{"id":12589,"date":"2012-11-10T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/11\/10\/america-elects-its-first-hindu-congressional-representative\/"},"modified":"2012-11-10T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T12:00:00","slug":"america-elects-its-first-hindu-congressional-representative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2012\/11\/10\/america-elects-its-first-hindu-congressional-representative\/","title":{"rendered":"America Elects Its First Hindu Congressional Representative"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rediff.com\/news\/report\/concerns-of-hindus-are-near-to-my-heart-tulsi-gabbard\/20121031.htm?print=true\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>UNITED STATES, October 31, 2012 (rediff.com by Aziz Haniffa): Tulsi Gabbard is considered a shoo-in [she won in a landslide] to winning Hawaii&#8217;s 2nd Congressional District November 6 on the Democratic ticket and becoming the first Hindu American in the United States Congress. Gabbard, 31, was last week again felicitated by the Indian-American community in the Washington, DC area in a manner unprecedented in terms of the community&#8217;s embrace of a Congressional candidate of its own, even though she&#8217;s not Indian American.<\/p>\n<p>Gabbard grew up in a multicultural, multi-religious household. Her father is of Samoan\/Caucasian heritage and he is a deacon in the Catholic church. However, he also likes to practice mantra meditation, including kirtan. Her mother is Caucasian and a practicing Hindu.<\/p>\n<p>Gabbard calls herself a practicing Hindu. &#8220;I fully embraced Sanatan Dharma after serious deliberation and contemplation in my later teens &#8212; it&#8217;s not because my mother was a Hindu. I&#8217;m a Vaishnava in the Brahma Madhva Gaudiya Sampradaya. As a Vaishnava, my perspective of Hinduism or Sanatan Dharma comes from the Bhagavad Gita&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If I am elected to Congress, I will be representing all people of Hawaii, as well as all the people of our country &#8212; including Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, everyone. The fact is, people of every religion in our country want the same thing &#8212; they want elected officials who know they are servants of the people, and not special interests. Of course, since I&#8217;m a practicing Hindu, they also know that the more unique concerns of Hindu and Indian Americans are near and dear to my heart&#8221;, says Gabbard.<\/p>\n<p>Much more of this interview at &#8220;source.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source UNITED STATES, October 31, 2012 (rediff.com by Aziz Haniffa): Tulsi Gabbard is considered a shoo-in [she won in a,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}