Article: The President-elect and India

This was a great article about future U.S. relations with India. Martha Nussbaum, the author, is a renowned scholar of Indian soceity and politics, and she's particularly attuned to minority rights and religious violence. Its nice to see those topics addressed in the context of U.S. policy toward India.

The article brings up the issue of NRIs and how they affect US-India policies. (NRI = Non Resident Indian, the Indian government's term for Indians who live abroad). I am, of course, really interested in the political activism of immigrant groups, and I think NRIs in the United States are a particularly interesting community. The 2000 Census counts about 1.6 million Indians in the United States. Its by and large a professional and affluent immigrant group. Nussbaum writes that the NRI community is active on issues like business and entrepreneurship and the US-India nuclear deal. And, her article recognizes that they are an interesting piece of the Hindu-Muslim political picture. But she doesn't go into it in too much detail, so here's my snippet of thoughts on the matter.

Its not unusual for immigrants to be involved in home-country politics, and sometimes, for them to have more hard-line political views than people in the country itself. For example, a friend of mine who lived in Israel for years says that American Jews tend to be more hawkish than most Jews he knew in Israel... maybe simply because the American media doesn't offer the spectrum of views about the Israel-Palestine conflict that are available to Israelis through what my friend describes as a very vibrant and thoughtful Israeli press.  Another example:  Cubans in the United States are known for their hard-line views on the Castro regime and US-Cuba relations as compared to Cubans in Cuba (although that is starting to change).

A similar dynamic might apply to Indians. Its possible that the beliefs of Hindu nationalists in the United States are actually more hardened and polarized than those of many of their counterparts in India because they are further removed from the complexities of Hindu-Muslim politics and interactions.  Since they don't actually live in that society, maybe they have fewer personal reasons to compromise.

To give a very stark example: In 1994, the Federation of Hindu Associations of Los Angeles awarded its “Hindu of the Year” title to Bal Thackeray. Thackeray is the leader of the Shiv Sena, and is a total extremist. He has advocated violence against Muslims, praised Hitler and incited riots in Mumbai. This award for Thackeray in the United States came at a time when the BJP, a mainstream nationalist party with strong links to extremist elements, was quickly toning down its nationalist rhetoric because so many Indians in India were shocked by the destruction of the Babri mosque and were pretty disenchanted with militant nationalism. So the political views of this Indian-American umbrella association were out of sync with the spirit of Indian politics at the time. Another example: a year after the destruction of the mosque, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (an American offshoot of a Hindu extremist group) raised over $1 million.

For more on this, see Vinay Lal's essay about the Indian diaspora in the United States. Its also worth mentioning that according to Lal, the BJP has more support among Indians in the United States than any other party.