The Imitation Game: With Zionist Help, Hindutva Ideology Rises in America
On or around March 14, 2026, Laura Loomer, a Jewish Zionist journalist whose screeds against Islam, tabloid approach to reporting, Air Force One conversations with President Donald Trump, and purge lists for the White House’s National Security Council have fairly earned her the label “notorious,” sat down for a public interview at the India Today summit in New Delhi and apologized for past “hurtful tweets,” for example referring to Indians as “third world invaders.” She went on to say that “I am an advocate for Hindu people and continue to speak against brutalities on them.” This was a seemingly staged moment, apparently scripted by a figure who is a relative unknown, but whose notoriousness should by all rights dwarf Loomer’s own.
Rajiv Malhotra, the figure in question, appears to be a modest man. A 75-year old Indian-American with a receding grey hairline and the hint of a smile who dresses in dark clerical-adjacent shirts and wears thick black glasses, Malhotra describes himself as a “researcher, author, speaker” on “current affairs, inter-civilization,” and “science.” Elsewhere, though, Malhotra is known as one of America’s and India’s preeminent ideologues of Hindu supremacy, Hindutva, which was founded in the early 1920s in India and, like Zionism is for Jews, is now the dominant version of Hinduism in America, with half of Hindus supporting it and the most powerful members of the community firmly in support.
In the lead-up to Loomer’s apology, Mahotra, in his own words, “developed a back channel” to Loomer “with the help of certain unnamed MAGA leaders”; ascertained that she had “changed” her views of India “in the past 60 days”; and also, according to him, “worked hard to make that happen” as part of “the art of building strategic alliances.” Not unpredictably, Malhotra responded generously to Loomer’s comments at the India Today conclave, though with telling venom directed elsewhere: “So glad she visited India & spoke. Ignore the IDIOTS who don’t understand the complexities, black/white binaries, blind idolatry/hatred, and over emotional. I can vouch that @LauraLoomer changed over past 2 months. Should be nurtured as solid Hindu supporter inside the MAGA camp.”
Considering that, a little more than a year ago, Loomer was amplifying her own name among Republicans for her stance against H-1B visas issued disproportionally to high-skilled Hindus by the United States government, there is more to this shift than meets the eye. Namely, the increasing ties between Israel and India, and between Hindu ideologues and Zionists in America, brokered by figures like Malhotra.
As I reported for the Libertarian Institute in September, Malhotra had already authored an article to this effect in Sapir, the New York-based Jewish Zionist journal which regularly features major financial and intellectual players in the Zionist movement. Malhotra’s piece, entitled “A Hindu Jewish Partnership” and citing the Jewish Zionist hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, argued that, like Jews, Hindu Americans are “‘model minorities’ who have made much of the American dream” and generated resentment as a result.
What this “synergy” between Hindutvas like Malhotra and Zionists like Ackman represents is the rise to explicit prominence in America of Zionism’s stealth imitator, Hindutva. This rise is facilitated by the same means that were used to facilitate Zionism: vast sums of money into philanthropy, nonprofits and politics from the finance and tech sectors to support the interests of a foreign nation. It represents arguably the most significant infiltration of a foreign ideology in our country since Zionism; and, like Zionism, it appears to be assuming, by stealth, a position of seemingly unchallengeable authority.
A promising entry point for understanding this infiltration can be found three days after Loomer’s and Malhotra’s public rendezvous. March 17 was the date of the Illinois Democratic primary for an open U.S. Senate seat, and included Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton and U.S. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, who is one of four Hindu members of Congress and who outraised Stratton by a 10-to-1 margin. Like the Loomer-Malhotra alliance, the outcome of the race does not quite add up to its underlying reality: Stratton won but Krishnamoorthi, like Malhotra, is the more influential player. He is a standard-bearer of a politics of influence that is lean and mean and powerful, predicated on “his ability to tap into a largely affluent Indian American community, whose growth and increasing political engagement — and giving — has paralleled his own rise.” This ability, according to a report in The Chicago Tribune, is based on Krishnamoorthi’s proximity to “industries in which Indian Americans are well represented” including “the health care sector” and “the world of tech and tech investment.” And it is based on Krishnamoorthi’s proximity to “segments of the Indian American community with ties to India’s…Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” who leads “a transnational…political ideology grounded in Hindu supremacy.”
Prominent on Krishnamoorthi’s list of donors or supporters in 2026 was Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, and Bharat Barai, a “[Narendra] Modi friend who has helped arrange large events with the prime minister, including a 2019 rally in Houston, where Krishnamoorthi attended and Modi appeared onstage with Trump.” Others included Ramesh Kapur and Ajay Bhutoria, arguably America’s most influential Democratic operators linked to Hindutva and Indian causes. And there was Mihir Meghani, the founder of the Hindu American Foundation. Finally, not surprisingly, there was Rajiv Malhotra, Hindutva’s resident intellectual and an “amplifier” of Krishnamoorthi’s since the latter condemned India’s neighbor, Muslim-majority Bangladesh, for what Krishnamoorthi saw as its persecutions against Hindus.
The Hindu supremacist vision that these backers of Krishnamoorthi’s share has, at its heart, an antipathy to Islam. But it also has at its heart an antipathy to what Islam in its vision represents: savagery, populism, and opposition to “modernization” and “progress,” which is to say opposition to technological dominance of some groups over others. According to Audrey Truschke, the most comprehensive scholar of Hindutva in America, Hindutvas’ commitment to modernization and technology is based on their “embarrassment [derived] from the British colonial period [in India] when [British] scholarship demeaned much about premodern India.”
It is also, according to Truschke and others, an elite phenomenon, adopted by Hindus of the upper caste of the social hierarchy, the majority of high-skilled Indian immigrants to America. These were people from the class which served the British Empire and got close enough to watch its technological primacy, then chose to imitate empire rather than, like Gandhi or other founders of India, resist it. Just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is, since October 7, 2023, a figure around whom both liberal and conservative American Zionists increasingly rally support, Narendra Modi is Hindutvas’ standard bearer. He is their unapologetic beacon for what they see as an appropriate level of Hindu assertiveness to correct for what in their view are past wrongs that have submerged Hindu potential.
Audrey Truschke’s notions that “anxiety and shame” and a corresponding drive to western imperial imitation explain Hindutva ideology might be dismissible as armchair psychologizing, except that they show up repeatedly in the rhetoric of Hindutva operators. They speak of their scientific prowess in self-defensive terms—“we are a race which is not inferior to any other race in the world”—and also speak, ahistorically, of “1,000 years of slavery” under Muslim rule. They accuse those Hindus who choose not to subscribe to a Hindutva read of Hindu tradition, and who argue for other less hierarchical strands of Hinduism in public discourse, as attempting, in Rajiv Malhotra’s words, to “hide their Hindu shame behind complicity or outright support of Hinduphobia.” Hindutvas’ stand is in many ways imitative of the stand of Jewish Zionists in America. They champion the “secrets of Jewish genius” based on Jews’ success in empire; and they argue that that those Jews who don’t believe that “the Jewish nation is owed the unconditional respect of its fellow nations” are guilty of “join[ing] the blame-shifting ranks, castigating the Jewish state for engaging in self-defense rather than apology.”
Over the past forty years, these Zionists have successfully turned the focus of Jewish life in America to “self-defense” by consolidating power in America’s institutions. Indeed, as analysts ranging from the academic Lila Corwin Berman to Adam B. Lerner of Politico have noted”
“…an important factor in consolidating Jewish-Americans political power since the mid-20th century has been the community’s targeted interest in Israel…Together powerful Jewish-American organizations…which receive much of their funding from wealthy Jewish-American donors, have transformed an otherwise small population’s activism on Israel into a potent force on a wider set of issues.”
These wealthy Jewish-American donors accomplished this feat by taking advantage of loosened government rules toward financial philanthropy to reconstruct Jewish identity along Zionist lines, via such nonprofits as the Wexner Heritage Foundation and Michael Steinhardt’s and Charles Bronfman’s Taglit Birthright Israel. From this base, they have used philanthropic and advocacy organizations (Steinhardt’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Middle East Forum, Paul Singer’s the Manhattan Institute) to push Washington to invest blood and treasure in fights against Muslim nations which opposed Israel, and to back politicians who backed those investments.
A similar but swifter and more streamlined path has played out for Hindutva operators in America. Namely, a consolidation of wealth-based philanthropy and politics to define the Hindu American community along Hindutva lines and turn Washington policy against Muslim nations to the benefit of India. (This also applies to some extent to the Indian-American community, since, as I will lay out in a coming report, some supporters of Hindutva are Indian but not Hindu.) Like Zionism’s rise in the 1980s and 1990s, this operation started in the 2000s and 2010s at the margins, with apparently benign concerns like Hindu representation in American society and apparently distant ones like Indian policy towards Muslims or American policy in Pakistan. But, enabled by Zionist-like operators with access to the hinges of power, these concerns have come to shape both foreign policy and, increasingly, American life.
To read the rest of this article, go to The Libertarian Institute.