There is a dizzy breeze of self-congratulation in the Indian-American diaspora around Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit. This is not unexpected. Adulation often fills the prime minister’s packed stadium events abroad. Experts readily list trade, technology and defence achievements to attest to India’s growing importance. Now, in addition to these usual reasons for celebration, the PM is also interacting with prominent “thought leaders” including popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, mathematician Nicholas Nassim Taleb, economist Paul Romer, investor Ray Dalio, and tech and space visionary Elon Musk.
This outreach towards thought leaders seems consistent with earlier initiatives towards the Western public sphere by the Modi government. In January 2022, the PM wrote personal letters of appreciation to global figures including cricket players, authors, and scholars. Such actions, backed up by nine years of his leadership as the Prime Minister of India and numerous stadium events abroad, naturally make for a euphoric mood in the Indian diaspora every time he visits.
Yet, there are some sobering questions that one might ask. What are the ground realities for Indians in the diaspora today? Have all these spectacular stadium events and “thought leader” feelers led to a greater voice for Indians abroad? Does the Indian-American diaspora really possess the kind of influence and power many of its members, and an uncritical press, often attribute to it? Or, is the fun and fanfare about “soft power” a diversion from the glaring reality that the discourse set by the Western establishment about the Modi government, India, and Hindus more broadly, is not what the cheerleaders say it is?
It is telling that just a few days before the celebrations about the PM’s visit began, Hindu American leaders were complaining rather helplessly on social media about how a first-time California state senator (who many Hindu Americans had voted for) had slammed her doors on them. Despite their pleas that the senator’s anti-caste bill (SB-403) was based on false premises, divisive, redundant, and possibly even illegal for religiously profiling one community, the Democrats in California apparently found their Indian American constituents to be unimportant enough to ignore. Even the fact of the much talked about Cisco caste investigation (around which much of the case for the caste discrimination laws was made) being dismissed recently has failed to give Hindu American groups the grounds to contest the bill more persuasively.
And yet, from complaining about being gaslit by the Democratic party, leaders have turned now to boasting about how important Indians are in America. This peculiar behaviour reminds us that despite its obvious educational and economic achievements, the Indian American diaspora remains incredibly isolated, insular, and oblivious to social and political realities in many ways — the reality of a deeply embedded, desperately dishonest, and bitterly unchanging narrative about Hinduism and Hindus in important institutions in the US.
One can see this narrative even in seemingly complimentary coverage of India and the diaspora in flagship news media in the West. “Flattery about GDP, mendacity about everything else”, seems to be the reigning formula now. To anyone who studies the media, or politics or society more broadly, the writing is quite plainly on the wall. Hindu Americans have money, but no influence, because they are so bereft of their own “thought leadership,” quite frankly, that they do not know what it is they are so quickly losing from one college-going generation to the next.
Another example of this inability to self-represent comes from the time of the Obama administration. A few years ago, the respected US correspondent of an Indian newspaper shared the story that President Obama was at a wealthy Indian-American fundraiser and had remarked that Indian Americans were the only people who donated to politicians without really asking for anything for their community. They were content with just photos and bragging rights. This tendency has repeated itself for years. When Indians in the diaspora organise, they lack a social or cultural “ask” that might benefit them collectively. They spend good money to get political celebrities but everyone knows that in the end, these actions are about securing an individual’s status within the community, no more.
After decades of such pointless solipsism, whatever a few cultural organisations might ask now seem to lack strength, and worse, even credibility. For instance, no one takes their “Hinduphobia” cries seriously because they have not invested in rigorous social research as a community to show they are serious. When other minority communities in the US talk about anti-semitism or Islamophobia, they do so because they have supported scholars in appropriate fields of study to examine and inform their claims. The Hindu-American community, on the other hand, merely turns its nose up at scholars in the social sciences and humanities, obsessing instead about the works of a few unhinged racists in the ranks of these professions to pontificate about Hinduphobia in the academy as a whole. In over 20 years of skirmishes with academia, Hindu Americans have failed to listen to one Hindu voice from the academy. Instead, they complain to the management, where they are duly ignored. The status snobbery is obvious, the consequences of this for its children are less so.
After the euphoria about meeting Modi and Biden wears down, one hopes that the diaspora’s wealthiest (if not brightest) will reassess the reality that confronts their descendants as well as what remains of their ancestors’ rich spiritual and cultural legacies. The same caution should apply to Indian leaders positioning the diaspora for their domestic political gains. If they have really made India a “Vishwa Guru,” they should be getting Joe Biden to meet Indian “thought leaders,” not the other way around.
The writer is professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco
