Chicago: While the Indian media was preoccupied with US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his aide Peter Navarro’s verbal gibes against India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the horror of another mass shooting in the US was also unfolding.
More on tariffs later.
However, what is common between the two incidents is the element of anti-India bigotry. To most discerning minds, it isn’t surprising that the radically regressive ideologies of transgederism, antisemitism, jihadism, and anti-India bigotry are somehow connected.
THE ANNUNCIATION CATHOLIC CHURCH SHOOTING
It was the third day of the new school year—Wednesday, August 27, 2025—at The Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The shooting began just before 8:30 am. The kids had gathered at the church for Mass to celebrate the start of the new school year. The school teaches pupils from preschool to eighth grade. It is affiliated with the over a century-old Annunciation Catholic Church next door.
The perpetrator, identified by the law enforcement agencies, was a 23-year-old transgender woman, Robin (born Robert) Westman. Westman opened fire through the stained glass windows. The shooter killed two children, ages 8 and 10, and injured 18. Robin also died in an apparent suicide.
Westman, by all accounts, appeared to be a mentally disturbed individual radicalized by the leftist jihadist ideology. Westman fantasized about violence against children and had an elaborately drawn seating map of the Annunciation Church. Besides anti-Catholic taunts, Westman’s manifesto mentioned killing “filthy Zionist Jews.” Westman’s weapons had “NUKE INDIA,” “Kill Donald Trump,” “Israel Must Fall,” “Mashallah,” etc., inscribed on them.
The US has seen a few high-profile trans violence cases in the past few years. On March 27, 2023, a 28-year-old Aiden Hale (born Audrey Elizabeth) murdered three children and three staff at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. “April of ‘99—the year Columbine [an apparent reference to the Columbine High School massacre in Columbine, Colorado] was born… (04/20/1999),” Aiden wrote in what is now referred to as the Nashville shooter’s manifesto.
On November 19, 2022, Anderson Lee Aldrich, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, fatally shot five people and injured 40 others at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs. Patrons subdued Aldrich, who was later sentenced to life in prison in June 2023.
Transgenderism is a radical gender ideology. It rejects the notion of Shakti and Prakriti. It “teaches that recognition of biological reality is bigotry,” write Jessica Hart Steinmann and Leigh Ann O’Neill (Transgenderism Won’t Let Girls Say No). “It trains girls to suppress their instincts, to reject the evidence of their own eyes, to doubt the fairness of rules that were designed to protect them. When they protest—even peacefully—they’re pushed aside.”
Many, eager to project the progressive pluralistic nature of the Hindu society compatible with “modernity,” ignore the fact that traditional Hindu ideas were not devised for social engineering.
As it usually happens with any mass shooting in the US, the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting also started a barrage of liberal commentary against America’s gun laws. Bearing arms is a constitutional guarantee under the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. The Second Amendment is a part of the US Bill of Rights, which reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Many prominent Democrats also went after people of faith, denouncing even the act of prayer. The Democrat mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, said, “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying… It was the first week of school. They were in a church.”
TARIFFS, ETC.
Undeniably, the US-India relationship is facing the biggest challenge of the Modi era. Neither tariffs nor the purchase of Russian oil, however, are new developments in the US-India relationship.
Tariffs were an issue in Mr Trump’s first term and were one of the primary focuses of his 2024 presidential campaign. India’s high tariffs on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, for example, were a sore topic even in the first Trump administration. In March 2019, during Mr Trump’s first term, the US revoked India’s Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) status following a review process launched in April 2018. The GSP allows certain products to enter the US duty-free, provided the beneficiary “developing country” meets the eligibility criteria established by the US Congress.
On the issue of violating US “sanctions,” President Joe Biden dispatched his Deputy National Security Advisor of Indian ancestry, Daleep Singh, to India. His threatening outburst about “consequences” to India made headlines. While Mr Biden’s Under Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, imposed a stealth visa ban on Indians for refusing to comply with US sanctions on Russia. During that time, Indians had to wait up to 600 working days to book a visa appointment.
“Not used to having countries outside the Atlanticist group turn down her commands,” wrote senior journalist Prof M.D. Nalapat, “Nuland inwardly fumed when South Block refused to scrap the S-400 deal and join the crusade against Russia that she has long been a champion of.”
American interests in the Indo-Pacific are undergoing a makeover under Mr Trump’s heterodox economic views and style of functioning. Many commentators, based on the antagonistic media portrayals of Mr Trump, reject his manoeuvres as cheap theatrics. However, the political astuteness of the man who, despite negative media narratives, lawfare, and attempts on his life, must not be doubted.
In his recent Wall Street Journal column, Walter Russell Mead, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute and a columnist at the WSJ, hints at a “shift” toward a policy of “protectionism in the Indo-Pacific.” That shift, writes Mead, “is enabled by a bipartisan shift away from trade policies grounded in promoting export-oriented growth models in less-developed economies.”
What this shift means for India is that it will need to demonstrate how it aligns with this new US grand strategy. It means “building a technosphere that China doesn’t dominate, deterring Chinese aggression in and around the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, countering jihadist terrorism and stabilizing the Middle East, fracturing the troubling Sino-Russian alliance, and reducing Chinese influence in India’s neighborhood are important to Washington and New Delhi,” writes Mead.
CHARLIE KIRK
At the time of writing for these columns, the sad news of the killing of Charlie Kirk hit the news waves. Kirk was a young (31-year-old) rising conservative star. He was instrumental in Mr Trump’s 2024 victory, helping to win young voters for the GOP. Kirk’s campus initiative, Turning Point USA, was truly a turning point in the 2024 US presidential election.
A college dropout, Kirk was a brave and eloquent speaker who engaged with the highly indoctrinated youth on college campuses. He openly debated across the US about faith, family, America, and other conservative values.
It is a sad commentary that Kirk’s voice was silenced by an assassin’s bullet on a US campus—Utah Valley University—a supposed temple of plural ideas and free speech. But again, these are the same US campuses where Globalized Intifada has been glorified and violence has been preached as being redemptive and therapeutic.
