Opinion Inside Track by Coomi Kapoor: India’s Top Export
Indian Americans have headed corporate giants and donated millions to the Trump campaign. They have made a name for themselves in professions ranging from academia to technology, banking and medicine.
File photo of PM Modi and Donald Trump. The much-delayed Indo-US trade deal was finally announced last week. But the hyped clout of the Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) in the USA appears to have played little part in reaching the nebulous agreement. In fact, 2025 saw the unraveling of the smug assumption that India’s most valuable export underpinning a special relationship with the USA are the PIOs, for whom Prime Minister Modi’s rally at Madison Square Garden in 2014 and the Howdy Modi show of strength in Texas were organised.
PIOs were once seen as America’s model immigrants, with a mean household income even higher than the US average and a low crime rate. Indian Americans have headed corporate giants and donated millions to the Trump campaign. They have made a name for themselves in professions ranging from academia to technology, banking and medicine. They have even arrived in US politics, traditionally the preserve of those with well established roots in the country. Kamala Harris was the Democrats’ candidate for President in 2024. New York’s newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani’s bloodlines are Indian, even if he opts to play up his African background. The Indian connection even extends to Vice President J D Vance’s household — his wife Usha’s parents migrated from Andhra Pradesh. The number of PIOs embedded in the Trump administration is an eye-opener.
Trump’s PIO Army
Kashyap (Kash) Patel is FBI chief, Sriram Krishnan is Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, Kush Desai is Deputy Press Secretary at the White House, S Paul Kapur is Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs. Harmeet Dhillon is the US Assistant Attorney General. With such powerful well-wishers, the Trump administration’s step motherly treatment of India, lumping us with Myanmar and Syria for tariffs, was puzzling. But lately, a sneaking suspicion has dawned that the PIOs in the Trump administration, far from being India’s backers, were working against our interests to demonstrate their loyalty to Trump. The imperative to adopt an anti-India line was pressure from Trump’s powerful MAGA supporters who have targeted the Indian immigrant as the villain in depriving white Americans of jobs. Online abuse against Indians on social media have ballooned, with Indians accused of visa scamming and grabbing positions which should rightfully belong to the native-born American. The MAGA lobby complains that Indians have manipulated American laws so as to bring to the USA not just their kith but even village kin. A disproportionately high number of Indian students study at American universities. (In 2025, the number of Indians seeking college admission fell by some 70 per cent.) After a Sikh truck caused a major accident on a Florida highway last year, there was a flood of abusive messages on social media, not just against all Sikh freight drivers, but even Raj Subramaniam, CEO of FedEx.
Evangelical Christians, who form the backbone of MAGA, complain against recent Indian arrivals altering the character of picturesque Norman Rockwell-style neighbourhoods with their noisy exuberant celebration of festivals, smelly cuisine and other idiosyncrasies. A 90-foot statue of Hanuman in Texas caused much angst among locals.
PIO Trojan Horses
Trump’s PIO cohort seems to believe in the old Hindi proverb that the newest convert is keenest to prove his loyalty. Recently, Republican Senator Ted Cruz in a leaked telephone call named Vance as one of the key White House men resisting an Indo-American trade deal. Vance, a product of the MAGA movement, is vulnerable because of his Hindu spouse and he even admitted that he hoped to persuade her to convert. Significantly, Usha did not even meet her relatives or visit her parents’ home state during the Vances’ brief trip to India. Dhillon in the Justice Department is known for her tough line in prosecuting student demonstrators on campuses and cracking down on universities’ hiring practices. Kash Patel has enforced Trump’s agenda vigorously, with special attention to MAGA’s pet projects. S Paul Kapur contributed in formulating tough immigration-related policies.
When Modi visited the USA for a Quad summit in 2024, Democrat candidate Harris’s office could not find an available time slot for meeting the Indian Prime Minister. Mamdani during his mayoral campaign declared that Modi was unwelcome in the USA. He even claimed flippantly that he doubted that after the 2002 riots there were any Muslims left in Gujarat. (In fact, the percentage population of Gujarati Muslims remains around eight per cent and their economic and education indicators are far higher than the average Indian Muslim.) Recently, Nalin Haley, son of PIO Nikki Haley, a former US ambassador to the UN, declared on social media that India was run by a “cheap government” which sends “cheap labour” to the United States.
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