The Uneasy Alliance: Why America’s Embrace of “Hindu India” Keeps Fraying
By Jeevan Zutshi
For four decades, Indians and Indian-Americans worked hard to build a durable Indo-US partnership. From the post Cold War thaw through the civil nuclear deal, the Quad, defence cooperation, and expanding trade and diaspora ties, the relationship was repeatedly described as the defining partnership of the 21st century. Today that investment feels shaky. Trade disputes, sharp rhetoric, renewed attention to Pakistan, and persistent criticism of India’s religious landscape have left many wondering whether Washington is simply uncomfortable with a confident, Hindu majority India.
History offers an uncomfortable pattern. During the Cold War the United States treated Pakistan as a frontline ally against communism while viewing non-aligned India with suspicion. Military aid flowed to Islamabad. In 1971, as Pakistan’s army conducted a brutal crackdown in East Pakistan, Washington tilted toward Yahya Khan’s regime and even dispatched the USS Enterprise toward the Bay of Bengal. India, which sheltered millions of refugees and ultimately helped create Bangladesh, was cast as the aggressor. The Soviet Union, not America, stood with Delhi. That episode remains fixed in Indian strategic memory: the United States has repeatedly found reasons to support India’s adversaries when larger calculations demanded it.
The post Cold War years brought real progress. Successive American administrations recognised India’s scale, economic potential, and shared concerns about China. Yet older reflexes never fully vanished. Pakistan continued to receive strategic attention, and India’s independent foreign policy, especially its defence and energy ties with Russia remained a source of irritation.
Under the current Trump administration the friction has become more visible. High tariffs on Indian goods, repeated claims of credit for deescalating India Pakistan tensions that New Delhi insists were bilateral, pressure over Russian oil purchases, and restrictions affecting H-1B visas have strained the relationship. Warm signals toward Pakistan’s military leadership have revived memories of the old tilt. These are largely transactional disputes, yet they land on a community that already feels scrutinised.
The religious dimension adds another layer. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has for years recommended designating India a “Country of Particular Concern” and has called for sanctions against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Its critique focuses on anti-conversion laws, alleged majoritarian policies, and violence against minorities. Indian governments have rejected these reports as selective and poorly contextualised, noting that the same bodies pay less attention to demographic anxieties, historical patterns of conversion, or reciprocal communal violence. When American institutions frame Hindu nationalism almost exclusively as a threat while applying softer standards elsewhere, it feeds a perception that a self assured Hindu civilisation is uniquely unwelcome.
Domestically, Indian Americans mostly Hindu, highly educated, and economically successful have become more visible. That visibility has produced both representation in government and a backlash. Online hostility, temple vandalism, and occasional rhetorical attacks from the fringes of American politics have increased even as overall hate-crime numbers fluctuate. Some claims of “Hinduphobia” are inflated; some reflect genuine unease with a non Abrahamic tradition that does not fit neat American categories of religious liberty. The result is a community that feels asked to apologise for its civilisational confidence while delivering the talent and capital that strengthen the United States.
None of this means the strategic logic has disappeared. China remains the central long-term challenge for both countries. Defence cooperation continues and technology partnerships expand. Yet trust is thinner than it was a few years ago. A partnership built only on shared threat perception and elite networks is brittle. It requires mutual respect for the domestic political realities each democracy faces.
America’s discomfort with “Hindu India” is not reducible to one commission or one administration. It is a mixture of historical habit, genuine differences over secularism and religious freedom, commercial competition, and the difficulty of accommodating a civilisational state that refuses to be a junior partner. Indians who spent decades cultivating this relationship are entitled to feel disappointed. The remedy is not grievance but clarity: pursue interests ruthlessly, reject selective lectures, deepen economic and people to people links that are harder to reverse, and remember that great power friendships are always conditional. The alternative allowing old patterns of external interference and internal polarization to define the relationship would be a strategic failure neither country can afford.
(Zutshi, a Kashmiri Pandit, is based in California’s Bay Area)
