Depending on how you look at it, the recent warm embrace by Christian nationalists in the United States, of Hindu nationalists in India is either very strange or, perhaps, inevitable.
The modern American nationalist is a curious specimen: A self-described patriot whose friends and models are all in foreign countries and whose enemies are all at home. He loves America, except for: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, the Ivy League, the scientific establishment, the medical and legal professions, the urban centres where most of the people and the GDP are, New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the West Coast, and the cities in Texas and Florida with more than one million people.
They have even turned against the military command and the upper echelons of law enforcement, which were once sacrosanct to the right. (I might have phrased that last sentence slightly differently for an American audience, but I am sure readers of this newspaper have heard quite enough about sacred cows.) Other than that, America is the bee’s knees in the estimate of the American nationalist, whose idols are Viktor Orban, Geert Wilders, and, now, strange as it may seem, Narendra Modi.
Advertised as the leading voice of Indian conservatism to an American audience somewhat surprised to learn that there is Indian conservatism, Swapan Dasgupta, lately of the Rajya Sabha and often of newspaper pages, recently addressed NatCon 4, the fourth annual convention of so-called national conservatives.
This is a populist-rightist faction at odds with what remains of traditional American conservatism and the old guard of the Republican Party, aligned with Donald Trump — current presidential frontrunner and, this being America, recent shooting victim.
It is fascinated by nationalist movements abroad, from AfD and Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia to the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid, with a special interest in religiously oriented parties such as the BJP. The fact is that American nationalism is, perversely, an internationalist tendency — Dasgupta wryly described the convention organisers as the “Conintern.”
Speaking extemporaneously, Dasgupta made a familiar case for Hindu nationalism, characterising it as a movement based on religiously encoded civilisational values rather than an attempt to impose some sort of Iran-style theological regime on India. He pointedly informed the audience that US-funded Christian evangelism in India is a considerable barrier to long-term cooperation between the Indian Right and the American Right — and then, of course, patiently fielded questions from earnest young Christians who wanted to ask about “the caste system” and sati.
At another panel, anti-immigration activists raised the alarm about Hindu-Sikh riots in the Canadian city of Brampton: “Import the Third World, you get the Third World,” one sneered. Many American nationalists would prefer that Indian nationalists were kept in India, and many of them regard the large, prosperous Indian diaspora in the United States, praised as exemplary by Dasgupta, as an embarrassment, a surrender of jobs, prestige, status, and political power to unwanted immigrants — and, the occasional Nikki Haley or Bobby Jindal notwithstanding, to non-Christian immigrants at that.
“India often doesn’t get the United States,” Dasgupta said, “and Americans don’t get India at all.” About that, he is correct. The so-called national conservatives do not know very much about Modi or his BJP, but they know enough to satisfy them: They know that he keeps winning elections, while those carrying their banner —from the segregationist George Wallace in the 1960s to the billionaire demagogue Ross Perot in the 1990s to Donald Trump in 2020 — generally fail at the polls. They know that he is despised by the same secular-minded liberals and Davos men who despise them. They know that he makes his enemies feel fearful and humiliated, as they desire to make their enemies feel fearful and humiliated.
And they know, though they would never admit as much, that whatever the court theologians may have to say about it, Narendra Modi and Donald Trump are devotees of the same god: Power.
India has often miscalculated in its relationship with the United States, but Indians have never had the luxury of being able to romanticise the United States. Americans, committed to our twin national principles that all men are created equal and that ignorance is bliss, have rarely done anything except romanticise India. Being too complex to comprehend, India provides an expansive blank screen upon which to project American yearnings: Americans know very little of Mohandas Gandhi the political leader, but Mahatma Gandhi the movie character remains very popular, even among those who have never seen the film.
New Dealers who hoped for a more Fabian postwar order saw a kindred spirit in Jawaharlal Nehru, who disdained them. One suspects that if Modi had the choice between being embraced by Christian nationalists in Washington or being rid of Christian evangelists in Uttar Pradesh, he would not hesitate to prefer the latter.
I suspect that the NatCon-BJP love affair will end in heartbreak because there is no such thing as religious nationalism: There is Hindu nationalism and there is Christian nationalism, and these are not only distinct tendencies but also — given the size of India’s Christian minority and the prominence of America’s Hindu minority — ultimately incompatible.
It is unlikely that the sort of Christian nationalism being contemplated by Dasgupta’s new friends in the United States will enjoy the kind of success Modi’s Hindu nationalism has achieved in India, but any such success would necessarily involve the general humiliation of American Hindus and other religious minorities, whatever rhetorical camouflage might be deployed to deemphasise the fact. After all, American political factions do not compete among themselves for mere material resources — the country is far too rich for that: They compete for status. The same already is true, or soon must be true, of India at the commanding heights.
And that is the limiting factor — and the danger — of identity politics. A rising economic tide may lift all boats, but status is, by definition, a zero-sum game. As the unhappy events of September 1, 1939 — September 2, 1945 attest, successful nationalists invariably soon turn their attention to the nationalists next door.
Williamson is national correspondent for The Dispatch and a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
