ILS-Second Opinion

These fund-raisers have attained the same celebrity status as Bollywood stars. Not only are we expected to feel proud of the super-rich amongst us, but we are also expected to adopt them as our community’s leaders.
God knows, we need our own kind of campaign finance reform, a sort of community mental floss to purge ourselves of this ailment. While I have only the highest regard for the physicians in our community, it turns out that most of the ‘Bush Rangers’ are medical professionals. Even as election 2004 will be remembered by desis for the launching of Bobby Jindal into the United States Congress, it will also be memorable for the amount of money the super-rich desis have tossed into the trough of the system.
These are not my leaders. I don’t recognize them.
So what makes a leader in an immigrant community? There is no referendum for the leaders of our ethnic communities, and those who become leaders of our ethnic organizations often do so because of their hard work and social prominence.
Our linguistic and regional organizations (Tamil Sangam, Gujarati Samaj, etc.) and our national professional groups (AAHOA, AAPIO, etc.) are some examples of major groups that produce visible leaders of our community.
Then there are those groups that work to transform
Continued On Page 46
Continued From Page 44
our cultural world, to reform parts of our culture that are undesirable, and to make a new desi way of being (women’s rights groups, gay and lesbian groups, worker’s rights groups, etc.). Those who work in these organizations are our real leaders: they help create our community through festivals and protests, the gatherings of joy and justice. They earn the right to speak in our name.
But they are not always viewed as the most important figures in our community. Instead, as in the mainstream world, money often drives importance. Those who donate cash are leaders. I’m not sure it is the money alone, or that the money buys our super-rich the chance to be photographed with this or that important white political leader.
Each of these sorts of characters wants as many pictures in their office with white politicians because they indicate that our ‘leader’ has contacts in Washington, and his/her backdoor to power allows him/her to play a disproportionate role as the representative of our community. Their money buys them access, which makes them leaders of our community.
If John Edwards is about the existence of “Two Americas,” we can quite legitimately talk of “Two South Asian Americans.” There is us – the bulk of people who work for reasonable to impossible wages – and then there are those who earn astronomical wealth.

A quarter of Indian Americans live in households with incomes below $25,000 – even though the community reported the highest median household income ($49,696). This means that the rate of inequality in our community is very high, with a few millionaires and a vast number who live in the basement of American society. While you can’t go into an urban hospital in the U.S. without being treated by either an Indian doctor or an Indian nurse, a fifth of Indian Americans have no health insurance, which is a higher percentage than the national average.
The super-rich are the NRIs – the Non-Resident Indians. In the 1970s, when the Indian economy went into a debt crisis, the government invented the idea of the NRI as a way to harness foreign remittances to cover the current account deficit and to collect capital for investment. The newly minted NRI had an important responsibility: no longer was this highly skilled sector to be looked at as a ‘Brain Drain’, but it was to be encouraged as a ‘Cash Cow’ to help the Indian state increase its foreign exchange reserves.
In 1982, Manmohan Singh (at that time a member of the Indian Planning Commission) said, “Indian communities abroad are noted for their hard work, initiative, and enterprise. As a result, they have accumulated large resources of investible funds.”
But NRIs have since matured from being the cash cow of India (to whose coffers they repatriate an embarrassingly low figure compared to the Chinese Diaspora), to being the ‘Money Mahout’ of the Republican Elephant.
Except that this elephant is not capable of being driven by our desi driver: the driver sits aloft feeding the elephant dollar bills while the animal goes where it wants and tramples all that comes in its path.
Most of us are not NRIs. We are immigrants, whose only investment into the homeland is money sent to our loving families and perhaps donations to social service projects. We don’t hold much of the $160 billion, the total income of Indians in Canada, the European Union and the U.S.A.
We are not like Lakshmi Mittal, the King of Steel in the U.K., whose idea of patriotism is reflected in this statement: “I do not think any NRI would invest in (in India) a major way because of emotional attachment. They want returns, they want results. I love my country. That is fine. But I must get returns as well.” Those of us who are not NRIs say, instead, we love both India and the U.S., and we are eager for our people, whether here, or there, to prosper and lead happy lives. That is more important than “returns,” whether in terms of personal bank account or of political cache.

Vijay Prashad is a professor of international relations at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn. His next book due soon is “Darker Nations: The Rise and Fall of the Third World.”