Why Indian-American candidates for US office don't ignore questions about their identity

By Zahir Janmohamed

In 2010, an Indian-American friend named Kiranjeet asked me if I would help her run for a junior-level political office in the southern US state of Virginia.

It was two years after America elected its first African-American president Barack Obama and my friend and I were hopeful that American voters were ready to embrace candidates from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds like her.

I joined Kiranjeet and her family as they went door to door to campaign. Before she launched her campaign, she decided she would not talk about her Indian identity. At the time, she and her husband worked as doctors in a well-known hospital and she wanted to emphasize that she was running for office to address the city’s health and educational problems.

However, our conversations with voters kept veering away from this platform. Some voters refused to speak with Kiranjeet’s husband, a Sikh Indian-American who wears a turban. A few admitted they were afraid of him. One voter even asked Kiranjeet why she gave her daughter an “Indian” name like Neetu instead of an “American” name like Amy.

Who we Are vs What we Stand For
We tried our luck once again, only this time Kiranjeet’s daughter and husband stayed behind. When Kiranjeet gave speeches, she would start with a short anecdote about her parents, both immigrants from Punjab, who came to the US in the mid 1980s. We reasoned that if Kiranjeet talks about her ethnicity before voters do, she might be able to steer conversation back to her policy proposals and to make her campaign about her ideas, not her skin colour.

The plan backfired and soon voters were asking Kiranjeet why she was now talking about India so much. Kiranjeet pulled out of the election soon after and I began to wonder: can an Indian-American campaign for office in the US and not make his or her identity an issue? This past week, the Left-leaning Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders became the first ever Jewish-American to win a US presidential primary in the northeastern state of New Hampshire. It’s a remarkable change.

Throughout America’s history, US presidents have all been Christian and it was once common for candidates to be asked during debates not whether they love Jesus but rather how much they love Jesus.

Sanders has been praised for, among other things, not speaking about his identity. American voters seem to love that he does not talk about his faith, in the same way many of his opponents do, and polls show voters do not care that he is Jewish, an encouraging shift, given how rampant bigotry against Jews once was in America.

But Sanders’ choice not to speak about his identity is a luxury often not afforded to Indian-American candidates. When I worked in the US Congress, I observed that Indian-Americans who run for US office are often limited to two options. One is to join the Democratic party and play up their ethnicity.

It helps to boast how your great-grandparents marched with Gandhi, as well as to talk about how no one in your family “in the village back home in India” had electricity until they moved to the US. I know several Indian-American candidates who hate that they have to tell these types of stories.

The other option is to join the Republican party where, as an Indian-American candidate, you are often expected to play down your ethnic heritage, maybe even degrade it. Bobby Jindal, the Indian-American governor of Louisiana, changed his name from Piyush to Bobby and left Hinduism for Christianity. He was also mocked on social media for commissioning a painting of himself in which his skin appears whiter than it really is.

Curious Case of Indian-Americans
In the days since Sanders’ victory, I have seen many commentators, both in India and in the Indian-American community, wonder why Indian-American candidates for US office do not ignore questions about their identity the way Sanders has done.

Each time I hear this, I remember my friend Kiranjeet who was thrust into discussions about her Indian identity that made it difficult, voters acknowledged, to see her as “one of them”.

Faced with this type of prejudice, I understand, but do not agree with, the impulse of politicians like Jindal who believes the path to success is to distance himself from his Indian identity. It’s easy to make fun of him and to call him a “sellout”. But we should also be critical of an increasingly racially charged political climate in the US where a candidate like Sanders is not asked about his name in the same way a candidate like Kiranjeet is.

(The author, a former US Congressional aide, is writing a book about Gujarat)