The Hindu American Foundation ( ) is an American Hindu non-profit advocacy group founded in 2003. The organisation has its roots in the Hindu nationalist organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad America and its student wing Hindu Students Council.
HAF's areas of activism include highlighting Hindu persecution in other countries, protecting Hindu rights in the United States, pushing back against the cultural appropriation of yoga, and opposition to legislation of anti-caste-discrimination laws. Scholars argue that HAF's activism aligns with Hindu nationalism and impinges on academic freedom.
Establishment
The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) was founded in September 2003 by Mihir Meghani, an emergency care physician; Aseem Shukla, an associate professor in urologic surgery; Suhag Shukla, an attorney; Nikhil Joshi, a labor law attorney; and Adeeti Joshi, a speech therapist. The organization describes itself as a human rights and advocacy group and emphasizes upon the "Hindu and American ideals of understanding, tolerance and pluralism."
The first Hindu advocacy organization to have a professional organizational structure and full-time staff, it is widely considered to be the most prominent Hindu advocacy organization operating out of America. Scholar Vinay Lal notes that the organization drew on the claims of Hinduism being unique in its tolerance and religious pluralism as well as the enormous goodwill created by Gandhi in the West.
Hindu nationalist ties
HAF co-founder Mihir Meghani had also founded the University of Michigan's chapter of the Hindu Students Council (HSC), a nationwide network of student societies affiliated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad America (VHPA), in 1991. He served on the governing council of VHPA and had even authored an essay for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the essay, he compared Hindus—a religious majority in India—with Jews, Black Americans, and colonized groups, whose bottled-up anger, for over a millennium, allegedly found a channel of outburst in the rise of BJP and demolition of the Babri Masjid. Coalition Against Genocide (CAG)—a platform established in the aftermath of 2002 Gujarat riots against Hindu nationalist violence directed at minorities—alleges that the formation of the Hindu American Foundation was the outcome of Meghani's parleys on the governing council of VHPA and an effort to rebrand the Hindutva agenda as "Hindu rights" as needed for mainstream American politics; Sangay K. Mishra, an assistant professor of political science at Drew University, agrees about the rebranding motto.
CAG further notes that most of the office bearers of the Hindu American Foundation were drawn from HSC activists. Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative finds the HAF board member Rishi Bhutada to have been the official spokesperson of "Howdy Modi," an RSS-backed rally in support of India's incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi held in Houston, Texas on September 22, 2020. A report published by BBC notes HAF to have lobbied support in favor of Modi among the diaspora. In September 2019, HAF published an open letter criticizing congressman Ro Khanna's public plea to reject Hindutva. The Bridge Initiative as well as several journalists have documented anti-Muslim statements made by HAF board members, past and present, and individuals invited to speak by HAF. Academic and journalists have also documented money trails linking HAF to other Sangh Parivar groups via their donors.
Sonia Sikka, an academic specializing in the intersection of religion and politics, notes clear alignments between HAF's activities and the politics of Hindutva Nationalism despite their claims to non-partisanship. Chad Bauman, a professor of religion at Butler University, contends HAF's portrayal of Hinduism to be misleadingly monolithic and sanitized, in service of a political agenda. Nishant Upadhyyay, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, specializing in gender and sexuality studies finds the group's queer-friendly portrayal of Hinduism to be embedded within a discourse of Hindutva homonationalism. Dheepa Sundaram, a scholar of religion and digital culture at University of Denver, notes that the group aimed at sanitizing Hindutva, in part by borrowing from decolonial vocabulary, misleadingly portraying terms like Hindutva, Brahminism etc. as oriental pejoratives.