Tulsi Gabbard’s pro-Russia political bent has been the cause of much alarm in the intelligence community ever since President-elect Donald Trump chose her to be his director of national intelligence. Because, sure, she lacks any relevant experience whatsoever for the job, a gargantuan responsibility that requires oversight of 18 intelligence agencies. But she also takes positions that make her seem, well, compromised by foreign governments.

For example, she has a tendency to espouse foreign-policy talking points that very much align with Kremlin propaganda, often with the help of her pal Tucker Carlson. She has blamed the U.S. for supposedly provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and posited that the Biden administration is developing “biolabs” in the invaded territory. She is weirdly into Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, having once held a private meeting with the strongman and refusing to ever admit that he did, in fact, repeatedly attack and kill his own people with assistance from the Russians. (Rossiya-1, a Russian state television channel, recently called her a “comrade.”) She even spreads conspiracy theories about herself, claiming earlier this year that she’d been placed on a Transportation Security Administration “terror watchlist” for criticizing Kamala Harris.

Those examples are sufficient for understanding why intelligence officials, Democrats, and even some conservatives are panicked about her nomination. But there is another incredibly compromising geopolitical stance, more buried in Gabbard’s past, that’s been overlooked in the many arguments to keep her far, far away from the top levers of American power: her deep ties to Hindu nationalism.

Since her entry into national politics, Tulsi Gabbard has cultivated and benefited from ties to United States chapters of the Sangh Parivar, an India-based network of Hindu nationalist advocacy organizations that attempt to influence policy in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the U.S.

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