Portside

When I pulled into the parking lot of the Hanuman Temple of Greater Chicago on a Saturday evening this past April, the first thing I noticed was a man standing in front of a parked car adorned with the flag of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the far-right Hindu nationalist party that has held power in India since 2014. The temple, which is located in the northwest Chicago suburb of Glenview, Illinois, was at standing-room-only capacity that evening, the space packed with hundreds of devotees. The audience, which included grandparents, adults with children in their laps, and bored teenagers scrolling on their phones, rose from their seats to applaud and chant the nationalist slogan “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”—“Victory to Mother India”—as the guest of honor arrived.

Glenview is an average middle class suburb that overwhelmingly voted against Donald Trump in the 2024 election, which is why it was alarming to see a crowd of hundreds cheer enthusiastically for Sadhvi Rithambara, a far-right Hindu nationalist whose rhetoric over the past four decades has incited violence against ethnic and religious minorities in India. In the 1990s, Rithambara traveled the country delivering fiery speeches that ultimately incited violent mobs to demolish the Babri Masjid, a Mughal-era mosque in the state of Uttar Pradesh. In January 2024, just months prior to India’s national election, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP celebrated the grand opening of a new Hindu temple where the mosque once stood. A year later, Rithambara is touring the United States to share the tale.

The BJP subscribes to Hindu nationalism, an ideology which aims to transform the secular government into an explicitly Hindu one, leading to the subjugation of Muslims, Christians, lower-caste Dalits, and other minority groups in India. This ideology has a growing presence in the United States, where Indian diaspora groups are funding Hindu nationalist projects in India and increasingly influencing U.S. political leaders. The Hindu Republican Coalition, founded by an Indian-American businessman in suburban Chicago who donated nearly $1 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign, even has Steve Bannon as a co-chair.

Rithambara’s tour coincided with a time of rising ethnonationalism across the world, as well as growing alliances between the far-right movements of India and the United States. In attendance for her April talk in Glenview were members of the Overseas Friends of the BJP, the Chicago Indian consulate, and Bharat Barai, a major supporter of Modi who has also stumped for President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance was preparing for his first official trip to India, during which he hoped to strengthen economic and geopolitical ties between the two countries. 

Despite dozens of organizations and individuals signing on to a letter demanding the temple cancel the talk, Rithambara’s event went on as planned. Her talk didn’t quite resemble a political stump speech, so much as a yarn of her campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid. With pride, she described her daring escapes from police and whipping up crowds of supporters while riding trains and walking streets, mythologizing herself like a hero in a folktale. 

“I once climbed to the rooftop of a college, and as soon as I shouted, “Jai Shri Ram,” something remarkable happened,” Rithambara told the audience. “Millions of people emerged from their homes, responding with the same powerful chant: “Jai Shri Ram, Jai Shri Ram, Jai Shri Ram.” At that moment, I realized that when you are truly determined, nothing can stop you from succeeding.”

Her performance was accompanied by background music, with a live piano and tabla joining in as her voice crescendoed to a finish met by thunderous applause from the crowd. 

Sitting there, I felt the reverberations of hate in my body—the performance was moving me, and I was horrified by it. It no longer felt like a mystery to me that her speeches could incite a mob of Hindus to demolish a mosque as they did in 1992. As extreme as it may sound, the scene felt eerily similar to that of a Nazi speech, or of white Americans cheering on lynchings. 

I had many questions for the people around me. I wanted to know if they recognized the parallels Ritambhara’s worldview and that of Donald Trump, and whether they, like me, found the presence of BJP imagery and members of the Indian Consulate at what was supposedly a spiritual event to be significant. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I didn’t want to identify myself as a reporter in that room. Perhaps it was an abdication of my journalistic responsibility not to do so. But the memory of a crowd attacking protestors of the 2018 World Hindu Congress in Chicago was still lingering in my mind.

But while ethnonationalists have grown their coalitions across borders, those organizing for inclusivity and peace have begun to do the same. Before arriving at the Hanuman Temple, I had spent the day at a church in the western suburb of Bellwood, where hundreds of people from across the Midwest had gathered for Dalit History Month. The event was a celebration of heritage for those descended from the lowest stratum of the Indian caste system, as well as the political vision of B.R. Ambedkar, an independence movement-era political leader of Dalit heritage who drafted the Constitution of India in 1949.

Ambedkar is revered by many lower-caste Hindus and other marginalized communities to this day for advocating for a casteless society, and his birthday is celebrated every year across India and its diaspora. The grim irony of Rithambara’s visit to Chicago coinciding with this event was not lost on its organizers: A few days before her talk, an interfaith activist coalition called on the Hanuman Temple to cancel the event, claiming that a place of worship shouldn’t be platforming violent ethnonationalism. “As someone who has helped care for a Hanuman temple for over twenty-five years,” Punya Upadhyaya, a co-founder of Hindus For Human Rights, said in a press release, “giving a platform to someone so antithetical to Hanumanji’s blessings”—referring to the Hindu god Hanuman’s teachings of selflessness—“is a shameful act.” 

“We should be celebrating Dalit History Month,” said Pushkar Sharma, executive director of South Asian Coalition to Renew Democracy (SACRED) at a press conference ahead of the back-to-back events. “Unfortunately, we’re here to call for a Hindu temple in Glenview not to platform hate speech . . . that calls for mass violence against marginalized groups.”

The Dalit History Month event, which was organized by the Ambedkar Association of North America, and had a remarkably different tone than that of the Hanuman Temple event later that day. Chandrashekar Azad, an Indian politician and lawyer of Dalit background who attended the event, noted the parallels between the struggles of Dalits in India and those of Black Americans—two communities pushed to the margins of society by state sanctioned disinvestment.

“Struggle brings change—and even in America, the African American community has witnessed that transformation,” Azad said in remarks to the audience. “If there’s any place where dream world is being realized, it is here—where every human is equal to another.”

After being surrounded by people celebrating a vision of equality and justice earlier in the day, it was difficult to sit at the Hanuman temple and listen to an audience applaud what amounted to hate speech just a few hours later. As I sat there, I thought about the constant tug of war between those who want an ethnonationalist state and those who want peace between people of all backgrounds. Because as Rithambara tours the United States, so does Azad. In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, journalist Isabel Wilkerson characterizes caste as “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value” that legitimizes and reinforces social hierarchy. But so long as those at the bottom continue to exist, there will always be people engaged in the struggle for equality and self-determination. 

“Ambedkar said wherever Indians migrate, they import their caste,” said Obed Manwatkar, one of the organizers of the Dalit History Month celebration. “That’s why it’s necessary to teach the values of Ambedkar to the next generation to build a casteless society everywhere.”

Ankur Singh is a Cicero-based, Chicago-adjacent freelance journalist and organizer.

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