Indian-Americans help in changing US relations with India

“Like all Americans participating in politics, American Indians are now sufficiently mature to advocate for their motherland much as the Jews be capable advocates for Israel,” the daily quotes Democratic Congressman Gary Ackerman as having said. He is chairman of the 118-member Congressional Caucus on India and Indians American.

Of an estimated one million American-Indians nationwide, about 80,000 to 100,000 live in the Washington area, mainly linked to high-tech corridors in Virginia and Maryland. American-Indians contribute both to Democrats, such as Ackerman and President Clinton, and to Republicans, such as Texas Gov George W Bush and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

Helms, a staunch backer of anti-communist Pakistan when it hosted anti-Soviet Afghan refugees in the 1980s, now tends to view India with a new-found sympathy and understanding, the daily says quoting Congressional sources.

It quoted Mark Lagon, Helms’ senior foreign policy aide, having said that the United States should drop sanctions on India, imposed after Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998, but did not offer such largesse to Pakistan.

Swadesh Chatterjee, president of the Indian-American Forum for Political Education, has met with Helms and, according to Congressional sources, opened him up to a new view of India. During the Cold War, India was both anti-Western and a big Soviet arms customer. It has since begun to reform its quasi-Socialist economy, and the United States has become its main trading partner.

The daily says some US strategic thinkers also find India increasingly valuable as a long-term counterbalance to the growth of Chinese influence in Asia.

Indian-American businessmen, for example, met with White House aides on Thursday to discuss joining the President on his March 19-26 trip to India.

About 300,000 American-Indian work in high-technology firms in the Silicon Valley, where they earned 60 billion dollars last year, Stanford University economist Rafiq Dossani told a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Thursday.

They are beginning to funnel their incomes, which average 200,000 dollars a year, into South India’s high-technology boom, already surpassing its export industry as a sources of foreign cash, he said.

Nationwide, American-Indians’ income averages 60,000 dollars, according to the 1990 census, higher than any other Asian immigrant group.