MUCH divides Donald J. Trump and Narendra Modi, but there are similarities between the two leaders and their politics beyond their shared fondness for Twitter. Both are nationalists with a strong populist streak; both have a tendency to authoritarianism, albeit of different kinds. Both, moreover, enjoy the strong support of their respective Religious Rights, despite past differences between the leaders and those movements. In Trump’s case, that means the coalition of mostly evangelical Protestants, conservative Roman Catholics and Mormons that grew into a major political force in the United States (U.S.) in the 1980s. For Modi, it principally means the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar – the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) movement that he joined as a boy, and its many affiliates.

To date, these two Religious Rights have had a considerable influence on Trump and Modi’s domestic policies and some impact on their foreign policies too, but have not yet complicated the U.S.-India relationship. There are reasons to think they might, however, as the ideologies and interests of these two powerful constituencies do not in any way align. Hindu nationalist dislike of Christianity is deep-seated; so too is Christian concern about violence inflicted on churches and believers.

Both Religious Rights played key roles in getting the leaders elected, whatever the misgivings some of their members might have had about the characters of the two men. In Trump’s case, for obvious reasons, those concerns ran much deeper than they did with Modi. A notorious womaniser twice divorced with a notoriously problematic relationship with the truth, Trump’s personal religious commitments are likely non-existent, despite vague protestations to the contrary. His conduct in business has been alleged to be less than ethical, falling some way short of the standards the faithful might ideally want to uphold. And in the past, Trump has expressed views that are anathema to the Religious Right, notably on abortion. In 1999, indeed, he stated that he was ‘very pro-choice’.¹

Yet the Religious Right backed Trump – and backed him fulsomely. Partly they did so because they were terrified of Hillary Clinton and what ‘liberals’ like her might do on social issues if they got into office. Partly they turned out for Trump because his campaign promised to deliver a lot of what they wanted on abortion, LGBT rights, and protections on what they see as ‘religious freedom’. But what sealed the deal, as it were, was the addition of Mike Pence, the evangelical-but-Catholic Governor of Indiana, to the ticket. Reliably anti-abortion, the now Vice President is also stridently hostile to gay and transgender rights, and had earlier introduced legislation in Indiana that LGBT advocates and others argue permitted individuals and businesses to discriminate on the basis of gender and sexuality.

 

Modi’s relationship with the Indian Religious Right is far less vexed, but also has its problems. Of course, he is a product of the RSS, moulded and made by the Sangh in so many ways. He joined the local shakha (RSS branch) in Vadnagar when he was eight. After breaking with his family in his late teens, leaving home and wandering northern India, it was to the RSS that he eventually returned. With the powerful Gujarat Sangh leader Lakshmanrao Inamdar (known as Vakil Saheb) as his mentor, Modi became a pracharak (‘preacher’ or ‘organizer’) and received both a formal and practical education with the RSS’s support. Committed, ambitious, and hard working, if not by his own account especially religious, he rose through the ranks, taking on more and more responsibility within the organization. Recognition of these traits got Modi deputed to the BJP in the mid-1980s, and brought him to the attention of another RSS stalwart, L.K. Advani, then looking to promote younger talent in the party. Backed by the Sangh and by the BJP senior leadership, Modi advanced further, to New Delhi, then to Gandhinagar, and finally back to the national capital as prime minister.

In 2014, the RSS turned out in force to mobilize voters and get Modi and the BJP into office. Its action was not unprecedented – the RSS performed a similar task nationally back in 1977 and then in later state elections, including in Gujarat – but it was unusual.² The rank and file backed him for the same reasons that many others did, believing he could deliver growth and jobs, cut down corruption, and restore national pride, but also because they thought he might deliver a Hindu Rashtra – or something like it – and all that would entail.

Yet despite all this, some in the movement have long harboured doubts about Modi, his style of leadership and his political agenda. Back in Gujarat, Modi made enemies in the Sangh well before he became chief minister, caught up as he was in the factional infighting among Hindu nationalists in the state that took place in the 1990s. Others in the RSS resent his autocratic manner and his apparent disregard for its internally revered culture of consensus decision making.³ Elements worry too about Modi’s embrace of big business and his encouragement of investment from overseas, which run counter to both the RSS’s established preference for swadeshi and their long-standing worries about the deleterious effects that foreign money, and the values it brings with it, might have on their Bharat. But in the end, as with Trump and the American Religious Right, Modi’s Right chose to set aside whatever qualms they had and support him.

 

So far both bets by both Religious Rights have mostly paid off. Trump has pushed an agenda that fulfils or come close to fulfilling many of the wishes of his Christian conservative backers, especially on gay and transgender rights and on abortion. He has tried twice to ban transgender people from serving in the military and sought to roll back a series of laws and regulations concerning the recognition or protection of their rights. He has appointed a series of judges, including Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, who are thought to be hostile to LGBT rights and known to be opposed to abortion. He has banned the payment of federal funds to foreign agencies that support terminations in any way, and within the United States, extended protections nominally designed to safeguard the religious freedom of doctors and others.

Last but not least, he ordered the transfer of the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which some evangelicals believe will help strengthen the Jewish nation and its hold over the city, thereby hastening the Second Coming of Christ.⁴

Modi’s record is – it must be admitted – a little different. His government has embarked on a culture war of sorts, aimed at those ‘secular’ forces that many Hindu nationalists believe undermine India and corrupt Indians. To promote its cultural and political agendas, it has meddled in universities and research councils, promoting Hindu nationalist causes like Vedic science and attempting to rewrite the story of India’s past. It has curbed the activities of foreign sponsored or run non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with some packing up and leaving the country altogether. Some also allege that it has turned a blind eye to violent acts carried out by Hindu nationalist extremists and mobs, from the lynching of mainly Dalits and Muslims by self-styled gau rakshaks (‘cow defenders’) to the punishment beatings inflicted on young Muslim men seen with Hindu women and accused of being part of a ‘love jihad’.

 

In both cases – American and Indian – the rising power of their Religious Rights has been met with concern abroad. But oddly, their growing influence has so far caused little or no troubles in relations between the U.S. and India during the time that Trump and Modi have been in power. This is, as I suggest, peculiar because the two movements have, on the face of it at least, conflicting interests, as well as conflicting values. One would expect them to clash, and yet so far, they have not.

 

Perhaps the most obvious area where they might disagree is in the competition for followers. The American Religious Right is composed of two groups – evangelicals and Mormons – with a deep interest in missionary work in places like India; the third element, the Catholic Church, also has an eye on the possible new recruits it might find in that country, as in others. The Hindu Right, on the other hand, has long been riled by attempts by Christian missionaries to proselytize in India and to convert Hindus, heightening their already high levels of suspicion about the West’s intentions for their country.

M.S. Golwalkar, the influential mid-20th century leader of the RSS (the organization’s second Sarsanghchalak, as the head of the RSS is known), wrote extensively and passionately on this topic in his Bunch of Thoughts (1966).⁵ He deplored Christian (and earlier, Muslim) attempts to recruit poor Hindus, in particular, arguing that Adivasi and Dalits only did so because they were promised material gains, and that their conversions were merely material and not spiritual. Worse still, Golwalkar argued, once they and others had accepted Christianity their commitments were divided: no longer were they devoted to the nation, as they ought to be.

Later Sangh leaders have done little if anything to disavow such beliefs – indeed, concern about the activities of Christian missionaries, as well as western NGOs thought to be Christian Trojan Horses, is a recurrent theme in the public pronouncements of the present Sarsanghchalak, Mohan Bhagwat.⁶ Moreover, Christians have in the past become victims of what is alleged to be Hindu extremist violence, causing concern in the United States within the Religious Right and pressure on the President, Congress, and the State Department to act. In the late 1990s, the number of attacks in India on churches, priests, nuns, and the ordinary faithful escalated sharply. They peaked again in 2008 and although figures are hard to verify, the incidence has remained high since, with some evidence suggesting another escalation in the mid-2010s.⁷

 

In the U.S., these and other acts have repeatedly been condemned by Christian groups and by government, and have prompted past presidents to speak out. On his last visit to India in January 2015 Barack Obama, invited as the guest of honour for Republic Day, made a point of calling on his host to uphold religious freedom partly out of concern for the welfare of its Christian communities.⁸

Trump is unlikely to follow in those footsteps – though it is possible that Pence could – and even if he did, it is doubtful that if he expressed similar criticisms to those voiced by Obama, he would provoke the same response. Parts of the Hindu Right, after all, love Trump. Unlike the Indian American diaspora, which overwhelmingly rejected the president at the polls back in 2016, the Religious Right in India and fringe groups in the U.S. like ‘Hindus for Trump’ or the ‘Republican Hindu Coalition’, admire his approach. Undeterred by Trump’s clampdown on the H1B working visas of which Indians are the biggest beneficiaries, they are drawn to his anti-Muslim rhetoric, his supposed focus on defeating ‘radical Islamic terrorism’, and his strongman demeanour.

 

It is possible then that Trump may keep a substantial clash between the American and Indian Religious Rights at bay, at least for a while. Longer term, however, it is difficult to imagine that their interests and values will not clash, and that U.S.-India relations will not suffer as a consequence. Even if we set the fraught and contentious issues of missionary activity and anti-Christian violence aside, there are other areas in the Religious Rights that could adversely affect their bilateral ties.

One of them – perhaps surprisingly – is yoga. Modi scored a significant win for India’s so-called ‘soft power’ when in the latter half of 2014 he persuaded the United Nations to recognize an International Day of Yoga every 21 June. The main opponents to the idea were a group of Muslim states, among them Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, as well as Pakistan.

Yoga is also controversial, however, among some fundamentalist Christians. Some have opposed its practice in state schools, resulting in a (failed) lawsuit in California in 2013 and a more recent case in Georgia in which ‘mindfulness’ classes involving yoga were modified after protests from concerned parents. At the same time, some Hindu nationalists, such the prominent commentator Rajiv Malhotra, who lives in the U.S., have objected to certain Christian and secular groups that they argue have unreasonably appropriated yoga. For them as for the fundamentalist Christians who seek to have yoga banned from schools, it is an inextricably Hindu practice.⁹

 

Although yoga now has the backing of Modi and the Indian state, it is hard to see a dispute about it escalating beyond a short-lived spat into a major diplomatic disagreement. Harder to assess, by contrast, are the potential consequences of the Sangh’s push to exert more influence over the Hindu part of India’s diaspora in the US and elsewhere.

Just as the RSS and its affiliates have worked hard in recent years to expand their activities within India, opening more shakhas and recruiting many more members, so have they become much more active overseas. Their aims are straightforward: to build support for the Sangh and the BJP’s political agenda in India, which they hope will translate into significant flows of money much needed to fight elections, to tap the experience and networks of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and people of Indian origin, and to influence the policies of the countries that host them in ways that might be helpful to them and to New Delhi.

So far, this nascent Hindu nationalist lobby has not been called upon to act, and its cohesiveness and effectiveness is uncertain. No issue comparable to the U.S.-India nuclear deal, helped along by adroit action on the part of the United States India Political Action Committee (USIPAC), founded in 2002 and modelled after its Israeli equivalent, has arisen in the bilateral relationship since Modi came to power. But we cannot ignore how much time and energy the Sangh and the BJP have recently invested in cultivating Indian communities in the U.S.

Close Modi allies like Ram Madhav and Vijay Chauthaiwale have repeatedly been deployed overseas to try to galvanize the Hindu nationalist diaspora, and the BJP has overhauled its outreach operation, the ‘Overseas Friends of the BJP’. In parallel, groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) are also expanding in key countries, including the U.S., where they run education programmes and week-long camps for children, as well as promoting ‘Hindu values’.

 

Underlying all of this is the biggest potential problem for U.S.-India ties that could emerge from the relationship between the two Religious Rights: the incompatibility of worldviews. Both expect in some sense to inherit the future. Many conservative Christians are convinced that the world will gradually convert – or in some cases resist accepting the Gospel – and that God’s promises to the faithful will be kept, up to, including, and beyond the Second Coming. Most Hindu nationalists believe that there will come a point when all will realize that the world is one family – vasudhaiva kutumbakam – and that India has a special role to play, as a vishwaguru (‘world guru’), in uniting that family by convincing all that there are multiple paths to God. This idea has been front and centre during Modi’s time in office, a feature of his major speeches on foreign policy and of notable pronouncements by his allies, including Bhagwat.¹⁰

Some argue that these two world-views are commensurable – among them are significant Hindu nationalist thinkers like Swami Vivekananda, whom Modi claims to venerate. It will take, however, a considerable effort to convince many conservative Christians to accept these precepts, as well as work to demonstrate that all Hindu nationalists live by them, eschewing violence against religious minorities.

 

So far, these issues have not complicated U.S.-India ties in the Trump era. Despite low expectations of what might be achieved and some astonishingly undiplomatic behaviour towards Modi from the President, including apparently making light of his marital status and mocking his accent, the relationship has got stronger thanks to assiduous and quiet diplomacy and a measure of forbearance on both sides. Politically and militarily, they are working together more closely on Indo-Pacific security than they did under Obama; economically, they have so far avoided the kind of disagreements that have marred some other bilateral relationships.

The two Religious Rights have not strayed far from their domestic preoccupations. But as I have suggested, things may not remain this way. A beaten missionary, yoga ban, or even a clumsy intervention in a Congressional race could escalate an incident that would expose the deeper differences between them, and where that might lead, with two such powerful and passionate constituencies involved, is not clear.

 

Footnotes:

1. NBC News, ‘Trump in 1999: ‘I am Very Pro-Choice’, online at: https://www.nbcnews. com/meet-the-press/video/trump-in-1999-i-am-very-pro-choice-480297539914?v= railb&.

2. Walter K. Andersen and Shridhar D. Damle, The RSS: A View to the Inside. Penguin Viking, New Delhi, 2018, p. 3.

3. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times. Tranquebar, New Delhi, 2013, p. 209. See also Andersen and Damle, The RSS, p. 16.

4. Diana Butler Bass, ‘For Many Evangelicals, Jerusalem is About Prophecy, Not Politics’, CNN, 14 May 2018, online at: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/08/opinions/jerusalem-israel-evangelicals-end-times-butler-bass-opinion/index.html.

5. M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (3rd edition). Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, Bangalore. (1st edition 1966).

6. See, for example, Bhagwat’s reported comments in ‘Bring Back all Converted Hindus, says RSS Chief’, The Hindu, 20 December 2014, https://www.thehindu.com/news/ national/enact-law-against-conversion-says-rss-chief-bhagwat/article6711131.ece.

7. On the violence in the late 1990s, see Human Rights Watch, Politics by Other Means: Attacks Against Christians in India, October 1999, online at https://www.hrw. org/legacy/reports/1999/indiachr/. On the later statistics, see the Evangelical Fellowship of India Persecution Report 2015, 17 March 2016, online at: https://www.worldea.org/news/4651/evangelical-fellowship-of-india-persecution-report-2015.

8. Annie Gowan, ‘Obama’s Remarks on Religious Intolerance in India Provoke Outrage’, The Washington Post, 6 February 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/06/obamas-remarks-on-religious-intolerance-in-india-provoke-outrage/?utm_term=.778fcd858340.

9. Rajiv Malhotra, ‘A Hindu View of ‘Christian Yoga’, Huffington Post, 8 November 2010, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/hindu-view-of-christian-yoga_b_778501.html.

10. Pavan Dahat, ‘With World Powers Stepping Aside, India Should Become "Vishvaguru": RSS Chief’, The Hindu, 10 June 2017, https://www.thehindu.com/news/states/with-world-powers-stepping-aside-india-should-become-vishvaguru-rss-chief/article18952071.ece.