The Indian Hand In The American Elections

India is in the limelight in the United States’ election season, but it is not because of the “Make in India” program. It is our DNA that is stamped all over the Presidential campaign: in disappointed Republican hopefuls like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, in the spouse of the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Usha Vance, above all, in the genealogy of the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris. If US citizens with Indian ancestry act as a vote bank, they will be spoiled for choice.

It is an unusual phenomenon which has provoked interesting comments. Columnist Tunku Varadarajan writing in the ‘Wall Street Journal’ claims that the ascent of Indian immigrants to the head of tech companies and US political parties proves that the "American dream" is alive and well-that anyone can reach the top if they have grit and perseverance.

This flattering interpretation reflects well on both countries, but it is economical with the truth. It oversimplifies the motives, backgrounds and experiences of families moving from different parts of India to the United States.

It plays down the ways in which our social biases, like patriarchy and casteism, fit comfortably into similar tropes in the US. And it ignores the connection between various waves of migration and the economic policies and woes of successive Indian governments.

President Johnson’s removal of the country-based quota system to welcome qualified immigrant professionals in 1965 saw an influx of urban, English-speaking Indian academics and doctors into America. The post-war US employment market tempted persons seeking careers in teaching, research and medicine by offering them the latest equipment and facilities, which were not available in India, where the budget only covered basic education and health care.

There was adventure and challenge in the US, but India did not experience a “brain drain”. The children of these first-generation migrants are the ones who are hoping to enter the White House today.

Those who head US tech companies are the product of a later wave of immigration, which started in the 1970s. Engineering graduates of prestigious IITs moved west for higher degrees and stayed on to work in information technology businesses springing up in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

The exodus was prompted by poor employment opportunities in India, where rigid licensing rules hampered competition, stifled private investment and initiative and reserved key sectors for public undertakings. By the time these policies were liberalised, many who had left our shores had upgraded their skills and risen to the top of large global monopolies in the US.

The disappearance of ‘licence raj’ in the nineties tempted members of the diaspora to return to India to leverage the competitive advantages of both countries, combining the experience they had gained abroad with the latest outsourcing tools. There were gains in productivity, efficiency and employment and a two-way movement of people, skill and capital.

The fortunes of Indian software engineers, call centre workers and the like were soon hitched to the bandwagons of US companies, a business model that continues to flourish in many metros. It has, however, failed to kickstart domestic investment, because the benefits of economic reform have been negated by poor infrastructure and rampant corruption.

Over the last decade, India has reached a crisis point. Economic power and influence are concentrated in the hands of crony capitalists, leading to stagnation in the industrial and service sectors, staggering levels of inequality and low job creation.

Those who have lost faith in the growth prospects of India are now fleeing westwards, mainly to the US, as legal and illegal migrants. We head the list of countries which supply aspirants for US citizenship more because of the failure of our economic policies than the exceptional quality of our educational institutions.

Recent riots in the United Kingdom show that a country mobbed by immigrants is usually concerned about the social integration of newcomers and the import of foreign quarrels to their shores. How have Indians who have entered the US met such expectations?

From the viewpoint of integration, the cultural stress experienced by Indian families, when their conservative traditions are challenged by American social practices like dating, has been documented in US and Indian movies of the 1990s. Migrant families even sheltered children from excessive foreign influence by returning to their roots, particularly when they could do this without loss of material comfort, as the Indian economy opened up.

The careers of those who remained in the US were eased by their command of the English language and their technical prowess. But, some features of the US work environment which suited Indian migrants were not particularly admirable.

Neither country offers a level playing field for engineers, who today constitute the majority of immigrants. This is an intensely patriarchal area almost everywhere.

By culture and education, early Indian migrant engineers were conditioned to fit into such predominantly male American workspaces. Indian families are geared to subordinate the autonomy and preferences of women to the priorities of their spouses. And, in neither country are women engineers welcome in colleges or on shop floors.

Peggy Seeger spoke for women around the world when she sang “I’m gonna be an engineer” in 1971. Yet, few of the women who strayed into IITs could hope for successful careers in India or the US, in the face of familial and professional hurdles, not even when desk-bound information technology jobs became the norm.

No wonder that the 2003 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of IITs by overseas Indian engineers became a stag party. The question I asked then in a piece written for the ‘Economic Times’ called “Where have all the women gone?” is at last being answered.

Women engineers have begun using bargaining tools and class action suits to call out the biassed, remunerative and promotional practices of tech businesses and forced them to offer redress.

The IT companies are also being accused of caste discrimination, which is similar in many ways to the racist treatment of African Americans. ‘Lower caste’ Dalits, who have migrated to the US after benefiting from Indian affirmative action policies (seat reservation in educational institutions) complain about the indifference and hostility of the “high” caste Indians, who head these businesses.

The WSJ article feigns ignorance of the inequalities and injustices within US and India, which put the American dream beyond the reach of many migrants. There is minimal integration of Indians with American mainstream culture, if we look at our presence in Hollywood or on Broadway.

Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamalan’s contribution to filmi kitsch is undeniable, but writers like Salman Rushdie and Amitava Ghosh, who live in New York, are hardly purveyors of Americana. The marquees of musicals (America’s distinctive contribution to the dramatic arts) are also devoid of Indian names, unlike the billboards of the theatres that line the London Strand.

Import of foreign quarrels to the US by migrants cannot be avoided, when asylum is offered to political dissidents. The Khalistani question is one such example.

On the whole, however, although happenings in India are keenly watched and sometimes debated in the US Congress, they have not provoked violent demonstrations among contending migrant groups on American soil. Nor is the Indian government likely to cosy up to a new President through an Indian connection.

America had posed a special challenge to Narendra Modi, the present Prime Minister of India, because of the visa ban issued by the State Department following the post-Godhra carnage during his chief ministership.

After it was revoked, branches of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayam Sangh (RSS) like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) have been funding US networks and pro-Modi lobbies. Details of their activities were revealed in a ‘Caravan’ article in 2020 during the last Presidential election.

Their aim is to mobilise support for PM Modi among families of Indian origin by offering them ways to “protect Indian culture”. They drum up crowds for his US visits and induce NRIs to register and vote for Modi in Indian elections.

They block protests against his policies by equating them with “Hinduphobia” and have even evoked this bogey against dalits talking about caste discrimination in the US.

Their hand was behind the candidature of Tulsi Gabbard (who is not of Indian descent but subscribes to Hindutva), during the Democratic primaries for the 2020 Presidential election, as recorded in the Caravan article. But, their efforts to penetrate the Biden White House and the Democratic party met with failure.

Their role in the present election is not clear, now that their candidate has shifted her allegiance to the Trump camp. A Kamala Harris Presidency will not give them or the Indian government special access to the White House. In the event of a Trump victory, however, will diplomacy go beyond the usual political and strategic techniques? We can only wait and see.

Renuka Viswanathan retired from the Indian Administrative Service. Views expressed here are the writer’s own.