No One Mentioned Modi, So Why Did Tulsi Gabbard Deny Being His Puppet At Hearing?

Gabbard was rightly worried that questions about her long ties to Modi’s BJP would arise

Tulsi Gabbard Senate hearing

The most incongruous moment of Tulsi Gabbard’s Jan. 30 Senate hearing to become Director of National Intelligence was when she opened her remarks by denying, among other things, being the “puppet” of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The hearing left Gabbard facing an uncertain vote due to a wide range of her unorthodox policy positions. Committee members are alarmed by the former Hawaii congresswoman’s refusal, for instance, to call NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a traitor. Many also red-flagged Gabbard’s 2017 meeting with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad,her blaming NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and that the person who could oversee the nation’s 18 spy agencies recently opposed a key surveillance authority known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702.

But since her DNI nomination, Gabbard has offered swift changes of heart on many of these issues. In the hearing, these reversals were touched on, with Democratic Senator Mark Warner calling the “changes” “confirmation conversion.”

All of Gabbard’s unorthodox positions are enough to raise more red flags than a Soviet parade for Senators on both sides of the aisle. Yet most critiques miss the forest for the trees by overlooking her relationship with Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

None of the hearing questions touched on this, but Gabbard rightly seemed wary they would. 

In the vast forest of Gabbard’s compromising positions, the tallest grove is her supporters who are closely connected to Modi or the BJP, as revealed by Gabbard’s first major public speech after her DNI nomination. On Dec. 15, 2024 at the BAPS temple in Robbinsville, New Jersey, she was joined—and flanked in photos—by Suhag Shukla and Bharat Barai.

Shukla, who describes Gabbard as a “dear friend” of herself and her husband, is Executive Director of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). For two decades, reported a November 2024 Congressional Research Service report, HAF has “sought to influence” the presidency, Congress, and state governments “by some accounts directly on behalf of the New Delhi government.”

The Shuklas are not impartial observers of Gabbard’s political ascent: they collectively donated $11,850 to her campaigns for Congress and President since 2012. HAF, of which they are co-founders, has remained a faithful presence alongside Gabbard since the beginning.

While in Congress, Gabbard called HAF “an organization that I and my staff work with, if not [on] a daily basis, probably a weekly basis.” She said this at an event hosted by the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party (OFBJP), the foreign wing of the BJP, which is now a registered Foreign Agent in America.

More curiously, for someone who could soon be tasked with guarding America’s secrets, Gabbard was also joined in New Jersey by Barai, a close associate of the OFBJP who, in 2023, registered as a Foreign Agent acting on behalf of the Consul General of India.

Barai’s ties to Modi run deep. Starting with hosting Modi in his home in the 1990s, Barai organized video conferences to popularize him with the Indian diaspora after he was banned from the U.S., led hundreds to India to campaign for his election, and organized the newly-minted Prime Minister’s first “rockstar reception” in New York City in 2014. 

As Barai sat next to Gabbard at the BAPS event, did the DNI nominee recall how he and his wife donated $25,405 to her political campaigns?

Gabbard’s ties to Barai raises eyebrows under normal circumstances. But after a top Indian minister known as Modi’s “closest political ally” was accused of plotting to assassinate Sikh separatists in North America in 2023, alarm bells should be clamoring if she is entrusted with national security.

Late last year, Canada alleged the Modi government was behind a successful assassination plot in Vancouver. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a member of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)—its CIA-equivalent—in a foiled plot in New York City.

Barai and Shukla are far from the only ones who financially backed Gabbard. Her rise in U.S. politics undeniably benefited from the association with and financial backing of leadership in America’s family of Hindu nationalist organizations—all of which link back to the BJP.

After Modi won office, Gabbard wasn’t shy about expressing her closeness to the BJP, keynoting two different banquets hosted by the OFBJP.

In Los Angeles, she spoke, wore a BJP-logoed scarf, and subsequently collected thousands in campaign donations from leaders of the OFBJP-Los Angeles chapter.

In Atlanta, she joined BJP Foreign Affairs Cell Chief Vijay Jolly, who openedhis remarks: “I am a soldier of the Bharatiya Janata Party!” Noting it was their third meeting, he mentioned her upcoming re-election to Congress, declaring: “Your victory later this year is a foregone conclusion.” Ten years later, on Nov. 15, 2024, Jolly took to X to congratulate her for her DNI nomination and share a picture of them at the OFBJP event.

As critics sound alarms, and the Senate Intelligence Committee asked its questions, the most pressing point on which to focus may be Gabbard’s association with the BJP—and if, in light of her recent liaison with Barai, it’s still ongoing.


Gabbard appeared to predict that association might arise as she complained at the hearing she would face “lies and smears” about being “Modi’s puppet.” That term is hyperbolic, but deep questions remain over her long-standing ties to the BJP. Topping the list: with the focus on Assad and Putin, why was she worried about Modi?

Pieter Friedrich is a freelance journalist specializing in analysis of South Asian affairs. He is the author of Sikh Caucus: Siege in Delhi, Surrender in Washington and Saffron Fascists: India’s Hindu Nationalist Rulers as well as co-author of Captivating the Simple-Hearted: A Struggle for Human Dignity in the Indian Subcontinent. Discover more by him at PieterFriedrich.net.

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