The strange tale of Tulsi Gabbard

Submitted by AWL on 20 December, 2022 - 6:05 Author: Sacha Ismail
Tulsi Gabbard and Narendra Modi, 2019

Congresswoman Gabbard meets Narendra Modi, 2019


Imagine if a Labour MP championed Corbyn in 2016, stood to be leader in 2020 – then left the party and become active on the far right. You are getting something of the flavour of US Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (in office 2013-21).

Discussing Gabbard, the cases of George Galloway and Barry Gardiner spring to my mind, for different reasons. Gabbard’s case, stranger and more disturbing than either, surely has lessons beyond the US.

Gabbard made great play of being the first Hindu member of the US Congress. But the Hindu tradition in which she was raised is a bizarre and abusive cult run by hippy-origin white right-wingers, the “Science of Identity Foundation”. It seems that throughout her winding journey Gabbard has remained linked to this organisation.

In 2016, when she backed Bernie Sanders for President and attacked the Democratic leadership in left-sounding language, Gabbard was actively working with both Science of Identity and the far-right Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar network, led by India’s governing BJP party and the RSS militia that spawned it. Her connections and mutual support with Sangh activists and organisations were extensive. An article on Gabbard in respected left-wing Indian magazine The Caravan calculated that in 2014 a quarter of donations made to her congressional operation came from these sources.

Shameful as Barry Gardiner’s record and stance on India are, Gabbard’s relationship with the Indian far right puts his in the shade.

Like RSS-BJP, Science of Identity is virulently anti-Muslim; much more than those Indian organisations it is virulently homophobic. Gabbard cut her political teeth in anti-gay activism in Hawaii; downplayed and dissembled while she pursued advancement through the Democratic Party; and since last year has returned to her roots with force, now predictably focusing her attacks on trans people.

Shortly after she supported Bernie Sanders, in early 2017, Gabbard visited Syria to meet with Bashar al-Assad and on her return defended the blood-soaked dictator. She went on to defend Putin’s military interventions to prop up Assad. There is the analogy with Galloway.

Yet while criticising the Democratic leadership as pro-war, Gabbard also advocated aggressive militarism against Islamists – by the US and anyone else. In that cause she championed not only Assad and Putin, but impeccably pro-Western Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (and pro-Western authoritarian Narendra Modi).

It seems clear that, however she has manouevred over the years, Gabbard’s bedrock political views are a quite distinctive variety of right-wing. But her multiple twists and turns also seem to be determined by a thick layer of heavy-duty political opportunism around that right-wing core.

When she stood in the Democratic presidential primary in late 2020, Gabbard presented as a liberal, to the right of Sanders but to the left of Biden. When she dropped out, she endorsed Biden – whom within months she would be denouncing from the extreme right.

Since she left Congress in January 2021, Gabbard has moved fast to the Trumpite right, making a media and perhaps renewed future political career spewing out talking points about trans rights “erasing women”, “anti-white racism”, and the rest. In the recent congressional mid-terms she publicly endorsed a dozen extreme-right Republican candidates – for instance Joe Kent, an anti-vaxxer and election-denier who enthusiastically defended the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol and managed to lose a safe Republican seat in rural Washington state.

She is now also a lieutenant colonel in the US army reserves!

Gabbard’s story raises a raft of issues sadly relevant for the left in the UK (and no doubt elsewhere):

• Why liberal and even left-wing politicians and political organisers are willing to tolerate influential or useful people with right-wing views and even connections to far-right organisations.

• The specific role of the Hindu nationalist right and far right, and their global networks. (Both these things are most certainly issues in the Labour Party.)

• The reactionary role of right-wing religious groups – of various religious origins – in politics, and the reluctance of many, again even on the left, to challenge them. (Again, definitely an issue in the Labour Party; but of course also on the socialist left.)

• Reactionary anti-imperialism, which as Gabbard’s case illustrates can be combined with support for other imperialist powers and even for one’s own imperialism.

• The need for a left based on democratic organisation, and substantial and engaged discussion and debate – in which leading figures cannot avoid scrutiny, criticism and accountability.

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