Last month, Moore, a political newcomer, and his running mate, former state Del. Aruna Miller, held a high-dollar fundraiser at the home of Jasdip “Jesse” Singh, the founder of Sikhs for Trump. The event was co-hosted by one-time Trump adviser Sajid Tarar, who founded Muslims for Trump and delivered a prayer for the then-candidate at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Singh and Tarar have strong connections to the current Republican governor, serving on his commission for South Asian issues.

The fundraiser was also organized in part by Dr. Sudhir Sekhsaria, a local allergist who referred to himself at the event as one of the campaign’s “finance chairs” and has given at least $12,000 to Moore and Miller since January. Sekhsaria had previously helped Miller as treasurer during her unsuccessful congressional run in 2018, soliciting thousands of dollars in donations from people affiliated with Hindu nationalism.

“It’s a very profitable method to tap into the Hindutva sectors of the community.”

Adapa Prasad, the national president of the group Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the U.S. outreach wing of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, also attended the fundraiser. The group, which Sekhsaria has also been linked to, was required in 2020 to register in the U.S. as a foreign agent.

A spokesperson for Moore and Miller’s campaign did not say how much money it raised from last month’s event, but the local news site Next TV reported a total haul of more than $100,000.

The fundraiser in Maryland for Moore and Miller appeared to be the latest instance of Hindutva, or a Hindu nationalist political ideology, creeping into American politics. As the global far right gathers power, Indian policy issues and Hindutva-affiliated money have increasingly shown up in U.S. elections. In Maryland, the combination of cozying up to allies of both Trump and Modi has raised questions among local activists and South Asian Americans as to what interest they might have in helping Democrats take back the governor’s mansion.

“We see this as a stepping stone for more folks with these right-wing connections to come into office,” said Gayatri Girirajan, a member of Peace Action Montgomery, a local chapter of the grassroots peace organization that has been advocating for transparency and accountability around the Moore campaign’s affiliations. “These are people who have a lot of influence, community power, money, and lobbying power to put policies in place that would have a significant effect on marginalized communities.”

Donors who are prominent members of groups associated with the U.S.-based Hindu right have funded Democratic politicians in recent years, including backing former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii; former Texas congressional candidate Sri Preston Kulkarni; and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill.

A spokesperson for the Moore campaign told The Intercept that the campaign is happy to accept support from people across the aisle, and that its success depends in part on bringing Republicans into the fold. They also said Sekhsaria is not employed by the campaign.

“In order to win elections, you have to build a broad coalition, and that often includes people who’ve previously supported Republicans,” the spokesperson said. “These donors have given to many Democrats here in Maryland and across the country, including every Democrat currently running for statewide office.”

Neither Singh nor Sekhsaria responded to requests for comment. Tarar confirmed that he is the founder of Muslims for Trump, but did not respond to other questions.

Tapping into the resources of the small but wealthy and well-connected part of the Maryland South Asian community can be the key to political success, said Girirajan, a Maryland resident who grew up in the local Hindu community.

“It’s a very profitable method to tap into the Hindutva sectors of the community,” she told The Intercept. “If you are able to really appeal — whether you truly believe the ideology or not — there’s so much money in Maryland, particularly among the upper-caste Hindu community.”

Ahead of the Maryland gubernatorial Democratic primary in July, Peace Action Montgomery launched an effort to raise awareness about Miller’s financial ties to people involved in right-wing Hindu politics, said Susan Kerin, the chapter’s chair.

In an email shared with The Intercept, a constituent contacted the Moore campaign to express concern about Miller’s ties to the Hindutva movement. Brian Adam Jones, the campaign’s director of communications, replied and asked whether similar requests were being made of other candidates in the primary, particularly John King, whom Jones claimed “has accepted thousands of dollars from BJP supporters.”

King, who served as education secretary under President Barack Obama, had been alerted about a donor with Hindutva connections and in June gave their donation of $1,500 to civil rights organization Muslim Advocates. The campaign condemned the Hindutva movement in a statement and pledged to not take money tied to it. (King did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.)

In response to local efforts urging the Moore campaign to disavow its relationships with right-wing Hindu affiliates and for Miller to return donations from them, the campaign added a page to its website in July to lay out “the facts” about Miller’s record on supporting Muslim communities and religious freedom.

“Aruna Miller has a clear record fighting for religious freedom and supporting the Islamic community in Maryland and abroad,” the site says. “There is not one dollar in this campaign that has anything to do with the Hindutva movement or international politics.”

The webpage also notes that some of the donors in question are major givers to Democrats like President Joe Biden and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and suggested that the focus on Miller had to do with her identity: “We refuse to accept that these donations are somehow only nefarious when they are in support of an Indian-American woman, the only immigrant in this race.”

“Our ask is return the money and really assure us that these people will not have access in any way, shape, or form to the administration.”

Two months after the Moore campaign put out the statement, Moore and Miller held the fundraiser at Singh’s house. A week after the fundraiser, on October 3, Moore and Miller met with leaders from several Muslim councils across the state. According to a summary of that meeting shared with The Intercept, the candidates told attendees that the campaign reviewed its donations and said that none came from members or sympathizers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the umbrella organization of Hindu nationalist groups.

That’s hard to believe given the fundraiser at Singh’s house, Kerin said. In the remaining weeks leading up to the election, she added, Peace Action Montgomery is renewing its efforts for the Moore campaign to acknowledge their concerns.

“Our ask is return the money and really assure us that these people will not have access in any way, shape, or form to the administration,” she said.

Moore’s selection of Miller as his running mate gave pause to some local activists and members of the South Asian community in Maryland. The activists were concerned about Miller’s record of accepting donations from individuals connected to U.S. Hindu nationalist groups, namely Sudhir Sekhsaria. At last month’s fundraiser, Miller singled out Sekhsaria as instrumental to her political career.

“I would not be here today if not for your love and your encouragement of me from day one when I first ran for public office,” she said to Sekhsaria, according to a recording of the event on YouTube.

Miller got her start in politics as a delegate for Maryland’s 15th District, where she served for almost nine years. In 2018, she ran for Congress to represent Maryland’s 6th District but lost in the Democratic primary.

Sekhsaria, his wife, and his medical practice have given thousands of dollars to Miller’s campaigns, according to campaign finance disclosures. While Sekhsaria has contributed to other major Democratic candidates like Biden and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., he has contributed more to Miller’s congressional campaigns than to any other federal candidate since 2002 — giving $10,200 in total.

While treasurer of Miller’s congressional campaign, Sekhsaria helped put together a fundraiser for Miller in Houston, which was attended by several people affiliated with right-wing Hindu activities in the U.S., including key organizers of “Howdy, Modi,” the massive 2019 rally that celebrated the close relationship between the Indian prime minister and Trump. Sekhsaria has also organized events for the Overseas Friends of the BJP, as well as Ekal Vidyalaya, a nonprofit that runs schools in India that reportedly spread a Hindu nationalist agenda in their curriculum; Sekhsaria and his wife pledged $30,000 at an Ekal fundraiser in 2018.

The potential influence of Hindutva money in U.S. politics has grown in recent years where there are sizable South Asian American communities. Politicians like Gabbard, Krishnamoorthi, and Kulkarni have been criticized by South Asian constituents and progressive groups for deflecting questions about their affiliations with people associated with Hindu nationalist groups and accepting their financial support.

While Miller has recently tweeted against the BJP’s anti-Muslim policies, she was also quoted at an Overseas Friends of the BJP event referring to Modi as a “rock star” ahead of his appearance at Madison Square Garden in 2014. The website of Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy nonprofit with reported ties to the U.S. Hindu right, also features a statement from Miller from 2017 in support of the group’s efforts to implement a revisionist version of Indian history into California textbooks.

Since launching her lieutenant gubernatorial campaign, Miller has distanced herself from praise of Modi. After the “rock star” comment resurfaced in May, just ahead of the primary, Miller wrote in a tweet that she had attended the Overseas Friends of the BJP event “a decade ago, before any authoritarian action he took as Prime Minister. I have stood for the rights of Muslims in Maryland and abroad for my entire career, and that will continue.”

The post Is Hindu Nationalist Money Making Its Way Into Maryland’s Governor Race? appeared first on The Intercept.

But for some Asian American voters, the decision has become more complicated. Though Kulkarni went to great lengths to court the quickly growing voting bloc in the Houston suburbs during his 2018 run against Republican Rep. Pete Olson, his efforts to cultivate a diverse coalition of supporters have gone awry among Indian Americans in the district. Kulkarni’s attendance last year at a rally headlined by India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump, in addition to allegations that his political career was launched with the aid of individuals ideologically connected to Hindu extremist groups in India, have cracked open deep-seated political divisions among Muslim and Hindu communities that were largely unified around his 2018 campaign.

“Our board is very mixed about how they feel about Sri,” said Munira Bangee, president of Houston Muslim Democrats.

A recent survey showed that U.S.-India relations ranks among the least important issues for the Indian American electorate, but Kulkarni’s ties to members of U.S. Hindu nationalist groups that are connected to violent, anti-Muslim activity in India have caused him to lose some of his 2018 supporters. A few have gone as far as backing Kulkarni’s Republican opponent — although Nehls himself has also been courted by pro-Modi groups and individuals during the race.

The seat in Texas’s 22nd District opened up after Olson, having defeated Kulkarni by 5 percentage points in 2018, announced his retirement last year. Kulkarni’s field operation in the diverse district — the majority of residents in Fort Bend County are people of color, and 17 percent are voting-eligible Asian Americans — includes contacting voters in 27 languages, up from 13 last cycle. Kulkarni’s domestic political positions hew mainly to the center. While he advocated for Medicare for All in 2018, his current platform favors a public option and states that he opposes efforts to dismantle Medicaid and Medicare. He has said that he is against defunding police departments and does not mention signature progressive Democratic issues, such as a Green New Deal, in his platform. His 2020 campaign has a host of endorsements from moderate Democrats, including the Blue Dog PAC, the political arm of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, as well as from a couple progressive groups like Indivisible and environmentalist organization the Sierra Club.

Though District 22 was once a Republican stronghold, the race for the open congressional seat is neck and neck, with the latest internal Democratic poll showing Kulkarni with a slight lead. In part because of the DCCC’s significant investment in flipping the district, Kulkarni’s fundraising has far surpassed Nehls: $4.5 million to $1 million.

Kulkarni did not directly answer questions from The Intercept about his connections to members of Hindu nationalist groups operating in the United States. In a statement, he said, “Unfortunately, our opponent’s campaign has attempted to sow division in our district, by inflaming tension in our faith communities, including the Hindu and Muslim communities. We absolutely reject such divisive tactics. In a district as diverse as TX-22, the only way to achieve true representation is through strong coalitions which include every community.” Nehls did not respond to a request for comment.

“Like a Father to Me”

The past two years in India have been marked by an alarming escalation of political and sectarian conflict instigated by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Under the BJP’s rule, India’s religious minorities, particularly Muslims, and Dalits and Indigenous groups, have faced violence and disenfranchisement.

Modi enjoys support in the U.S. from a like-minded segment of the Indian American public, including a Houston-based nonprofit connected to people affiliated with Hindu nationalist organizations across the U.S. that planned last year’s “Howdy, Modi” rally. He also has vehement opponents, however, including some who were appalled by Kulkarni’s appearance at the rally and the candidate’s acceptance of at least $60,000 in campaign contributions from members of U.S.-based Hindu nationalist groups and their family members.

At the center of the controversy over Kulkarni’s donors is Ramesh Bhutada, the national vice president of the U.S. wing of the Indian Hindu nationalist paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. In the 1970s, Bhutada helped establish Houston’s first chapter of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization under the RSS umbrella that is set up in the U.S. as a nonprofit with a stated aim of doing service work and fostering community among Hindus living in America. Bhutada has also been active in political organizing for Modi’s election campaigns, as well as organizing and fundraising for the campaigns of several U.S. politicians, notably Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, who has drawn her own criticism for ties to Hindu nationalist groups and been a vocal supporter of the Modi government. Both Bhutada and his son Rishi were involved in organizing “Howdy, Modi.”

Bhutada and his relatives were reportedly involved in an effort that raised a total of $45,000 to jump-start Kulkarni’s 2018 campaign. Kulkarni himself has indicated that Bhutada was instrumental in getting his political career off the ground: After winning the Democratic nomination in the 2018 primary runoff, he said in a victory speech that Bhutada “has been like a father to me on this campaign.” Bhutada and his wife Kiran have donated a total of $29,000 to Kulkarni’s 2018 and 2020 campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Speaking to The Intercept, Rishi Bhutada said that he and his father first met Kulkarni in 2018 after he happened upon an Indian name while researching District 22’s Democratic primary candidates. The younger Bhutada is on the boards of Hindu American Foundation, a controversial D.C.-based advocacy organization that invited Kulkarni to its 2018 gala, and Hindu American PAC, a political action committee that donates to politicians it deems represent Hindu American interests, including $22,500 to Kulkarni since 2018.

Rishi Bhutada said he and his father were impressed by Kulkarni’s commitment to building diverse coalitions in the district, as well as his positions on domestic policy issues like climate change and gun violence.

“Sri was really pioneering something different, where he was strongly pushing outreach to every immigrant community in the district: Indian American, Pakistani American, Chinese American, Nigerian Americans, everybody,” said Rishi Bhutada, who has donated $20,200 to Kulkarni along with his wife Shradha. “So we really thought, OK this guy is trying something new and is possibly the best candidate that the Democrats have had in this district since Nick Lampson. He’s got a shot and we really believed it.”

The Bhutadas began activating the Hindu American community to support Kulkarni, asking them to donate and volunteer for his campaign. Among them were several individuals who helped organize “Howdy, Modi” and who are leaders in U.S. affiliates of the Hindu right. Their connections and contributions to Kulkarni were first reported in August by independent journalist and activist Pieter Friedrich, who has been at the helm of an online campaign against Kulkarni and these donors.

These ties, not much noticed in 2018, have become highly contentious in Kulkarni’s current campaign, in large part due to his attendance at the Modi rally. “The ‘Howdy, Modi’ event caused a lot of tension between communities,” said Shakeib, a voter in District 22 who asked to be identified only by his first name, citing fear of online harassment. “On the one hand, we had 50,000 people that came to the event, and on the other side, we had a huge protest happening. I haven’t seen that kind of mass protest before in 25 years living in Houston.” Shakeib has not yet decided who he will vote for, telling The Intercept that he hopes Kulkarni will condemn the RSS and consider returning the controversial donations in order to rebuild trust with the Muslim community before Election Day.

People were tipped off to Kulkarni’s attendance at the event after Harris County District Clerk Marilyn Burgess, a Democrat, posted a photo on Facebook posing with Kulkarni inside NRG Stadium in front of American and Indian flags. The photo set off a heated conversation within the Houston Muslim Democrats’ private Facebook group, Bangee said, over why he attended an event celebrating the right-wing Indian prime minister.

Kulkarni addressed the group later that week, saying that he went “not as an endorsement of any specific figure or policy, but as a show of respect for the Indian-American community and especially the volunteers who worked hard to organize the largest collection of Indian-Americans in America’s history, many of whom were also volunteers on our campaign last year, and who worked alongside people in this forum to register and get out voters last year.” He said this was his same rationale for attending Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech during the Islamic Society of North America convention in Houston the month prior.

Kulkarni went on to say that he had spent more than 60 hours last September in private discussions with various stakeholders on the Indian government’s unilateral decision to revoke Kashmir’s partial autonomy and lock down the Muslim-majority region last August, an action that caused international alarm amid reports of an internet shutdown, extrajudicial detentions, and human rights abuses.

In the weeks leading up to the November election, the online campaign against Kulkarni has painted him as effectively a stooge for Hindu nationalists in the U.S. — criticizing his close ties with individuals like Ramesh Bhutada and his apparent hesitance to disassociate himself from right-wing Hindu groups in the U.S. Late last month, Kulkarni lost the endorsement of Emgage, an American Muslim political action committee that had supported his 2018 run but decided to refrain from endorsing any candidate in the District 22 race this year after facing pressure to distance itself from him.

“The unfortunate thing is that when these attacks against Sri started, his response didn’t go far enough to give people comfort that he was disassociated from the views being attributed to him online,” said Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of Emgage Foundation. “He also didn’t clearly disassociate himself from potential supporters who held those views, or were tied to organizations accused of extremism abroad.”

Crisis Control

Kulkarni has tried to manage the controversy over his candidacy that has been raging for the past several months. In response to criticism, he has given a handful of interviews in which he professed that he and his campaign have no connections to foreign organizations or ideologies, including the RSS. His campaign added to its website that “it does not accept support from any foreign entities, nor is it connected to or influenced by any foreign organizations, such as RSS, [the Chinese Communist Party], or their affiliates.” At a private meeting of board members of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston earlier this month, Kulkarni, a former U.S. Foreign Service official, was captured on video telling assembled guests that as little as two years prior, he had been unaware of the existence of the RSS and would have thought it was an acronym for Real Simple Syndication, a popular web feed.

After Emgage’s decision not to back his campaign this September, Kulkarni posted a “letter to the Muslim community” on his website, lamenting that the group had been pressured by “nefarious actors” to renege on its support for him and vowing that if elected to Congress, he would oppose measures by the Modi government to strip the citizenship of Indian Muslims — an issue of serious concern to Indian Americans whose friends and families in India would be gravely endangered by such a move.

“I want to make it clear that I am, and always have been, an ally to the Muslim community,” Kulkarni wrote. “My goal throughout all of this is to serve as an intermediary between our many different communities to spark dialogue and understanding in the hopes of creating real change that can help people.”

Kulkarni has made a final push with the Muslim community, including visiting several mosques during the early-voting period that began on October 13. He also made one last appeal on Facebook to the Houston Muslim Democrats: “For all those who want true representation in TX-22, please don’t listen to the conspiracy theories and propaganda. Look at our record and the choice is clear. We need all of your support and we need it now.”

Though some skeptical voters were appeased by Kulkarni’s letter, for some Indian Muslims in the Houston area, his response was too little, too late, after months of apparent equivocating about the Modi government’s discriminatory policies. Those who spoke to The Intercept said that in the worst case, Kulkarni’s remarks appeared to be merely an attempt to salvage his dwindling base of Muslim supporters while also retaining his funding streams from individuals connected with the U.S. Hindu right.

“People are still not happy, his base is still falling,” Shakeib said. “What people are now asking him is that he should condemn what’s going on in India, he should condemn the RSS, and he should return funding he’s gotten from these executives.”

Hindutva Money in Politics

Over the last few years, the potential influence of Hindutva money in U.S. politics has become a wider concern within the South Asian American diaspora. Members of the U.S. Hindu right could leverage their funding and leadership in their communities to influence how elected officials respond to the deteriorating political situation in India, including by obstructing congressional censure of the Modi government, said Raju Rajagopal, co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, a progressive Hindu American advocacy group. Rajagopal, who co-moderated a virtual town hall with Nehls last month, said that as a lifelong Democrat, he would never ask voters to back a Republican and that he has heard from some Democrats in the district that they may abstain from voting in the race.

As a hub of Hindu nationalist activity and the second-largest Indian American population in the country, Texas has also become one of the main states where voters are paying more attention to Hindutva money in politics. Even as Kulkarni’s conflict is largely intra-Democratic, Texas Republicans have sought to capitalize on the dynamic. In a series of since-deleted tweets on September 25, Olson referred to contributions to Kulkarni from his major Hindu donors as “big time money from Nazi sympathizers,” despite the fact that Olson himself received $4,000 from Ramesh Bhutada in 2009 and 2011. During the 2018 race, Olson was caught on video referring to Kulkarni as a “liberal, liberal, liberal Indo-American who is a carpetbagger.” While Kulkarni was in the crowd at “Howdy, Modi,” Olson was part of the event’s congressional delegation and shook hands with the Indian prime minister on stage. Olson did not respond to a request for comment.

On a national level, Republican Hindus last December launched Americans4Hindus, a Super PAC created in response to what its founders perceive as leftist, anti-India sentiment within the Democratic Party, particularly from Indian American politicians like Reps. Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal, who have sharply criticized Modi over his government’s human rights abuses. Several members of the group have been involved in pro-Modi and pro-BJP organizing, including its co-chairs, Romesh Japra and Raj Bhayani.

The group has endorsed Trump, as well as a number of congressional candidates, including Nehls, who attended an A4H Zoom call during the week of the Republican National Convention. In September, Nehls and his brother, who is running to succeed him as sheriff, participated in an in-person event co-hosted by A4H and Hindu Congress of America, another right-wing group.

Switching Sides

Among Nehls’s Hindu American supporters in the district is Bangar Reddy, a Fort Bend County resident for 25 years. He previously donated $1,000 to Kulkarni in June 2019 after he said he attended a meet-and-greet with the candidate at the home of Jugal Malani. Malani is the chair of the nonprofit that organized “Howdy, Modi,” and, with his wife and son, has donated $18,300 to Kulkarni’s campaigns. But Reddy, who was a transportation coordinator for the event, thought that Kulkarni should have been a more active participant.

Reddy ran in the district’s Republican primary and, after losing, joined Nehls’s campaign as outreach director. Referring to Kulkarni as a leftist and a socialist, Reddy told The Intercept that he disagreed with the candidate making statements on Indian politics that Reddy perceived to be critical of the Indian government.

“Over a period of time, things have changed. Sri has become more far left, pandering to every community and promising everything,” Reddy said. “The ‘Howdy, Modi’ event was a litmus test that proved he’s neither for Indian Americans and doesn’t have a solid agenda.”

In addition to Nehls’s military and police service, Reddy told The Intercept that the sheriff has established himself as a familiar face in the district and built rapport with different communities. “Everybody knows him, and over a period of time he’s grown a good relationship with the Indian American community,” he said.

Last August, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh visited the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office for the Hindu holiday Raksha Bandhan; HSS chapters across the U.S. are known to visit police and fire departments, as well as local elected officials, during this holiday.

Nehls has shown himself to be uninitiated on many issues that are driving divisions in District 22. During the September virtual town hall co-hosted by Hindu and Muslim progressive groups, Nehls repeatedly expressed that he did not know enough about the Muslim ban or India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslim migrants from Muslim-majority countries from receiving expedited citizenship.

As Election Day nears, Indian Muslims, and others who have become invested in the issue, are torn over who to vote for. Following the Islamic Society of Greater Houston meeting with Kulkarni, an ISGH board member came out in support of Nehls, setting off further discord in the community as the board president tried to quell rumors about the organization endorsing any candidates, which it cannot do as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

But others say they will bite the bullet and vote for Kulkarni. “Everybody’s a staunch Democrat and some are willing to look beyond his funding and support him,” said Bangee of Houston Muslim Democrats, who lives in the neighboring 7th District. “They’ve held fundraisers and phone banked and donated … because a Democrat is better than a Republican.”

Update: Oct. 30, 2020
This article has been updated to clarify Ramesh Bhutada’s history of political organizing and fundraising. 

The post How Sri Preston Kulkarni’s Run for Congress Got Tangled Up in Indian Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

The internal tension came to a head earlier this month, when a bipartisan resolution, introduced by Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., with 65 co-sponsors, failed to be scheduled for a markup in the House Foreign Affairs Committee as planned. Committee Chair Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., originally promised to bring the resolution up for debate, but after he met with Indian government officials, the resolution never made the schedule.

To mitigate a groundswell of scrutiny emanating from Congress, the Indian Embassy has launched a full-court press of lobbying initiatives.

“I am very disappointed that the resolution was not put on the markup calendar,” Jayapal said in a statement to The Intercept on March 3. “I worked with Rep. Steve Watkins to make our resolution bipartisan, and we worked with the Committee to make changes so that the resolution could move forward quickly at this critical time in India, where violence against religious minorities and journalists has claimed more than 40 lives in the last week.”

The Indian government has deployed an arsenal of lobbying tactics to hinder the House resolution’s momentum since its introduction in early December — expending a disproportionate amount of resources and manpower to prevent the House from taking an official stance on Kashmir. The resolution’s passage would be a symbolic blow to India’s international reputation, which has suffered under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s rapid-fire implementation of controversial policies widely seen as stepping stones to transforming the country from a secular democracy into a Hindu supremacist state.

After hearing concerns about the resolution from the Indian Embassy and other Foreign Affairs Committee members, Engel proposed edits to the language with the intention of “advancing a measure through the committee with a clear path to passage on the House floor,” his office said. But Kashmiri American advocates told The Intercept that the latest changes uncritically accept talking points from the Indian government and its supporters about Kashmir’s history and the current situation. Despite Jayapal agreeing to those edits, Engel did not include the resolution in the first markup of the year, as promised. Hindu American Foundation, a pro-India advocacy group, took credit in a newsletter for stalling deliberations after putting out a call to action to pressure members of Congress against supporting the resolution.

The postponement of the resolution is the latest wrench the Indian government and its supporters have thrown to quell the political backlash in the U.S. against India — likely out of fear that the country’s hard-fought bipartisan relationship could become compromised. To mitigate a groundswell of scrutiny emanating from Congress, the Indian Embassy has launched a full-court press of lobbying initiatives in Washington.

That lobbying campaign has included scores of meetings between embassy officials and U.S. lawmakers, the hiring of a Washington-based lobbying firm, and previously unreported emails to congressional offices that contain misleading information about the latest developments in Kashmir and the intentions behind the Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA. The Indian Embassy did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

Hindu American Foundation, known among progressive and minority South Asian American groups for using intimidation and the spread of misinformation to counter their advocacy work, has been at the forefront of reinforcing the embassy’s efforts — deterring members of Congress from taking critical positions on India and masquerading as a liberal representative of the Indian American community.

“If I could describe the Indian lobby, it’s very aggressive but not super sophisticated,” said a co-founder of Americans for Kashmir, a Kashmiri American-led policy organization based in Washington, who asked to not be named for fear of reprisal. “They seem to act with the intention to inflict blunt force trauma versus to have more nuanced conversations.”

Seizing the Narrative

Since Modi’s landslide reelection in May, the Indian government has instigated an alarming escalation of political and sectarian conflict. The government has insisted that scrapping Kashmir’s special status, and incorporating its part of the region into India as union territories, was necessary for Kashmir’s security and for Kashmiris to gain equal rights and economic opportunities. Since August, Kashmir has suffered more than $2.4 billion in losses, and thousands of people have been detained, some under the Public Safety Act, which permits detention for up to two years without charge.

Daily protests and communal and police violence erupted across the country following the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act on December 11, which excludes Muslim migrants from Muslim-majority countries from receiving expedited citizenship. Last month, the protests morphed into an anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi that coincided with Donald Trump’s first presidential visit to India.

“All of a sudden, the BJP government after winning reelection moved with a real urgency and clarity of purpose in enacting some very controversial, pro-Hindu majoritarian policies,” said Milan Vaishnav, director and senior fellow of Carnegie Endowment for Peace’s South Asia Program. “I think that took a lot of people in the United States, and in Washington in particular, by surprise.”

“All of a sudden, the BJP government after winning reelection moved with a real urgency and clarity of purpose in enacting some very controversial, pro-Hindu majoritarian policies.”

The abrogation of India’s constitutional Articles 370 and 35A, which conferred Kashmir its semiautonomous status and decision-making powers, sparked concern from dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers in August; Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered a strong rebuke, calling India’s actions “unacceptable” when he spoke at the Islamic Society of North America convention, and for the U.S. government to support “a U.N.-backed peaceful resolution that respects the will of the Kashmiri people.” India and Pakistan have fought over the region since 1947, when both countries gained independence from British rule.

The House Subcommittee on Asia’s October hearing on human rights in South Asia became a flashpoint for rising tensions between India and the U.S. Congress, as Democrats questioned why India would impose a blockade on internet access and prevent foreign journalists and government officials from visiting Kashmir if the situation on the ground was returning to normal. Panelist Aarti Tikoo Singh, a former Times of India journalist who justified the abrogation as a means of defending Kashmir against the “Pakistani terror state,” clashed with Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who earlier in the hearing said that “the situation in Kashmir is part of an overall Hindu nationalism project” and told Tikoo Singh that “the press is at its worst when it is a mouthpiece for the government.”

In the wake of the torrent of criticism at the hearing, the Indian Embassy hired Cornerstone Government Affairs to lobby House Democrats in particular, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, who was the Indian ambassador to the U.S. until the end of January, told India Abroad, a news outlet that caters to Indian American communities. According to filings made under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Indian government has paid the firm $120,000 for its services in the past three months. (Cornerstone’s contract with India lasted through the end of February; it is not yet public whether it has been renewed.)

A Cornerstone senior consultant, Democratic political operative Paul DiNino, is helping the group carry out its work for India. DiNino is deeply embedded with the Democratic Party; he has been a political fundraiser for several Democratic senators and worked as the national finance director for the Democratic National Committee during the Clinton administration, as well as a deputy chief of staff for former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

According to FARA filings last month, on behalf of the embassy, Cornerstone lobbyists have contacted members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission — which also held a hearing focused on Kashmir in November.

Shringla explained the Indian government’s hiring of Cornerstone, saying that direct engagement with members of Congress is the embassy’s “highest priority.”

As ambassador, Shringla held a marathon of face-to-face meetings with dozens of lawmakers after August 5, meeting some — like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — more than once. Prior to the October subcommittee hearing, he and other Indian diplomats briefed several Foreign Affairs Committee members and other congresspeople on Kashmir in a closed-door meeting.

Shringla held a marathon of face-to-face meetings with dozens of lawmakers after August 5, meeting some — like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — more than once.

Shringla also met with Republican lawmakers Reps. Francis Rooney, R-Fla., Pete Olson, R-Texas, and House India Caucus co-chair George Holding, R-N.C., who subsequently defended India on the House floor. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., hosted a farewell breakfast for Shringla before he left his position. In his new role as India’s foreign secretary, Shringla recently met with a congressional delegation in New Delhi that included Holding and Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., chair of the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific.

Indian American Muslim Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, has led the campaign on Capitol Hill to inform members of Congress on the fallout of the CAA in India and appeal to them to publicly address it. The Indian Embassy caught wind of the group’s activities and tried to intervene by asking members of Congress to meet with them or showing up at their offices, said Sana Qutubuddin, national advocacy coordinator for the council.

“The Indian Embassy has been trying to meet with everybody we’re meeting with, people who they think their understanding of India has been compromised,” Qutubuddin told The Intercept. “They’re trying to maneuver around us and suffocate our ability to effectively advocate for these issues.”

The embassy had scheduled a meeting with Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin’s human rights and foreign affairs staffer in late February, Raskin’s spokesperson Samantha Brown told The Intercept, but canceled the day of due to a scheduling conflict with the Justice Department.

Prior to hiring Cornerstone, India contracted the Podesta Group from 2010 to 2017 for a total of $4.7 million, according to FARA filings. The Podesta Group shuttered at the end of 2017 after its work with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort came to light during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The Indian government also has a longstanding relationship with BGR Group, a lobbying firm known for its Republican connections; that contract, which has been active since 2005, was renewed on January 1 for $175,000 through the end of March. BGR’s disclosures show that the firm works on “U.S.-India relations,” but does not detail specific issues.

The Indian Embassy has also circulated several emails, obtained by The Intercept, to congressional staffers to share heavily biased updates on Kashmir, as well as to explain the scope of the Citizenship Amendment Act — including information that has been challenged by news reports and human rights groups.

On January 10, the Indian Supreme Court ruled the indefinite internet restrictions in Kashmir — which had been in effect for almost six months — an “arbitrary exercise of power” against Kashmiris’ freedom of speech and expression, and ordered the government to review them. On January 27, Vasudev Ravi, a second secretary for the embassy, sent an email to congressional offices that read, “Internet services have resumed in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir on mobile devices (date) and on fixed line broadband connections” as of two days prior.

This wasn’t true; several news outlets reported at the time that significant restrictions on internet access were still in place. Kashmiris were only able to visit about 300 government-approved websites, among them sites for news, entertainment, and search, but excluding social media, on a low-speed 2G connection — in effect making it difficult for people to even get online. On March 4, Indian authorities issued an order to temporarily restore full internet access — for about two weeks, and still at slow speeds.

A second secretary for the embassy wrote that “there has been no incident of major violence. Not even a single live bullet has been fired. There has been no loss of life in police action” in Kashmir. This wasn’t true.

In a January 2 email, Ravi wrote that “there has been no incident of major violence. Not even a single live bullet has been fired. There has been no loss of life in police action” in Kashmir. Violent standoffs between police and protesters, torture, and civilian deaths, have been well documented by multiple news outlets and human rights groups. Jammu Kashmir Coalition Civil Society and Associated of Parents of Disappeared Persons have documented at least six killings by Indian security forces between August 5 and December 31. The email also stated that there was “no restriction on media/journalists” in the region and “all mainstream newspapers are being printed,” but local reporters have been struggling under the lockdown: forced to work at a crowded media center with unreliable internet connection while facing intimidation and threats from security forces.

In another email sent as the Citizenship Amendment Act moved through parliament, Ravi dissected a New York Times article from December 9 that addressed the potential negative impact the bill would have on Muslim migrants — that it would deprive them a pathway to naturalization — and 200 million Indian Muslims who risked detention or deportation if they were not able to prove their citizenship under a proposed nationwide registry. Ravi pulled out several lines from the article, referring to its claims at times as “hyperbolic,” “polarizing,” and “completely false and without any basis.” The assertions in the Times article, he wrote, “stoke fears among Muslims and reinforce the myth that the legislation is anti-Muslim.” As The Intercept has reported, the CAA and an India-wide register of citizens, which has already been instituted in the state of Assam, could actually work together to explicitly target Muslims.

Ravi wrote in another email about the CAA that the law is “non-discriminatory; does not alter the secular nature of the country” — even though it omits Muslims, among other religious groups, and does not cover migrants seeking refuge from neighboring regions that do not have a Muslim majority, such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Tibet.

Obstacle Course

Shringla told India Abroad in January that while most members of Congress have been receptive to the embassy’s persistent outreach strategies, there remained some who “don’t have a full understanding of the situation or they don’t want to have that.” He named Omar, Jayapal, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., as members of Congress who have been particularly resistant; the latter two have introduced separate resolutions denouncing India’s actions in Kashmir.

Americans for Kashmir first worked with Tlaib to put out a resolution in November that sought support for Kashmiri self-determination, a key demand for many Kashmiris since a U.N.-mandated plebiscite in 1948 never came to fruition. A spokesperson from Tlaib’s office said her resolution, which has no co-sponsors, sought “to help highlight and end the human rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir and recognizes that Kashmiris have a right to self-determination. She remains deeply concerned about the dangers they are facing. Her goal is to get legislation moving in the House to address these issues.” They said Tlaib would “continue to work to bring this issue to the House floor.”

The Kashmiri American advocates then pivoted to work with Jayapal on a separate resolution, which has faced several roadblocks from the Indian government, Engel’s office, and parts of the Indian American diaspora.

Jayapal scheduled two meetings with Shringla prior to introducing the resolution, both of which the Indian Embassy canceled. Two sources who worked on the resolution said that before Engel agreed to sign off on it, he required a Republican co-sponsor and watered down the original language — a characterization Engel’s office disagreed with. Jayapal introduced the resolution with Watkins, a Republican representative from Kansas, as a co-sponsor on December 6.

Jayapal scheduled two meetings with Shringla prior to introducing the resolution, both of which the Indian Embassy canceled.

The resolution was originally anticipated to be included in the Foreign Affairs Committee’s December 18 markup, but was postponed after Cornerstone sent a letter on behalf of Shringla to Engel and committee Ranking Member Michael McCaul expressing concern over the Kashmir resolutions, with a white paper of updates on the ground. The letter had been circulating online days after it was sent. “I firmly believe that mutual respect for each other’s institutions, such as the independent judiciary and the democratic processes that express the will of the people, would be undermined by Resolutions such as H:745 and H:724,” Shringla wrote, using the reference numbers for Jayapal’s and Tlaib’s resolutions, respectively. The Americans for Kashmir co-founder said it was unusual for the embassy to refer to specific legislation in its outreach efforts.

Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who was visiting Washington that week, asked to meet with Foreign Affairs leadership the same day the markup was supposed to happen. Jayapal was added to the list of attendees and urged to hold off on advancing the resolution until meeting with Jaishankar, the Washington Post reported. Upon learning that Jayapal would be present, the minister asked for her to be excluded; when Engel refused, the minister abruptly backed out of the meeting, a move that was criticized by many Democratic presidential candidates. Jaishankar later told Indian reporters that he didn’t think Jayapal’s resolution was “a fair understanding of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir or a fair characterization of what the government of India is doing, and I have no interest in meeting her.”

Despite the cancellation, Jaishankar still met with other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Asia subcommittee, namely Democratic Reps. Ami Bera and Brad Sherman and Republican Reps. Francis Rooney and Ted Yoho, as well as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch, R-Id., and Ranking Member Bob Menendez, D-N.J. In January, Menendez sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging him to press the Indian government to reverse the CAA. Offices for those officials did not respond to requests for comment.

While Jayapal’s resolution spent several weeks in standstill, Cornerstone met with Engel in person on January 15 to discuss Jammu and Kashmir. At the end of February, Engel’s office alerted Jayapal’s staff that a markup was planned for early March but that several more edits to the resolution were necessary. In addition to an amendment on the CAA and a proposed national register of citizens, Engel’s office said the chair intended the measure to reflect the changing circumstances in India without any duplicate or extraneous language, and to ensure it would pass with bipartisan support. Engel’s office said it had no record of the meeting.

Advocates said some of the changes, which are not yet reflected in the resolution text on the House website, are informed by materials the Indian Embassy has circulated to congressional offices. They also noted an additional reference to the mass displacement of Kashmiri Pandits, a minority Hindu community, from 1989 to 1990 — a highly contentious issue in Kashmiri history. Hindu American Foundation leadership had denounced Jayapal for omitting Pandits from the resolution when it was first introduced. HAF and Kashmiri Pandit groups have held congressional briefings since August on Kashmir, one of which Engel attended.

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“In line with the viewpoint of many nations, HAF’s position is that the issue is one that is internal to India and should be resolved as peacefully and and expeditiously as possible,” wrote Suhag Shukla, Hindu American Foundation’s executive director, in an email. “We would also urge American lawmakers to not gloss over the impact of terrorism on both Indian and American interests in peace and stability in the region.”

The advocates said they thought the edits marred the resolution’s intentions to hold the Indian government accountable and decentered Kashmiri Muslims’ struggle.

When the resolution was not included in the March 2 markup notice, Engel at first gave reassurance that he would include it at the last minute in order to stave off opposition.

Meanwhile, Hindu American Foundation — members of which had informally met with Jayapal in December — sprung into action to spike the resolution. The group’s Public Policy Director Taniel Koushakjian circulated an email on March 2 that he had noticed Jayapal’s resolution was “gaining momentum” when he was on Capitol Hill the week prior. He urged recipients to help stop “Jayapal and her allies” from convincing Engel to include the resolution for markup, sharing a link to predrafted emails to send to Congress against the “bad, anti-India, anti-Hindu resolution.”

The Monday before the markup, Engel told Jayapal that he would not include the resolution due to concerns from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Kashmiri American advocates said. Hindu American Foundation took credit for blocking the resolution; Koushakjian claimed in a newsletter that more than 2,500 emails were sent to Congress in the first 48 hours of the campaign. “You spoke. Congress listened,” Koushakjian wrote. “But we can’t stop, because our opponents aren’t going to stop, either. We won today, but that doesn’t mean victory is guaranteed tomorrow.”

Engel’s office confirmed that it had heard concerns from other Foreign Affairs Committee members, as well as the Indian Embassy, which it said was expected given that India was against the resolution. “Our office hears from virtually every embassy in Washington on resolutions like this,” Engel spokesperson Tim Mulvey told The Intercept.

“Chairman Engel has repeatedly refused to even bring the resolution up for debate,” Americans for Kashmir, along with 13 South Asian American and anti-war groups, said in a statement. “We are deeply alarmed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s posture of stonewalling and inaction.”

Engel, known for his hawkish stance on foreign policy, is facing uncertain reelection prospects this year. The 16-term incumbent is facing two progressive challengers in New York’s 16th District in the Democratic primary in June.

Diaspora Infighting

In recent years, Capitol Hill has become a microcosm of the glaring political differences within the South Asian American community, as identity-based groups have wrestled with one another to influence policy and perspectives on India and the diaspora. While Muslim, Dalit, and Kashmiri activists have worked to raise awareness among lawmakers on the injustices their communities confront in the U.S. and India, right-wing Hindu Americans and India interest groups established a dominant presence to wield outsized influence in Congress.

Congresspeople who have taken critical positions on India have also faced backlash in the form of angry messages online and over the phone, as well as demonstrations outside district offices and town halls from Indian Americans who threaten that the community will retract their support.

Last May, Equality Labs, a South Asian American human rights group, partnered with Jayapal and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to hold a congressional briefing on caste discrimination in the U.S. based on a report that examined how the Indian caste system maps onto the diaspora. Before the briefing, Shukla said Hindu American Foundation had a phone conversation with Jayapal’s chief of staff and sent an email to him, Jayapal, and Khanna, stating that the group condemned caste-based discrimination and asked to attend the event “to learn and find ways for common ground,” with “no intention of disturbing” it. Neither office followed up with details, Shukla said.

Khanna withdrew from the briefing at the last minute due to “pressure from many influential Hindu groups.” Jayapal remained the event’s sole sponsor.

Capitol Hill has become a microcosm of the glaring political differences within the South Asian American community.

“I look forward to attending future briefings from those groups,” Khanna told The Intercept. “If they have another briefing, I would be happy to attend.” Khanna said he had spoken about issues regarding the caste system with the Indian ambassador and other high-level officials. “I have spoken out very clearly against right-wing nationalism and will continue to do so.”

Hindu Americans gathered outside a town hall hosted by Khanna in October, to protest a tweet he wrote under a story on Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s ties to Hindu nationalists, in which he called for Hindu American politicians to “reject Hindutva,” or Hindu nationalist ideology. More than 230 Hindu and Indian American groups and individuals, including Hindu American Foundation, sent Khanna a letter criticizing the tweet, as well as his statement on Kashmir, and asked him to withdraw from the Congressional Pakistan Caucus, which he had recently joined.

“I have no plans to remove myself from the Pakistan Caucus,” Khanna said at the time. “I am also a proud member of the India Caucus, and have been supportive in Congress of strengthening the U.S.-India relationship, including our defense ties. I will continue to work toward peace on the subcontinent, which requires a willingness to hear a diversity of voices on the issues at hand.”

In August, when Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., wrote to Pompeo expressing concern about India’s actions in Kashmir after hearing from his Pakistani and Kashmiri constituents, the backlash he received from Indian American constituents prompted him to hold a meeting with them and apologize for not consulting them first. He later went to “Howdy, Modi,” a political rally in September for the Indian prime minister held in Houston, attended by Trump and more than 50,000 Indian Americans, as part of a bipartisan congressional delegation and has since co-sponsored Jayapal’s resolution.

From Washington, Hindu American Foundation has backed the Indian government on Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act, according to activists, with an emphasis on minority Hindu communities from Muslim-majority regions.

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By threading the needle between claiming to be a minority group subject to “Hinduphobic” hate violence and a representative for the Indian American community, Hindu American Foundation has gained access and influence in advocacy and policymaking spaces on Capitol Hill, said Lakshmi Sridaran, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together, a racial justice and domestic policy organization.

“They’re a very disruptive force with a lot of power,” Sridaran told The Intercept. “They are entering progressive spaces and using harmful analysis and policy recommendations against the communities that are actually impacted by real violence.”

HAF collaborates with Democrats who are either Hindu or politically connected to the Hindu American community. Last year, its board members made donations to Khanna, Bera, Gabbard, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and Sherman, who was named the organization’s “Friend of the Community,” among others — as well as to a Hindu American political action committee, of which board member Rishi Bhutada is listed as treasurer. In 2018, Hindu American PAC donated $2,500 to Jayapal.

Shukla said in an email that the political work of Hindu Americans has been increasingly dismissed as malicious.

“This out-of-hand discrediting of Hindu perspectives is becoming a form of intolerance that would not be accepted if it was directed at other minority faith communities in the United States,” she wrote.

Though the fate of Jayapal’s resolution hangs in the balance, the Indian government’s lobbying apparatus shows no signs of abating its counteroperation to influence Congress and thwart progressive advocates.

Qutubuddin said the Indian Embassy has underestimated the ability of Muslim and Kashmiri organizers, through raising awareness and sharing their stories, to make an impact on the next steps Congress takes on India.

“The embassy is spending so much money to counter the voices of stakeholders,” she said. “We’re all from impacted communities; we were raised here but our families are there.”

The post India Lobbies to Stifle Criticism, Control Messaging in U.S. Congress Amid Rising Anti-Muslim Violence appeared first on The Intercept.

Modi gushed profusely about Trump — the president was warm, friendly, energetic, “full of wit.” “You introduced me to your family in 2017,” Modi said, referring to his trip to the White House that summer, “and today I have the honor to introduce you to my family.”

While most Indians in the U.S. identify as Democrats and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party enjoy significant popularity in the diaspora — and the joint appearance opened up the potential to confer some of that support on Trump.

“You enrich our culture, you uphold our values, you uplift our communities, and you are truly proud to be American. And we are proud to have you as Americans,” Trump told the largely Indian American audience. “We thank you, we love you, and I want you to know that my administration is fighting for you each and every day.” He promised to “take care of our Indian American citizens before we take care of illegal immigrants that want to pour into our country,” but neglected to mention that about half of the nearly 4.5 million Indians in the United States are foreign-born, and a growing number of Indian migrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Thousands gathered at NRG Stadium for the “Howdy, Modi” event, including members of both the Indian and American governments. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

With the words “Shared Dreams, Bright Futures” on the large screen behind them, and American and Indian flags flanked on either side of the stage, Modi and Trump presented their twin agendas around border security and counterterrorism. “Both India and the United States understand that to keep our communities safe, we must protect our borders,” Trump said, as he promised to help India defend against “radical Islamic terrorism.”

On the face of it, the blockbuster “Howdy, Modi” event was the Indian American diaspora’s extravagant welcome to the Indian prime minister for the first time since his landslide reelection victory in May — complete with flashy musical and dance numbers. But beneath the cultural gloss, it was essentially a political rally for two nationalist world leaders, organized by a nonprofit with Hindu nationalist links.

For decades, a network of American groups affiliated with Hindu nationalist organizations in India has embedded itself in the diaspora by holding cultural and religious events, lobbying Congress, contributing to political campaigns, and acting as a mouthpiece for Modi and the BJP. Since the early 2000s, these groups have worked to expunge Modi’s once-tarnished reputation in the U.S., enlisting the Indian American community, about half of whom are Hindu, and U.S. lawmakers to defend his increasingly authoritarian agenda and whitewash his complicity in human rights abuses.

“Howdy, Modi” corralled not just Trump and tens of thousands of Indian Americans, but also a delegation of U.S. politicians, including Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Texas Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who appeared on stage to shake hands with Modi in tacit support of his government’s Hindu nationalist agenda.

Behind the Spectacle

The fanfare surrounding the Indian prime minister’s visit was jarring in light of recent moves by Modi and the BJP that have had calamitous consequences for Muslims in India. In August, more than 1.9 million people — mostly Muslims — were excluded from a government citizenship list in Assam and given 120 days prove that they are not living illegally in India. Eleven detention camps, each of which can hold at least 1,000 people, are reportedly being built in the state. On the other side of the country, Modi’s government unilaterally revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status and decision-making capacity, established in Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, jolting the Muslim-majority region with mass arrests, a communications blackout, and violent clashes with security forces.

Meanwhile in Houston, the prime minister fiercely praised the Indian Parliament’s action. “Article 370 had deprived people of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh of development. Terrorist and separatist elements were misusing the situation. Now after abrogation, people there have got equal rights,” he said. The crowd, and even some journalists in the press box, cheered and stood to clap.

“‘Howdy, Modi’ is a blatant celebration of the destruction of democracy and a complete disregard for human rights,” said Sana Qutubuddin, an organizer with the Alliance for Justice and Accountability, a coalition of progressive South Asian American groups.

Behind the event was Texas India Forum, which has direct links to members of U.S.-based Hindu nationalist groups affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a fascist paramilitary organization that espouses the notion that India should be a Hindu state and its minorities second-class citizens.

The nonprofit is registered to the residence of Houston employment lawyer Amit Misra, a coordinator of the Hindu Education Foundation — the education wing of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the international branch of the RSS. The Hindu Education Foundation is known for its role in lobbying against using the term “South Asia” rather than “India” to describe the modern-day region that stretches from Pakistan to Bangladesh, and for objecting to middle school textbooks that explicitly link the caste system to Hinduism. (Texas India Forum did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The chair of the “Howdy, Modi” organizing committee, Jugal Malani, is the brother-in-law of the national vice president of the HSS and an adviser to the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA, an education nonprofit whose Indian counterpart is affiliated with an RSS offshoot. Malani’s nephew, Rishi Bhutada, was the event’s head spokesperson and is a board member of the Hindu American Foundation, known for its aggressive tactics to influence political discourse on India and Hinduism. Another spokesperson, Gitesh Desai, is president of Houston’s chapter of Sewa International, a service organization linked to the HSS. The event was also backed by more than 600 “welcome partners,” including groups with Hindu nationalist ties.

Modi began fostering ties with Hindu nationalist groups in the U.S. to help build sympathy within the Indian American community after the U.S. rejected his visa application in connection with the 2002 Gujarat riots, during which Hindu mobs unleashed terror on Muslims after the community was blamed for a train fire that killed Hindu pilgrims. Women were raped, homes and mosques destroyed, and up to 2,000 people were killed. Modi, who at the time was chief minister of the state, was accused of overseeing the violence.

Demonstrators gathered outside the stadium to protest Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda and his recent actions in Kashmir. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

Among the thousands who demonstrated across from the venue on Sunday were progressive South Asian Americans and their allies who oppose Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.

“There’s a presence of so many religious and cultural minorities — Dalits, Indian Christians, Indian Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs — because we’re standing up for our kin who are facing great deals of oppression and atrocity at home, and we won’t be silenced in the face of that violence,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, an activist with the Alliance for Justice and Accountability.

While Hindu nationalist groups in the U.S. have developed the community infrastructure and connections to organize such massive events as “Howdy, Modi,” Soundararajan explained that they represent only a sliver of the South Asian American community.

“They’re a small, well-organized group that is trying to use money to show that they have power,” she told The Intercept.

Political Dissonance

The Democratic Party has fractured over its position on India in recent weeks. Several progressive Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., have spoken out against Modi’s actions in Kashmir, while others in the party have been unwavering in their support. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., has most pointedly criticized Hindu nationalist ideology and was denounced by Indian and Hindu groups in response.

Nonetheless, there were six Democrats among the 21 lawmakers who joined Modi on stage. Even New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, who faced severe criticism in August for a letter he wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressing concerns over Kashmir, attended, waving and pressing the palms of his hands together when his name was called. In response to the outrage generated by his letter, Suozzi had called a community meeting of his Indian American constituents and apologized for not consulting them before sending it.

Also present were Hoyer, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.; Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill.; and Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who last year attended the World Hindu Congress, an event known for giving a platform to Hindu nationalists, including RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green’s name was announced, but he had put out a statement the day before that he would not attend “Trump’s photo-op.” Rep. Linda Sánchez, D-Calif., was also originally scheduled to appear. Her spokesperson did not respond to a question about why she pulled out.

With Modi standing behind him, Hoyer recited a quote from Mahatma Gandhi on democracy as “something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong.” He said that the U.S. and India provide “an equal opportunity to dream and work hard to make that dream come true.”

“I’m proud, as all of you are, that the U.S.-India relationship remains bipartisan, both Democrats and Republicans working to bring the two nations closer in pursuit of that goal and our common principles,” he said.

When asked if Hoyer’s presence at the event could be seen as supportive of Hindu nationalism, his spokesperson pointed to the representative’s reference to India’s efforts to secure the vision of Gandhi and the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of the country as “a secular democracy where respect for pluralism and human rights safeguard every individual.”

But under Modi, India’s founding ideals have been desecrated as far-right Hindus have become emboldened by the administration, and hate crimes against Muslims and other minorities have skyrocketed.

“Howdy, Modi” attendees show their support for the Indian prime minister. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

Links to Modi and Hindu nationalism can even be found in at least three Democratic presidential campaigns. Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has received large donations from individuals involved in Hindu nationalist groups, including Malani and the Bhutada family, since the start of her political career. Joe Biden’s Asian American Pacific Islander national vote director, Amit Jani, is a Modi supporter, and his father was a co-founder of the Overseas Friends of the BJP.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s policy director Sonal Shah was a former national coordinator of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, and her father was a former OFBJP vice president. Buttigieg’s campaign spokesperson said that Shah had “helped raise money for earthquake victims in 2001” with VHPA and pointed to a statement she made when she was on Barack Obama’s transition team that she “would not have associated with VHP of America” if she could have known the role its Indian counterpart would have in the Gujarat riots.

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Activists pointed out the tensions between Democrats appearing at a Modi event while the party as a whole decries Trump and his xenophobic immigration policies. Soundararajan questioned the conflicting political messages of liberal lawmakers who associate with Hindu nationalism.

“If the Democrats are serious about being the resistance, does justice end at the border?” she asked. “Can we afford to be progressive domestically but fascist abroad?”

In September, right when Congress came back in session, the Hindu American Foundation held a Senate briefing on Kashmir to push its perspective on the repeal of the constitutional articles that ensured Kashmir’s autonomy and the history of the region.

“I’m not sure how many staffers attended, but [HAF was] already there to counter the narrative that’s been emerging from the media and activists, saying that everything is fine and the media is just exaggerating,” said Hafsa Kanjwal, a Kashmiri American history professor at Lafayette College.

Republicans, of course, experience no such contradiction. Apart from the Texas senators, GOP lawmakers on stage included North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, and Texas Rep. Pete Olson, who wore a kurta, or traditional Indian tunic, to the event.

At times, the Republican agenda has intersected with the interests of right-wing Hindu lobbyists. The Republican Hindu Coalition, founded in 2015, has recently taken up the cause of building Trump’s border wall, with founder and Modi supporter Shalli Kumar offering to raise $25 million for the project. Kumar has also named Steve Bannon as an honorary co-chair of the coalition (a title he shares with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich). Kumar reportedly accompanied the former Breitbart executive chair, who has been involved in the construction of a private border wall, to fundraise at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Diaspora Diplomacy”

Houston has been a hub of Hindu nationalist activity in the U.S. since at least the late 1970s, when its HSS chapter was founded. Years before Modi was even a contender for prime minister, the Houston chapters of the HSS and the OFBJP were mobilizing from thousands of miles away to get him elected. Ramesh Bhutada, the HSS vice president, played a prominent role, organizing a 700-person phone-banking campaign for Modi, said Pieter Friedrich, a South Asia affairs analyst who has documented Gabbard’s ties with Modi and American Hindu nationalists.

At “Howdy, Modi,” the Indian prime minister thanked those who participated in the 2019 elections; the OFBJP organized phone banks to call Indians and ask them to vote for Modi, and some nonresident Indians even went to their home states in India to campaign and vote in the election.

Hindu nationalist organizations have historically portrayed themselves as liberal social and religious groups that denounce bigotry and uphold equality, Friedrich told The Intercept, while developing and maintaining close ties with Hindu nationalists in India who are openly hateful and violent toward minorities. In 2014, South Asia Citizens Web released a report showing how the network of Hindu nationalist groups in the U.S. had funneled millions of dollars to their counterparts in India since 2001.

“Hindu nationalists in America have utilized their minority status to protect themselves while supporting a majoritarian supremacist movement in India,” Friedrich said.

The Indian government has historically been disengaged with the Indian diaspora. At the time of India’s founding, Nehru adopted a policy of “active disassociation” from the diaspora, choosing not to intervene in another country’s sovereignty, writes Sreeram Chaulia, a professor at India’s Jindal School of International Affairs.

Migration from India was also seen as a “brain drain” of skilled and educated Indians that contributed to the underdevelopment of the country. Modi has turned this narrative on its head by framing the diaspora as a shining representative of India on the world stage that generously gives back to its homeland.

The BJP has strategically deployed “diaspora diplomacy” to recruit India’s overseas community to support its agenda and counter negative press coverage. In the 1980s, the BJP was the political voice behind a campaign to build a Hindu temple on land where a mosque already existed. The campaign’s supporters claimed that the Babri mosque was on a holy site that was considered the birthplace of a Hindu deity.

Attendees show their support for Modi and Trump. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

The Overseas Friends of the BJP was formed right before the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other Hindu nationalist groups razed the mosque in 1992, igniting deadly intercommunal violence that killed at least 2,000 people. The OFBJP was tasked with damage control in the U.S. It has since mobilized to lobby congressional officials and campaigned abroad for Modi’s bids for prime minister. With the help of American Hindu nationalists, Modi periodically connected with the diaspora through videoconferences from 2007 to 2012, Friedrich writes in his article, while he was banned from entering the U.S.

“It is in the best interest of the BJP to nurture the Indian diaspora. They are our biggest soft power,” Vijay Chauthaiwale, head of the BJP’s foreign affairs cell, told Indian news site News18 ahead of “Howdy, Modi.” “PM Modi has been interested and extremely committed to make this diaspora an informal ambassador of his development agenda. They represent the Indian local community. For the BJP, it is important to nurture them along with the local community.”

Modi became prime minister in 2014 and with that, his U.S. visa was finally approved. A five-person committee connected to American Hindu nationalist groups organized a grand welcome for him at Madison Square Garden in New York City that was similar in magnitude to “Howdy, Modi.” He expressed his gratitude to an audience of about 20,000 Indian Americans, describing them as “my countrymen who, having settled here thousands of miles away from India, have increased India’s honor and pride.”

Five years later in Houston, Modi remained committed to cherishing his relationship with the Indian American community, despite the many miles of land and ocean between them.

“Today, you may be far away from your homeland,” he said, “but your homeland’s government is not far from you.”

Correction: September 25, 2019, 4:38 p.m.
A previous version of this story stated that Rep. Linda Sánchez, D-Calif., attended “Howdy, Modi.” She was originally scheduled to appear, but she was not present at the event.

The post The Network of Hindu Nationalists Behind Modi’s “Diaspora Diplomacy” in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

From February to March, Gucci, Versace, and other luxury brands at autumn/winter fashion week dressed mostly white models in hijab-like headscarves. Around that time, two women filed a civil rights lawsuit against New York City related to an incident in which the NYPD forced them to remove their hijabs for mugshots.

Gap, a clothing brand known for its all-American ethos, featured a young girl in a hijab smiling broadly in its back-to-school ads this past summer. Meanwhile, children were forced to leave a public pool in Delaware; they were told that their hijabs could clog the filtration system.

Muslim women and Muslim fashion currently have unprecedented visibility in American consumer culture. Yet women who cover are among the most visible targets for curtailed civil liberties, violence, and discrimination in the anti-Muslim climate intensified by Donald Trump’s presidency.

By selling modest clothing or spotlighting a hijabi in an ad campaign, the U.S. clothing industry is beckoning Muslim women to be its latest consumer niche. In order to tap into the multibillion-dollar potential of the U.S. Muslim consumer market, large retailers have positioned themselves as socially conscious havens for Muslims, operating on a profit motive rather than a moral imperative.

Many Muslim women, especially those who grew up post-9/11, may find inclusion as consumers to be a reprieve from everyday Islamophobia. However, the representations circulated by retail companies are reductive of Muslim-American identity. Certain Muslim women who conform to expectations of patriotism and consumption are granted visibility, while others, like black Muslim women, are erased from the narrative of Islam in America. Meanwhile, Muslims whose labor is exploited overseas are disappeared from corporate conscience.

The Muslim Consumer Market

In February, Macy’s became the first U.S. department store to sell a modest clothing line, called the Verona Collection. Macy’s was widely praised as “inclusive” and “taking diversity very seriously.” Refinery29 raved, “It’s great to see Macy’s really taking the steps to champion the causes it says it believes in.”

Macy’s debuted the Verona Collection shortly after the retailer announced that several stores would close in 2018 (more than 120 stores have shuttered since 2015). A week before the launch, Macy’s stock hit its lowest point of 2018. But soon after the announcement, things seemed to be looking up for the flailing company. A business analyst said, “At this time for investors the new clothing line should be treated with cautious excitement for what it may mean for the company moving forward.”

Macy’s financial instability when starting to sell hijabs and modest clothing calls into question the motive behind suddenly catering to Muslim consumers. Why now?

“It feels like a way of generating publicity by putting out an inclusive image, trying to make themselves seem more relevant,” Sylvia Chan-Malik, author of “Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam,” told The Intercept. “But perhaps that’s cynical, because I know a lot of Muslim women who were very happy about it. I just don’t know what the intentions are.”

In addition to Nike, Gap, and high-end designers, there are several recent examples of the U.S. retail and fashion industry courting Muslim women who dress modestly. In 2016, New York Fashion Week presented its first all-hijab runway show from Indonesian designer Anniesa Hasibuan. That November, CoverGirl brought on hijabi beauty blogger Nura Afia as its latest brand ambassador. This past May, H&M released a modest clothing line leading up to Ramadan.

Since the early 2010s, multinational Western companies have catered to Muslim consumers after marketing consultants identified them as an influential demographic with growing spending power. According to the latest Thomson Reuters State of the Global Islamic Economy Report, Muslims worldwide spent about $254 billion on clothing in 2016, which was predicted to increase to $373 billion by 2022.

Western retailers have mostly concentrated their Muslim outreach to foreign consumers. Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, and DKNY are among the brands that have sold Ramadan capsule collections or stocked modest clothing exclusively in their Middle East outlets. This past summer, MAC Cosmetics put out a glamorous makeup tutorial for suhoor, the pre-dawn meal during Ramadan, targeted at women in the Gulf region.

Consumer research on the U.S. market revealed a similar opportunity for profit. In 2013, Ogilvy Noor, the “Islamic branding” division of advertising company Ogilvy, estimated American Muslim spending power to be at $170 billion. DinarStandard and the American Muslim Consumer Consortium reported that Muslim-Americans spent $5.4 billion on apparel that same year.

Ogilvy Noor has determined that Muslim millennials are driving consumption with their collective belief that “faith and modernity go hand in hand.”

“If I was to pick one person who represents the cutting edge of Muslim futurists, it would be a woman: educated, tech-savvy, worldly, intent on defining her own future, brand loyal and conscious that her consumption says something important about who she is and how she chooses to live her life,” explained Shelina Janmohamed, vice president of Ogilvy Noor, who is Muslim. “The consumers these brands are targeting are young, cool and ready to spend their money.”

Ogilvy Noor’s approach inches toward essentializing who young Muslims are, which can then be monetized by corporations. The staggering economic power of the Muslim market is the determining factor in retail efforts to tap into it — less so a response to what Muslims could actually benefit from. But for many young Muslim women, consumer visibility can signal mainstream recognition and belonging, regardless of corporate intention.

“Maybe I’ll Feel More Safe”

While retailers are ultimately incentivized by profit, clothing and cosmetics brands are also providing more options for women who choose to cover, as well as fulfilling some hijabis’ desires for representation, said Elizabeth Bucar, author of “Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress.”

“Muslims are a large part of the American population today — they’re visible,” Bucar, an associate professor at Northeastern University, told The Intercept. “They’re running for office, they’re our co-workers, they’re our neighbors, and, from a retail point of view, they are also consumers.”

Many Muslim women celebrate, and actively participate in, efforts to acknowledge them as consumers. Muslim beauty and fashion bloggers on Instagram and YouTube promote brands to hundreds of thousands of followers. Verona Collection designer Lisa Vogl and model Mariah Idrissi are among those who have found commercial success in collaboration with large brands.

In September, the de Young Museum in San Francisco opened the first major museum exhibition on contemporary Muslim fashions, signaling that Muslim women’s clothing is a legitimate topic of interest in the U.S. “We wanted to share what we’ve been seeing in Muslim fashion with the larger world in a way that could create a deeper understanding,” the de Young’s former director, Max Hollein, told the New York Times.

Consumer visibility can also signal a step toward the inclusion of Muslims as American in politically hostile times, particularly for the generation who grew up during the war on terror, when most representations have cast Muslims as foreign terrorists and a threat to national security.

“It’s incredibly validating on an individual level to Muslim women who wear the scarf, who have to struggle with the comments and the vitriol and the violence that they encounter every day,” said Chan-Malik, an associate professor at Rutgers University. “It’s almost a very practical sense of relief, like, ‘Oh, if this becomes more normalized, maybe I’ll feel more safe.’”

That increased representation is meaningful to some Muslim women cannot be ignored. However, who gets to be seen and how exposes the underlying logics of capitalism that flatten visibility into which Muslim women are the most marketable.

The “Hijab Fetish”

The market homogenizes Muslim women, collapsing tremendous diversity into a product that can be easily digested. “Certain kinds of representation and visibility are privileged, while others are rendered undesirable,” write Duke University associate professor Ellen McLarney and University of North Carolina associate professor Banu Gökariksel. “Muslim identities unpalatable to the sensibilities of the market are excluded, often leading to further marginalizations at the intersections of class, race, and ethnicity.”

This is evident in how the fashion and beauty industries grant visibility to certain Muslim women. Writing about the “hijab fetish” in consumer culture, Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described how representations of Muslim women in advertising conform to “an image of an over-filtered, hot, bourgeois, fair-skinned hijabi woman, whose highlight is ‘on fleek’.”

In fact, most Muslim women in the U.S. do not always wear a headscarf in public; one-fifth of American Muslims are black; almost half of Muslim-Americans reported incomes under $30,000 last year; and many American Muslims identify as queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming.

Despite the fact that black Muslim women are largely absent from mainstream consumer culture, said Kayla Wheeler, an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University, the women of the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple laid the foundation for Muslim fashion in the U.S decades ago.

“The Nation of Islam tried to use clothing to give black women a new respectable identity that they had been denied by white supremacy, so they could … push back against stereotypes of black women as promiscuous or asexual or not real women or humans at all,” said Wheeler, who researches black Muslim women’s fashion.

Somali-American model Halima Aden and Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, along with designers Nzinga Knight, Eman Idil, and Lubna Muhammad, are among the few black Muslim women who have been given visibility in the fashion industry.

Black Muslim women are triply vulnerable in the U.S. to racist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic attacks.

Wheeler said that black Muslim women’s headscarves can be racially distinctive in wrapping styles and fabrics — nuances that are obscured among the commercial images of predominantly Middle Eastern and South Asian women. Meanwhile, black Muslim women are triply vulnerable in the U.S. to racist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic attacks (last month, a white man pulled a gun on a group of black Muslim teenagers, including headscarf-wearing girls, at a McDonald’s in Minnesota).

“Black Muslims are not seen as sympathetically as brown Muslims,” Wheeler told The Intercept. “Everyone faces Islamophobia, but when you add anti-blackness and suspicions about black Islam not being real Islam, they become not only a foreign threat, but a domestic threat.”

Corporate posturing to marginalized groups — what University of Denver law professor Nancy Leong describes as racial capitalism — has long been a business practice to persuade minority groups to become brand loyal and liberal consumers to buy products as a political statement.

A still from a L’Oréal Paris advertisement featuring Amena Khan.

In January, L’Oréal Paris announced its “unique and disruptive” hair care ad campaign, featuring model and social media influencer Amena Khan. In the ad, she wore a pale pink hijab, with a pink blazer, in front of a pink background. Within a week, Khan left the campaign after her tweets criticizing Israel for its attack on Gaza in 2014 were surfaced. In a statement, L’Oréal Paris agreed with her decision to step down, saying that the company is “committed to tolerance and respect towards all people.”

Brands “want the face, but they don’t want the complex politics or the identity or the voice behind it,” Hoda Katebi, a political fashion blogger and community organizer, told The Intercept, pointing to her own experiences with brands that have approached her to collaborate or model their clothing. “Once a Muslim woman asserts her agency, they’ll strip that away.”

The fetishization of the hijab descends from decades of stereotypical images that have been used to fortify imperial projects in the Middle East and Islamophobic policies and attitudes at home. U.S. meddling in Muslim-majority countries and the war on terror have been the political backdrops against which retailers and advertisers have commodified Muslim women and their clothing.

The Veil and U.S. Empire

The representation of Muslim women and the veil in U.S. consumer culture has historically shifted alongside the agenda of U.S. empire. The veil, which encompasses myriad forms of head covering, has been attributed multiple, often contradictory, meanings: empowering, oppressive, threatening, fashionable, subversive.

For decades, the myth of imperial benevolence has informed U.S. foreign policy, alongside feigned concern about Muslim women and their material conditions, which has advanced agendas that benefit the political and economic elite.

The veil became fetishized in the U.S. during the Iranian women’s movement after the 1979 revolution, Chan-Malik told The Intercept. Women mobilized for a week of protests after Ayatollah Khomeini, who replaced the U.S.-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi, established compulsory veiling, rather than allowing women to choose whether to cover.

The U.S. media focused on the chador as the symbol of oppression that the “poor Muslim woman” was forced to suffer under the ayatollah’s rule, Chan-Malik writes in her book. “Women’s rights became a rallying call that could be employed by the United States to explain the ills of the Middle East and the ‘terror’ of Islam.”

The images produced and circulated during this time established an American Orientalism that continues to inform ideas about Muslim women as oppressed and in need of a U.S. savior.

In her book “The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture,” University of Texas at Austin professor Faegheh Shirazi lists pre-9/11 marketing strategies based on Orientalist stereotypes, which were used to sell cars, computers, perfume, and even soup: “the mysterious woman hiding behind her veil, waiting to be conquered by an American man; the submissive woman, forced to hide behind the veil; and the generic veiled woman, representing all peoples and cultures of the Middle East.”

In the wake of 9/11, the burqa became the most visible symbol of the Afghanistan War, weaponized to serve the Bush administration’s imperial agenda. In her infamous radio address, first lady Laura Bush claimed that the Taliban would “threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” a harrowing detail suggesting that even beauty products were subject to tyrannical policing. The unveiling of Afghan women would come to represent their “freedom,” as well as their transformation into consumers.

After the Taliban fell, the U.S. beauty industry acted as an arm of empire and seized the opportunity to export Western products and techniques to Afghanistan. Marie Claire and Vogue magazines, joined by beauty companies like Paul Mitchell and Estée Lauder, funded the humanitarian-inflected “Beauty Without Borders,” a beauty school in Kabul meant to teach women how to perform salon services, despite the fact that salons had already existed. American shampoo and makeup became tools to liberate Muslim women.

By the early 2010s, the veil was still viewed with suspicion when worn by Muslim women, but had otherwise become an edgy, often sexualized, commodity. “Burqa chic” in fashion magazines and runway shows played upon the veil’s shock value, McLarney writes. Jeans brand Diesel released an ad in 2013 featuring a topless, tattooed white woman wearing a niqab, and non-Muslim celebrities, including Rihanna, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, toyed with wearing veils as if they were costumes. Capitalist manipulation, McLarney writes, had transformed the veil “from emblem of utter dehumanization to expression of fashion, protest, and even personal freedom.”

Muslim women’s clothing has acquired new significance under the Trump administration, which tacitly endorses the exclusion, hatred, and criminalization of Muslims. Trump’s call for a Muslim registry and a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” on the campaign trail, which manifested as the de facto Muslim travel ban, set the tone for his approach to U.S. Muslims.

In response, liberals have turned the Muslim woman into a feminist icon. The stylized image of a woman wearing an American flag as a hijab, created by street artist Shepard Fairey, hovered above crowds at the Women’s March as a symbol of multicultural inclusion and political resistance. However, as many have pointed out, the image distorts the history of state violence and injustice against Muslims in the U.S. and abroad — and the American feminist movement’s complicity in that. The poster’s conspicuous presence at anti-Trump demonstrations also invoked how Muslim-Americans are rendered visible in ways that can be harmful to the community.

The Politics of Visibility

The selective visibility of hijabis reinforces a false binary between “good” and “bad” Muslims, upholding liberal, flag-waving Muslims as tolerable and benign without rectifying deeply entrenched perceptions of Muslims as terroristic and fanatical. While most Americans do not personally know a Muslim, Pew Research Center reported that Muslims are regarded with the most negativity among religious groups. A recent study also found that terror attacks with an alleged Muslim suspect receive 357 percent more media coverage.

“People love good, patriotic Muslims who don’t threaten whiteness, who don’t challenge the historical and systematic violence that this country is built upon,” said Aqdas Aftab, who wrote about the hijab and capitalism as a fellow for Bitch Media.

As Muslim women are increasingly embraced in consumer culture, Nazia Kazi, author of the book “Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics,” said that Muslim men are still regarded as “sexually frustrated, violent, inherently patriarchal figures” — stereotypes that materialize in the ongoing criminalization of Muslim men.

Muslims in the U.S. have been monitored via state-sponsored policing and surveillance, Kazi writes in her book, as well as through “everyday curiosity, concern, and watchfulness.” When it comes to Muslim women, she writes, observation turns into “voyeuristic fascination.”

“Muslim women, specifically those who wear hijab, are a unique source of curiosity and sympathy and bigotry and Islamophobic assumption,” Kazi, an assistant professor at Stockton University, told The Intercept.

That bigotry has increased in the Trump era, when flagrant Islamophobic rhetoric and policies have coincided with a reported increase in discrimination and abuse against Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a 17 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents from 2016 to 2017, a trend that continued into 2018. This year alone, there have been numerous reports of hijabis being harassed, verbally abused, pushed in the subway, and assaulted by having their hijabs pulled off.

Kazi called the approach that retail companies have largely taken to address Islamophobia “leveraging hypervisibility,” or harnessing the heightened scrutiny of Muslims to highlight the most exemplary. That has the effect of rendering invisible “just how devastating Islamophobia is for the most marginalized among Muslim women around the world,” she said.

The clothing industry, for example, magnifies visibility of certain Muslim women, while hiding others from public view — those whose labor is exploited in garment factories overseas.

The global production of fast fashion depends on sweatshop labor to bring the latest runway trends to clothing racks. Gap and H&M use factories in Muslim-majority countries that have been accused of gender-based violence and labor abuses. Nike, notorious for its decadeslong dependence on sweatshop labor, also uses factories in predominantly Muslim countries.

“Who will hold them accountable for underpaying, overworking, and harassing their vulnerable employees when the same companies are being lauded for being inclusive and liberal?” Aftab said.

Muslims who applaud the commercialization of the hijab should be cognizant of the exploitation of Muslim garment workers, as well as how large corporations are taking away from small, Muslim-owned businesses, said Katebi, who organizes a sewing cooperative for refugee women in Chicago. That includes companies like Haute Hijab and Sukoon Active, which have been making modest clothing and activewear for years.

Increasing Muslim representation is not just an ineffective strategy for fighting Islamophobia, but a dangerous one, Kazi said, as it misunderstands Islamophobia as an individual bias, rather than a structural apparatus.

“The hypervisibility of Muslims is undeniably linked to the political climate,” she said. “So while the public is casting this gaze over Muslims in the U.S., what falls out of the conversation are political histories, regional inequality, the histories of white supremacy and race.”

Muslim women are at the forefront of pushing such issues into mainstream political discourse, particularly in electoral politics and grassroots organizing. Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, who next month will become the first Muslim women in Congress, ran on progressive platforms that included a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for All,” and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Katebi described her vision for systemic change: those who make art and those who do politics partnering with impacted communities to secure material gains. “Our liberation,” she said, “is not going to come from multibillion-dollar, capitalist corporations headed by white people.”

Freedom and justice, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, will be won at the polls and on the ground — not in the checkout aisle.

The post Marketing the Muslim Woman: Hijabs and Modest Fashion Are the New Corporate Trend in the Trump Era appeared first on The Intercept.

What was once intended as a revolutionary strategy to take down interlocking oppressions has become a nebulous but charged buzzword co-opted across the political spectrum. A new book, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump,” undertakes a rigorous analysis of race politics and the history of race in the United States to grapple with the shifting relationship between personal identity and political action.

Identity, he argues, has become abstracted from our material relationships with the state and society, which make it consequential to our lives. So when identity serves as the basis for one’s political beliefs, it manifests in division and moralizing attitudes, instead of facilitating solidarity.

“The framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure,” Haider writes. “As a result, identity politics paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very norms it set out to criticize.”

The concept of identity politics was originally coined in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbian socialist feminists who recognized the need for their own autonomous politics as they confronted racism in the women’s movement, sexism in the black liberation movement, and class reductionism. Centering how economic, gender, and racial oppression materialized simultaneously in their lives was the key to their emancipatory politics. But their political work didn’t end there. The women of Combahee advocated for building coalitions in solidarity with other progressive groups in order to eradicate all oppression, while foregrounding their own.

By grounding his critique in specific histories and material relations, Haider takes a multi-pronged approach to exploring just how sharply identity politics has veered from its radical roots.

Through his involvement in organizing against tuition hikes and privatization, Haider describes the missteps of movements that falsely separate economic and racial issues into identity-based “white” issues and “POC” issues. His examination of “white privilege” reflects on the development of the white race, codified in 1600s colonial Virginia by the ruling class to justify economic exploitation of Africans as slaves and preclude alliances between African and European laborers following Bacon’s Rebellion.

In his chapter on “passing,” Haider attempts to understand the case of Rachel Dolezal as an example of “the consequences of reducing politics to identity performances.” He examines the work of novelist Philip Roth, as well as the political transformation of poet Amiri Baraka, who embraced black nationalism in the 1970s and later renounced it for Marxist universalism. Finally, Haider explains how Donald Trump’s election was foreshadowed through the rise of neoliberalism in electoral politics decades before. Through the work of British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, he draws careful comparisons to how the U.K.’s Labour Party managed economic crisis and moral panic in the 1970s, which paved the way for Margaret Thatcher to take power.

Haider’s short book concludes with the paradox of rights as the end goal of mass movements. Instead, he calls for a reclaiming of an “insurgent universalism,” in which oppressed groups position themselves as political actors rather than passive victims. At turns fascinating and provocative, “Mistaken Identity” steps back from Twitter fights and think pieces to contextualize debates on identity politics and reconfigure how race informs leftist movements. The Intercept’s interview with Haider has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Can you walk through how identity politics shifted from a revolutionary political practice to an individualist liberal ideology?

1977 was a historical turning point. First of all, it was a crisis for mass movements, which can be traced back to the civil rights movement — the New Left of the 1960s and black nationalism that came after that. These mass mobilizations and organizations ran up against their own strategic limits, they were confronted with state repression, and so their dynamism was declining. At the same time, there was what Stuart Hall called a “crisis of hegemony,” in which the coordinates of American politics were being totally rearranged — and the same process was happening in Europe — in which the economic crises of the 1970s had led to a total reorganization of the workplace, trade unions were on the defensive, and mass movements were decomposing. And so part of what happened in this period is that the language of identity and fighting against racism got individualized and attached to the individual advancement of a rising black political class and economic elites who were once excluded from the center of American society by racism, but now had a passageway to entry.

I think in the current moment, we lack a political language that can shift from division to solidarity, and that’s something that was a major question for the anti-racist movements from the ’50s to the ’70s, and that’s what the Combahee River Collective was writing about. We don’t have a language about collective struggles that take on issues of racism and can incorporate cross-racial movements. So I think part of the reason that this individualistic kind of identity politics comes up so much on the left among activists who really do want to build movements that challenge the social structure is because we’ve lost that language that came with mass movements, which could allow us to think of the ways to build that solidarity.

You write that “the ideology of race is produced by racism, not the other way around.” What does this mean?

In this book, I don’t talk about “race” in general because we could think about many different historical contexts in which divisions are introduced between groups, which become hierarchical, and some of them may be related to color of skin. But there are examples of that type of group differentiation that isn’t related to color of skin, like the case of the Irish and English colonialism in Ireland in the 13th century, which I refer to in the book. You could look at different examples of plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and you’d have to explain [race] differently because there were not only African slaves, but also “coolies” from India and China.

I talk about a very specific history of race that emerged from forced labor in colonial Virginia in the 17th century. … My argument is that the first racial category that gets produced is that of the white race, in order to exclude African forced laborers from the category that European forced laborers were placed in, which was one in which there was an end of their term of servitude, [as opposed to] the category of slaves, who had no end to their term. The white race was invented, as Theodore Allen said, in the way that the laws changed regarding forced labor, and that’s the beginning of the division of people into racial categories in U.S. history. What racism did in this case was it differentiated between different kinds of economic exploitation and ultimately became a form of social control, which divided the exploited through introducing hierarchies and privileges for some people, which prevented them from seeing a common interest [between European and African migrant forced laborers] and a common antagonism against those who were exploiting them.

Your personal encounters with racism and observations of campus activism are woven throughout the book. How have your own identity and experiences informed your understanding of race?

Regarding campus activism, my experience was as a person of color who was radicalized largely by learning about the Black Power movement and Marxism through the Black Power movement. So I never imagined that people would see an incompatibility between them, especially because Marxism was the powerful force that it was in the 20th century, as it was taken up and adapted in the non-Western world. That’s something that’s forgotten or suppressed today. So as a person of color getting involved in social movements, I was getting really dismayed that often, race became the source of division and fragmentation and defeat, instead of being part of a general emancipatory program. It was that frustration that led me to thinking about and writing about what went into this book.

The left is often accused of being “too white” or “too male.” How can the left begin to address internal racial dynamics?

If you have an organization or a movement that is dominated by white men, that is a political and strategic problem. If you treat it as a moral problem, you’re not going to be able to solve it. I think the important thing is to actually be able to change the situation. Anyone who has participated in activism knows that in a meeting, someone may be called out or told to “check their privilege.” There’s an interesting article that came out of the feminist movement by Jo Freeman called “Trashing” — the contemporary equivalent of “trashing” is “calling out.” The funny thing about calling out is that it doesn’t work because it centers all the attention on the white man who engaged in whatever transgression is being morally condemned. It also creates an atmosphere of tension and paranoia so that even people who aren’t white men may feel nervous about speaking because they might say the wrong thing — and get trashed. So it’s a question that people who are involved in organizing have to take seriously, that white men have to take seriously.

There was a principle that the black communist Harry Haywood said was fundamental in organizing during the anti-racist struggles of the 1930s. He said that everybody has to come to terms with their own national position. So white comrades have to oppose white chauvinism, and they have to take a leading role in opposing it. And he said black comrades have to take the leading role in opposing reactionary nationalism, which at the time was Garveyism and the like. He said that with this division of labor, which was part of actual mass movements, you could start to overcome these problems. But then he said later on, when the party dropped their actual campaigns against racism, they started policing each other’s language, and that division of labor was gone, and the problem didn’t get addressed. So that’s something that still holds. White men in movements have to take the lead in trying to overcome those hierarchies that manifest themselves in social interactions, but also people of color have to step up and say, “We don’t accept this division between racial and economic issues, between race and class, and if someone is coming in and trying to say that these issues are all ‘white’ or this is a ‘white movement,’ that’s not true because we’re here and we’re playing a role, and we believe these issues are connected and we can work on them together.”

Can you talk about the ideas behind black nationalism in the 1970s and its limitations? How has black nationalism endured in contemporary U.S. politics?

After 1965, after the civil rights movement had achieved major policy changes, it was unclear where the movement should be headed. Even leading figures in the civil rights movement were thinking that now that legal segregation had been formally undermined, they still had to deal with the fact that most black people were in poverty and that there were de facto structures of exclusion. Martin Luther King, for example, started to get interested in the Poor People’s Campaign, which is what he was working on at the end of his life. But another approach at this point was what some people called “riots” and what others called “urban rebellions” in the northern cities, revolting against the economic control of landlords and white businessmen and so on. In the northern, urban context, black nationalism as a political program was about building alternative institutions, rather than asking for integration into white society.

So there were two things happening. One was black nationalists building parallel institutions, and the other was the overcoming of legal segregation and the rise of a new black political class and economic elites, which had always existed to some extent, but the scale completely changed. And so black nationalist organizations were behind many of the campaigns to have a black mayor in a majority black city. In the case of Amiri Baraka, it was Kenneth Gibson. Part of the reason Baraka turned from black nationalism toward Marxism was the realization that once Gibson was in charge of Newark, politics as usual continued. I think black nationalism had a revolutionary role in its period — it was a very important strategic and political development — but throughout the ’70s, with the ascendance of the black political class and black economic elites, it ran into a contradiction.

Black nationalism became tied to black political and economic elites because it had an ideology of racial unity, and when people were completely excluded from governance and control over their own lives, it made sense for there to be a kind of alliance between these more elite figures and the lower economic strata because they were both confronting racial structures of exclusion. But as the process of incorporation of black elites into the existing political and economic structures continued, those interests were no longer aligned, especially in the 1970s, as politicians at every level were starting to impose austerity on their populations, cutting social programs and so on. It became the black politicians who were doing that, and so the contradictions between the black elite and the majority of black people in cities became very clear. And so what I think persists now is that division between the elites and ordinary working people, and a residual ideology of racial unity that is often used to cover up that class division. That was very much the case with Barack Obama.

How can identity politics be brought back to its radical origins within contemporary political discourse and organizing?

I think we have to be open to understanding that our identities are not foundations for anything; they are unstable, they are multifarious — and that can be unsettling. But we have to find ways to become comfortable with that, and part of how we can do that is by creating new ways of relating to each other, which can come through mass movements. The way we can overcome the fragmentation that identity seems to lead to now is precisely by recognizing what the Combahee River Collective proposed: being able to assert a political autonomy and also being in coalitions. I think that’s very practical. It’s not going to come from having endless arguments on Twitter; it’s something that has to come through political activity. It’s through working on concrete, practical projects in coalition with others. That in itself is a process in which racism is undermined, and white people who are working together with people of color can learn to question their own assumptions and overcome racist impulses.

I’m very inspired by the rapid growth of socialist organizations right now, but I am concerned sometimes that socialism gets equated with some kind of program for economic redistribution that has been the same since the 19th century. Socialists have always been engaged in coalition-building — there was always a principle of internationalism, there was never a fixed conception of the kinds of demands a socialist movement has to put forward. Sometimes a demand that may not seem to be directly related to the redistribution of wealth can be part of coalition-building and mobilizing people. If a socialist organization is at the forefront of a movement against racism — and this was the goal of certain black members of the Communist Party in the ’30s — then people are going to look around and say, “Who’s on our side? It’s these people. When we were dealing with police violence, these were the people, this was the organization that stepped in to help. And this is an organization that is multiracial, and they think that these issues we encounter in our daily lives matter, just as much as any other economic demand might matter.” So socialist organizations also have to be open to experimentation and flexibility in order to pre-empt identity as a source of division and instead, pre-emptively build solidarity.

Can you explain your vision of a universalist political framework?

We have to set aside the kind of universalism that resolves divisions and difficulties in advance by saying that we have some kind of universal foundation, like human nature or materialism like it’s some physical matter, which has nothing to do with materialism as Marx talked about it. That’s not the universalism I’m advocating for because that kind of universalism has historically been caught up with exclusion and domination — like what was put forth by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, which were systematic with slavery, colonialism, and various forms of violence. … My understanding of universalism is when the people and groups that are excluded from this [definition of] universal rise up and claim their autonomy to produce a new kind of universality. It’s not something that pre-exists; it’s a break with the existing state of things. The classic example is the Haitian Revolution, which came after the French Revolution, which pointed out that France still held colonies in which there was slavery, despite whatever was happening there.

We’d be able to see a new universalism if these rigid divisions between so-called identity categories like race and gender and the category of class were overcome in a real, practical movement. If we were able to see organizations emerge and make real, concrete change in which they bridge those gaps — in which it would become impossible to say that “this is a white organization” or “this is a male-dominated organization” — it would necessarily involve challenging economic inequality and the class structures of American society. For a movement to arise, which tackled the fundamental structures of inequality, domination, and exploitation in American society in such a way that identity as a force of division could not exist — that would be a real universal moment.

Top photo: Isaiah Moore, right, argues with counterdemonstrators about race relations during a rally in Coolidge Park on Aug. 17, 2017, in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The post How Identity Politics Has Divided the Left: An Interview With Asad Haider appeared first on The Intercept.

So far this year, 773 people have been fatally shot by police, according to the Washington Post, while independent databases that include other causes of death by police report tolls above 900. In the three years since the flashpoint of Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, pushes for reform have reverberated through all levels of government, most notably from former President Barack Obama’s policing task force. And yet, much like gun violence itself, police brutality in the United States remains stuck on repeat. A new book published last week goes beyond the rhetoric of reform to interrogate why we need police at all.

In “The End of Policing,” Alex S. Vitale argues that police reforms implemented in the wake of Brown’s death — from diversity initiatives to community policing to body cameras — fail to acknowledge that policing as an institution reinforces race and class inequalities by design.

“The suppression of workers and the tight surveillance and micromanagement of black and brown lives have always been at the center of policing,” writes Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College.

Starting with the “original police force,” the London Metropolitan Police, Vitale provides a succinct historical framework to understand how police in the U.S. were created to control poor and nonwhite people and communities. The modern war on drugs can be traced back to “political opportunism and managing ‘suspect populations’” in the 20th century. The increasingly intensified policing of the U.S.-Mexico border today stems from nativist sentiment and economic exploitation of migrant workers starting in the 1800s. Surveillance and suppression of political movements takes root in imperialist Europe, when ruling powers used secret police to infiltrate and eliminate the opposition.

“The End of Policing” maps how law enforcement has become an omnipresent specter in American society over the last four decades. Police are deployed to monitor and manage a sprawling range of issues: drugs, homelessness, mental health, immigration, school safety, sex work, youth violence, and political resistance. Across this spectrum, current liberal reforms are intertwined with upholding the legitimacy of police, courts, and incarceration as conduits to receive access to resources and care. Vitale’s approach goes beyond working within the carceral system to propose non-punitive alternatives that would eventually render policing obsolete. He convincingly argues that a combination of community-based programs, support services, regulation, economic investment, and political representation for poor communities of color can significantly shrink the impact of policing in exchange for justice and community empowerment.

In a time when the president of the United States openly supports and facilitates aggressive policing, and police officers continue to kill black Americans with impunity, “The End of Policing” is an essential primer to unpack the innate brutality of policing and begin to envision an America free from police violence and control.

The Intercept’s interview with Vitale has been condensed and edited for clarity.

There have been a host of reforms proposed in reaction to the shootings of black Americans by police in the last three years. How does your book address the shortcomings of these reforms?

The bad news is that at the national level, any hope of the federal government bringing about some kind of progressive reform has largely evaporated. The reforms that existed under the Obama administration were pretty limited in scope and their effectiveness is open to question. The good news is that the vast majority of decision-making about police reform happens at the local level, and local political pressure can really make a difference. But the bad news about that is that the kinds of reforms most people are advocating for I don’t think are going to make a substantial difference. Some improvements in training, policy, and accountability may lead to a reduction in deaths, but it won’t address the larger question of overpolicing.

What we’ve seen in the last 40 years is an explosive increase in the scope and intensity of policing. Everything from the war on drugs to the war on terror to the war on disorder is driving a set of police practices that are invasive and aggressive, and the deaths we see on the nightly news are the tip of an iceberg of policing experienced in poor communities, especially poor communities of color. There is very little empirical support for a lot of the reforms being proposed, like diversifying the police or community policing or implicit bias training. What really needs to be done is we need to dial back the explosive increase in the scope of policing, and quit using the police to solve every kind of social problem.

Your book was written before Donald Trump’s election. In what ways has your outlook on working toward non-punitive police reforms changed under the Trump administration?

It’s changed the political opportunities. Trump has attempted to close the door on rational, technocratic, liberal reforms to policing for this “Blue Lives Matter” approach that policing shouldn’t be the last resort, it should be the first resort, to address all kinds of problems in a world divided between good and bad people, and it’s the police who keep the two sides separated. This is a horribly inaccurate and counterproductive view of the world, both for him and for those who support this viewpoint in the law enforcement community. My hope is that in the absence of any kind of progress on a liberal reform agenda, people will be open to thinking about more systemic reforms.

You write about the origins of modern policing, in which you debunk the mythology constructed around police as protectors and crime fighters who keep the public safe. Can you talk a bit about the real reasons why policing exists?

We should understand policing as the most coercive form of state power … and the reason is that policing has historically and inherently been at the root of reproducing fundamental inequalities of race, class, and immigration status. Trump, the police, ICE — this is just a continuation of a history of exclusion and repression going back to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, Texas Rangers driving out Mexican landholders and indigenous populations to make room for white settlers, the transformation of slave patrols and urban slave management systems into what became Jim Crow policing in the South and ghetto policing in the North. Police have historical origins in relation to both the formation and disciplining of the industrial working class; early 19th century forms of policing in Europe and the United States shaped rural agricultural workers into urban industrial workers, and then suppressed their movements to form labor unions and win better living conditions.

The point of all this is to fundamentally question this liberal notion that police exist primarily as a tool for public safety and therefore, we should embrace their efforts uncritically, when in fact, there are lots of different ways to produce safety that don’t come with the baggage of colonialism, slavery, and the suppression of workers’ movements.

There’s a refrain throughout your book that the policing and incarceration of marginalized people is ultimately far more expensive than non-carceral alternatives. So why isn’t the government pursuing cost-saving measures that would also better people’s lives?

A lot of research about police practices is couched in terms of effectiveness — can we show some improvement in an outcome like recidivism or crime rates? But there’s very little attention to any notion of justice and the political context in which these decisions are made, the implications of these processes on the people subjected to them, or the alternative ways to achieve the same ends. So we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to cycle people through jails, courts, emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and their lives never get any better. And ultimately, the community is not significantly improved either. So if we did any kind of cost-benefit calculation that took this into consideration, we would do something different.

The problem is we’re caught up in an ideological battle, in which the politics of austerity and a neoconservative commitment to punitiveness as a response to social discord means that we don’t ever get a chance to assess a series of possible options to address community problems. Most people, if they really felt they had options, would say, well, we need some youth programs, supportive housing, community-based mental health care. If we could use the resources that are being spent on police, jails, prisons, and courts, there would be plenty of money to invest in those kinds of solutions, but at all levels of government, they’re just never on the table.

“The End of Policing” by Alex S. Vitale.

You write about how police are inherently political and have always functioned as an extension of state power around the world. In what instances has it been clear that American police are not neutral actors, but in fact, serve the political agenda of whoever is in office?

We continually discover evidence of police engaging in the surveillance and suppression of social movements, in which there’s no real allegation of criminality. From the suppression of Occupy Wall Street and the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline movement to the surveillance of Black Lives Matter, that’s becoming clearer. These have occurred under both [the Obama and Trump] administrations, but more importantly, they’ve occurred in mostly Democratic cities governed by Democratic mayors with democratically appointed police commissioners. What’s important to them is that politics be channeled into a very narrow conceptualization of liberal electoral politics, and anything that can’t be is fundamentally illegitimate, disruptive, and disorderly, and should be surveilled and, if necessary, suppressed. And the police have always been at the center of that process.

Many places around the world and some parts of the U.S. have decriminalized or legalized certain drugs or sex work. What are the challenges around attempting to legitimize these underground economies that are so heavily moralized against?

It’s very important politically for neoconservatives to define crime and disorder in moralistic terms because the alternative would be to acknowledge the role of markets and the state — that black markets are a product of a lack of economic opportunities. Instead, neoconservatives criminalize on moralistic terms so that drugs can’t be understood as a public health problem with origins that may be linked to the deindustrialization of rural America, the entrenched poverty of urban America, the pharmaceutical industry and flooding the market with cheap opioid pills. [Drug use] is framed in terms of “Just Say No” and punitive sanctions for those who don’t go along with it. So whether it’s prostitution, drug abuse, kids acting out in school, shoplifting — these are all framed in moral terms, which closes off the possibility of any kind of conversation about how to reduce the harms and the demand. I try to undermine those moralistic arguments and think about the people involved in these black markets as full human beings, whose well-being should be part of any calculation on how to address these issues and understand that the historic role of police in managing these problems has been primarily counterproductive.

You write about restorative justice as an example of non-punitive alternatives to policing. Can you talk about what this model looks like in schools, as well as in communities grappling with violence?

Restorative justice is a mechanism that’s designed to resolve social problems in non-punitive ways by trying to identify what the underlying forces are behind problematic behavior and, instead of using punishment and exclusion to respond to that behavior, drawing that person in and trying to figure out what can be done to both repair them and whatever harm their problematic behavior has produced.

The place where this has gotten the most traction has been in schools. These systems typically involve peer adjudication, where students work with students engaged in problematic behavior to try to identify the behaviors and causes of those behaviors, and then come up with some solutions. Often, the problem is coming from outside the school, something going on at home or in the community, but sometimes it’s coming from within the school, like bullying. We had a horrible stabbing here in New York City just recently, the first death of a student on campus in many years, and of course, the young person who did the stabbing said they were subjected to long-term, persistent bullying. And what’s going to be done about that? Possibly nothing. Instead, they’re putting metal detectors in the school. So that’s a kind of punitive approach. A restorative justice approach would have created avenues to address that bullying long before it escalated into a violent, deadly confrontation. The whole school community has to be involved — students, teachers, administrators. It requires rethinking how whole disciplinary systems are organized so that problems are identified early, and the goal is to resolve them, not to punish them.

In communities, one of the more interesting models is linked to a concept called justice reinvestment. We know there are neighborhoods where problematic behavior is highly concentrated, and local and state officials spend millions of dollars to police and incarcerate people. What if those communities kept some percentage of people who get arrested in the community and tried to develop strategies for resolving their problems, and in return, the community got the money that would have been spent incarcerating them? We could afford to begin to produce some supportive housing and community-based mental health systems, we could find summer jobs and after-school employment for young people. We could develop services not just for them, but for their parents. These things are cheaper than jails, prisons, and police, and they don’t come with all the collateral consequences of driving people through those punitive systems.

What is the relationship between police abolition and prison abolition?

I think of abolition as a process rather than an outcome. I don’t explicitly go around saying “abolish the police” or “abolish prisons.” Instead, I say that if we understand police and prisons as inherently coercive and punitive and stained with a history of reproducing inequality, those institutions should always be used as a last resort. Instead, we should identify, whenever possible, constructive, restorative, non-punitive solutions to our social problems. And, to the extent we can do that, we reduce our reliance on those deeply problematic institutions.

We need to quit beginning with the premise, Oh, I’ve got a problem, let’s get the police involved. No, I’ve got a problem, and I want to demand that government solve this problem in a way that is ethically and intellectually defensible and will actually produce benefits for the community and those who’ve been the target of punitive approaches.

Top photo: Demonstrators confront police while protesting the acquittal of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley on Sept. 16, 2017, in St. Louis.

The post Envisioning an America Free From Police Violence and Control appeared first on The Intercept.