Hindutva in America: An Ethnonationalist Threat to Equality and Religious Pluralism

What This Report Is

The Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights published this 68-page report in 2025. It investigates Hindu American organizations like HAF, CoHNA, and HSS. The report calls them an “ethnonationalist threat to equality and religious pluralism.”

What We Looked At

How a study is done determines whether you can trust what it found. The Citation Integrity Dashboard evaluates methodology (how the research was done) — not conclusions (what the research found). We classified this report as an Investigation Report. That means it examines a named organization using published records and secondary sources. It does not collect original data like a survey or incident tracker would. Because of that classification, two dimensions (scoring categories) do not apply: Classification Rigor and Case Capture. The remaining six dimensions carry the full weight of the score.

What We Found

The report does not engage with its subjects’ responses. Counter-Evidence measures whether a report takes criticism seriously. This dimension scored 2 out of 10. HAF, CoHNA, and VHPA have all published substantive responses to the claims made about them. The report does not address those responses. Instead, a section heading frames the main counter-argument — that some critiques of Hindu communities reflect anti-Hindu bias — as a bad-faith rhetorical move. There is no limitations section. A report that characterizes organizations without engaging their replies is asking readers to trust one side of an argument.

Most of the report’s sources come from organizations that oppose its subjects. Source Independence measures whether a report’s evidence comes from places separate from its own network. This dimension scored 3 out of 10. The report cites 261 sources across 89 domains. That sounds diverse. But 188 of those sources are advocacy organizations. Many have pre-existing adversarial relationships with the groups being investigated. The Hindutva Harassment Field Manual — produced by SASAC and Hindus for Human Rights — appears 11 times as evidence. The Indian American Muslim Council appears 7 times. Savera, a coalition that published its own report attacking HAF, appears 5 times. Using these groups’ characterizations as independent proof is a sourcing problem.

The report’s key labels lack published criteria. Definitional Precision measures whether a report defines its terms clearly enough for an independent reader to apply them. This dimension scored 4 out of 10. The report does include a definitions glossary — a genuine positive. But the words that do the heaviest work — “supremacist,” “ethnonationalist,” “far-right” — appear hundreds of times without decision rules. A reader cannot determine from the published text what specific behavior makes an organization “supremacist” rather than “conservative.” Without those criteria, the labels cannot be checked or applied consistently.

The same standards are not applied in both directions. Coverage Symmetry measures whether a report’s criteria work the same way regardless of who is being evaluated. This dimension scored 4 out of 10. The report characterizes diaspora mobilization, coalition building, and policy lobbying by HAF and CoHNA as evidence of supremacy. SASAC, Savera, and Hindus for Human Rights conduct the same types of coordinated advocacy — but the report does not apply its characterization criteria to them. It cites their materials as evidence instead. The criteria are structurally one-directional.

The Bottom Line

This report scored 3.7 out of 10. That places it in the Advocacy-Grade band (2.0 to 3.9), which means it functions more like advocacy material than independent research. No score cap (an automatic limit triggered by especially low scores on critical dimensions) was applied. The score reflects methodology only. The report’s conclusions about these organizations may be correct — but its methods do not give a reader the tools to verify that independently.