Who is lobbying for India’s Modi government on Capitol Hill?

On a Wednesday morning in September 2022, a lobbyist reached out to a congressional staffer in Washington, DC. He wanted to set up a meeting on behalf of his client to discuss some human rights concerns in Pakistan and a newly introduced resolution in the United States House of Representatives regarding religious minorities in India.

During the meeting a few weeks later, the client made an appeal: Could the congressional office where the staffer worked back a ban on sustainment packages for F-16 fighter jets sold to Pakistan due to that country’s alleged persecution of its Hindu minority?

This client was not a foreign government or a defence policy think tank. It was a domestic nonprofit called the Hindu American Foundation.

The staffer was taken aback. Despite being familiar with the group and its advocacy on behalf of Hindus in the US, the staffer did not expect it to be so deeply involved in geopolitics.

The Indian government at that time had been publicly pushing back against a $450m F-16 package for Pakistan. India’s defence minister had expressed concerns about it to his US counterpart, and the external affairs minister had openly disparaged the US government for the package.

“In that moment”, the staffer said, “it became clear to me that the Hindu American Foundation was acting on behalf of the Indian government.”

The foundation, also known as HAF, emerged two decades ago as a voice for the Hindu community in the United States. It wasn’t formed to champion the Indian government.

But since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, HAF has ramped up its political activities in favour of the Indian government, which is led by Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

It has emerged, despite its claims of “nonpartisanship”, as an effective advocate of the BJP, attempting to influence the US government through meetings with members of Congress to push for the passage of multiple pieces of legislation on critical aspects of US foreign policy related to India.

Its founders, board members and a parallel political action committee – the Hindu American PAC – have made significant contributions to the election campaigns of legislators who have in turn supported HAF’s lobbying efforts on these issues.

Throughout this time, HAF has maintained a cosy relationship with the Modi government. It has acted in the US to counter the Modi government’s critics, collaborated with the Indian embassy on events and programmes, and corresponded with the embassy on sensitive matters.

Yet in public, HAF distances itself from the Indian government and the BJP. It vehemently refutes allegations that it acts on their behalf, reiterating that its members are merely Hindus engaged in the US political process and calling any allegations of government collusion “dual loyalty slurs”.

HAF appears to be treading a fine line. Its activities in favour of the Indian government, coupled with its continued collaboration with the Indian embassy, raise questions as to whether it should register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938.

Registration as a foreign agent is required any time an entity represents the interests of a foreign principal before any agency or official of the US on the principal’s behalf.

The definition of a foreign agent in US law includes “any person who acts … at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal … and who directly or through any other person engages within the United States in political activities for, or in the interests of such foreign principal.”

“Lobbying for specific foreign policy issues would clearly qualify as ‘political activities’ under FARA,” said Benjamin Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy programme at the Quincy Institute think tank. “The threshold in the statute is merely doing work at the ‘request’ of a foreign principal,” he added.

But HAF is not registered under FARA, even though it has pushed the BJP government’s agenda before members of the US government.

“The mere fact that our positions overlap with those of a foreign principal is not enough to show that we are a foreign agent,” Mat McDermott, HAF’s senior director of communications, said in an email. “HAF is not affiliated with the Indian government or the BJP in any manner.” (HAF‘s full response to Al Jazeera can be read here.)

The early years

One of the first political activities undertaken by HAF took place in 2005 when the US Department of State denied Modi a visa after interreligious violence erupted while he was chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. HAF issued a statement condemning the decision, calling it the product of a “coordinated campaign” by the Indian left-wing and their US supporters to vilify Modi and the BJP.

“It was obviously a horrible chapter in Indian history. But you just have this focus on Hindu violence, but not Muslim violence,” Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, told this reporter in an interview.

“All of a sudden, [the narrative] shifts to ‘Hindus are dangerous and violent, and they’re anti-Muslim.’ It’s definitely compiling and compounding the negative portrayals of India.”

This was HAF’s first foray into Indian politics. In the years that followed, it largely focused its attention on domestic advocacy for Hindu causes.

In May 2005, HAF and other Hindu groups proposed ​​more than 117 edits to California textbooks that tackled India and Hinduism.

In 2007, the group rallied around a House resolution that for the first time would recognise the festival of Diwali. In 2008, it launched the Take Back Yoga campaign to promote and publicise the Hindu roots of yoga.

However, 2013 marked a noticeable shift in HAF’s lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill in favour of Modi, the prime ministerial candidate for the BJP in the upcoming Indian national elections.

Gaining ground

HAF on its website says it is politically agnostic and nonpartisan. Its status as a nonprofit bans it from making donations to candidates.

Its board members and executives, however, are on the board of the Hindu American Political Action Committee (HAPAC).

“There is no functional overlap between these two independent organizations nor meaningful communication. It is common and completely within the confines of US 501(c)(3) law for members of nonprofit boards to also serve on boards of political action committees in their personal time,” McDermott said.

Although the two groups are not officially affiliated with each other, all but two board members of HAPAC are part of HAF in some capacity.

HAPAC has spent nearly $200,000 on campaign contributions since it began making donations in 2012.

Donors to HAPAC over the years include many of HAF’s board members, such as co-founder Mihir Meghani and his family members.

Meghani was also a co-founder of the Hindu Students Council, an organisation affiliated with the BJP. He was HAF’s top donor, according to its 2018 tax disclosures in Florida. He donated more than $500,000 that year.

Shekar Reddy, a trustee of the Global Hindu Heritage Foundation, was the second-largest donor. In 2022, that group was found to be raising money for the demolition of “illegal” Christian churches in India.

Like Meghani and Reddy, other affluent Hindu Americans have contributed to political campaigns through HAPAC. These include Ramesh Bhutada, an industrialist who has pledged more than $1m to Hindu organisations and causes, including HAF, through his family foundation.

Bhutada is also a director of Sewa International and former vice president of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh. Both organisations, which operate in the US, are part of the “Sangh Parivar”, a group of organisations affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the ideological fountainhead of the BJP.

These political donations have helped rally support for Hindu and Indian geopolitical causes.

HAF’s founders and donors have also campaigned for political candidates.

“Ro Khanna is running for the US Congress against Mike Honda. Honda wrote a letter asking the State [Department] to deny Modi a visa,” Mihir Meghani wrote in a 2013 email on a Google group.

“It is imperative that as Indians and Hindus that we support Ro. As part of my commitment, I have given the maximum donation of $5,200 to only [two] candidates this year – Tulsi Gabbard and Ro Khanna, and I hope that you will give your maximum support to him as well.”

Meghani did not respond to multiple requests for an interview sent via email and the social media platform X.

Making way for Modi

Even before Modi was officially announced as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in September 2013, the tide was turning in his favour. The Brookings Institution think tank called him India’s most admired and most feared politician, and a number of opinion pieces about his popularity featured prominently in US and international media.

But at the same time, the Hindu-Muslim riots in his state remained a dark stain on Modi’s record.

In 2013, Representative Joseph Pitts, a Republican from Pennsylvania, introduced a resolution reaffirming the US government’s decision to not grant Modi a visa. According to an unnamed congressional staffer who spoke to India’s Outlook magazine: “Each office who signed the resolution received a visit from HAF … HAF is not promoting Modi, but they are trying to undermine anyone in Washington who is critical of Modi.”

On May 26, 2014, Modi was sworn in as prime minister. Soon after, his visa ban was lifted.

The first term

HAF stepped up its pro-Modi activities once he was elected prime minister in 2014. In 2016, it organised a conference call with Representative Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota and one of the 25 lawmakers who had sought a ban on Modi’s visa, “to clarify his contested record over legislation regarding India”, according to the India Post. The call included a number of organisations, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, a US-based nonprofit.

It also featured a man named Bharat Barai.

Barai, who would later sponsor a fundraiser for HAF and register as a foreign agent on behalf of the consul general of India, “specifically asked Ellison about his diatribe against Narendra Modi and happenings in Gujarat”, India Post reported. He offered to travel to Washington to talk to Ellison’s staff to give them a “clear picture” of how Modi handled the riots.

People celebrated in Times Square after the groundbreaking ceremony of a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in August 2020 [File: Frank Franklin II/AP Photo]

On a cloudy Sunday afternoon in June 2017 in Washington, DC, the Indian embassy organised a welcome reception for Modi. More than 70 volunteers helped out at the event. Some were from the Washington Leadership Program, a nonprofit dedicated to placing South Asian students in congressional internships. Others were from the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the international arm of the BJP’s ideological parent. The rest were from HAF.

“​​Congrats​ ​to HAF, HSS and WLP​ leadership​ for the coordination efforts,” Roopal Shah, one of the coordinators of the event, wrote in an email addressed to the volunteers. “Grateful to the Embassy and to the Indian Government for allowing us to be a part of this event.”

McDermott denied that HAF had ever collaborated with the Indian embassy for Modi’s visits “in any specific way”.

He maintained that HAF would welcome leaders of any Indian government regardless of party affiliation.

The BJP has no shortage of allies in the US. One of them, the Overseas Friends of BJP, a registered foreign agent, has the stated objective of “projecting a positive and correct image of India and its people in the US and foreign media and correcting any distortions in the media’s reporting of current events taking place in India”.

While this is the Overseas Friends of the BJP’s stated purpose, it is also a strikingly accurate description of HAF’s activities.

In February 2017, as the Modi government was being criticised for fanning religious ethnonationalism and fomenting violence against religious minorities in India, HAF wrote to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. It requested the retraction of its report on the persecution of Indian religious minorities. It also requested the commissioners to engage with HAF’s leaders “regarding the Commission’s continued misrepresentations of India’s religious diversity, legal system, and political dynamics”.

In July 2018, alongside the start of Modi’s re-election campaign, HAF released a policy statement at a Capitol Hill briefing. It detailed the ways in which the government of India had provided “unprecedented religious accommodations to its religious minority population”.

HAF’s report provided a robust defence of Modi’s policies and denied widespread reports that minorities were being persecuted.

But it denied having acted in collaboration with the Indian government.

“We have different members of HAF staff who probably have relationships with members of the Indian government,” McDermott said. “But there are no weekly, monthly or yearly calls. There is no coordination whatsoever.”

The Overseas Friends of BJP did not respond to an interview request submitted through its website.

Back in office

A month after Modi was sworn in for his second term as prime minister, HAF conducted its annual Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill, during which more than 80 of its representatives held meetings with more than 100 House and Senate offices.

In those meetings, these representatives urged legislators to pass a resolution that would elevate India to a major non-NATO ally (MNNA) of the US. Attempts by the Indian government to be elevated to this special status have not been made public although pro-BJP Indian think tanks have been campaigning for such a move.

In addition, HAF’s representatives, as the organisation said on its website, met dozens of senators just “hours before” they began debating the National Defense Authorization Act. One of the amendments – to bolster US-India relations – was successfully passed.

“India’s designation as an MNNA, whenever that happens, will be a symbolically important push within American bureaucratic decision-making to prioritise India,” Sameer Patil wrote in July 2019. Patil is a former fellow of the International Security Studies Programme of Gateway House, a foreign policy think tank in Mumbai.

Soon after Modi’s re-election in 2019, HAF, in collaboration with the House India Caucus, conducted yet another Capitol Hill briefing attended by staffers from more than a dozen House and Senate offices and federal agencies. The House India Caucus is a group of congressional representatives with the shared objective of legislating on issues related to India.

Titled “India’s Democracy in Action”, the briefing provided an analysis of the recently concluded general election in India. The event featured remarks from a secretary of the Indian embassy.

HAF, in effect, had provided a platform for an Indian government official to meet with US congressional staff.

“Whenever you’re putting people in the same room as US officials and you’re trying to influence the officials in relation to a foreign policy with a foreign government, that is a huge FARA trigger,” Freeman of the Quincy Institute said.

Over the years, HAF has also conducted closed-door sessions for members of Congress. In one such session in 2022, it presented four Kashmiri activists who supported the repeal of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted semiautonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir before Modi’s government revoked it in 2019 – a change legal experts termed as unconstitutional.

This session came on the heels of 60 incidents of crackdowns on Kashmiri journalists recorded by Amnesty International and an internet blackout that lasted 18 months – one of the longest in history.

“Be rest assured that the government of India is doing everything it can to protect the rights of women,” one of the Kashmiri activists, Yana Mir, said during a session. Mir is married to Sajid Yousuf Shah, who heads the BJP’s media department in Kashmir. “Be rest assured that the government of India is doing everything it can to protect the rights of journalists.”

In response to a request for comment, McDermott told Al Jazeera in an email that the “description of Yana Mir as an activist is inaccurate. Yana Mir is primarily a journalist. Because she may have a different viewpoint on Kashmir and the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution than you or Al Jazeera very well may make her no less of a reporter. Your description of Mir as an activist here comes across as condescending and pejorative, and we believe it is intentional.”

Notably, HAF’s website describes Mir as being one of four activists, and Mir’s X bio shows she is the vice president of a social welfare organisation.

In December of the same year, Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state and a Hindu of Indian origin, introduced House Resolution 745, “urging the Republic of India to end the restrictions on communications and mass detentions in Jammu and Kashmir as swiftly as possible and preserve religious freedom for all residents”.

In response, HAF led a campaign against the resolution, calling it “anti-Hindu” and “anti-India”. Later, the group’s website said it had “successfully prevented” the resolution from being considered on three occasions.

“This bill contained language that was outrightly false and no longer relevant, given the government of India’s near-immediate lifting of communications restrictions, restoration of freedom of assembly, and lifting of precautionary curfews,” McDermott said.

But the internet blackout in Kashmir lasted for at least a year after Jayapal introduced the resolution.

In December 2019, protests against a new citizenship law rocked India. The law granted fast-track citizenship to religious minorities from India’s neighbouring countries. It explicitly mentioned which religions would be covered – Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. It made no mention of Muslims.

At the same time, the government’s preparations to implement the National Register of Citizens were under way – a mechanism through which “foreigners” would be identified, detained and ultimately deported. Coupled with the new citizenship law, which would legitimise the citizenship claims of people from most religions if they were declared foreigners, many feared that this exercise was a way to render Muslims stateless.

HAF issued a news release defending the Citizenship Amendment Act. It said the act was long overdue and necessary, providing respite for persecuted religious minorities who have sought refuge in India. Since then, it has continued to advocate for this law.

A complex entanglement

“We have never coordinated with the Indian government, through the Indian Embassy in DC or otherwise,” McDermott said in an email.

But in a November 2018 newsletter sent to its subscribers, HAF described itself as a “partner organization” of the Indian embassy in Washington, DC.

In the summer of 2019, HAF organised a programme that placed its interns in congressional offices. McDermott said HAF provided housing and a stipend to the interns, who worked on par with other congressional interns “without any oversight from HAF”.

But not all of them were placed on Capitol Hill. One of the interns was sent to work with the Indian embassy.

Collaborations such as these make it difficult to gauge the nature of HAF’s relationship with the Indian government, which is shrouded in secrecy. Despite acknowledging that communications between the Indian embassy and HAF exist, the embassy has denied three requests for the contents of these communications, invoking an exemption on the basis of “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State, or relations with a foreign state”.

Some of their communications with HAF, the embassy said, were “held by the Embassy in a fiduciary capacity”.

An excerpt from a Right to Information response from the Indian Embassy dated March 15, 2023

The embassy has also refused to disclose the number of times the parties corresponded with each other, which party initiated the communications and the extent of the correspondence, even refusing to clarify which part of the exemption was being invoked.

HAF also did not comment or elaborate upon its communications with the Indian embassy as requested by Al Jazeera.

In 2022, the Saraiya Family Foundation donated $50,000 to HAF, part of which was allocated for the development of infrastructure to “track anti-Hindu elements in the media”. The foundation’s president, Chandresh Saraiya, is the former president of the South Florida chapter of the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation, a member of the RSS family.

HAF is one of the organisations that have arisen in the West in recent years to campaign against what it calls Hinduphobia.

When it met the congressional staffer in 2022 regarding the $450m F-16 deal with Pakistan, it had also pushed back against House Resolution 1196, which condemned human rights violations against religious and cultural minorities in India.

“They wanted us to insert ‘Hindu’ into that bill as another oppressed group,” the staffer said. “I was like, ‘I’m a Hindu too, and I don’t think that’s credible.’ Would you want to say that ‘Black Lives Matter’ should include white lives, too?”

Angana Chatterji, a scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, pointed out that while people of Hindu descent may experience racism, Hinduphobia is not a contemporary movement or a rising concern like that of Islamophobia. “Hinduphobia acts to align diasporic Hindu majoritarian campaigns with those of Hindu nationalists in India,” she said.

In September 2021, HAF led a campaign against an academic conference called “Dismantling Global Hindutva” and used social media posts, mass emails, petitions and news releases to portray it as an attack on Hindus. “Hindutva,” meaning “Hinduness” is a Sanskrit term used for the Hindu supremacist ideology.

“It’s an academic exercise to critique, maybe even to deconstruct, but dismantling is very squarely a political activity,” HAF’s Shukla told The Washington Post.

The campaign and resulting backlash quickly snowballed with the scholars scheduled to speak receiving a barrage of online hate messages, even death and rape threats.

A 2022 study traced patterns in users of Twitter, now known as X, whose tweets and retweets featured specific hashtags, retweets, bots, and the frequency of their tweets and retweets over time and linked HAF to an online network of far-right Hindu groups and the BJP that targeted the conference. The study found Shukla to be the “largest individual amplifier of attacks” against the event.

While the conference did ultimately take place, many participants withdrew out of fear. HAF was credited for its efforts.

“Dismantling Global Hindutva was publicised to be a thunder, but ended up in a whimper, thanks to [the] efforts of @HinduAmerican [and] other Hindu groups,” Ram Madhav tweeted. Madhav is a member of the National Executive of the RSS.

He did not respond to a request for comment.

Before the conference, HAF conducted an online event. Shukla received an audience question, which she quickly summarised.

“Someone has asked if we have informed the government of India about this particular situation,” Shukla said, referring to the conference. “We have.”

The “situation” in question that HAF had informed the government of India about, McDermott clarified in the email, was that the conference “was being falsely promoted as having official backing or endorsement of the 60+ universities listed, when in fact it didn’t”.

The third race

In the run-up to this year’s general election, in which Modi sought a third term, HAF continued to echo the BJP’s talking points.

So far, it has successfully managed to evade scrutiny for its actions.

Screengrab from a webinar organised by the Hindu American Foundation in April 2024 titled, ‘Avoiding Legal Trouble in the Mega Election Year’

“At the very least, I think HAF’s actions would raise serious questions at the Department of Justice about whether HAF should be registered under FARA,” the Quincy Institute’s Freeman said.

The Department of Justice, however, prioritises cases in which money has changed hands or there is an actual contract between the principal and the agent. In the 20 letters of determination issued by the department’s FARA unit since 2017, there was either a contract in place, a financial relationship or the owner of the agent entity was a foreign national.

In the absence of communications between HAF and the Indian embassy, there is no evidence that this is the case with HAF.

“When it comes to foreign influence in the US, the Department of Justice is drinking from a firehose and has to play triage, focusing on the most egregious violations,” Freeman said. “To fix this, the DOJ needs more resources from Congress and the law needs to be modified to remove a number of FARA loopholes.”

Mukta Joshi is a lawyer trained in India and an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. Dhrumil Mehta and Sriharsha Devulapalli contributed reporting.

This article was supported by the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Journalism School.