Donald Trump won say my Indian American neighbors
by Gopal Ghosh, a software consultant in the U.S.*
Last Saturday morning, I was on my daily walk in the park near my home in New Jersey. I saw my neighbors Pragya, an engineer, and Amit, a doctor, also out for a walk. Usually, when I see the couple, I wave and walk faster, in order to avoid chatting. But they walked towards me and stopped and so I had to stop.
“So, how are you doing? How are your wife and kids?” Pragya asked. We are fine, I replied, and asked about them.
“You know I had the virus,” Amit said. “My three employees also got it. We all took hydroxychloroquine and recovered quickly.”
I must have looked puzzled because he added “yes, the drug works. We took the correct doses. Combined it with other anti-viral drugs.”
Several studies show that hydroxychloroquine, which President Donald Trump hailed as a wonder cure for COVID-19, has proven to be ineffective against the virus. Amit runs his own medical practice in a low-income neighborhood in Newark. As during many of our other conversations, I was relieved I was not one of his patients.
“So, what do you think of the voting results,” Amit asked. Before I could reply, Pragya said “don’t you think Trump won? He was leading in Pennsylvania and the other key states. Then, all of a sudden, the election was stolen from him.”
“Yes, yes Trump won,” added Amit. “The voting machines were manipulated to change the votes for (Joe) Biden.”
I knew they were Trump supporters. In 2016, they told me they enjoyed going to a Trump election rally in New Jersey, which was organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition.
Like Amit and Pragya, several Hindu professionals in America support Trump because he is “tough on Muslims” and is a friend of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India.
My neighbors also support Trump’s restrictions on immigration and say that work visas should be based on merit. Yet neither of them would qualify for merit-based work visas. Amit emigrated from India in the 1990’s, after he was sponsored for a permanent resident visa by his older brother. Trump criticizes such visas as “chain migration” and restricted their issuance.
During one of his visits to India, Amit married Pragya, following an arrangement made by their parents. The couple earned their degrees in India, though not from the top colleges.
Amit finished his medical residency at a government-run mental hospital in rural Mississippi. He got the post, which qualified him to work as a doctor in the U.S., because very few American medical graduates want to work at such hospitals, especially in remote areas. Pragya earned a certificate in Clinical Laboratory Science from Rutgers University, New Jersey.
She and Amit back Trump’s demand that college admission quotas for Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities should be abolished. However, I heard from another Indian neighbor that Pragya got her job at the New Jersey Department of Health because she applied as a minority.
When chatting, Pragya and Amit often casually point to their high status in India, saying they are Brahmans. But in America, they join some other upper caste Indians who seek college admissions, jobs and government funding programs set aside for minorities, claiming they suffer discrimination and hardships similar to Blacks and Hispanics.
Then, Amit supports Trump’s cuts in government welfare programs for the poor. Yet his medical practice depends on payments from Medicaid and other government programs, which cover the health care costs of his mostly low-income patients.
Twelve years ago, Amit and Pragya bought a house on the street in East Brunswick where I live. They moved from nearby Edison, which has a large Indian population, because they wanted better schools for their two children.
Whenever I come across Amit and Pragya, after we chat about the weather and the kids, they praise Prime Minister Narendra Modi for reviving Hindu pride and boosting India’s status on the world stage. They also say that Modi is showing Muslims in India their “proper place,” as second class citizens in a Hindu India.
Perhaps Amit, and maybe Pragya too, are members of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the secretive, militant Hindu extremist organization which controls Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Though neighbors for years, we do not socialize. Besides chatting during our walks, we meet at the Diwali, Holi and other gatherings organized by a local Indian association. We also see them at the Swaminarayan temple in Edison.
I am a Hindu who views the religion’s tenets as secular. Yes, many upper caste Hindus, who migrate to America, retain the prejudices they held in India, mainly against Muslims and the lower-castes. I find that as some of them grow more affluent in America, their prejudices expand, instead of moderating.
Some of my fellow graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, many of them with advanced degrees from U.S. universities, also support Trump and Modi. They offer the same reasons as Amit, though wrapped in sophisticated language, They say, for instance, that the Trump Modi alliance is pushing the geo-political balance in Asia in India’s favor.
As is true for other Indian professionals in America, Hindus who support Modi and Trump find well-paying jobs, facing little or no competition from Blacks and Hispanics. On the contrary, as in Pragya’s case, Indians take minority jobs originally set aside for Blacks and Hispanics. Also, living in middle class and affluent areas with Whites and other Asians, Indian professionals do not face racism or other discrimination from Blacks and Hispanics.
“Look at India, the air is filthy,” Trump said during the final U.S. presidential debate in October 2020. His White supporters want Indians - and other immigrants - to leave the country. Yet, despite Trump insulting India and his supporters insulting Indians, I am puzzled that Hindus like Amit and Pragya support Trump.
Indians in the U.S. face both overt and subtle racism from some Whites because they view Indians as another minority, stealing their college admissions and jobs,
Every day the hidden racism is evident, for instance, from readers’ comments even in reputed media like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Recently, a reader, identified as OldLady1519, commented in The Washington Post that ”The H-1B program is made up heavily of Indians, and has been for decades, and there's a backlog of green card applications that would give them a lock on our employment-based green cards for a decade or more.”
Facing such regular hostility, do Amit and Pragya have a need to feel superior to others - Blacks and Hispanics in the U.S., and Muslims back home in India?
