Howdy Mr Trump? That's India calling

At over 4 million strong, the Indian diaspora in the United States is one of the most influential immigrant community. Indians constitute the richest ethnic group with median household income higher than that of any other group in the USA as per most recent census estimates, with lowest poverty rates in America at 7 per cent. The number is 17 per cent for other immigrant groups, and 14 per cent for Americans taken as a whole. An Indian kid has won the annual Spelling Bee contest for the last 11 years on the trot, with Americans winning only four times out of last 20 years going back to 1999. So, the heft in all spheres – intellectual, economic, and political (not necessarily in that order) – is such that the community punches above its weight.

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While the presence in the first two spheres has been around for decades going back to Hargobind Khurana and Amar Gopal Bose in 1960s, and the Information Technology revolution of 1980s that produced Vinod Khoslas and Vinod Dhams, political capital is a more recent phenomenon going back to the decade of 1990s and 2000s when the Chatwals, Jindals and Haleys came up on the American political horizon. It has been a steady rise since then with the 2020 presidential race having two serious contenders with India connect – Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris.

The idea of leveraging diaspora for India’s soft power projection took shape during the first NDA government when the Vajpayee government started the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) to bring the globally spread community with Indian roots under one umbrella. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken the thought to next level turning it into an important foreign policy tool. Events like Howdy Modi and Madison Square Garden bring the arc lights on the community and through their stories to the nation as well, which then can be used to push India’s foreign policy objectives. So even as the opposition grudges the attention Modi gets in his travels abroad like no other leader in recent history, in marketing jargon the buzz created around the country through these gigs can translate into business and much else.

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This then is the background that sets Donald Trump’s eagerness to be seen with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the ‘Howdy Modi’ event in Houston, Texas. In the 538-votes electoral college that chooses president of the United States, 38 votes come from Texas, second highest for any of the 50 States and the District of Columbia after California with 55 votes. In 2016, Trump won 36 of them keeping with the Red tradition of the southern frontier State that has stayed with the Republicans since 1976. But the 2018 midterm polls threw some disconcerting notes for the GOP. The Democrats pulled off victory in two districts and could consolidate gains in the 2020 presidential elections, making it a possible battleground State as they call it in American hustings.

Do the names of two India connect presidential candidates strike a pattern? Both Harris and Gabbard are Democrats! While Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley became Republican Governors of Louisiana and South Carolina in 2007 and 2010 respectively, the Indian community largely swings left in the United States. All the four Indian Americans elected to the US Congress in the 2018 midterm poll – Raja Krishnamoorthy, Premila Jeyapal, Ro Khanna, and Ami Bera – are Democrats. Of the other 8 Indian Americans who had contested the elections, and lost, 7 were Democrats and only one a Republican.That’s one more reason why Trump is taking all the trouble to fly down to Houston and be with Modi despite a busy United Nations calendar. 

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Mercurial Trump’s refusal of Modi government’s Republic Day invite in 2018 was seen as a snub to India by a president who was variously described as impetuous and an insurgent in the White House. His standing by Modi in Houston this Sunday as India’s soft power plays out would essentially be two democracies acknowledging each other, grudgingly perhaps in case of the American president. And hello, did you notice I did not even mention Pakistan!

Read: 'Howdy, Houston!,' PM says on his arrival in the US before 'Howdy, Modi'