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This interview with Savera Coalition partners Safa Ahmed and Pranay Somayajula dives into an expose on the influential Hindu American Foundation, or HAF, as a Hindu supremacist institution masquerading as a civil rights organization. We discuss HAF’s claimed reputation as a leader in civil rights and its true agenda to perpetuate caste discrimination and support for the authoritarian Indian Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP regime in the United States.
We discuss HAF’s roots in the Hindu supremacist or Hindutva movement and its recent, more explicit shift towards the broader U.S. multiracial far right. We conclude with a discussion of the Savera Coalition’s goals and strategy in bringing it down.
Safa Ahmed is the Associate Director of Media & Communications for the Indian American Muslim Council. She has written on Hindu supremacy and human rights in India for Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, Jacobin, Progressive Magazine, and several others.
Pranay Somayajula is an Indian-American writer and organizer, based in Washington, DC. He currently serves as Organizing and Advocacy Director for Hindus for Human Rights, an organization that was founded in 2019 to provide a Hindu voice of resistance to caste, Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), and all forms of bigotry and oppression. His writing has been featured in Jacobin, The Nation, and The Drift, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock. He is also the host of Return to Bandung, a podcast that explores questions of imperialism, resistance, and internationalist solidarity throughout history and into the present day.
Episode resources
- “HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry As Minority Rights,” Political Research Associates and Savera, 2024.
- “Hindu Supremacy and the Multiracial U.S. Far Right,” Savera, The Public Eye, 2024.
- “A Global Trail of Violence: India’s Hindu Supremacist Movement and Its Role in the Transnational Far Right,” Savera, The Public Eye, 2024. Edited excerpts from Savera’s report, “The Global VHP’s Trail of Violence.”