A sizable contingent of young Indian American celebrities may flank President-elect Donald Trump when he returns to the White House in January.
They include Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-lead a new nongovernmental initiative with Elon Musk called the Department of Government Efficiency, and Kash Patel, who, if confirmed, may become Trump’s FBI director. Jay Bhattacharya and Harmeet Dhillon, who have more subdued public receptions, are preparing for possible important positions at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Justice, respectively.
Additionally, Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President-elect JD Vance, will be the first South Asian American to hold the position of second lady.
On the president-elect’s recently announced team, these Indian Americans are arguably the most well-represented minority group.
Many find it strange that this ethnic community, which makes up less than 2% of the population, is usually among the most Democratic of all Asian ethnicities. According to some, the Indian American community has long been ready to conform to the present Republican paradigm. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that Indian Americans are playing important roles in Trump’s administration, experts said, while he continues to criticize China, embraces giants of the internet industry, and applauds the present Indian government.
According to Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder of AAPI Data, it’s astounding how underrepresented Indian Americans are in comparison to other groups of color.
According to experts, their support of some of Trump’s policies, such as Ramaswamy’s calls for mass deportations and Patel’s unfounded charges of a secret deep state, is out of step with the political views of the majority of Indian Americans. However, that may be about to change.
Although NBC News polling did not break down the vote by ethnicity, AAPI Data’s nationwide surveys of Asian American voters show a decline in support for Democratic candidates. Seventy-seven percent of Indian Americans reported voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. 69% of respondents stated they intended to vote for Harris in September 2024.
More generally, Asian Americans moved to the right by 5 points, while the whole population swung by 3.2 points.
According to Ramakrishnan, Trump was more popular among Indian Americans aged 18 to 34, particularly among Indian American men. Not all of the younger males, such as Ramaswamy and Kash Patel, are native-born. Younger guys who were born abroad and are probably newly naturalized are included. It’s likely that you have a sizable tech workforce.
Some believe that this shared bond runs counter to the narrative that led them to the United States. Trump ran on a strong anti-immigrant stance, with supporters like Ramaswamy vowing to cut back on the H-1B visa program and even cancel birthright citizenship.
The Trump team said in an NBC News statement that Biden’s ineptitude and illegal immigration attracted Indian Americans to the GOP.
Indian Americans, fed up with the Biden administration’s ineptitude, unrestricted illegal immigration, and economic stagnation over the past four years, turned out in historic numbers to support President Donald J. Trump and his Make America Great Again agenda, according to Trump-Vance transition spokesperson Kush Desai.
Requests for feedback from Patel and Ramaswamy were not answered.
According to Sangay Mishra, an associate professor at Drew University in New Jersey and the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans, “I think it fits really well with Trump’s vision of what he wants his right-wing, conservative, populist politics to look like.”
An immigration pattern than led to the current moment
Experts claim that a number of contemporary domestic and global events have made it possible for the GOP to accept individuals like Patel and Ramaswamy when they might not have otherwise. They said Indian Americans are doing well at home.
They typically make the most money in the United States. According to AAPI Data, 77% of them hold a bachelor’s degree or more, and they are overrepresented in the tech sector.
This did not occur spontaneously. The first significant wave of Indian immigration to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily young individuals seeking employment in white-collar industries, is largely to blame.
According to Madhavi Murthy, an associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, it’s a highly demographically particular group in terms of caste, class, and educational opportunities that they had in India that enabled them to travel to the United States. This group produced the present generation of well-known Indian Americans that we see in politics today.
Stories by Ramaswamy, Patel, and even Usha Vance suit that description. Vance Patel’s father works in finance, while Ramaswamy’s father is an engineer.
Additionally, both Vance and Ramaswamy come from wealthy upper-caste families who enjoy privilege under India’s strict caste system, which, despite being outlawed, nonetheless controls a large portion of social and economic life on the subcontinent. In his book Woke Inc., published in 2021, Ramaswamy talks about discovering his high-caste Brahmin heritage. He said that “kings were below us” and that his family’s lower caste slaves had to enter the house through a different door and adhere to various customs.
According to Mishra, caste privilege is a component of their identity. A certain amount of that does provide the potential for embracing a very conservative and hierarchical worldview.
Although Mishra said he doesn’t believe Trump explicitly took caste and ethnicity into account when choosing his employees, he believes those characteristics may have contributed to their reputations as successful immigrants and model minorities in the United States.
Trump’s chilly ties with China are also advantageous for the growing number of Indian Americans in the GOP.
According to Ramakrishnan, there are fewer talented persons of color in the Republican Party. Due to heightened tensions between the United States and China, it is more challenging for Chinese Americans to hold high-level positions today than it was 10 or twenty years ago.
However, Trump has a favorable opinion of India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The role India might play
The president-elect’s fondness for Modi and his government, a right-wing nationalist movement that some human rights organizations blame for the reversal of civil rights in India, is credited by some analysts with contributing to the success of Indian Americans, and Hindus in particular, in the Trump administration.
Trump and Modi have demonstrated their close relationship on multiple occasions. In 2019, they joined hands at the Howdy, Modi! rally in Houston, which attracted tens of thousands of Indian Americans.
Both Patel and Ramaswamy have previously been outspoken in their support of Modi’s policies, even though none of Trump’s Indian American staff appointments have discussed India’s leadership much.
Tulsi Gabbard, another Hindu Cabinet contender, has supported the divisive prime minister in the United States and has several meetings with him. Gabbard, a Samoan American who became a Hindu convert as a child, may be Modi’s most ardent supporter within the government.
India is one of the United States’ most significant partners, Gabbard said in a video message welcoming Modi to the country in 2019. Additionally, she has repeated Hindu nationalist rhetoric about the rise of Hinduphobia in the United States and the need to defend Hindus against jihadist Muslims, which Trump has also used.
In a 2016 Diwali campaign statement coordinated by the Republican Hindu Coalition, Trump declared that the Indian and Hindu communities would have a loyal friend in the White House. Radical Islamic terrorism will be defeated.
Gabbard’s team told NBC News that the criticism she received for her relationship with Modi was bigoted.
In an email, transition team spokesperson Alexa Henning stated that the repeated attacks on Lt. Col. Tulsi Gabbard’s faith and patriotism by Democrats and the media are not only untrue, but also discriminatory. Like President Trump, she understands the value of strong collaboration to fortify U.S.-Indian relations, particularly when it comes to shared goals like countering terrorism and advancing economic connections.
According to Mishra, the alliance makes it easier for more Indian and Hindu politicians to enter the GOP, even though Trump isn’t necessarily evaluating Indian American candidates solely on their ties to India.
“They may or may not be associated with Hindu right-wing politics, but they are united by broader right-wing politics,” he said.
Alignment with a movement that has been racist against Indian Americans
Regardless of how closely their policy views coincide, not everyone supports the Trump administration’s alleged inclusion of Indian Americans.
There is definitely an element of the right which is deeply racist and white supremacist, Mishra said.
The number of brown faces in Trump’s orbit has angered far-right and white nationalist Trump supporters, who have posted on sites like X that they believe this is an indication of a softer stance on immigration.
Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist influencer whom Trump once hosted for dinner, posted that Usha, JD Vance’s wife, was not raised as a Christian and is not a Christian. This is what kind of family?
Is it reasonable to assume that a man with an Indian wife and a child named Vivek will be in favor of white identity? I’m trying out another video.
Similar far-right accounts echoed that sentiment, with one posting photos of Patel, Ramaswamy and Usha Vance s family captioned the future of conservatism.
In July, when Dhillon delivered a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention, she was the subject of similar trolling, with big right-wingaccountsaccusing her of witchcraft and calling for her deportation.
Dhillon s team declined to comment.
Vance and Ramaswamy have both openly spoken about being Hindu, but it often comes with a caveat. Vance saidin a Fox News interviewwith her husband that despite her faith, she pushed him to get closer to Christianity.
Ramaswamy has tried to hedge his Hindu faith by quoting Bible verses on the campaign trail and telling voters, We share the same values, the same Judeo-Christian values in power.
Ramaswamy s team did not respond to a request for comment but in August told NBC News that they disagreed with that characterization.
Yes, he knows the Bible better than many self-proclaimed Christians, but that s exactly what allows him to speak with authority about shared values, his senior adviser and communications director Tricia McLaughlin told NBC News. He has given speeches where he invokes a fundamental teaching from Hindu scripture, the Vedas: satyam vara, dharmam chara. It means: speak truth, do your duty. Which happens to be the heart of Vivek s message to our country.
But experts said that to a right-wing base that loves Trump for his anti-immigrant stances and America First rhetoric, no amount of assimilative behavior will win everyone over.
I m old enough to vividly remember post 9/11, many Muslims, many Hindus, many Sikhs from South Asian communities went into overdrive to prove that we are truly Americans, said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the nonprofit South Asian Network. We know today that does not work.
While speaking with Vivek Ramaswamy on his podcast earlier this year, conservative pundit Ann Coulter started by telling him, I agreed with many, many things you said when you were running for president. But I still would not have voted for you because you re an Indian.
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