[4] Vinay Lal, a professor of South Asian history at University of California, Los Angeles noted that the organization appeared to have banked on the enormous goodwill created by Mahatma Gandhi in the West.

[14] HAF rejected that their founders had any ties with Hindu Nationalist politics and accused CAG's "leaders and member organisations" of "espousing Marxist ideology or fringe Islamist positions, openly advocating anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-India views".

[27][28][29] In 2005, when the Asian-American Hotel Owners Association invited Modi for an address, activists, including John Prabhudoss, lobbied the United States Congress to introduce a resolution criticizing him for his role in those riots.

[12][32][c] In 2013, HAF again opposed a fresh bill by Pitts that commended the 2005 visa denial, encouraged the federal government "to review the applications of any individuals implicated in religious freedom violations under the same standard", and urged for the repealing of anti-conversion laws in several Indian states.

[12] In August 2019, after the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, which took away the autonomy of the province and rendered it a union territory, HAF published a "Reporter’s Guide" which emphasized about how the new regulations would ensure equal property rights for women, protections for the queer community, and better opportunities for Dalits in the region.

[12] HAF has since portrayed castes as occupational guilds which had brought stability to premodern India before being reified under British colonial rule; it has vehemently opposed drawing parallels between caste-discrimination and racism — arguing that it belittles the brutality faced by African Americans — or even any depiction of the caste-system as a rigid birth-determined pyramid of hierarchy.

[41][42] HAF perceived such policies to have the potential to enable the malicious targeting of Indian Hindu academics and lodged stiff opposition; their office-bearers argued caste to be a "stereotype" that was imposed upon South Asians under British rule.

[48] The proponents of the bill insisted that an explicit ban on caste discrimination was needed to raise awareness of this bias, but HAF contended that this proposal unfairly targeted Hindus;[49] and may result in racial profiling against Hindu Americans.

[51][52] However, in October 2023, after sustained lobbying by HAF, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, agreeing that "caste discrimination [was] already prohibited under existing civil rights protections".

[56] The suggested changes had sought to downplay the salience of caste in Indian history, reject Indo-Aryan migrations in favor of Indigenous Aryanism,[d] and not describe the declining status of women in ancient India, arguing that such portrayals would humiliate Hindu children in classrooms.

Multiple Indologists, including Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Harry Falk, Robert P. Goldman, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Sheldon Pollock, Patrick Olivelle and Madhav Deshpande, and other South Asian activist groups opposed the changes.

[63] In May 2021, HAF filed a defamation lawsuit against Sunita Viswanath and Raju Rajagopal of Hindus for Human Rights, Rasheed Ahmed from the Indian American Muslim Council, Prabhudoss, and Truschke.

[64] A diverse group of intellectuals and academics — Akeel Bilgrami, Amitav Ghosh, Anita Desai, Cornel West, Martha Nussbaum, Nandini Sundar, Noam Chomsky, Romila Thapar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Sheldon Pollock, and Wendy Doniger among others — condemned HAF's tactics as a SLAPP, designed to silence critics and push forward Hindutva.

[67] On 15 March 2022, Judge Amit Mehta stayed the defendants' motions to dismiss the suit since he deemed one of their arguments about whether HAF had satisfied the second requirement of invoking diversity jurisdiction — by proving the amount of monetary loss to have exceeded 75,000 USD — as a "substantial question" of procedure, that needed to be settled before adjudication on merits.

On 20 December 2022, he dismissed the suit since HAF had failed not only to establish any cause of action, even assuming that their allegations were factually accurate,[e] but also to provide any evidence that the court had personal jurisdiction over the defendants except one.

[74][75] Dheepa Sundaram, a religion and digital culture scholar at University of Denver, found the lawsuit to leverage "the rhetoric and tactics of social justice activists" in "pursuit of an oppressive ideology".

[citation needed] Sailaja Krishnamurti, a professor at Saint Mary's University (Halifax) who specializes in religious traditions of the South Asian diaspora, summarized that HAF has "earned a reputation" of being a conservative group purveying Hindu nationalist politics.

[81] Nishant Upadhyay, a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, specializing in gender and sexuality studies found the group's queer-friendly portrayal of Hinduism to be embedded within a discourse of Hindutva homonationalism.

[65][86] However, Arun Chaudhuri, an anthropologist of religion and politics at York University, cautions that such disavowals should not be taken at face value but rather as efforts at distancing HAF from the overtly negative connotations of Hindu nationalism.