There Are Many Reasons to Oppose Tulsi Gabbard’s Trump Job. This Is a Pretty Big One.

Tulsi Gabbard’s pro-Russia political bent has been the cause of much alarm in the intelligence community ever since President-elect Donald Trump chose her to be his director of national intelligence. Because, sure, she lacks any relevant experience whatsoever for the job, a gargantuan responsibility that requires oversight of 18 intelligence agencies. But she also takes positions that make her seem, well, compromised by foreign governments.

For example, she has a tendency to espouse foreign-policy talking points that very much align with Kremlin propaganda, often with the help of her pal Tucker Carlson. She has blamed the U.S. for supposedly provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and posited that the Biden administration is developing “biolabs” in the invaded territory. She is weirdly into Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, having once held a private meeting with the strongman and refusing to ever admit that he did, in fact, repeatedly attack and kill his own people with assistance from the Russians. (Rossiya-1, a Russian state television channel, recently called her a “comrade.”) She even spreads conspiracy theories about herself, claiming earlier this year that she’d been placed on a Transportation Security Administration “terror watchlist” for criticizing Kamala Harris.

Those examples are sufficient for understanding why intelligence officials, Democrats, and even some conservatives are panicked about her nomination. But there is another incredibly compromising geopolitical stance, more buried in Gabbard’s past, that’s been overlooked in the many arguments to keep her far, far away from the top levers of American power: her deep ties to Hindu nationalism.

Since her entry into national politics, Tulsi Gabbard has cultivated and benefited from ties to United States chapters of the Sangh Parivar, an India-based network of Hindu nationalist advocacy organizations that attempt to influence policy in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the U.S.

This ideological web is centered around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an almost century-old collective inspired by European-style fascism. The collective is devoted to the idea of establishing India as a Hindu-supremacist ethnostate, instead of as secular nation home to people of all faiths; India’s autocratic prime minister, Narendra Modi, and many of his partisan acolytes got their start as RSS volunteers.

In furtherance of their goals, RSS affiliates have not only stoked violence against Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities in India, but have used their global outposts to persuade foreign governments to ignore India’s human rights abuses—and to dismiss any critiques of Hindu nationalism as “Hinduphobic” bigotry. But the attempts to silence detractors is not limited to India’s borders: The Indian government has been credibly accused of orchestrating plots to kill citizens of other countries who are opposed to Modi’s government.

Gabbard is not of South Asian descent herself—her parents are from American Samoa—but she’d been steeped in certain tenets of Hinduism while growing up in Hawai’i, because her family members were enthusiastic devotees of a local spiritual sect, the Science of Identity Foundation, that splintered off from the Hare Krishna movement in the 1970s and got involved in Honolulu politics. (Gabbard’s first name is the Sanskrit word for a sacred plant considered to be the terrestrial incarnation of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi.)

The Science of Identity Foundation has a cultlike and bigoted history; Gabbard had disavowed its homophobic stances, which she’d once championed as a Hawai’i state representative, by the time she began running for Congress. But beyond the community she grew up in, Gabbard has a long history of appearing at events for, and courting support from, Hindu-fundamentalist groups. After her general-election victory in 2012, which made her the first Hindu American member of Congress, Gabbard continued to show up at fundraisers hosted by Sangh Parivar–affiliated organizations and by the Hindu American Foundation, a nonprofit that has explicitly lobbied American politicians on behalf of Modi’s party’s interests.

Gabbard heeded these groups’ foreign-policy asks in Congress even before she’d ever made a trip to India, or met Modi for herself: She opposed a 2013 bipartisan congressional resolution that recognized Hindu nationalism’s violent impacts on India’s religious minorities and spoke out against a congressional hearing about the persecution of Indian Muslims. At her 2015 wedding, a spokesman for Modi’s party delivered “personal greetings” and gifts from the prime minister. (By then, the Indian newspaper the Telegraph had already deemed Gabbard “the RSS fraternity’s newest mascot.”) Throughout her congressional tenure, Gabbard continued parroting Hindu nationalist talking points about the threat of “Islamic extremists” and the “complex history” behind the Modi government’s brutal military crackdown on the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir. When she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, these concerns were resurfaced, and Gabbard reacted by accusing her critics of “Hinduphobia,” the common (and unfounded) defensive crouch from Hindu nationalists.

Gabbard’s political history with Hindu nationalism could make her just as vulnerable to manipulation by the Indian government as her Russian sympathies could make her vulnerable to manipulation by Putin. Late last year, the Justice Department revealed that it had arrested and charged an Indian citizen for attempting to carry out murder-for-hire plots against at least two American Sikhs; a new filing in the case, unsealed just last month, directly accuses an Indian government official of giving the orders for those plots to advance.

The monitoring of such plots necessitates international coordination. The U.S. investigated these efforts on its own soil after getting intelligence from Canada, whose prime minister, Justin Trudeau, alleged last year that a Sikh Canadian was successfully assassinated by a lackey of the Indian government. How can Canada—or any other country where India’s wannabe assassins hatch their schemes—trust such information with the likes of Gabbard? What if there are other compromising details about her that the Indian government is hip to—and can exploit to its advantage? Imagine that this conundrum becomes relevant to any country or dictator willing to help Modi manipulate the American government. Where does that leave the U.S. in the grand scheme of things?