by NAMIT ARORA
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (left) and US President Donald Trump PHOTO/Indian Express
Indian-Americans, a group that includes me, overwhelmingly support Democrats (84 percent voted for Obama in 2008) and will do so again this year. Only a tiny minority is expected to vote for Trump (perhaps single digit, including jackasses like Dinesh D’Souza). Does this make us very liberal as a group?
Consider some more facts. We Indian-Americans overwhelmingly support Modi, too, at a rate even higher than among Indians in India. We host rock-star receptions for Modi in arenas like the Madison Square Garden. But Trump and Modi are similar in so many ways—authoritarian / anti-democratic, anti-Muslim; anti-LGBT; steeped in nationalism (White/Hindu); allied with far-right groups (KKK/RSS); economically conservative; anti-labor union; thuggish (think Amit Shah); big on defense spending; etc. Even if we concede that Trump is worse, their proximities are undeniable. So why do we Indian-Americans despise Trump yet love Modi? What’s behind this apparent paradox?
Part of the answer is that we are an immigrant minority group, so we need the social liberalism of Democrats, which is far more hospitable to immigrants like us. However, most of us come from the dominant class in India (upper-caste Hindus). We harbor an instinctive dislike for Muslims and are insensitive to the concerns of minorities in India. Modi stokes our Hindu pride and nationalism, and gives us a feel-good sense of India as a major world power (it helps that most of us are not reminded daily of the grim realities of life in India, and the invisible ‘development’ promised by Modi). Modi too wants to make India “great again” (but which he began doing by cutting the already low spending on education, healthcare, and the environment in his first two annual budgets!). From afar, we fall for Modi’s bullshit in ways we don’t fall for Trump’s bullshit, though the bullshit is not too different.
Most of us Indian-Americans are conservative in other realms too: gender roles, sexuality, ‘family values’. We may be quite sensitive to the racism we face from whites in America but are ourselves very racist towards blacks. I’m not speaking here about those among us whom one might dismiss as ‘cow-belt hicks’ but about the high-wage-earning Indian professional class in places like Silicon Valley.
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