https://www.heraldgoa.in/edit/opinions/who-doesnt-belong/447060/
Bright smiles in the accompanying photograph from the Oval Office earlier this week underline the contradictions in this ultra-bizarre American moment, in the wake of President Trump’s indiscriminate wrecking-ball geopolitics. On the one hand, Trump is now taking an overtly xenophobic line against would-be migrants from countries like India and China, but at the same time here is incontrovertible evidence of immigration’s positive impacts, as the USA won the International Physics Olympiad (it is for the world’s brightest high school students) with an all-immigrant team of Agastya Goel, Allen Li, Joshua Wang, Feodor Yevtushenko, and Brian Zhang. The White House’s chief science and technology policy advisor Michael Kratsios jubilantly tweeted in typical Trumpian syntax that “These incredible geniuses DOMINATED at the International Physics Olympiad in July, bringing home a record FIVE gold medals — the greatest performance in team history.” These are strange, schizophrenic times - with ripple effects from the USA to the rest of the “West” – as immigrants have never been more successful and significant, but now also openly targeted by far-right exclusionary politics of hate. In particular, Indians in America (and an estimated three-quarters-million-plus Indian-Americans back home) suddenly find themselves in a firestorm: Trump’s blatantly discriminatory attacks on India on the global stage; H-1B visa rules directly targeting Indians above all; an unceasing torrent of online anti-Indian racism; and – this one must really hurt – exhortations to buck up and do more from Indian politicians like Dr. Shashi Tharoor - “if you care about the relationship with your motherland, then you also have to fight for it, speak for it and make more of an effort to press your political representatives to stand up for India.” Dr. Tharoor is perfectly right that desis in America can play a bigger role in lobbying their representatives to correct Trump’s inexplicable (at least by what we can see above the table) attacks, but it is also true that New Delhi has not stood up for Indians in America like it should, in shameful comparison to regional leaders like Telangana chief minister Revanth Reddy, whose excellent response on Twitter to the H-1B changes was “This is totally unacceptable in the historical context of Indo-American relationships. It is for the Indian Government to immediately set up a mechanism to resolve this amicably keeping the interests of our tech population and skilled workers, who have served America for so long. The suffering for our Telugu techies will be unimaginable. Requesting Hon'ble Prime Minister and EAM Shri@DrSJaishankar to resolve this issue on a war footing.” Unfortunately, that “war footing” is unlikely to occur, and the Indian government is instead trying to spin each blow from the MAGA crew as net positive. See, for example, Amitabh Kant’s own tweet: “Donald Trump’s 100,000 H-1B fee will choke U.S. innovation, and turbocharge India’s. By slamming the door on global talent, America pushes the next wave of labs, patents, innovation and startups to Bangalore and Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon. India’s finest Doctors, engineers, scientists, innovators have an opportunity to contribute to India’s growth & progress towards #ViksitBharat. America’s loss will be India’s gain.” Leave aside the fact that India’s finest are likely not queueing up for H-1Bs, or the question of whether or not Kant will prove correct, it is most likely true that India and America are cleaving apart in unexpected ways that might result in our looking back at the past 25 years as a kind of golden age. In many ways, 17-year-old Agastya Goel - standing behind Trump in this photo - epitomizes the most familiar aspects of that story. Already a two-time gold medal winner at the International Olympiad in Informatics, this star Palo Alto student is the son of Stanford University professor Ashis Goel, who ranked first in the IIT JEE in 1990, and after his PhD (also at Stanford) worked in crucial roles in Silicon Valley, where, among other highlights, he is credited for leading “monetization” at Twitter. Is that degree of elite assimilation – in which the Goels are amongst hundreds of thousands of Indian success stories – at all reversible? Is it even possible to force Indian-Americans to go to “the back of the bus” where some MAGA ideologues now say they belong? These are frankly unthinkable notions, and even if their rhetoric becomes even more unhinged, the bigots will find surely them impossible to achieve. Just like happened with Jewish Americans almost exactly 100 years ago, who faced searing prejudice despite competing “by the book” – they’re destined to fail because Indian-Americans are conspicuously playing and succeeding by American rules, including – quite hilariously – in the highest Trumpist echelons. No one is going to stop them. I liked Pankaj Mishra’s sharp analysis about what he astutely calls “The End of the Belle Époque” in the latest issue of *Harper’s Magazine*: “I remember how, in the Nineties in India, after socialist regimes imploded across Europe, politicians, businessmen, and opinion makers suddenly began to present apprenticeship to America as the quickest route to the “tryst with destiny” once promised by Nehru—a tryst postponed for decades, in many resentful Indians’ eyes, by feckless ventures in geopolitical nonalignment, affirmative action for low-caste Hindus, and a socialistic economy. And there were many others in the floundering nation-states of Asia and Africa who succumbed to the American ideology of individual aggrandizement and self-cherishing.” Mishra accurately recalls that “Winning was easier for those who spoke English relatively well: Anglophone Asians and Africans turned out to be much better placed than members of the large Chinese diaspora to benefit from neoliberal globalization under American auspices. As it happened, the political and socioeconomic interests of the English-speaking transnational class in India and the elite in the United States interlocked as smoothly as those underpinning the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States. By the mid-Aughts, many members of the diasporic Indian intelligentsia served as proxies for the American Establishment, emphasizing the virtues of U.S.-style capitalism to eager audiences in Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, as well as in the pages of major American newspapers.” But now, that season of NRI dreams is most likely defunct. Mishra says “careful mimicry of the current American elite is unlikely to yield the same high returns it once did. An extermination of the brutes in the Middle East, presided over by Obama’s successors, has been followed by a swift cancellation by Trumpian decree of the postracial age. America seems unlikely to be made great again by the demagogues of white nationalism, who cannot help but channel fury over irreversible decline at those who have been working hard, through either literal or spiritual immigration, to become American.”
