Indian Americans in US politics: Pioneers, pigeonholes, and a new page

With Kamala Harris on the ticket as the United State’s first candidate of biracial Indian ethnicity, the discussion on the role of Indian Americans in politics has emerged as a headline item ahead of the national polls in November. 

There are now more than 4.5 million Indian Americans in the US – approximately 2.4 million of them voters – representing about 1.5 percent of the voting population. In 2023, in a tribute to the motherland’s overtaking its northern neighbour as the world’s most populous nation, they had surpassed Chinese Americans to become the largest Asian American group in the US, with a population growth of 50 percent in the last decade alone. 

The same year, Indian Americans were more represented in the US Congress than ever before with five representatives, about 40 representatives in state legislatures, and a vice president. 

A long way since the first Indian American was elected as Congressman in 1956.

How a lettuce farmer spread his roots

The first Indian American in the US House of Representatives was Dalip Singh Saund, a three-time Congressman from 1956 to 1962. Saund was a key figure in the early political organisation of Indian Americans in the US, and the organiser of the Indian Association of America, which campaigned for citizenship rights for Indians¹. 

He had moved to UC Berkeley for his studies in 1920 and received a PhD in mathematics in 1924, but under racist laws in the US, he could not get citizenship or find work, and ended up becoming a lettuce farmer in the Imperial Valley. 

Sikh farmers were pioneers in the Indian community – many moved to the US as labourers working in terrible conditions laying railroads or in lumber work, they were disallowed from marrying White women and had no citizenship rights, could not lease or own land, or go back and forth to the homeland². Over time, the community would move into farm work as California’s agricultural industry grew, and slowly gain political capital in the region. 

Saund was an established farmer, diversified into selling fertilisers, and gained a foothold in the community outside of his ethnic roots. He himself lived in the US for 29 years before being eligible for citizenship.

Saund worked his way up slowly. He first won a relatively less competitive election for a judgeship in a small border town called Westmoreland just three years after becoming a citizen, and gained a reputation for coming down on vice³. Building on this, he stood for a much more competitive Congressional seat, often referring to himself as DS Saund, while his opponents, in a precursor to the “Barack Hussein” jibe, went out of their way to highlight Dalip Singh. Saund aggressively went door to door, enlisted his family in campaigning and outdid new registrations by over 10,000 voters⁴. 

The Nation called it a “democratic miracle” that he won, especially against a millionairess celebrity pilot who had spent more than all other candidates combined⁵. Saund won re-elections with massive margins but was stopped in his tracks from winning a fourth when he suffered a massive stroke that left him paralysed soon after he won his primaries. 

For almost five decades after Saund’s tenure, there was no Indian American in the US Congress. 

Until Bobby Jindal. 

The immigrant America wanted

Bobby, born Piyush, bore some similarities to Saund, but in other ways would drop the breadcrumbs that help understand Indian Americans politicians who came from the post-1965 wave of professional migrants. Jindal fit the trope of the immigrant America wanted – Ivy educated top of the class, pre-med degree in biology, Rhodes scholar in Oxford, and McKinsey analyst. 

Like Saund, Jindal would push his way into the American social fabric past the disadvantages of his skin colour. His entry into Louisiana politics was through the backdoor – he interned for a politician, and gained a reputation as something of a wunderkind technocrat⁶ and came to him with a plan to reform the healthcare system in the state. He offered to put it into action so long as he was made the state’s health secretary, a job typically reserved for late-career professionals with years of public service. When asked if he would consider the post of assistant secretary, Jindal refused. The audacity of his ask was underlined by the fact that he was 24, and had never held public office.  

Jindal’s candidate lost, but he had nonetheless made such an impression that his candidate’s rival, who became governor, was still made health secretary. Then, at age 28, despite never having a PhD, he was appointed the president of the University of Louisiana, and before he turned 30, he was appointed assistant secretary of health and human services in George W Bush’s administration⁷. Three years later, he would be a Congressman from a district with a negligible population of Indian Americans with a whopping 78 percent of the vote, which he proceeded to extend to 88 percent in his next election – numbers Kim Jong Un may be tempted to accept. 

In 2007, at one of the lowest points of Republican polling in the US, and Barack Obama’s near-victory in a landslide against John McCain, Jindal won the Louisiana gubernatorial primary with a thumping majority. He polled three times his nearest rival, enough that the run-off could be cancelled for the first time in the state’s history for a non-incumbent, making him the country’s first Indian American Governor. Except, of course, that he didn’t consider himself Indian American. 

“We came to the US to become Americans, not Indian Americans,” Jindal once quoted his father. And while a number of Indian Americans still claimed him as theirs, he had also done that one thing that rankled Hindus, the community most likely to retain the faith tradition they are born into. He converted. 

As if to pour salt on any sputtering embers of his roots as an ethnic minority, Jindal’s governorship would see some of the most zealous articulations of far-right White Christian politics, including a bill that allowed public schools to teach children Biblical alternatives to evolution and other explanations for global warming, proposing a version of the Muslim ban that Donald Trump would later make famous, requiring that all employers allow workers to bring guns to their workplace, and authorising the castration of convicted sex offenders. 

Like Saund, Jindal swept away his Indian ethnicity, except in one important way. The notion of the math-tutoring physician cum bespectacled lawyer professional was engendered into his public persona – one that Forbes captured with no sense of irony in a piece featuring Jindal titled, “Indian Americans: The New Model Minority”. 

Names still matter but there’s a new model

And thus here we are today. Names still matter. Trump referred to Nikki “Nimrada” Haley⁸ during the primaries, an obvious dogwhistle lest anyone mistake her for a celestial girl next door. 

But the Indian American politician today needs to only mildly undermine the wafting aroma of curry leaves like Californian Congressmen “Ro” Khanna and “Ami” Bera, Michigan Congressman “Shri” Thanedar of Michigan, and his Illinois counterpart Raja Krishnamoorthi, who generally eschews the Subramaniam⁹ from his name. 

That makes Pramila Jayapal of Washington both the only Congresswoman, and the one Indian American representative who held onto the name she was bequeathed. 

However, a new group of Indian Americans are now in various races. Amish Shah in Arizona, Sandeep Srivastava in Texas and Suhas Subramanyam in Virginia, and Prasanth Reddy in Kansas are keeping their names as is.

There are ways in which this new wave of Indian Americans in politics depart from the legacy of Saund and Jindal. All of them have advanced degrees, have held professional or managerial positions, and fit the technocrat model of politicians. Except Thanedar (more on him next week), all but one are from Congressional districts that are diverse¹⁰ and have relatively high rates of Asian American populations. All these districts are urban, and have median incomes at least 33 percent above the national median. 

Khanna and Subramanyam, in fact, are from two of the three wealthiest constituencies in the US. All their districts have higher white-collar occupations, higher home values – in a nutshell the aspirational districts that have learnt to love their Spelling Bee champions. 

What is clear is that a new page will be turned on Indian American politics in the US. 

Unlike Dalip Singh and Piyush, the next generation will embrace their Ananyas, Aaryans and Ishaans. They will be less beholden to prove their worthiness by doing the most egregious bidding of their party extremists, so long as they keep their bare knuckles hidden. 

The American voter still pigeonholes its faces carefully. However, Indian Americans will not be picked for who they represent, but what they represent. There won’t be any military veterans, clergy, or union organiser prototypes emerging from the Indian American quarters¹¹. People trust you because they think you’re a doctor, a lawyer, or tech executive. Stay in the technocratic lane and keep your mouth shut about Gaza. 

Citations

1. https://www.congress.gov/85/crecb/1958/08/04/GPO-CRECB-1958-pt12-7-1.pdf

2. Many Sikhs, including most famously Sardar Udham Singh, who would assassinate Michael O’Dwyer, married Mexican-American women who they were allowed to marry. This would lead to the creation of a Mexican-Sikh community in California which has been in place for generations. Read this for more into the history of Sikh-Mexican marriages.

3. Judges in the United States are elected by the general public.

4. “Mrs. Odlum, Saund Wage Hot Race,” 14 October 1956, Washington Post: A12; “First India Native Goes to Congress,” 11 November 1956.

5. The Nation 1956-11-24: Vol 183 Iss 21.

6. For a detailed profile of Jindal’s early years, see Sager, Mike (2008) Bobby Jindal, All American. Esquire. 150:4 pp 225.

7. In the United States, this is typically a political appointment  by the government.

8. Haley incidentally also had her husband change his first name from Bill to Michael, which was reportedly more saleable.

9. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7285471

10. All the constituencies have 30 percent or more non-White populations. Prasanth Reddy in Kansas’s third district is the only one standing in an overwhelmingly White constituency.

11. Reddy is a military doctor, as opposed to an active combatant.

Complaining about the media is easy. Why not do something to make it better? Click here to support our work.