Figure 1: The anti-Muslim hate propagated by the far-right queer Brahmin Hindutva activist Abhijit Iyer-Mitra
I have spent three decades studying how communicative inversions sustain power. Today I write as I watch with with growing alarm, how some of the most marginalized of identities are weaponized to resurrect the oldest forms of supremacy.
The thesis is brutal in its simplicity: the global far right, from the saffron laboratories of Hindutva to the venture-capital cathedrals of Peter Thiel’s Silicon Valley, did not rise *in spite of* LGBTQ existence, but *through a strategic cannibalization* of queer visibility itself. While the Euro-American liberal left drowned in the shallow waters of safe-space discourse and corporate rainbow branding, the far right learned to pinkwash authoritarianism with lethal precision.
Let me take you to two laboratories where this experiment is most advanced.
Laboratory 1: Hindutva’s Rainbow Ghar Wapsi
In September 2018, when India’s Supreme Court read down Section 377, the RSS–BJP ecosystem moved with predatory speed. Within hours, Mohan Bhagwat declared that “homosexuality has been part of Hindu culture since ancient times.” The same organization that once called queer people “psychological patients” now wrapped itself in the language of decolonial love.
This was never about liberation. It was a masterful inversion: position Hindu nationalism as the true inheritor of sexual freedom against the “Abrahamic” (read Muslim and Christian) repression that supposedly arrived with invaders. At Delhi Pride 2019, I watched young men in saffron scarves chant “LGBTQ rights are Hindu rights” while holding placards that read “Protect gays from jihadi hate.” The communicative infrastructure of WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels amplified this message to urban, upper-caste Hindu millennials who wanted to feel both modern and ancestral at once.
I have spent three decades studying how communicative inversions sustain power. Today I write as I watch with with growing alarm, how some of the most marginalized of identities are weaponized to resurrect the oldest forms of supremacy.
The thesis is brutal in its simplicity: the global far right, from the saffron laboratories of Hindutva to the venture-capital cathedrals of Peter Thiel’s Silicon Valley, did not rise *in spite of* LGBTQ existence, but *through a strategic cannibalization* of queer visibility itself. While the Euro-American liberal left drowned in the shallow waters of safe-space discourse and corporate rainbow branding, the far right learned to pinkwash authoritarianism with lethal precision.
Let me take you to two laboratories where this experiment is most advanced.
Laboratory 1: Hindutva’s Rainbow Ghar Wapsi
In September 2018, when India’s Supreme Court read down Section 377, the RSS–BJP ecosystem moved with predatory speed. Within hours, Mohan Bhagwat declared that “homosexuality has been part of Hindu culture since ancient times.” The same organization that once called queer people “psychological patients” now wrapped itself in the language of decolonial love.
This was never about liberation. It was a masterful inversion: position Hindu nationalism as the true inheritor of sexual freedom against the “Abrahamic” (read Muslim and Christian) repression that supposedly arrived with invaders. At Delhi Pride 2019, I watched young men in saffron scarves chant “LGBTQ rights are Hindu rights” while holding placards that read “Protect gays from jihadi hate.” The communicative infrastructure of WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels amplified this message to urban, upper-caste Hindu millennials who wanted to feel both modern and ancestral at once.
The data is chilling. Qualitative interviews show that a significant segment of the self-identified LGBTQ respondents in metropolitan India were likely to vote BJP, voting along the lines of caste and majoritarian ideology.
Ashok Row Kavi, Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, and Manvendra Singh Gohil are the trifecta of caste-privileged queer gatekeepers who have draped the rainbow flag over Hindutva’s saffron scaffolding. Row Kavi, the upper caste Hindu elder statesman of Indian queer activism, proudly declares himself “to the extreme right of the RSS” while pocketing state patronage.
Iyer-Mitra, the upper-caste defense-analyst provocateur, weaponizes his gay identity to spew Islamophobic bile and cheerlead for Hindu majoritarianism on every prime-time panel that will platform him.
Prince Manvendra, the Rajput royal whose palace walls still echo feudal entitlement, lends aristocratic glamour to Modi’s Pride photo-ops while remaining conspicuously silent on Dalit and Muslim queers lynched by the same ideology he courts. Together, these three elite savarna men have turned queer liberation into a VIP enclosure: entry granted only if you salute the Hindu Rashtra and agree that the real threat to rainbow bodies comes from mosques, not from the mobs waving bhagwa flags. Their politics is not inclusion; it is laundering hate with glitter.
Ashok Row Kavi is widely regarded as India's most famous queer person who openly supports the BJP and Hindutva ideology. Born in 1947, he is a pioneering journalist and LGBTQ+ rights activist who became the first Indian to publicly come out as gay in a 1986 Savvy magazine interview. As the founder and chairperson of the Humsafar Trust—one of India's oldest and largest LGBTQ+ organizations—he has advocated for queer rights for over three decades, including key roles in the legal challenges that led to the 2018 decriminalization of homosexuality under Section 377.
Row Kavi's support for the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is explicit and longstanding. He has framed Hindu nationalism as inherently inclusive of queer identities, drawing on ancient Hindu texts to argue that homosexuality aligns with "decolonial" Hindu traditions rather than "Western imports."
The far right had successfully recruited the very bodies it once criminalized into its electoral machinery. Trans rights? Marriage equality? These remain distant dreams. The queer body is useful only as a cultural trophy in the war against the Muslim Other.
This is culture-centered inversion at its most sophisticated: the subaltern voice is not silenced; it is hollowed out, filled with majoritarian venom, and sent marching back into the streets wearing the colors of the rainbow.
Laboratory 2: Peter Thiel’s Palace of Mirrors
Across the Pacific, a gay billionaire funds the intellectual architecture of white supremacy. Peter Thiel’s money flows to JD Vance, Blake Masters, and a thousand Substack prophets who warn of “woke gender ideology” while cashing his checks. The contradiction would be comic if it weren’t catastrophic.
Thiel’s public defense is Girardian: multiculturalism, he says, leads to scapegoating, and the only way out is a monopolistic Leviathan (preferably coded by Palantir). His private life is the perfect alibi. When critics call out his financing of anti-trans legislation, the response is swift: “How can he be homophobic? He’s married to a man.”
This is elite capture of identity in real time. The queer billionaire becomes the exception that proves the hierarchical rule: sexual freedom for those who can afford it, discipline and borders for everyone else. The white supremacist base tolerates the contradiction because Thiel’s capital delivers something more precious than ideological purity—power.
Milo Yiannopoulos, Caitlyn Jenner, the “Gays for Trump” flotilla at Mar-a-Lago—these are not outliers. They are the far right’s human shields, proof that reaction can be fabulous, that supremacy can come with good cheekbones and a Founders Fund term sheet.
The Left That Lost Its Voice
And here is where the story turns tragic. While the far right was learning to speak in rainbow frequencies, much of the Euro-American left retreated into the therapeutic grammar of harm and safety. Identity stopped being a site of material struggle and became a prestige economy of pronouns and trigger warnings brought to you by McKinsey’s DEI division.
Class politics did not disappear; it was gently, expertly, anesthetized. The same corporations that painted their logos rainbow in June slashed wages, broke unions, and funded police foundations year-round. The left, terrified of being called problematic, largely looked away.
As someone who cut my theoretical teeth on Marx, Lening, Gramsci and Fanon in the libraries of West Bengal, I recognize this as classic hegemonic incorporation. The master’s tools did not dismantle the master’s house—they redecorated it.
Toward a Decolonial Queer Praxis
There is still time, but only if we are ruthless with our diagnostics.
1. Identity is not the opposite of class; it is one of its most powerful mediations. We must return to the Combahee River Collective’s original insight: the liberation of the most oppressed queer Black woman is the precondition for the liberation of all.
2. Pinkwashing is a communicative strategy, not a moral failing. It must be met with counter-narratives that are materially grounded: land rights for Hijras, universal healthcare that includes gender-affirming surgery, labor protections for sex workers.
3. The far right’s queer fellow-travellers must be engaged not with liberal outrage but with the cold clarity of power analysis. Thiel is not a self-hating gay man; he is a rational monopolist who understands that some bodies can be sacrificed for the greater project of accumulation.
I began this piece with an articulation of the ways in which identity, removed from material struggles, is auctioned off to the highest bidder—whether that bidder wears saffron or a Palantir hoodie.
This is culture-centered inversion at its most sophisticated: the subaltern voice is not silenced; it is hollowed out, filled with majoritarian venom, and sent marching back into the streets wearing the colors of the rainbow.
Laboratory 2: Peter Thiel’s Palace of Mirrors
Across the Pacific, a gay billionaire funds the intellectual architecture of white supremacy. Peter Thiel’s money flows to JD Vance, Blake Masters, and a thousand Substack prophets who warn of “woke gender ideology” while cashing his checks. The contradiction would be comic if it weren’t catastrophic.
Thiel’s public defense is Girardian: multiculturalism, he says, leads to scapegoating, and the only way out is a monopolistic Leviathan (preferably coded by Palantir). His private life is the perfect alibi. When critics call out his financing of anti-trans legislation, the response is swift: “How can he be homophobic? He’s married to a man.”
This is elite capture of identity in real time. The queer billionaire becomes the exception that proves the hierarchical rule: sexual freedom for those who can afford it, discipline and borders for everyone else. The white supremacist base tolerates the contradiction because Thiel’s capital delivers something more precious than ideological purity—power.
Milo Yiannopoulos, Caitlyn Jenner, the “Gays for Trump” flotilla at Mar-a-Lago—these are not outliers. They are the far right’s human shields, proof that reaction can be fabulous, that supremacy can come with good cheekbones and a Founders Fund term sheet.
The Left That Lost Its Voice
And here is where the story turns tragic. While the far right was learning to speak in rainbow frequencies, much of the Euro-American left retreated into the therapeutic grammar of harm and safety. Identity stopped being a site of material struggle and became a prestige economy of pronouns and trigger warnings brought to you by McKinsey’s DEI division.
Class politics did not disappear; it was gently, expertly, anesthetized. The same corporations that painted their logos rainbow in June slashed wages, broke unions, and funded police foundations year-round. The left, terrified of being called problematic, largely looked away.
As someone who cut my theoretical teeth on Marx, Lening, Gramsci and Fanon in the libraries of West Bengal, I recognize this as classic hegemonic incorporation. The master’s tools did not dismantle the master’s house—they redecorated it.
Toward a Decolonial Queer Praxis
There is still time, but only if we are ruthless with our diagnostics.
1. Identity is not the opposite of class; it is one of its most powerful mediations. We must return to the Combahee River Collective’s original insight: the liberation of the most oppressed queer Black woman is the precondition for the liberation of all.
2. Pinkwashing is a communicative strategy, not a moral failing. It must be met with counter-narratives that are materially grounded: land rights for Hijras, universal healthcare that includes gender-affirming surgery, labor protections for sex workers.
3. The far right’s queer fellow-travellers must be engaged not with liberal outrage but with the cold clarity of power analysis. Thiel is not a self-hating gay man; he is a rational monopolist who understands that some bodies can be sacrificed for the greater project of accumulation.
I began this piece with an articulation of the ways in which identity, removed from material struggles, is auctioned off to the highest bidder—whether that bidder wears saffron or a Palantir hoodie.
At the heart of this rise of identity politics is the neoliberal project, delinking identity based struggles from their material roots and from the politics of class. Even as the far-right co-opts identity, it simultaneously mobilizes hate directed at diverse identities at the margins to mobilize the working classes in its politics of hate.
To resist this co-option is to build a materialist project of queer praxis that is anchored in material struggles, connected to the working class struggles, and placed in dialogue with working class organizing.
The rainbow is not a brand. It is a wound, a weapon, and—if we dare reclaim it—a horizon.
Jai Bhim. Queer Azadi. Global intifada.
The rainbow is not a brand. It is a wound, a weapon, and—if we dare reclaim it—a horizon.
Jai Bhim. Queer Azadi. Global intifada.