This is the first of a three-part series on the functioning of Hindutva organisations active in the United States.
In the spring and summer of 2023, Senate Bill 403, which sought to add caste as a form of ancestry protected from discrimination, was making its progress through California’s legislative process. It was watched closely by the state’s 2 million people of South Asian descent, with Ambedkarite activists backing the effort and Hindutva groups opposing it. On 11 September 2023, SB 403 was sent to the governor’s office after receiving near-unanimous support in both the state assembly and senate.
A few days later, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, went to Chicago to attend a meeting with donors to a political-action committee working on President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. There, he met Ramesh Kapur, who runs a Massachusetts-based company manufacturing medical equipment as well as the US–India Security Council, a lobbying organisation. Kapur has been involved in fundraising for candidates of the Democratic Party since 1983, when he helped elect the future presidential nominee Michael Dukakis to a second term as Massachusetts governor. “If you want to be our next president, veto the bill,” Kapur told Newsom, according to Harper’s Magazine. Newsom did so on 7 October, sending Kapur an email hours before he issued the veto.
Since then, Kapur has been active in fundraising for Newsom, whom he described to Harper’s as “the champion of the Hindu cause.” When Biden announced that he would not seek re-election, in July, Newsom was briefly considered a potential candidate, but the nomination was secured by another California politician, Vice-President Kamala Harris, whom Kapur has supported since her first run for the US Senate, in 2016. In an interview with a Telugu channel, he claimed that had he not approached Harris—whose mother was a Tamil Brahmin—over SB 403, “this bill would have been signed.” He later denied that he had solicited and secured her intervention, telling the Washington Post, “If I said that, I misspoke.” The offices of Harris and Newsom did not respond to my questions.