At the confirmation hearing of Kash Patel for the position of FBI Director, Senator Thom Tillis introduced him as the son of Indian immigrants from their home state of Gujarat, which he described as a “melting pot” of religions. Patel’s father had fled Uganda during Idi Amin’s expulsion of Indians before ultimately settling the family in New York. Patel displayed his religion and ethnicity alongside his belief in the U.S. Constitution. He saluted his parents by declaring “Jai Sri Krishna,” a greeting that literally means glory or victory to Lord Krishna. He later performed an unusually traditional gesture of reverence for Hindu parents, bowing down to touch their feet. If we set aside the grave concerns Democrats raised about Patel’s conspiracy mongering and his ambitions to dismantle the “deep state” by exacting revenge on Trump’s enemies, Patel’s nomination appears to reflect values Democrats would embrace: a commitment to pluralistic democracy, an embrace of racial and cultural differences, and an affirmation of America as a haven for immigrants. But are these the values that drew him to the Trump administration?
Patel is one among several Indian Americans who factor prominently in the evolving Trump cabinet and MAGA movement. During the 2024 presidential campaign Nikki Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the son of Hindu immigrants ran against Trump before endorsing him. J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha is the daughter of Telugu speaking Hindu immigrants. After his election, Trump nominated Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institute of Health (NIH), Sriram Krishna as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, and Harmeet Dhillon to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Vivek Ramaswamy enjoyed a short-lived alliance with Elon Musk in heading the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard, who is not of Indian origin, but a Hindu, to be the Director of National Intelligence. Given Trump’s emphasis on merit-based achievement, calling these nominations DEI hires, a label he assigned to Kamala Harris, also of Indian descent, would amount to blasphemy.
What, then, is the ground that Indian Americans stand on in the MAGA movement? Is it the inclusive capacity of liberal democracy, or loyalty to a reactionary politics that undermines it? Here it is helpful to take the scenic route, by examining developments in Trump’s America alongside of Modi’s India. Doing so allows us to expose certain paradoxes about minority advancement. Non-Hindus are not elevated in Modi’s Hindu-izing India the way Hindus are in so-called white Christian America. Hindu and Christian nationalists tend to be anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist; but it is unclear how they will relate to each other in the long run. In America, a shared loyalty to Trump may, at least for a time, overcome the difference between being Hindu and being a white Christian nationalist. Still, Trump support has several threads – Christian nationalist, white supremacist, and populist – which already have taken issue with some of these Indian American nominees. The conflict over H1-B visas between Steve Bannon’s populist MAGA and Elon Musk’s elite, technocrat MAGA, inclines some to question how long this marriage will last.
The Crisis of Liberalism
In both India and the United States, the grievances of disaffected minorities and the responses of political parties and public institutions to these grievances have galvanized the far right. The advancement of MAGA and Hindutva (the Hindu-ization of India) reveals a crisis of liberalism – the rights-based order designed to ensure equality before the law and protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. As far right parties gain momentum globally, the liberal order designed to constrain state power, deter fascism, and protect vulnerable classes from scapegoating demagoguery is eroding. Some believe we are witnessing the birth of a post-liberal order, but the precise shape of that order in America remains fuzzy. Will non-whites and non-Christians flourish in a post-liberal America? Had Kash Patel greeted his parents with “As- salaam alaykum” instead of “Jai Sri Krishna,” would his fate be any different?
Both countries possess Constitutions that protect the rights of its citizens, including classes who have faced a history of discrimination. Despite what might seem like radically inclusive visions of nationhood, considerable discontentment – from the left and the right – marks the histories of India and the United States. One side laments what Uday Mehta describes as the inherent exclusions of the liberal state. Old hierarchies and patterns of discrimination by whites or upper castes persist beneath the veneer of equality before the law. As a result, the state never delivers enough on behalf of the marginalized communities, and they persistently agitate for more. For the other side, the state has catered too much to “identity politics” to the detriment of national unity and security. The defense of secularism is dismissed in India as “pseudo-secularism” by its critics on the right, a phrase that alleges vote bank manipulation by parties who court the votes of Muslims and other marginalized minorities. Right-wing media in the U.S., from the days of Rush Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson, attacks affirmative action, D.E.I., wokeism, and entitlements as policies that undermine national heritage and the identity-free meritocracy they espouse.
Freighted and convulsed by grievances from all sides, liberal democracy eventually reaches a tipping point. A new, reactionary subject emerges on the very platform used by subordinated or marginalized groups: That subject presents himself as the victim of historical injury, whose very existence is threatened by these “others” – their politics, policies, and political correctness – and the possibility of being replaced by them. We learn that “White lives matter” and of the rising perils of “Hinduphobia” which by themselves are not unreasonable. Those who employ this language, however, are not seeking inclusion within the nation, they claim to be the nation. They use the language of liberal rights to pursue a post-liberal order.
The post-liberal imagination is gripped by a vision of national solidarity and the retrieval of a lost cultural heritage. It is fueled by outrage over the rights doled out to a plethora of angry advocacy groups. The radical right, according to the journalist Matthew Rose, responded to “a spiraling crisis of belonging” fomented by liberalism’s individualism. It fills the vacuum with its own vision of a multi-cultural order, one constituted by a dominant culture, but which subordinates other cultural groups – grudgingly viewed as having been grandfathered into citizenship – in its hierarchy. Trump made significant gains in the 2024 election among citizens of Asian, African, Latino, and Arab descent, shattering the myth that these constituencies are the province of Democrats. The non-whites who voted for Trump have effectively exited the liberal order to join a movement that promises them security in exchange for their subordination. Whether this support will protect them from anti-immigrant or racist sentiments of hardliners remains to be seen.
Religion, H1-B, and Indian America
In 2023, Indians received 78 percent of all H1-B visas issued in the U.S. The recent dispute over the granting of these visas to Indians reveals the tension between MAGA’s “America first” diehards and technocrats like Musk who believe in attracting the best talent to fill jobs in places like Silicon Valley. The far-right MAGA supporter, Laura Loomer opposed Trump’s decision to appoint the venture capitalist, Sriram Krishnan as his Senior Policy Advisor for AI. Regarding H-1B’s, she declared, “Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India.” What do such sentiments signal for Indian engineers or students seeking employment in America’s tech sector?
Indian Americans tend to vote democrat but increased their support for Trump in the last election. Some are drawn to MAGA’s cultural conservatism, others to the moneyed tech sector, and others to the wealth that deregulation is believed to unlock. And yet, their presence in the orbit of MAGA raises questions about how extremists will perceive them. Last July, J.D. Vance faced racist comments about his Indian American wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, their mixed race children, and their Hindu names. The white supremacist, Nick Fuentes asked how anyone can expect that “the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” Vance appears to have developed a high degree of tolerance for such rants. Musk’s staffer, Marko Elez, had to resign because of social media posts in which he called readers to “normalize Indian hate” and declared his own repulsion to “marrying outside of his race.” Vance’s response was to “bring him back” because his life should not be ruined because of “stupid social media activity.” It remains to be seen how Christian nationalists – the ones who declare “Jesus is my Lord and Trump is my President” – will receive Tulsi Gabbard, who is not of Indian descent but is a self-professed Hindu, to head the Department of National Intelligence. Gabbard has met with Modi several times and has had to answer criticism that she has Hindu nationalist sympathies.
The Indians supporting Trump also include Christians or Hindus who say that they like Christians. Jay Bhattacharya is a Christian convert from a Hindu family who distinguished himself by opposing the Covid lockdowns. Vance himself credits his marriage to Usha, a practicing Hindu, for inspiring his 2019 conversion to Catholicism. When Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president, he occasionally had to address questions about his Hindu faith. In his response, he identified himself as a Hindu who embraces America’s Judeo-Christian values.
During his 2024 campaign, Ramaswamy attacked Nikki Haley, who was born to a Sikh family but converted to Christianity. Ramaswamy was quick to identify Haley by her birth name – Nimrata Nikki Randhawa – and portrayed her self-designation as “Nikki Haley” and her conversion to Christianity as examples of opportunism to secure her political ascendancy. Ramaswamy’s attack on Haley could have been applied to countless immigrants who alter their names to become more legible to white America. It also taps into a well-established Hindu nationalist critique of Christian conversion, which portrays it as a form of opportunism to gain access to Western resources.
If white Christian America embraces the Hindu Americans who enjoy proximity to the White House, it will indicate that a shared commitment to the MAGA agenda can transcend religious differences. If, however, the white Evangelicals that helped elect Trump take issue with “Hinduness,” Usha, Vivek, Kash and other members of the Indian diaspora may find themselves on the wrong side of Trump’s wall.
Cover photo: Kash Patel is sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination to be FBI Director, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, January 30, 2025. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP)
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