Michael Wyke/AP Photo
Attendees at the ‘Howdi Modi’ event, September 22, 2019, at NRG Stadium in Houston
*Indicates a name has been changed at the source’s request.
In September 2019, Vijay Mehta attended “Howdy Modi,” eager to see Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The Houston rally drew more than 50,000 people, a rare mass gathering for an elected foreign leader in the United States. It featured over 400 musicians and dancers, Bollywood-style fanfare, and a visit from President Trump. The two leaders caused a Secret Service frenzy with a surprise hand-in-hand walk around the stadium, footage the Trump campaign is now using to court Indian American voters.
Mehta, a retired surgeon from Temple, Texas, is a big Modi fan. “I was awed by Modi. I had tears in my eyes,” he says. He is also enthusiastically voting for Biden/Harris in November. “Trump invited himself last minute. Most people in the audience didn’t even know he was going to be there.”
On the surface, Mehta seems to defy conventional wisdom. Modi’s hard-line immigration and citizenship laws and his tacit approval for Hindu fundamentalism seem well aligned with Trump’s policies. But for many Indian Americans, particularly Hindu Indian Americans, who shift from being the majority in India to a minority in the United States, voting for a Democrat and supporting Modi are not mutually exclusive political identities.
That Trump is trying to leverage his relationship with Modi to gain favor with the community is no surprise. The nearly two million eligible Indian American voters are a highly educated, wealthy, and fast-growing voting bloc with sizable numbers in critical swing states. By some accounts, Texas now has the second-largest population of Indian Americans in the country, after California.
Yet voters like Mehta are quick to find daylight between the two men. “Trump is a blind nationalist while Modi is a compassionate nationalist,” he says. “Trump can’t even denounce white supremacy when asked directly. In Modi’s 15-year career [as a politician] he hasn’t said a single anti-Muslim thing.” (Modi is a more careful, self-controlled speaker than Trump—though he is also strategically silent during instances of communal violence, and clearly bigoted speech thrives within his party and among his own appointees.)
Others, like Dilip Desai*, a staunch Elizabeth Warren supporter in the Democratic primary, insist that focusing on Modi’s record on human rights and religious minorities in India ignores India’s problem with corruption and the country’s lack of political choices. Congress, now India’s opposition party, ruled the country for nearly 50 years after independence mostly under the control of a single family, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The party even ran the same candidate—Rahul Gandhi—in the last two elections, despite resounding defeats. “If there was someone better than Modi, then I would support that person,” says Desai. “Modi is not personally corrupt and in India, that’s enough.”
Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes that Indians in the diaspora tend to give Modi a long leash on social issues because of his perceived disinterest in personal wealth and their frustration with cronyism. But in the United States, Trump’s bid to reduce H-1B and student visas, his crude, racist rhetoric about minorities, and the vocal, Christian evangelical base have made the GOP the party of intolerance in the eyes of many Indian American voters. “Because Hinduism is not traditionally a proselytizing religion, there’s a sense of wait a second, we respect all faiths but you can’t all of a sudden shove yours down our throats. This is a long-term problem for the Republican Party,” says Vaishnav.
The idea that Modi’s popularity might garner votes for Trump is partly the result of scant understanding about Indian American voters. In September, AAPI Data released a survey of Asian American voters overall, reporting that 65 percent of Indian American participants said they would vote for Biden and 28 percent for Trump. At face value, this looks like clear slippage from the Democratic Party, since only 16 percent of Indian Americans voted for Trump in 2016. Several outlets seized on the disparity to speculate that Trump’s tactics were working, glancing past the survey’s small sample size of 260 voters with a +/-6 percent margin of error.
However, a new report released on October 14 offers a fuller picture. The Indian American Attitudes Survey (IAAS), co-authored by Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, and Vaishnav, found Indian Americans firmly behind Democrats, with 72 percent saying they will vote for Biden and 22 percent for Trump, despite Modi’s popularity. Published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Pennsylvania, the survey includes nearly 1,000 voters from across the country with a +/- 3.2 percent margin of error.
“The idea that support for Modi would translate to votes for Trump is essentially an intellectually lazy argument,” said Kapur, professor of South Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, during an interview on the podcast Grand Tamasha. The argument, according to Kapur, assumes that Indian Americans don’t care about domestic issues in the country they live in, an assumption that the survey refutes.
For many Indian Americans, particularly Hindu Indian Americans, voting for a Democrat and supporting Modi are not mutually exclusive political identities.
Instead, the report reveals that the economy, health care, and racism are the top three issues that Indian Americans are prioritizing, with U.S.-India relations ranking second to last out of 12. Foreign policy, it turns out, is a low voting priority, as it is for Americans in general. The study also examines what it calls the “Kamala effect.” While groups have seized on Kamala Harris’s past comments on India’s domestic policies to paint her as anti-Hindu, results show that her candidacy, along with her heritage, has increased overall support for the Democratic ticket in the community.
In fact, the narrative that U.S.-India relations may diminish or significantly change under a Biden/Harris administration itself rings hollow. Most foreign-policy experts agree that the U.S. will continue to develop a strong relationship with India no matter who is president. “Focusing on events like ‘Howdy Modi’ is looking at where the heat is, but there’s not a lot of light there to drill down into attitudes,” said Kapur.
In Dallas, activist Chanda Parbhoo says that the rally created a false impression that Indian Americans in Texas vote overwhelmingly Republican. Parbhoo is the founder of SAAVETX, a volunteer organization that mobilizes South Asian Americans to swing Texan districts from red to blue. After the 2016 election, she reached out to her local Democratic Party office to find out how to get involved and never received a return call. “I realized we needed to engage people in a way that the party hadn’t done before or maybe didn’t know how to do. I decided to go where the South Asian community gathers, places like temples, mosques, and festivals where we were registering 100 people a session,” says Parbhoo.
In the beginning, the voters she spoke to talked more about Indian politics because it was what they knew. Now, many SAAVETX volunteers are older women who have never volunteered for a political cause before. “We’ve just started collecting useful data on South Asian American voters and finding out that while people may talk about Indian politics at parties, what they care about is health care, education, and immigration,” says Parbhoo.
Born in South Africa, Parbhoo moved to Dallas in 1979 at a time when she knew very few Indian immigrants in her community or elsewhere in the country. “During the Iran hostage crisis, every time a hostage was paraded across the screen, my family knew not to go out. People would tell us to ‘go back to your country,’ thinking we were Iranian,” Parbhoo says. “People who have lived here a long time, we’ve experienced issues with racism and we see Trump as a person bringing that back.”
Murali Chirala, a voter in the Bay Area, expressed a similar fear. Trump’s presidency has brought back memories of Dotbusters violence in New Jersey, where he lived in the late ’80s. The gang gained notoriety for attacking an Indian immigrant leaving a bar who ultimately died of his injuries. “Every time there was a little recession, I’d tell my wife not to wear a bindi to the supermarket,” says Chirala. “We thought all that was a distant memory, but what Trump has unleashed in the last four years has us worried again.”
Chirala, a fintech entrepreneur, has worked with the Modi administration on revamping the Aadhaar Program, a biometric identification number given to every Indian citizen. Chirala considers Modi a decisive leader who has elevated India on the global stage with a long-term vision. Part of that vision includes making Hindu society central to India’s identity. “There’s no longer a need to push Hindu religion under the covers. Modi brought about this comfort.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, however, Muslim Indians are disproportionately victims of discrimination and communal violence in India.
The idea that Modi’s popularity might garner votes for Trump is partly the result of scant understanding about Indian American voters.
Modi’s popularity is certainly higher among naturalized Indian American citizens than those born in the U.S. The IAAS report shows that Modi has a mean favorability score of 55 on a scale of 1 to 100, higher than Trump’s but lower than Biden’s. However, when examined more closely, co-author Badrinathan noticed that Indian Americans born in the United States have a less positive view of Modi by seven points.
Badrinathan and her colleagues are now working on a follow-up study about attitudes toward similar policy issues and current affairs in the U.S. and India. Anecdotally, she’s observed that many Indian Ph.D. candidates in the U.S. were disturbed by the Trump administration’s limit on H-1B visas that would directly affect their chances of transferring to a job in the U.S. Yet they also supported the Indian government’s Citizenship Amendment Act, which expedites a pathway to Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities in surrounding countries, but not for persecuted Muslim immigrants to India.
“For me, personally, that was a big motivation to study how people respond to the same democratic norms when they are the majority in a country versus when they are a minority, as Indian Americans are in the United States,” says Badrinathan. “Are we more likely to support democratic norms when they benefit us versus when they might come at our expense?”
For Indian Americans who support Modi but denounce Trumpism, this may be the next question to reckon with, especially if a Biden/Harris administration confronts India on human rights. But it likely won’t change their movement toward the left in American politics. “There have to be elements of fairness,” says Chirala. “In that way, we keep changing our thinking.”
