These assertions seem to be skewed and decontextualized, as you point out in your questions. Many of the identity-claims that Hindus in North America make are no different from the claims made by other immigrant groups. Yet, the secular criticism asserts that to even speak as a Hindu-American is a mere front for some fascistic Hindu nationalist fantasy back home. The Hindu-American community includes not just a few prosperous first-generation doctors and engineers but the children of less privileged immigrants from India and the whole global diaspora as well. There are Hindus in America who are the descendants of families taken as indentured laborers to island plantations. There are Hindus in America who have faced very similar racism and marginalization as other minority communities in school. To paint them all out to be oppressive elites is inaccurate. It is partly true that many Hindus may think of themselves in simplistic civilizational terms and end up appearing arrogant about their religion (though I would prefer a religion being “arrogant” about tolerance over intolerance and violence any day). But what Lal appears to have not noticed is that this whole idea of “my religion (or culture) is better than yours” is not something innate to Hindu thought or philosophy; we have not typically gone around labeling non-Hindus as “unbelievers” in the past. So where has this identitarian discourse come from? We need to recognize that there is a lack of intellectual capital in the community that leads to this kind of superficial chauvinism. Liberal scholars should seek to speak to the community and elevate the discourse, rather than condescendingly throw a cut-and-paste simulacrum of critique at them (I’m thinking of Doniger’s pet phrase “Dead Male Brahmins” for example, or Lal’s bizarre dig at the twice stateless Telugu Brahmin community which he alleges is a powerful force). As for the claim that Hindus here are more Hindu than in India, the examples Lal gives are frankly quite inane, if not rather rudely normative. So, is there something wrong if temples in the US offer a lot of puja services? We go to our temples not just to make deals with God but to restore our attention to the divine in the midst and in the forms of our very real, human, and social obligations. We are serving our parents, our children, and our communities when we go to our temples. The “people” are not just revolutionary fantasies we have about them in some far corner of the earth, they are right here too. And the struggling and less privileged among them are coming to the temples for food, for healthcare, and many of the good things that a devout community also does in God’s name. If his criticism is addressed to second-generation Hindu Americans who don’t understand the complexities of Indian pluralism, frankly that kind of misunderstanding has also played out in the perception of some second-generation Hinduphobic secular journalists and academics too!