Trump and Modi at Howdy, Modi, 2019 Sri Preston Kulkarni and Ramesh Bhutada were repeatedly asked their perspective on the issues tackled in the article, but neither returned any attempt to contact them. When India’s Hindu nationalist movement began facing staunch criticism in the US in the 1990s, it found it expedient to develop a presence in the halls of US Congress so as to tell its side of the story. After Modi was banned from the US in the early 2000s, the movement’s Indian-American affiliates realized they needed advocates within Congress itself, who could push their agenda while stifling their critics. As Hindu nationalist sympathizers within the diaspora usually found that the pro-immigrant Democratic Party offered space and scope to easily enter and expand, they have typically focused their efforts on supporting candidates on the left even as they champion a chauvinistic and majoritarian agenda in India. * As…

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