The complicated diaspora story

THE New York Times can’t seem to have enough of Usha Chilukuri Vance. Her non-designer dresses, her square heels, her black hair with its “visible streaks of gray” — indeed, all her appearances this past week at the US Republican National Convention, where her husband JD Vance accepted the nomination as Donald Trump’s running mate — have persuaded the grand old newspaper that the potential second most powerful wife in the world, unlike the Trump women, doesn’t spend all her time “catering to the male gaze”.

The exact opposite is also true. We revel in criticising the ‘foreigner’, especially if he is White, using our superior ‘5,000-year-old civilisation’ inheritance as a weapon.

Usha’s professional credentials seem far more interesting – she works with a ‘cool, woke’ San Francisco law firm. She met JD Vance at Yale and went on to get a Gates fellowship at Cambridge. Till 2014, she was a registered Democrat. She was already married to him for seven years when he delivered a speech titled ‘The Universities are the Enemy’ in 2021.

There’s so much shifting in America these days that the old certainties about ‘red’ and ‘blue’, the colours of the Republican and Democrat parties, respectively, may no longer ring as true. Trump, himself, wants to speak for all of America, not just the Republican ‘half’ of the country. Vance himself has moved from describing Trump as ‘cultural heroin’ to becoming his vice-presidential pick. And then there’s Kamala Harris.

When Joe Biden steps down from his re-election bid, as seems more than likely this weekend, will the eminently forgettable Ms Harris slide into his spot — or will the Democrats find another leader to lead them?

For all those cheering at home about ‘Indian-Americans’ being right next to the heartbeat of power — the fact is Kamala has always identified herself as ‘black’ rather than ‘brown’. Usha, too, who remains both Hindu and vegetarian, is hardly likely to influence her husband to change US policy in favour of India, even though her granduncle back in Andhra Pradesh was once the head of the state RSS unit.

In the lingo of the Chandigarh street, people like these are called ‘coconuts’ — Brown on the outside, White on the inside.

Remember Daleep Singh? Two years ago, the former US Deputy National Security Adviser — and grandnephew of Dalip Singh Saund, the first Sikh as well as Indian-American to be elected to the US Congress — told the Modi government that there would be ‘consequences’ if India tried to circumvent US sanctions and buy cheap Russian oil in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Daleep’s remarks seriously upset New Delhi at the time and Indian officials had to tell the Americans that if they wanted to speak frankly, they would have to do it in private.

Daleep would certainly qualify as a top-quality ‘coconut’ — incapable of sensitivity towards the people he still looks like.

Of course, we must celebrate the achievements of Indians abroad — that’s a given. In the last 100-odd years since the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act, when Indians were forbidden from entering the US, the Indian-American community has possibly become the most successful expatriate community, numbering about five million. When @TheRabbitHole84 handle pointed out on X that the median household income of Indian-Americans at $119,858 was higher than of all other Asian communities, including Chinese, Japanese and Pakistani, Elon Musk himself RTd the tweet. Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and Satya Nadella of Microsoft lead two of the 10 largest US companies.

The diaspora story is a complicated one. Love and yearning for the mother country remain strong, even though both the immigrant’s nicely manicured feet are firmly planted ‘back home’. Most people are able to juggle both identities and emotions well — Karan Johar’s many movies will testify to that. The problem arises when Indians begin to identify with their compatriots abroad and imagine that these compatriots are still part of the extended village they left behind — even when the village in question may be from a different part of the country and, perhaps, even from a different era.

It’s a bit like the village bumpkin saying he has a right to live in the house of his ‘jaat-bhai’ in the city. In fact, the current hysteria over Usha Vance or earlier Kamala Harris — as journalists hunt out grandaunts and uncles in the mother country — is really a bit of an extension of that exact same feeling the said bumpkin expresses towards the successful city-bhai. We are an emotional people, for sure, and what is life without feeling and fervour; the problem arises when we allow sentiment to contaminate our better judgement.

So, Rishi Sunak becomes ‘our man’ in London, although it was his grandparents who left India and first moved to Kenya. Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam has a special connect — even though he is of Jaffna Tamil origin. And Leo Varadkar, the former Taoiseach of Ireland, is just a small hop and step from ‘amchi Mumbai’.

Sometimes, it gets worse. Few care about Mohamed Irfaan Ali, the President of Guyana, or Chandrikapersad Santokhi, the President of Suriname, or Wavel Ramkalawan, the President of Seychelles — all of them descendants of British-indentured labour in these former British colonies. Government figures suggest there are 32 million people of Indian origin abroad, not counting those in South Asia, but the truth is that our admiration remains focused predominantly on the successes and achievements of those in the West.

The exact opposite is also true. We revel in criticising the ‘foreigner’, especially if he is White, using our superior “5,000-year-old civilisation” inheritance as a weapon — blissfully unaware that it actually reveals our deep insecurity about our own place in the world. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh once captured this Indian dilemma succinctly. “Yankee go home,” he said on our collective behalf, “but take me with you”.

Moral of the story? The adoration of Usha Vance and Kamala Harris is tainted, but we are simply unable to see it that way.