Second generation Indian immigrants are participating in American politics through the prismatic lens of their own racialisation, and should be understood as political agents through that framework. But one should not deploy this context as a rationale for supporting conservative and fundamentalist groups operating in the US.

Svati P Shah (svatipshah@gmail.com) is a postdoctoral associate with Duke University, Durham, USA.

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Given the wide array of this participation, from every political orientation imaginable (anarchist, old left, new left, progressive, liberal, centre, right, etc), and at almost every level of American political

However, given the unpredictability of this engagement (an actor-cum-policy “wonk”, a converted Roman Catholic g overnor of Louisiana, a Hindu Rightaffiliated techno logy expert) there are some deeper questions to be asked about what this “coming of age” may mean for second generation Indian Americans.

The Sonal Shah Case

The motivation for this piece stems from commentary on Sonal Shah, who continues to serve as a discursive lightning rod for speculation about why second generation Indians in the US, usually spoken of as a unitary group, would ally themselves with the Hindu Right. Two aspects of the Sonal Shah controversy are instructive in thinking through wider questions around second generation Indian American political engagements. First is the way in which Shah’s VHP-A involvement became emblematic for many south Asians on the left, both in the US and in India, of the theory that second generation Indian Americans experience an exceptional level of internalised identitarian conflict, and that this conflict explains the overwhelming, if largely unwitting, support they are seen to lend to Hindu fundamentalist groups operating in the US. The second instructive aspect of the controversy is the defence of Shah against the “accusation” that she was in the VHP-A leadership, which came from several corners, including, surprisingly, from liberal and progressive second gene ration Indian Americans who are also committed to countering the Hindu Right.

With respect to the idea that second generation Indians get caught up with the Hindu Right due to identitarian conflicts, a recent article by US-based academic Sonalde Desai in the Economic & Political Weekly is a case in point. In the piece, D esai surmises that, like so many other second generation Indian Americans, Sonal Shah may have joined the VHP-A b ecause she was searching for identity and belonging, and that the Hindu Right

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offered it. This, according to Desai, is qualitatively different from her own identity as an Indian immigrant in the US. Comparing herself to a second generation Indian American student in her own university who had joined a Hindu fundamentalist organisation, Desai writes,

…having grown up in India, I had a very secure identity that did not need the props of caste, language or religion; pan-Indian ethnicity was all I needed. [The student] was raised in a family which had been thrown out of Uganda, passed through the UK and finally settled in the US. She was still searching for an identity and home and the Anavil Samaj of North America provided a security blanket to her that I never needed….Perhaps some of these young people remember their own dis comfort and sensitivity at unkind or con descending comments from classmates as they grew up in intolerant white suburbs and want to spare others the same indignity (Desai 2009).

Beyond marking the sympathetic and knowing tone of this statement, there are two aspects this perspective, which I regard as emblematic, that bear critique. The first is the problem of speculating on the role that Hindu fundamentalist groups play in the lives of second generation I ndian youth in the US. With the depth and breadth of research on the Indian diaspora that already exists, and with the possi bility of speaking with second generation young people in a systematic manner on these kinds of issues, why speculate, unless speculation becomes a vehicle for advan cing an a priori conclusion? S econd, this argument divorces the question of identity from the context of race in the US and, more importantly, from the process of American racialisation.

Racialisation

While a discussion of racialisation with respect to second generation south Asians in the US is far beyond the scope of this piece, locating some of the parameters for the problem of excluding racialisation from this discussion is not. In separating identity from race, we are left conceptualising s econd generation Indian Americans as an agglomeration of individuals searching for themselves, and blundering into the grasp of the Hindu Right in the process. While plenty of blunders are committed by s econd generation Indians as we attempt to engage both with India-as-place and I ndia-as-concept, “blundering” does not suffice as an explanatory framework because it does not account for the history and structures of race and class in the North American context, nor does it a ccount for the ways in which Indian i mmigrants have engaged with this history upon arrival. If the student to which Desai refers grew up in an “intolerant white suburb”, as did I, it is because that student’s parents chose to live in a majority white space, and to become racialised within it. In the bipolar racial landscape that still constitutes the major gravitational field of American sociality, and that constituted most of it during the 1960s and 1970s, when the wave of Indian immigrants arrived whose children are now visibly and increasingly engaging in American politics, the vast majority of those immigrants chose to assimilate into “whiteness”, as far as that was possible. The “multicultu ralist” route that many second generation Indian A mericans have undertaken to their own Indianness is mediated by this highly

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c ontin gent, structurally contextualised choice, and by the fact that the majority of Indian immigrants to the US in the 1960s were able to accumulate education in post- independence India, but not resources. In the US, they achieved personal wealth that exceeded their possibilities for doing so in India, wealth that was ploughed into bringing the rest of the family over, to be sure, but that was also spent on temples, festival celebrations, and language and “cultural” education for their children. This kind of migration story is relevant for many Indian immigrants who came to the US at this time, and is especially helpful in understanding the ways in which the Sonal Shah case could be productively nuanced.

For example, due to the vagaries of class and caste, a Shah or Patel immigrant Gujarati family, of the category that financially supported the Hindu Right in India during the 1990s, and that has now become iconic in the characterisation of the Hindu Right’s diasporic cadre, may not have been able to build institutions or participate in elite cultural production in Gujarat in 1965. The fact that these immigrants were able to afford these things in the US, and that their own engagements with Hindutva were also mediated by a well-documented impetus to preserve and produce one’s “culture” in America, has much to do with the appeal of Hindu fundamentalism for second g eneration youth as anything else.1

The classed nuance of Indian immigration to the US helps to explain the seemingly unlikely quarters from which Sonal Shah found supporters for her own nomination to a post in the new Obama government. The defence of Shah against the accusation that she had been in the VHP-A leadership came not from the Hindu Right, at least, not overtly, but from feminist south Asian women’s organisations, from liberal and progressive blogs, and from some progressive south Asian academics who were appalled by the Modi government’s genocidal actions during the February and March 2002 attacks on Muslims in Gujarat. The defence, which was almost always framed in relation to the original piece on Sonal Shah by Vijay Prashad (2008), generally fell into two categories. The first was a summary rejection of the fact that Shah was a member of the Hindu Right. This fact, corroborated by Shah’s documented leadership role in the VHP-A, was downgraded to an accusation and even slander by Shah and her supporters. This defence would make sense coming from the Hindu Right, and is a timehonoured strategy – first deny, worry about the rest later. The liberal and progres sive support of this defence is not so easily explained. Sepia Mutiny, a progressive Indian American blog, was fairly e xemplary of the progressive reaction against the atte mpt to divest Shah of any legitimacy in the White House. It went like this:

…Prashad’s accusations against Sonal Shah smell like a smear – not so different from Sarah Palin saying Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists.” I have no idea whether Sonal Shah is secretly sympathetic to the VHP or not; I do not believe so….Vijay Prashad wants to paint a very particular image of Sonal Shah, as a kind of die-hard Hindu chauvinist, who continues to harbour secret communal hatreds, even if she has not made public statements to that effect, is not formally affiliated with any relevant groups, and has been doing valuable social work with Google.org and Indicorps. But that is just one narrative. One could easily construct a counter-narrative along these lines: Sonal Shah’s parents are in fact supporters of the VHP, and are friends of Narendra Modi. As an ABD growing up in Texas, she had little awareness of the destructive and intolerant nature of Hindu nationalism, and when the opportunity came around to work with VHP-A to raise money for earthquake victims in Gujarat in 2001, she took it. But perhaps, with maturity, and as she took a higher profile role in the organisation, she also began to gain an awareness of the costs of affiliation with the VHP, and left to found an organisation that does similar work, but with a secular slant.2

The writer later added,

According to her statement, even at the time, Shah did not subscribe to the message or ideology of the VHP. She characterises her work as purely focused on humanitarian aid. She also clearly distances herself from the agenda of the VHP, and suggests she has had no involvement in Indian politics, nor intends to have any. That second narrative I have presented is admittedly speculation. But I put it out there because I think there is as much evidence to support it as there is to support the narrative that Prashad has put out in Counterpunch.3

This defence is curious, because it was widespread, and because it is based on pure, albeit passionate, speculation. Why would this kind of speculation work as a credible defence against the documented facts of Shah’s affiliations? While acknowledging that this particular defence did not result in support for Shah from all quarters, it did seem to strike a nerve among second generation Indian Americans, a nerve which was less about supporting the Hindu Right than it was about the ways in which Indian Americans as a whole were being constructed through this particular debate. Had the support for this defence of Shah been rooted in second generation support of the Hindu Right, Shah’s affiliation with the VHP-A would have been celebrated by

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her peers, rather than being disbelieved. The defence worked because it accessed a kind of s econd generation Indian American zeitgeist that posited American liberalism, embo died by Shah’s humanitarianism, against the idea that she was “a kind of diehard Hindu chauvinist, who continues to harbour secret communal hatreds”. That she was seen to be judged as a card carrying Hindu fundamentalist was at i ssue, because of the erasure this judgment implied of Shah’s participation in the American (read: white) political milieu, in which the liberal intentionality to help others trumps all other motivations.

I do agree that people may join organisations in the US that end up promoting xenophobic, ethnocentric and nationalist ideals as a way of addressing the problems that are wrought by aiming to assimilate into American whiteness. I also agree that Shah, like Bobby Jindal, and Kal Penn, and thousands of other second generation Indian immigrants, are participating in American politics through the prismatic lens of their own racialisation, and should be understood as political agents through that framework. Shah’s actions, like Jindal’s and Penn’s, are complex, and are irreducibly inflected by the racial and class matrices that make immigration in the US intelligible. However, unlike Shah’s liberal and progressive supporters, I do not agree with deploying this context as a rationale for supporting conservative and fundamentalist groups operating in the US. Critics of Shah, and of the Shahs to come in Indian American politics, must account for racial and class formation in the contours of support for movements, both within and outside the US, that are far from the liberal democratic ideals that ostensibly structure mainstream American politics. In this article, I have aimed to raise these questions,

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--though in no way do I presume that they may be definitively r esolved here, or anywhere else. Rather, this argument calls for a nuanced and contextualised analysis of second generation I ndian Americans in American politics, while eschewing the possibility of s imple answers.

Notes

1 My argument here draws from Vijay Prashad’s critique of the “model minoritisation” of Indians in the US in his book (Prashad 2000).

2 “In Defense of Sonal Shah [Updated w/statement from Sonal]”, 10 November 2008, http://www. sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/005510.html, accessed 8 April 2009.

3 Ibid.

References

Desai, Sonalde (2009): “Soldiers of Saffron, Sonal Shah and Secularism”, Economic & Political Weekly, 44(7): 26, 14 February

Prashad, Vijay (2008): “Obama’s Indian”, 7-9 November, http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad11072008. html, accessed, 8 April 2009.

– (2000): The Karma of Brown Folk, University of M innesota Press.

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