As the date of the U.S.
General Election draws nearer, Trump and Hindu Nationalists find favour in one
another.
Goans
can breathe a sigh of relief that the once most famous South Asian American
Republican, the arch-conservative Dinesh D’souza, has all but slunk away from
the public eye, owing to the fact that he was found
guilty of campaign finance violations.
Instead, while that son-of-Goan-soil attempts to shill yet another book
about what he believes to be wrong with American politics, from the comfort of
the Internet, other South Asians have taken up the mantle of embarrassing
subcontinental people in the homeland and abroad.
Enter
the Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC). In an event
they hosted for U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump in New
Jersey a fortnight ago, the RHC put on a clownish display that melded
Bollywood, Islamophobia, and patriotism. Though several Indian American attendees
were surprised to see Trump at the spectacle, which was billed “Humanity
Against Terrorism”, perhaps their first clue that something wasn’t right should
have been that the programme was presented by an organization that calls itself
the Republican Hindu Coalition. Describing the affair in The Concourse as one where “Hindus
and Trump Rallied together in a Xenophobic Fever Dream”
(21 October), Giri Nathan marvels at how the “fundraiser for ‘victims of terror
in America and around the world’” managed to “somehow set a new standard for
surreality in the present election cycle, with a Donald Trump keynote speech
bookended by hours of Bollywood song and dance”.
But
not to be outdone by his hosts, Donald Trump upped the oddness ante by
proclaiming, “I am a big fan of Hindu [sic], and I am a big fan of India!” As Eesha
Pandit remarks in an article for Salon (22 October), Trump would be given
to such effusiveness, since “[t]here are more than 4 million South Asian
Americans currently living in the United States, and approximately 67 percent
of them, or 2.7 million, are U.S. citizens. Additionally, South Asian-Americans
are one of the most politically active ethnic blocs”. Trump went on to announce
that if he was elected, “the Indian and Hindu community will have a big friend
in the White House”.
Undoubtedly,
the lynchpin in this unholy alliance between overseas Hindu nationalism and
Trump’s pro-Hindu/Indian American stance is the Islamophobia both sides share. In
The Guardian (17 October), Rashmee
Kumar quotes Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan
as saying of the RHC-Trump event that its “celebration of Diwali suggested that
attendees were mostly upper caste…” In addition to a lamp-lighting ceremony,
the audience was also treated to some sort of performance
where make-believe terrorists and U.S. soldiers duked it out. The show was very
much in keeping with Trump’s virulent
anti-Muslim campaign, but it also speaks to
Hindu Indian nationalism which posits Muslims as the other to the Indian
nation.
That
this then also appeals to the Trump-supporting Indian American, even if a
miniscule demographic at just seven
percent, bears witness to the perpetuation
of toxic Hindu nationalism within the Indian nation-state and its diaspora.
Further, in seeing India and Indian Americans only as Hindus, Trump
additionally borrows from the community’s own self-presentation as manifestly
upper caste and the authentic arbiters of Indianness.
Multiple
incidents of post-9/11 xenophobia in American have shown that time and again
racists cannot (and do not want to) tell the difference between Muslims, Arabs,
South Asians, Latinos, Sikhs, Hindus, or anyone ‘foreign-appearing’ for that
matter. Despite this, that the RHC would court a man whose supporters wish to
“Make America Great Again”, which is euphemistic for making it White Again, is
proof of a dysfunctional relationship. Equally enamoured, Trump has just
released a campaign
video in which he attempts to woo Indian
American voters by speaking in Hindi. Maxwell Tani reports in Business Insider (27 October), that “[t]he
ad prominently features an image of [Indian Prime Minister] Modi as well as
Trump's take on Modi's popular
campaign slogan, ‘Ab Ki Baar Trump
Sarkaar,’ or, ‘This Time, We're With Trump's Government’”. Given Modi’s own
history of drumming up Hindutva, this is not just the stuff of coincidence.
As
can be seen by the commentators I have cited above, many South Asian Americans
have actively voiced their disdain of the RHC ‘fundraiser’ and Trump’s odious pandering
to the religiously nationalist sentiments of Indian American voters. In a
similar vein, a video crusade titled #VoteAgainstHate has
begun making the social media rounds in an effort to educate “long-time
Republicans and unaffiliated voters, particularly of immigrant heritage, to
vote against hate by not voting for Donald Trump”. In the version of the video
aimed at South Asian American voters, several younger generation Americans of
subcontinental heritage address their elders and remind them of their immigrant
hardships and desires for a better life. “You guys are the American dream”, one
of the speakers states emphatically in a plea to those who fail to see that
Trump’s America is a dangerous one.
But while the video does well to point out
to South Asian Americans that casting their lot with Trump would be a disservice
to immigrants, it does so by relying on the unquestioned belief in the
homogeneity of the South Asian American community, particularly along the lines
of class privilege as epitomised by the constant references to the American
success stories of this demographic. Not only is this an overstatement which
essentially reads Indian Americanness and, likely, caste privilege, onto the
diversity of South Asian America, but it also doesn’t delve into the very
elitism and Islamophobia in the community that has drawn Trump to it. It is not
until this community begins to ask difficult questions of itself about its
investment in caste privilege and nationalism that change can occur.
From The Goan.
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