Tulsi Gabbard and the left

The 2020 Presidential primary race in the Democratic Party effectively started the day after Election Day 2018. The mainstream press seems to be looking for stories to bash the leading progressive candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbert. For the more centrist candidates, not so much. That will come, though, sooner rather than later. Politics is politics.

I've been following some of the recent criticisms of Gabbard from left perspectives. Here is a Jacobin from 2017 (so maybe a bit dated in terms of the 2020 race) article that, as the title indicates, takes a dim view of her record: Branko Marcetic, Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend 05/26/2017. It puts a lot of stress on her anti-LGBT record in the past, which The Young Turks segment below also addresses.

Michael Brooks on his podcast show named for himself, The Michaael Brooks Show, stresses his concerns about her shortcomings form a left viewpoint in a sensible evaluation of her record, Is Tulsi Gabbard Far Right? Chris Matthews Impressions. (TMBS 72) 01/12/2019:

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian looked at Gabbard's record and the criticisms directed at her, with particular reference to her record on LGBT issues. While recognizing real left concerns about Gabbard, they stress here the need for a critical attitude toward the dim view that the corporate media take of progressive candidates. Tulsi Gabbard Attacked For Anti-Gay Past The Young Turks 01/14/2018:

My biggest concern about her from what I know is her fondness for the Indian Prime Minister since 2014 Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist leader in his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As Marcetic recounts, Modi has promoted Islamophic notions, as has Gabbard:

... most appalling was his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in the western state of Gujarat, which left one thousand people dead, nearly eight hundred of whom were Muslims. Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time and has long been accused of allowing the riots to happen, with a former senior police officer testifying in 2011 that Modi said the night before the riots that Muslims needed to be taught a lesson.

Despite all of this, Gabbard has been one of Modi’s most prominent boosters in the US. “He is a leader whose example and dedication to the people he serves should be an inspiration to elected officials everywhere,” she said of Modi in 2014.

For about a decade, the United States refused to give Modi a visa to travel to the US in light of his involvement in the Gujarat riots. For Gabbard, this was a “great blunder,” and she later told the press that “there was a lot of misinformation that surrounded the event in 2002.” She personally congratulated Modi on his 2014 election, and was later involved in organizing his first trip to the US. She also met two BJP leaders who had visited the United States beforehand, and spoke alongside them at an event in Atlanta. [my emphasis; internal links not included]

Marcetic also argues that Gabbard's anti-interventionism in foreign policy may have a lot in common with isolationist-nationalist assumptions, including opposing the Iran nuclear agreement.

Zaid Jilani wrote on The curious Islamophobic politics of 2020 presidential candidate contender congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in AlterNet back on 02/23/2015:

To the media, Gabbard is a curious spectacle. She’s a Hawaii Democrat, coming from one of the nation’s most progressive and dovish chapters of the Democratic Party, but she’s also an Iraq war veteran, and she’s consistently tried to outflank President Obama and the rest of her party to the right on foreign affairs. Last month she openly mocked Secretary of State John Kerry during an appearance on CNN, saying that he thinks, “if we give them [Islamic extremists] $10,000 and give them a nice place to live that somehow they’re not going to be engaged in this fighting.”

To Gabbard, the fact that Syria and Iraq have been through years of brutal civil war, wrecked economies and massive displacement is irrelevant; the only reason they have an extremism problem is because of Islamic theology.

But the case of Tulsi Gabbard becomes less curious and more expected once you look at her links to a different set of ethnic and religious hardliners: the Hindu nationalist Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since her election to Congress, Gabbard has tied herself closely to this party, which has a history of condoning hatred and violence against India’s Muslim minority. Many of her stateside donors and supporters are also big supporters of this movement, which disdains secularism and promotes religious sectarianism.

In a current piece, Akbar Shahid Ahmed writes on Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 Plan Threatens The New Left Foreign Policy Of Sanders And Warren Huffington Post 01/11/2019.