By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Most people now know that the Democratic Party candidate in the upcoming American presidential election, Kamala Harris, had a very impressive Indian mother, originally from Tamil Nadu state. Less well known is that the wife of Republican vice-presidential hopeful, J.D. Vance, is also Indian.
Usha Chilukuri Vance was raised by Indian immigrants from the state of Andhra Pradesh and grew up in an ethnically diverse San Diego suburb. Her father, Krish Chilukuri, is an aerospace engineer and university lecturer, and her mother, Lakshmi, is a professor of molecular biology and provost at the University of California at San Diego.
Chilukuri Vance received her BA degree in history from Yale in 2007 and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in England in 2009, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2013, she spent a year clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he served as an appeals court judge in Washington, followed by a year as a law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts.
“My parents are Hindu. That is one of the reasons why they made such good parents. That made them very good people,” she told an interviewer recently.
All this by way of introduction to one of America’s fastest growing and successful ethnic groups. Indians constitute just under 1.5 per cent of the country’s population, some 4.6 million people, two thirds of whom are Hindu or consider themselves close to Hinduism. And they have punched way above their weight in just about every field.
There were few Indians in the United States prior to 1965. All this changed with that year’s Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced the racist 1924 Immigration Act.
Indian Americans today have the highest median household income in the U.S. by ethnic group, almost twice that of white households. About 75 per cent have college degrees, including 40 per cent with postgraduate degrees. They also dominate the elite, competitive academic public high schools. They own 60 per cent of all hotels. One in every 20 doctors in the U.S. is Indian, as is one in every 10 students entering medical school.
Indian Americans have made their names in countless fields, from tech (Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna) to science (Nobel laureate in chemistry Venkatraman Ramakrishnan) to literature (Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri) to journalism (Ali Velshi).
Indian academic deans like Chilukuri Vance’s mother are found at top American business schools, including the universities of Chicago, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern and New York. Indian American kids even dominate the National Spelling Bee contests!
No surprise, then, that Indians are now fielding political candidates on the national stage. Being a relatively wealthy and highly educated voter group helps that engagement, as politically minded Indian Americans can access resources and fundraise from within the community.
“What you’re seeing now is a virtuous circle in which people are starting to run for office. They’re getting political donations from their friends, their social networks, but even communities across the country who are excited and proud of their candidacy,” according to Karthick Ramakrishnan of AAPI Data, an organization studying the political attitudes of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
There are now five Indian Americans in Congress and nearly 40 in state legislatures. Two candidates who made a splash in the Republican primaries earlier this year were the tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
According to data from the Pew Research Center, Indian Americans have a largely positive view of India, with 76 per cent seeing it favorably.
America’s Indian community is also affected by India’s own political shifts. For the past few decades, India’s version of Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, is making strides not just in India but also in its diaspora.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, whose Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) now rules India, finds increasing support in the American Indian diasporas. A Pew Research Centre report notes that 51 per cent see him very favorably.
In 2015, the Chicago billionaire industrialist Shalabh Kumar set up the Republican Hindu Coalition, and he reportedly extolled Modi as his idol. He poured money into Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Trump even recorded a message in Hindi.
During a recent three-day visit to the United States, Modi, along with the prime ministers of Australia and Japan, attended the sixth QUAD Leaders’ summit hosted by Joe Biden.
Modi met with some 15,000 Indian Americans Sept. 22 at the “Modi & US: Progress Together” rally at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, NY. “Wherever I travel, every leader praises the Indian diaspora,” he told them. Calling the Indians settled in the United States “ambassadors,” the prime minister thanked the Indian community in the United States for the respect India has earned in that country
“This is the American Indian spirit” that “is taking India-U.S. relations to new heights.” India has decided to open two new consulates in Boston and Los Angeles.
The historian and journalist Vijay Prashad sees a growing neoconservative chauvinism in the community, which he calls “Yankee Hindutva,” complete with a Hindu lobby that is beginning to rival any other ones in terms of its political clout.
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