Bedfellows Dept.: Hindus for Trump

Rozina Ali

Donald Trump’s best Indian-American friend is a sixty-sevenyear-old billionaire from Chicago named Shalabh Kumar. One recent Saturday, the candidate accepted Kumar’s invitation to speak at a fund-raiser in New Jersey, organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition, a group that Kumar founded last year, with the blessing of Newt Gingrich. In 2013, Kumar took American congressmen to India to meet Narendra Modi (now the Prime Minister), a Hindu nationalist, who, at the time, had been banned from the United States, owing to allegations that he’d played a role in the killing of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat. Kumar donated almost a million dollars to Trump’s campaign, after the two bonded over Modi’s leadership and the threat of Islamic terrorism. “A lot of people think that Trump is somewhat of a racist,” Kumar…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 7, 2016

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