Can Indian Americans be as loyal to India as they are to the US economy in which they thrive?

Against the backdrop of the two countries avatars of nationalism stand Indian-Americans, many of whom may be wondering where their loyalties lie, or should lie..

Suppose one of our countrymen goes to America, settles there and wants to become an American citizen. However, he refuses to accept your Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and others as his national heroes. Would you then call him a national of America?”

That’s a question MS Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for 33 years between 1940 and 1973, once posed to an American professor. The question is documented in Golwakar’s fittingly titled tome, A Bunch of Thoughts.

One of the thoughts that Golwalkar wrestled with is loyalty to the Hindu Rashtra, and the inability of the minorities — obsessed as they were with creating “miniature Pakistans” and “Padrestans” — to be loyal to the country, her traditions, her heroes down the centuries, her security and prosperity. That loyalty had to be undivided, unadulterated. For Golwalkar, those with divided loyalties were the “hostiles”. The RSS chief’s question was a counter to a poser from the American professor: “Muslims and Christians are of this land alone. Why don’t you consider them as your own?”

The professor’s answer to Golwalkar’s counter-question was a sheepish no — he would not be able to consider an Indian who becomes an American citizen a national of the US if he refuses to respect that country’s national heroes.

Golwalkar’s short point was that the same criterion should be applied to India. “How can you say that we should call such people nationals who, while living here, work against the honour and traditions of the country, and insult our national heroes and objects of national veneration?” The RSS chief ’s analogy with American and an American citizen would have taken place when immigration was a gleam in the eye of most Indians. As the authors of The Other One Percent: Indians in America point out, the roughly 3 million of Indian origin who reside in the US — roughly 1% of the population — arrived in three distinct periods: the “early movers’ in the mid-1960s, the “family” cohort in the early ’90s, and the infotech generation in the mid-90s, who now make up some two-thirds of all Indian-born Americans.

Golwalkar’s poser about who is an American citizen wasn’t meant for the Indian American IT generation; but perhaps never in the past five decades has it been more apt for persons of Indian origin (PIOs) in the US than it is now. After all, this is an era in which a liberal globalised order is in decline, replaced as it is by nationalism of the “blood-and-soil, ethnic sort”, as The Economist put it. “A benign love of one’s country... is being replaced by an urge to look on the world with mistrust.”

In the US, Donald Trump’s insular campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” appears to be evolving — if that’s the right word — to address a core constituency: the Christian nationalists. Soon after becoming president, Trump thundered that he would defend American values because Americans want that: “one beautiful nation under god”. If that seemed a one-off in the first flush of an election win, Trump left little doubt about his penchant for the pious at an Independence Day weekend “Celebra Freedom Concert” in early July. The event — to honour veterans — was a blend of patriotism and pietism, the stress more on the latter, what with the audience predominantly of the evangelical Christian variety. Trump was on song: “In America we worship god, not government.”

Faith and Flag

Back home, nationalism that celebrates the flag and faith is also in vogue — much on the lines of how Golwalkar and the Sangh would have envisioned it, and what a few that represent the party at the Centre believe is the way to go. A cultural and political notion of a Hindu nation that seeks rejuvenation and revivalism is on the rise — a Hindu nation that may be accommodating and tolerant of other faiths and religious beliefs, as long as those following those faiths and beliefs are true to the salt of the land they were born in.

As Golwalkar wrote: “The mere fact of birth or nurture in a particular territory, without a corresponding mental pattern, can never give a person the status of a national in that land.” For him, “mental allegiance” was the universally accepted criterion for nationality.

Against the backdrop of the two countries’ avatars of nationalism stand the Indian Americans, many of whom may be wondering where their loyalties lie, or should lie. Most Indian Americans have traditionally been Democrats, but for the first time in a long time there was a large swing towards the Republican Party, perhaps swayed by Trump’s promise to eradicate terrorism.

Most of these Indian Americans — roughly 2 million — comprise the IT generation, the biggest beneficiaries of the outsourcing boom, easily India’s biggest contribution to a globalised world. It’s just that Trump isn’t a big fan of globalisation and outsourcing, determined as he is to have Americans “buy American, hire American”; that was what the executive order he signed in April to tighten the screws on H 1-B visas was called.

Since the Y2K days, Indian Americans have benefited from the outsourcing phenomenon. As The Other One Percent points out: Indian American households have the single highest income level of any group in the country — more than twice the general US population.

In mid-2016, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal declared that his parents came to the US from India four decades ago to become Americans, not Indian Americans. Jindal, the first Indian American to run for a presidential election, didn’t find too much of support, funds and traction and eventually had to suspend his campaign.

In the Punjab assembly elections in February, thousands of PIOs and NRIs — not just from the US — canvassed for the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress. The Election Commission (EC) subsequently sought the government’s opinion on whether PIOs can campaign in Indian elections. Meanwhile, there is a clamour from sections of PIOs for dual citizenship — of the country they were born in, and of the one they have adopted. And the Cabinet recently gave the green signal for NRIs to vote in Indian polls by “proxy”.

The EC estimates that some 16 million Indian citizens live overseas, of which about 70% are eligible to vote; about 10% of them — mostly university students and those on H-1B visas — are in the US. To paraphrase Golwalkar, would the loyalty of these overseas Indians be “undivided”, “unadulterated”?

Source: ET

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