How Trump’s concern for Bangladeshi Hindus shows the Hindu community is gaining a political voice – Firstpost

In the final days of the campaign, heated exchanges between US presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump accelerated at an expected pace. However, a comment that Trump made last week particularly caught my attention when he was talking about the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh.

At a time when India’s opposition parties have abandoned them and allowed themselves to be slaughtered by the now emboldened Islamist forces, this gesture was unique.

Posting a message on the occasion of the Hindu festival of Diwali on the social media platform X, Trump condemned the “barbaric violence” taking place against Hindus, Christians and other minorities in Bangladesh. He also accused Kamala and Joe Biden of ignoring Hindus around the world and in America.

Interestingly, Trump also touted the anti-Hindu agenda of radical leftists and promised to protect Indian Americans after coming to power. In the same message, he also promised to strengthen the country’s great partnership with India, calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi there his good friend.

These remarks by Donald Trump came on the eve of the US elections and there is no doubt that, apart from legitimate concern about the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh, they also carry a certain degree of politicization.

After all, as many as 80 percent of the population of Americans of Indian origin are Hindus, and in a fierce electoral competition in which Kamala Harris is fighting a tough fight against Trump, every electorate that supports her counts. In fact, Trump has courted the Hindu diaspora community settled in the United States on previous occasions, including for political reasons. During the 2016 presidential election, he attended a massive rally in New Jersey in an attempt to woo the Indian-American community. He also continued the precedent set by President George W. Bush in 2003 of celebrating Diwali at the White House with the annual lighting of a ceremonial lamp during his presidency.

However, despite all attempts by Republican candidate Donald Trump to woo the Hindu electorate in the US, the Indian-American community has long supported Democratic Party candidates. This is because of her positions on immigration, health care and other issues, which appeal more to Indian-Americans.

With a population of approximately 5.2 million, they constitute the second largest immigrant community in the U.S., historically indicating a deep preference for the Democratic Party. But now this trend is also changing rapidly. The number of Indian-American respondents who identified as Democrats dropped to 47 percent from 56 percent over the past four years, according to a survey released this year by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The number of people identifying as Republicans, meanwhile, rose to 21% from just about 15% as of 2020. If these numbers hold true, they will also significantly influence how people vote in the current election. This means that the Grand Old Party’s support base is widening among Indian Americans, most of whom are from the Hindu community.

Interestingly, Trump’s outreach to Hindus in America comes at a time when one of the main grudges they hold against Republicans is their perceived intolerance towards minorities, particularly under the influence of the Christian evangelical lobby. In such a scenario, some of the earlier statements by Republican leaders calling on their countrymen to embrace Christian nationalism have not gone down well with his political base among the Indian-American community.

But now the Republican Party is rapidly changing its former image, where many pro-Hindu leaders have climbed to the highest ranks and proudly display their credentials. This includes Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance. Unlike Kamala Harris, who pretended to be a black woman despite her Indian heritage, Indian-born leaders have always expressed great pride in their roots.

The trend of politicians more openly accepting their Hindu identity is not limited to American politics. We saw Rishi Sunak do the same in the UK. In recent years, there have been many instances where various international leaders have raised the issue of Hindu rights on global platforms. Last year, Dutch politician Geert Wilders pledged to support the cause of persecuted Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh after his surprise election victory in December 2023. In fact, Wilders has long been a champion of Hindu rights; he even raised the issue of attacks on Hindus in Islamic countries in the Dutch parliament.

Similarly, Tulsi Gabbard, herself a practicing Hindu, played a key role in raising the community’s profile in American politics. Already in 2013, she sent a loud message to the entire world when, after winning the Congressional elections, she became the first and only practicing Hindu to take an oath on the Srimad Bhagvad Gita.

Trump’s reference to Bangladeshi Hindus is an extension of the same trend. This shows that Hindu identity and Hindu rights are gaining more and more importance around the world, and in a very welcome move, the community is finally looking to increase its participation in the global political discourse.

In India, Hindus are often accused of majoritarianism and demonized for seeking a political identity. This is despite the fact that other communities are rather encouraged to mobilize politically due to the compulsion to pursue vote bank politics by some mainstream political parties in the country. This name-calling and suppression of Indians’ political free will also affects their global identity. In Canada, for example, a large portion of the immigrant population is Hindu and often faces attacks on places of worship and other forms of harassment, and yet it is the Khalistanis who dominate the narrative and force politicians to placate them by using their collective power.

Hindus may be a comfortable majority in India, but if we look at the global level, Hindus are not a majority community but only a small minority compared to Abrahamic religions such as Islam and Christianity. If Christians constitute 31.6 percent of the world’s population and Muslims constitute about 25.8 percent, then only a tiny fraction of 15 percent identify as Hindus worldwide.

Apart from India and Nepal and, to some extent, Mauritius, Hindus in every other country in the world are identified as a minority community. In such a scenario, their rights are often ignored and the grim stories of their persecution in many countries completely fade into the background. However, in recent years, thanks to India’s economic performance and the growing purchasing power of the country’s Hindu community, there has been a desire to support campaigns for Hindu rights around the world.

This does not mean that Hindus were no longer able to exert influence comparable to that of the Jewish or Islamist lobby. But at least there’s a start. Donald Trump’s statement condemning the persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh is important. Indians are finally finding a political voice around the world.

The author is a geopolitics and foreign policy commentator based in New Delhi. She obtained her PhD from the Faculty of International Relations at the University of South Asia. @TrulyMonica tweeted. The views expressed in the above text are the author’s personal and exclusive views. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.

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