The long history of Indian American lobbying in US – and why it still isn’t influential enough

A spike in the funding for Kamala Harris came from Indian American donors soon after her elevation to candidacy, reversing the flailing campaign following Biden’s catastrophic debate with Trump. While funding on the Democrat side has increased dramatically since the ticket turned to Harris, it is not clear if that is because of her, or because of the lack of enthusiasm for a second Biden presidency. 

Harris’s ethnicity has been part of the conversation on funding. When questions on Biden’s struggling candidacy were raised, there was a concern that if any candidate other than Harris were to be put on the Democratic ticket, it would lead to a backlash from Black voters. There was little talk of offending Indian Americans voters. The community was seen as still not having the ‘numbers’ to be decisive. The population is distributed throughout the US rather than in small geographical areas that would assure it consistent representation.

But elections are not just about the numbers a community can claim at the ballot box. 

This is not to say that Indian Americans do not vote in sufficient numbers – at 74 percent voter turnout during the 2020 election, the community was more politically engaged than most other US ethnic groups. Indian-born members of the community who acquired US citizenship (as opposed to being born in the US) have even higher rates of voter turnout, ironic given that this population is largely derived from highly educated, metropolitan Indians, who had much lower electoral participation rates while in India. For a community with a small demographic footprint, the key to political power is thoughtful, and potentially coordinated funding. 

For two decades now, there have been conversations on how Indian Americans’ strategy of making a mark in US politics is driven by the Jewish American example, whose influence in electoral politics is much bigger than the 2.4 percent share of the population it has.

There are several factors that impact attitudes towards political funding, the existence of a common cause matters, as does the culture of political funding in that community. This is particularly important for first-generation migrants whose attitudes towards political funding exist in a continuum from their experiences in their countries of origin. 

Now in India, with some exceptions, party contributions are frequently driven by extortion, so there is a bit of unlearning involved. Money is no less central to US politics than it is to Indian politics, but there are important differences, especially as it relates to legal lobbying, which help understand political participation. 

First, lobbying is legal, so long as it is reported. Even a foreign country is allowed to lobby members of the US Congress, so long as the activity is kept above board. 

Second, the US imposes certain limits on what can be donated to individual candidates for specific elections, but there is the concept of a Political Action Committee or PAC, which pools money that can be spent on behalf of a candidate, a ballot initiative or a party. 

Third, people vote for way more things in the US than they do in India. A typical ballot has several lines to be filled out – a voter must choose a presidential candidate alongside a slew of local candidates, taxation-related measures and referenda. This is in contrast to the Indian system in which one votes for a candidate belonging to a party, thence transferring decision-making to their representative on most matters. Many voters will carry a voting guide from an organisation they trust into their voting booth to decide on which way to vote on the various items.

The US exercises representative democracy on several facets of public services – there are many more political offices to contest for in the US as compared to India. Besides the typical municipal, state and federal elections, one could be on a ballot to be on educational positions such as a local school board, or a state university’s trustee council, bureaucratic positions like county clerkships, or even law enforcement positions such as a town sheriff or a local judgeship. Apart from political offices, items of public expenditure are frequently decided through direct voting, so when one typically goes in to vote, besides individual candidates, one expects to vote for specific ballot measures. Sometimes a state or locality will elect conservative public officials, but pass a progressive referendum in the same cycle.

This means there are a range of elected positions for communities to vie for, but it also means that the political system allows for a significant amount of deviation from party lines. Unlike in India, where most members of a political party are likely to vote on issues whichever way their party leadership asks them to, in the US, the members of the House of Representatives are elected every two years. So, they cannot afford to value their party diktats over what their constituents demand if they wish to keep getting elected. 

Essentially even a relatively small community can find a niche – either by starting small at local elections, or by finding a ballot measure they can influence through the right kind of collective action.

Organised lobbying

There are a number of organisations that lobby financially on behalf of Indian Americans as a whole, such as the Indian American Impact Fund or, for some subset of Indian Americans, the Hindu American PAC. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the origin of an Indian American political consciousness on the heels of growing membership among cultural associations for various linguistic communities. It also saw the emergence of groups such as the Hindu Students Council¹, the OFBJP, and VHP America in the aftermath of the Rath Yatra and Babri demolition². 

Several of the individuals who were active in these political movements would eventually help build the organisations and networks which drive Indian American electoral lobbying and political donations today. 

In 1993, VHP America held a 10,000 attendee event called Vision 2000 in Washington DC, the largest political event featuring Indian Americans at the time. It featured a number of Indian American activists alongside politicians from India including Murli Manohar Joshi, Ashok Singhal, Uma Bharti and Narendra Modi. 

The very next year, a Congressional Caucus on India and Indian-Americans was instituted. At its helm was Congressman Frank Pallone, a representative from New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional district. This district includes Edison, NJ, known as Little India, and the relevance of Indian Americans in the district is underlined by the fact that even the voting ballots here have a version printed in Gujarati. Pallone has been a steady supporter of India in DC, and has since gone on to win the Padma Bhushan.

All-purpose PACs specific to ethnic or national identity may operate at an abstract level without a well-defined area of activism. So a basic PAC that pertains to all matters Indian makes sense when India is part of the political agenda in the US, as was true during the sanctions regime under Clinton or the nuclear deal under Bush. The majority of functional lobbying, however, happens through lobbies that are active irrespective of geopolitical issues. 

In this, there were two lobbies whose engagements had long-term ramifications for the Indian American presence in DC. The two communities synonymous with the pre-tech boom Indians in the US were doctors and motel owners, and their problems as an organised community drove the early community organising. 

The American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPIO) organised to lobby Congress on healthcare issues such as medical malpractice, and the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) was put together to lobby for issues relevant to motel owners. While their immediate lobbying was typically not India specific, there were networks being developed and implicit knowledge of the DC ecosystem that Indian Americans entered through these.

Indian-origin physicians – particularly a small group of active political donors from Florida, including Raghavendra Vijayanagar and Zach Zachariah³ – would end up building the first Indian American Republican Council. Many of their core members backed George W Bush for the 2000 election. 

Although Clinton is often looked at as the president who turned around US-India relations, it was under Bush that there was a significant spike in the community’s presence in DC, with 14 high-level Indian American appointees in his administration.  Till the 2000s, even though the Indians in the tech industry were a visible entity, there were few serious political funders, till Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia became the first Indian American to hit the news as a mega donor and organiser on the Democrat side by fundraising for Al Gore.

In both the late Clinton and early Bush era, the main driver of Indian American political engagement in the US was first to roll back sanctions relating to the nuclear tests, and subsequently around the India-US nuclear deal. This period saw the growth of the USINPAC, which was modelled after the Israel lobby and specifically funded US Representatives with the aim of influencing their votes on issues specific to India. Yet, once the nuclear deal was done, the purpose of an all-inclusive India specific lobby reduced, and the USINPAC no longer played a significant role in lobbying.

The Asian American Hotel Owners Association’s deepening engagement with India-specific politics came about through an unexpected event. In 2005, the Gujarati entrepreneur-dominated lobby invited then Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the keynote speaker for their 2005 convention. It triggered a flood of petitioning from evangelical Republican representatives as well as civil rights groups that ended up prevailing, getting Modi banned from entering the United States. 

However, the incident underlined the importance of greater engagement with the far-right of US politicians. Since the Modi debacle, AAHOA has kept up its lobbying but beyond sticking to issues related to hospitality, it started backing Indian-American candidates, and turned into a conduit for access to other forms of lobbying. While AAHOA is bipartisan, it tends to lobby more politicians on the Republican side on issues such as opposing expanded labour rights like paid sick leave for workers or caregiver leave.

Key figures 

AAHOA’s debacle with Modi did end up playing an important role in the changes to Indian American participation in lobbying DC. For one, Indian Americans realised that they needed to get more political buy-in from quarters that would typically not be aligned to Indian interests – like far-right Christian representatives such as those who blocked Modi’s visit. 

This period saw the growth of a key mega donor who has both been instrumental in engaging the NRI community with the BJP and Modi on one hand, and funding conservative causes and candidates in the US – Shalli Kumar. Kumar arranged for a group of three Christian right representatives to visit Modi while he was still chief minister, a move that de-facto restored Modi’s relationship with US lawmakers⁴. 

Unlike earlier Indian American coalitions with Republicans that focused on free enterprise and fiscal  conservatism, Kumar’s push for a more Hindu-centric politics moved a more direct engagement on social conservatism and anti-Muslim rhetoric. This saw an alignment with pro-Israel representatives in the US Congress to build the Congressional Hindu Caucus, as well as arranging a Trump campaign event in 2016 called ‘Humanity United Against Terror’, in Edison, NJ, where Trump made his mildly infamous “I love Hindu” comment. Kumar’s Republican Hindu Coalition has funded several key races in 2022. A separate PAC, called the Hindu American PAC does bipartisan funding.

Despite the overall Indian American vote remaining Democrat, the number of big-ticket donors on the Republican side is sizable. These include Texas-based outsourcing and IT services millionaire Anurag Jain, South Carolina entrepreneur Rom Reddy, Florida attorney Rahul Patel, Michigan entrepreneur Raj Vattikuti, as well as Republican donors who focus on Sikh issues such as members of the Singh semiconductor family, who fund the Sikh PAC. 

While these Republican-leaning funders play an important role in several states, the Modi connection in the growing lobbying influence of Indian Americans is by no means Republican-centric – Bharat Barai, the organiser of the Modi Madison Square Garden event, has historically been a Democrat funder. 

Two other Indian American communities are important components of the big-ticket funding space – investors and tech leaders. While investors also include a broad range of Indian Americans in banking, one place where investors and tech come together is in Silicon Valley venture capitalists. VCs, like physicians and hoteliers, initially organised around their own PACs such as the National Venture Capital Association, which generally lobbies on tax-related issues. An early instance when the community played a strong hand in a political issue when some of the biggest Indian American names among VCs – including Gaurav Garg, Promod Haque and Kavitark Shriram – banded together to lobby against a bill that would have given free preschool services to the poor in California by taxing high income earners.

On the whole, in both small and large contributions, there are many more Indian Americans on the Democrat side. The larger contributors who donate in excess of US$100k during election cycles have slowly grown from among the Indian American community especially in the last decade. 

Within this influential group, there are dedicated Democrat funders who generally align across the board with the party. Consequently their core funding goes directly to the party committees or PACs rather than one specific issue. These include venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Pradeep Rao, and various others in the finance and tech space including Dinakar Singh, Tushar Shah, Sameer Gandhi, Shashikant Gupta and Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah.

A milestone campaign battle relevant to Indian Americans was that between former Obama staffer Ro Khanna and veteran Congressman Mike Honda. The two ran against each other in a battle of the Asian Americans 2014 and 2016 in California’s 17th district, which has an Asian American majority and is the wealthiest constituency in the United States. The district also houses some of the most Indian American-heavy cities in the country including Fremont, Sunnyvale Milpitas and San Jose. 

The Californians for Innovation PAC which promoted Khanna featured a bonfire of Indian American serial entrepreneurs chipping in including Vinod Khosla, Sameer Gandhi, Anil Godhwani, Venky Harinarayan, Ashok Krishnamurthi, Anand Rajaraman, Sumir Chadha, and Kanwal Rekhi. The campaign was an unusual one in that it supported one Democrat, Khanna, while running attack ads on another, Honda. Khanna lost narrowly in 2014 but won with a thumping majority in 2016 (ironically after declining PAC money), and has held the seat ever since. Khanna’s list of donors is also a consistent go-to who’s who list of Silicon Valley fat pockets.

New movers and shakers 

In the post Covid era, there has emerged a new player in the Indian American political scene – the tech-bro political influencer. Here, the driver is a bigger movement of wealthy tech investors who double up as social media influencers and libertarian fantasizers. These folks have grown in importance alongside a slew of tech billionaires in shifting forms of weekly disgruntlement, whose access to social media loudspeakers have given them an outsized ability to move opinions. 

The undisputed leader of these is Elon Musk. But a number of those in his extended networks of podcasters and social media commentators, including Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan, have also pushed political positions online. 

These individuals may not be heavyweights in terms of their direct investment, but play a role in moving the dial in certain directions. For instance, the Republican primary campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, which had its own PAC called American Exceptionalism PAC, raised funds from Indian Americans including Sankesh Abbhi, Raj Vattikuti and Sundeep Madra. 

Another recent case of Indian American tech industry funding was for a cryptocurrency PAC called Fairshake. This PAC, which has raised a stunning $169 million to influence lawmakers to regulate positively on cryptocurrencies, has its fair share of Indian American tech bros. Kanav Kariya’s firm Jump Crypto bankrolled Fairshake to the extent of US$15 million⁵ as well as blockchain entrepreneurs Avichal Garg, Tushar Jain and Raj Gokal. All three are also online influencers who push content related to cryptocurrencies.

Two Indian American mega donors deserve mention for different reasons. First, the largest direct funder⁶ of various PACs and candidates of Indian origin is probably Nishad Singh. If you haven’t heard of him, you will soon during his jail sentencing as one of the core staff at FTX. Singh spent over US$ 15 million on various causes related to women’s rights. 

The second Indian American mega donor, and probably the person who has spent the most of his personal wealth on US political campaigns, is Shri Thanedar. An unusual politician recognised by his trademark wig, which has its own Twitter page, Thanedar stood for and won elections from an unusual constituency for an Indian American entrepreneur – Michigan’s 13th district. This district is one of the most segregated and income-unequal constituencies in the United States. It includes Detroit, which is 80 percent African American and one of the poorest cities in the US, and its bordering city Grosse Pointe, which is over 90 percent White and overwhelmingly wealthy. Thanedar’s mega donations have primarily been to himself; by some accounts, he has spent over $20 million of his own money on various campaigns to get elected.

Finally, there are other Indian American mega donors whose political contributions seem more driven by immediate self-interest than common cause with the motherland, such donors need to hedge the bets by backing all parties concerned, especially if they run the kind of organisation that could use political help. 

A case in point is the mega donor Reddy family, which owns Prime Healthcare Management, a hospital chain which settled a $65 million fraud case in 2018 for overbilling patients. It also reached a a $37.5 million settlement in 2021 for that most Indian of all medical scams – referral kickbacks. 

Then there’s Asit Choksi, a major Texas donor who mainly funds Republicans and has various cases against him. Nevada mega donor Raj Chanderraj has been under the scanner for irregular dealings, and Illinois donor Niranjan Shah was blacklisted by the Democrats on account of a scandal for getting favours for family members.

While a number of articles have discussed the origins and organisation of the India lobby in the US to the Israel lobby, there are important distinctions that suggest Indian Americans are unlikely to see the same extent of political influence.

Most of the mega donors on either side of the political spectrum are first-generation Indian Americans. In terms of overall contribution, theirs is still miniscule compared to Jewish Americans who have a longer history of coordinated political funding in the United States. Jewish Americans also have a consistent track record of effectively rallying around Israel-specific causes, in large part driven by the idea of historical and continuing threat to the Jewish nation, but also around antisemitism in the US. Unlike them, Indian Americans do not have the same rallying cause around India, nor do Indians report the same level of discrimination. Instead, the pattern we see here of political engagement among Indian Americans who are active as funders or as candidates is largely out of alignment to the causes of the party, or self-interest in expanding political influence. 

Indian Americans will be important in whatever government is elected next. But this is not on account of the scale of their political donation – they still remain a minor force in American politics compared to other vested interests. Indian Americans are not politically unified behind a cause, and given the diversity of the community, it is unlikely they can ever be expected to be a single-issue vote block. What matters is that Indian Americans are among the wealthiest and most highly educated Americans, with a massively outsized footprint in medicine, tech, banking, and higher education. 

With those in the bag, you can be cheap and still powerful.

Citations

1. Mihir Meghani, who founded HSC, would go on to also found the Hindu American Foundation

2. This period also saw the creation of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneur), and the election of the first Indian American to a state office - Kumar Barve

3. Zachariah was known as the ‘Money Man’ for the Bush family, and made an impact in Republican fundraising well before Indian Americans started doing it in an organized fashion.

4. Shalli Kumar has since faced problems for misrepresentation with the Republican party and individual Republicans soon after the visit, including with Rep Cathy McMorris Rodgers who was one of the politicians he arranged to meet with Modi. More details at a Vice story: How India’s New Prime Minister won over the Tea Party

5. Kariya has since resigned from his position

6. As opposed to making political donations through companies

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