A US-based Hindu advocacy group has called for the dismissal of President Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro for “his deeply inappropriate and Hinduphobic reference to caste and his portrayal of India’s Prime Minister in a sacred act of Hindu prayer”.
The group said that such comments from someone high up in the administration empower the worst elements and show up in classrooms, hiring panels and temple vandalism.
American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD), a watchdog group operating under the larger organisation HinduPACT (Hindu Policy Research and Advocacy Collective), protested Navarro’s remarks in an interview with Fox News earlier this week in which he said: “I would simply say this to Indian people to understand what is going on here. You have got Brahmins profiteering at the expense of the Indian people, and we want that to stop.”
Navarro, Trump’s senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing, has been ranting against India’s decision to continue buying Russian oil and thereby funding its war on Ukraine, even calling it “Modi’s war”.
Last week, Navarro made a series of posts criticising India’s refusal to stop buying Russian oil and used a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi meditating in saffron robes in a post, upsetting many believers who saw it as a slight to Hinduism.
“Navarro’s rhetoric constitutes not only a cultural violation but also a reckless provocation that endangers the dignity of over a billion Hindus and threatens the foundational relationship between the two largest democracies,” AHAD said.
Stating that this is beneath the diplomatic dignity of the US, Ajay Shah of HinduPACT, said: “This is not foreign policy. It’s weaponised Hinduphobia.”