earth shattering. That’s what we’re going to do in this election.”