SALON

Sunday, Jan 13, 2013 1:00 PM UTC

Hindus now have a fellow believer in Congress

By

Topics: From the Wires,

NEW YORK (AP) — When Dr. Uma Mysorekar looks at the members of the new Congress, the Indian immigrant and practicing Hindu can see that, for the first time, there’s someone who shares her ethnicity and someone who shares her faith.

To her surprise, they’re two different people.

Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is the first Hindu elected to Congress. Rep. Ami Bera of California, also a Democrat, is the third Indian-American to serve in the House.

Gabbard, however, isn’t from India, where Hinduism originated and to which the vast majority of its adherents have ethnic ties.

Bera is a Unitarian. His two Indian-American predecessors in Congress, Dalip Singh Saund and Bobby Jindal, also were not practicing Hindus. The late Saund, a California Democrat elected in 1956, was Sikh. Jindal, a Republican elected to the House in 2004 and now Louisiana’s governor, is Catholic.

Gabbard’s presence in Congress creates an interesting moment for Hindus in the United States, a chance to celebrate a barrier broken but also a topic of discussion as they ponder how closely religion and nationality are entwined, or even should be.

Mysorekar is glad to see a practicing Hindu in the country’s halls of political power, no matter her nationality.

Gabbard “is a Hindu representative, it doesn’t matter where she came from,” said Mysorekar, president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, a temple in the New York borough of Queens that is one of the country’s oldest.

As a non-Indian Hindu, Gabbard is most definitely an outlier.

According to an analysis issued last month from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, there are about 1 billion Hindus in the world. Of those, 94 percent are in India, and 99 percent in the larger South Asia region. The analysis, based on data from 2010, the latest available, estimated the population of Hindus in the United States at 1.79 million. Most are of Indian descent.

Hinduism encompasses a range of beliefs and practices, and there is no formal conversion practice. That acceptance of plurality in the faith, that Hindus come in many forms, would make it “hypocritical” for Indian Hindus to look askance at Gabbard for not sharing their ethnicity, said Smita Kothuri, 38, of McLean, Va.

“How can I hold it against her? I’d be untrue to my religion if I held it against her,” she said.

Other Indian Hindus agreed with the sentiment.

“I don’t think it makes a difference that she’s not Indian,” said Kinjal Dave, 17, a high school senior in Hillsborough, N.J. “I think it’s the faith that matters.”

The press secretary for Gabbard, a 31-year-old Iraq war veteran, declined an Associated Press request to interview Gabbard for this story, but sent along a statement Gabbard had made upon being sworn into office, for which she used a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu religious text.

“I chose to take the oath of office with my personal copy of the Bhagavad Gita because its teachings have inspired me to be a servant-leader, dedicating my life in the service of others and to my country,” she said.

Gabbard has said she was introduced to Hinduism through her mother, and embraced it fully as a teenager. She also is the first member of Congress to be born in the U.S. territory of American Samoa.

The reception from Indians and Indian media to her electoral victory has been largely positive, although there has been at least one mistaken media report making a reference to Gabbard being Indian-American. (She and her siblings all have Indian first names.)

Having any Hindu representation in Congress breaks barriers in a country that, despite religious freedom being enshrined in the Constitution, has seen its elected officials overwhelmingly come from Christian backgrounds.

It can be an inspiration to other Hindus who are interested in public office, that their faith and most voters’ unfamiliarity with it, won’t prove insurmountable. “I think it instills confidence to say there’s been a Hindu there,” said Suhag Shukla, executive director of the Hindu American Foundation in Washington.

It’s also an opportunity to introduce Hinduism as a faith to people who may have seen it as solely the purview of those who have a connection to India.

Dharmasetu Das knows all about that. Born in Massachusetts to a military family, the 55-year-old white man whose original first name was David has been practicing Hinduism for decades. Now living in San Diego, he performs weddings and other ceremonies as a Hindu pandit, or priest.

He was a teenager when he came across some books on the faith, and “I felt like this was it,” he said.

He hasn’t come across too many other non-Indian Hindus like himself over the years, and is happy to know he now has a compatriot in such a high-profile place like Congress.

“Just opening people’s eyes,” he said, “it’s a great thing.”

___

Follow Deepti Hajela at www.twitter.com/dhajela

More By Deepti Hajela.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
345 points346 points | 114 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
64 points65 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
36 points37 points | 2 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
34 points35 points | 3 comments
vote
Doug Henwood: Capitalism Thrives on Class Exploitation
36 points37 points | 4 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations