New York City Mayor Eric Adams was slated to attend an event in Queens next week featuring a prominent far-right Hindu activist, according to the event’s organizers, before withdrawing yesterday, a day after New York Focus sent inquiries about his attendance.
The event, a dinner at an Indian cultural center in Fresh Meadows, Queens, will feature Indian Hindu nationalist activist Kajal Shingala, whose speeches frequently feature calls for violence against Muslims in India and boycotts of non-Hindu businesses.
“She is one of the most prolific Hindu far-right orators,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, who runs an organization tracking hate speech in India that has catalogued dozens of Shingala’s speeches. “She has been at the forefront of promoting anti-Muslim, anti-Christian hate, bigotry, and speeches that incite violence.”
A spokesperson for Adams, Zachary Nosanchuk, said that while Adams’s attendance at the event was requested by organizers, “he never planned to attend and it was never on the Mayor’s public schedule.”
Harshad Patel, president of the Gujarati Samaj of New York, which is hosting the dinner, and other event organizers told New York Focus that the mayor’s team had confirmed his attendance.
They promoted a flyer advertising his attendance at the event as the guest of honor. Shingala, who uses the name Kajal Hindusthani online, also shared the poster on her social media platforms, where she has close to a million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and X. Patel is separately organizing a fundraiser at his house for Adams’s reelection bid this evening, which the mayor is still planning to attend, Patel told New York Focus.
Adams faces an uphill battle to win reelection as an independent against state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month and would be the first Muslim mayor of New York City.
Mamdani has been the subject of a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiment online. Supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who has strong ties with Gujarati Hindus in the United States, including the Gujarati Samaj of New York — have pilloried Mamdani after he called the prime minister a “war criminal” at a mayoral forum hosted by New York Focus and Hell Gate. Mamdani, whose father is a Gujarati Muslim, spoke at the forum about Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Shingala travels widely within India and internationally, frequently speaking to large crowds and releasing videos that are viewed millions of times on social media, Naik said. In 2023, she was arrested in northwestern India on charges of propagating hate speech. Her speeches reportedly triggered inter-religious violence. She was released on bail shortly thereafter.
Her speeches frequently return to several themes. One is the importance of patronizing only Hindu businesses, and refusing to buy goods from Muslims, even if their products are cheaper.
A 2024 speech she delivered in northwestern India provides one example. “If you buy from Abdul to save five rupees, Abdul will use the same money to behead your child, to pick up your daughters, and to defend terrorists in court,” she said.
Another theme is “Love Jihad,” an unfounded conspiracy theory alleging an organized effort by Muslim men to convert and marry Hindu women in order to replace Hindus as the dominant group in India.
In a 2021 Instagram video, she alleged that young Muslim men “get money from the madrasa to entrap Hindu girls” into marriage, using the term for an Islamic school.
“You get trapped with these jihadis and in the end, you will either be found chopped up in a suitcase or burnt alive or buried or killed,” she added.
“Kajal is a special, good speaker for Hinduism, and I think, as a Hindu, I should promote her.”
“We don’t favor any religions,” he said. “She talked with the president and she wants to come to have a lecture. That’s it.”
Harshad Patel, the president of the group, struck a different note. “Kajal is a special, good speaker for Hinduism, and I think, as a Hindu, I should promote her,” he told New York Focus.
Shingala is currently on a speaking tour in the US, with stops planned or completed in Texas, Georgia, and other states. A description of her speech by organizers of a Dallas, Texas, event last month said that she “stressed the importance of supporting Hindu carpenters, milkmen, plumbers, electricians, and others, and not giving business to jihadis to save a few rupees, because that money could be used to harm your fathers and brothers.”
Shingala did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Over two dozen groups in an interfaith coalition issued a letter yesterday condemning Adams’s involvement in the event.
This isn’t the first time Adams has gotten embroiled in controversy surrounding Indian politics. Last year, Adams distanced himself from a float in New York City’s India Day Parade that featured a model of a Hindu temple built on the site of a mosque that was destroyed by Hindu vigilantes in 1992. A letter to Adams from an interfaith coalition called the float an effort to “celebrate ongoing violence and terror against 200 million Indian Muslims.”
