 "Donald Trump was helped by the Republican Hindu Coalition; here's how")
Donald Trump’s surprise victory on Wednesday in the bitterly contested US presidential election might have shocked people the world over, but there were people, aside from those who voted for him, who have found a cause for joy. In particular, Indian right-wing group, the Hindu Sena, celebrated in Delhi as projections trickling in showed Trump leading Clinton in the race to the Oval Office.
Pictures of the celebration showed posters proclaiming 'India loves Trump'. This was not the first time the group expressed its preference for Trump’s victory, in an election which the group itself had no real stake in.
The American Hindu community also had a reason to cheer as Trump gave his acceptance speech after scripting a historic upset.
Less than a month before the election results, over 5,000 Indian-Americans had gathered in Edison, New Jersey, to cheer for Trump.
At the charity event organised by the Republican Hindu Coalition that was attended by the then Republican presidential nominee, Indian celebrities like Prabhu Deva, Shriya Saran and Sophie Chaudhry had enthralled the audience.
Indian-Americans looking to amplify their voice in the US politics launched the Republican Hindu Coalition in November last year, to bring the entire community on one platform and advance policies important to the community’s members.
“Having watched the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) work to achieve its goals, and after conferring with many prominent Hindu Americans, I was inspired to found the RHC (Republican Hindu Coalition),” the group’s founder Shalabh ‘Shalli’ Kumar, the chairman and CEO of the AVG Group of Companies, had said in his inaugural address.
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An article from the wire.in explained the Trump-Hindu convergence as a result of the coming together of India’s right wing ideologies and the post-9/11 narrative that Islam was a danger to the Western civilisation. The report revealed that Shalabh Kumar had personally donated close to a million dollars to the Trump campaign.
Days before the election result, on November 1, the coalition released a political ad titled ‘Crooked Hillary – Vote for Republican, Vote for US-India Relation’. The ad, the report said, painted Hillary Clinton as a pro-Pakistan, pro-Islamic terrorism, anti-Narendra Modi candidate.
Trump, the article argued, had effectively played to the fears of some American Indians, predominantly Hindu, regarding terrorism, immigration and Pakistan-US relations.
In September, Trump had good things to say about the community – a rarity, given his overt hostility against non-white communities in his campaigns.
"The Hindu community has made fantastic contributions to the world civilisation and to American culture and we look forward to celebrating our shared values of free enterprise, hard work, family values, and a strong American foreign policy,” Trump had said in a statement.
While some Hindus in America might have provided real support to Trump, the Hindu Sena in India was not to be outdone.
In June this year, after holding a havan to pray for Trump’s victory, the group celebrated the real estate mogul’s birthday at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.
A colourful open invite sporting the face of Trump surrounded by balloons, said "join us and let's celebrate the birthday of the saviour of humanity, the Republican presidential nominee of the United States of America”.
The group’s leader, Vishnu Gupta, had then said: "We are celebrating his birthday because he is our hero. We wish that he lives for thousands of years and removes the Islamic terrorism from this entire world." And, in what could have only been a shot in the dark, Gupta had predicted that Trump would surely win, come November.
However, whereas Gupta and his cohorts could at best provide vocal support from across the seas, RHC made material contributions. According to an Economic Times report, the RHC contributed a total of 1.5 million dollars to the Trump campaign and held 50 meetings in the battleground states of Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.
Despite such vocal support from members of the community, and Trump's victory, polls taken before the election showed that only seven per cent of the Indian-American population in the US planned on voting for Trump.