Shane Jones has said racist things about migrants. On the Kia Ora Modi rally, he is the one telling the truth

I write from Palmerston North, where I have spent the last nine years directing a research centre that studies how communities at the margins are silenced, and how the ideologies that silence them travel. For more than two decades, across community sites in seventeen countries, my research has traced the global circulation of Hindutva, the political ideology of Hindu supremacy that animates Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. So when Shane Jones stood before the New Zealand First convention this month and told the Labour Party, National Party, ACT Party and Green Party that "the next time you go to an ethno-nationalist rally to receive a foreign leader, take off your knee pads," I found myself in the uncomfortable position of recognising that the most accurate public description of the Kia Ora Modi event had come from the politician whose rhetoric about Indian migrants I have publicly criticised as racist.

Both of these things are true at once, and holding them together is precisely the work that our political culture keeps refusing to do.

The racism must be named

Let me be unambiguous about the first truth. Jones's "butter chicken tsunami" line, delivered on a far-right internet radio station and cheerfully recycled since, reduces an entire migrant community to a food item, a rhetorical move with a long colonial genealogy. His convention speech, which promised to call out the growth of the Indian population every day, every week, every month, which conjured images of foreign-run gangs in the kiwifruit industry and of young Uber drivers paraded through the courts, works by attaching criminality and cultural threat to brown bodies. This is the standard grammar of anti-migrant populism, and commentators asking whether the party's rhetoric is getting "weird and weirder" are asking a reasonable question about a party that has built its campaign launch around a self-described nationalism. When the Prime Minister called the butter chicken comments "alarmist" and unhelpful, he was, if anything, understating the harm. My research with Indian communities in Aotearoa documents how this kind of language lands: in the workplace, in the schoolyard, in the everyday sense of being permanently on probation in the country you call home.

And so must the ethnonationalism

Here is the second truth. The event Jones was describing, the Kia Ora Modi gathering that filled Spark Arena with more than 10,000 people on 11 July, belongs to a well-documented genre. From Madison Square Garden to Wembley to the "Howdy Modi" spectacle in Houston, mass diaspora rallies have been a central communicative infrastructure of the Modi era, staging the leader as the embodiment of a Hindu nation and folding overseas Indians into that nation's imagined body. The peer-reviewed literature on Hindutva, my own work included, has traced how these spectacles travel with consequences. In Leicester in 2022, young men marched through a diverse neighbourhood chanting Jai Shri Ram, a devotional phrase that has been weaponised as a slogan of anti-Muslim intimidation, and an independent inquiry led by researchers at SOAS and the LSE found that Hindu nationalist influence and disinformation helped drive the violence that followed. A leaked UK Home Office review reached a parallel conclusion, identifying Hindu nationalist extremism as an ideology of concern.

Nor is this an assessment imported from elsewhere. Aotearoa New Zealand's own Combined Threat Assessment Group, in its Violent Extremism Ideological Framework developed on behalf of our counter-terrorism agencies and published in 2022, names Hindutva as a sub-category of identity-motivated violent extremism, listed alongside White identity-motivated violent extremism. The Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians, an organisation of the very migrants Jones's rhetoric maligns, wrote an open letter ahead of the visit raising the treatment of Muslims and Dalits in India and warning that the Spark Arena event could function as a vehicle for the ideology. I said publicly before the visit that the rally would mix ceremonial celebration with the recognisable dog-whistles of Hindu nationalism. Calling Kia Ora Modi an ethnonationalist rally is a description drawn from evidence, and the description holds regardless of who utters it.

The distinction that matters, the one my scholarship insists on at every turn, is between Hindutva and Hinduism, and between a political project and a people. Most of the people who queued for hours outside Spark Arena came for belonging, for pride, for the rare experience of hearing their language fill an arena in a country where their names are routinely mispronounced. That longing is real and it deserves respect. Hindutva is a supremacist political formation that preys on exactly this longing, and naming it protects, rather than smears, the Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, Christians and dissenting Hindus within the diaspora who are its first targets.

The mainstreaming problem

Which brings us to what our political leadership did with this evidence. The Prime Minister, asked directly about Hindutva before the visit, said he was not concerned about its rise, a remarkable statement given that his own government's threat-assessment architecture categorises the ideology as a form of violent extremism. He then departed from the official programme to join the rally, where, as The Spinoff's reporting from inside the arena records, he praised Modi as "one of the most important leaders of our time" and held hands with him as they waved to the crowd. Labour's leader called on Modi and welcomed the new strategic partnership. Across National, Labour and ACT, the register was gushing: the charisma, the oratory, the crowd. The scholarly literature on authoritarian populism has been telling us for years that this is exactly backwards, that the leader's charisma, the mass rally, the fusion of leader and people into a single roaring body, are the signature technologies of democratic erosion, the very things that should prompt caution rather than admiration.

And the erosion is documented, extensively. The V-Dem Institute's global democracy report classifies India as an electoral autocracy, describing a slow and systematic dismantling of democratic institutions under the BJP. Reporters Without Borders has repeatedly raised the alarm about the collapse of press freedom in India, where journalists critical of the government face harassment, raids and imprisonment. There is a serious argument, made in these pages and elsewhere, that diaspora diplomacy of this kind is simply how leaders engage Modi, and that trade interests demand the performance. I take that argument seriously, and I note what it concedes: that our leaders knowingly lent the mana of the New Zealand state to a rally format designed to glorify a leader presiding over democratic decline, and did so while waving away the ideology their own agencies have named.

What the dismissal forecloses

When the Prime Minister brushed off Jones's convention remarks as crass, and when the ethnonationalist descriptor was folded into the running story of Jones's swipes at migrants, something disingenuous happened. Treating an evidence-based description of a political ideology as an attack on an ethnic community collapses the two into one, as though to be Indian is to be Hindutva. That collapse is itself a racialising move, and it does a double injury: it shields a supremacist project from scrutiny, and it erases the Indian New Zealanders, many of them Muslim, Sikh, Dalit and progressive Hindu, who have been asking their adopted country to take Hindutva seriously for years, often at real personal cost. I know something of that cost, having faced sustained and coordinated harassment from Hindutva-aligned networks since 2019 for doing this research.

Aotearoa does need serious conversations about migration, about the transnational diffusion of Hindutva, and about what social cohesion demands in a superdiverse society. Those conversations require us to critique Jones's racism and to acknowledge his accuracy in the same breath, because a political culture that can do only one of these things at a time will keep mistaking flattery for diplomacy and description for prejudice. The evidence about the Kia Ora Modi rally sat in the public sphere before a single politician walked into Spark Arena. They walked in anyway.

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Mohan J Dutta is Dean's Chair Professor of Communication at Massey University and Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). His research on Hindutva in Aotearoa and the diaspora spans over two decades and has been the subject of documented, coordinated harassment from Hindutva-aligned networks.