The quote ‘I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ is often incorrectly attributed to 18th century philosopher Voltaire. It is a paraphrased interpretation of Voltaire’s text by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall.
This thought is sacrosanct to the idea of democracy, and yet in two largest democracies in the world, the United States and India, this sentiment has few takers.
India and the US go to the polls in 2024. In the US, the Republican Party candidates make a beeline for campaigning, with caucuses and primaries and swing states strategies being drawn up. There is also a politics of polarisation that’s fogged the environment. No one epitomises that better than the 45th US President Donald Trump, whose unceremonious ouster after the January 6 insurrection, and his subsequent legal battles have put him in the eye of the storm.
Trump, like Grover Cleveland (the 22nd and 24th US President) could become a non-consecutive president and has already changed the landscape of Republican and US politics, by injecting caustic rhetoric, bordering demagoguery with his attacks on immigrants and pejorative name-calling. The Republican Party has gone so far Right that Ronald Reagan, the messiah of the conservatives, would find himself trailing in the polls today.
One common theme redolent across both countries is a sense of the politics of polarisation. The diatribe has replaced discourse, ideologies dominate over ideas, and cantankerous culture wars over convivial bipartisanship.
Indian-American GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy entered the fray with an ideological axe to grind. His cudgel aimed at ‘wokeism’, and his antagonists are the progressive Left. Ramaswamy’s credo is espoused when he says “we’ve celebrated our diversity so much that we forgot all the ways we’re really the same as Americans”. He calls this “a national identity crisis”. He cites meritocracy, cheering the end of affirmative action, and quotes civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr, saying “we need to judge not on the colour of your skin, but the content of your character”
Ramaswamy’s ironies and hypocrisies unravel themselves. One is being blinded by his own caste privilege, which played a part in his parent’s educational pedigree and subsequent means to migrate.
The equality he preaches is one that his family would have depended on for equal opportunities to get ahead, in a then predominantly white-favouring Anglo-Saxon Christian privileged community. His biggest blind spot is forgetting that King wasn’t just influential in ushering in egalitarianism for African Americans with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that very Act made it possible for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 to fructify. A seminal moment in overhauling an archaic immigration system, that was previously quotas and race-based and skewed towards immigrants from the Western hemisphere. Those barriers eradicated then allowed equal opportunities to immigrants from the Global South, and among them Ramaswamy’s family.
Like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Ramaswamy wants the MAGA base, without the MAGA figurehead (Trump). As the adage goes, if America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. The culture wars have trickled into the Indian media, where a section of the Twitterati (or Xers maybe?) have long viewed the complexity of politics through Manichean binaries of — equating the Right wing in the US as good for India, hard on Pakistan, pro-Israel, while the progressive Left is bad for India, with its human rights records inquisition, support to Palestine, and the New York Times and Washington Post have an anti-India narrative.
Recently, MAGA pastor Hank Kunneman pejoratively attacked Ramaswamy for his Hindu faith, brazenly saying not to vote for someone who “does not stand primarily for Judeo-Christian values”. He crooned, “will you have some dude, who will put his hand on anything but the Bible, put his strange gods in the White House because he understands policy”.
US-India ties transcend political lines in both the countries and the problem with the big tent politics in the US is the heterogeneity of beliefs within the same party. There are progressives and moderates in the Democrats, and fiscal conservatives, Tea Party, and MAGA loyalists on the red side of the spectrum. Senator Mitt Romney, then Governor, was Trump’s GOP predecessor for US President in 2012. Then, seen as too ‘out of touch’ with common Americans, today, ironically viewed as the saner voice for Democrats to negotiate with across the aisle. Romney is a fiscal conservative, and liberal in many ways with his Michigan and Massachusetts roots. But he must toe the party line, even on extreme views on abortion and pro-gun laws.
This is perhaps a clarion call for the nationalists in India, to discern more carefully, over a broad strokes assumption of MAGA and the American Right; in this case a MAGA pastor was racist to someone on the Right of Indian origin and Hindu faith. The last being sacrosanct to the Indian Right.
The Immigration Act of 1965 paved the way for many members of my family to come to the US. One uncle came in 1965 itself. No doubt, the US is more diverse, accepting, and embracing than it was six decades ago. He recalled a conversation with an American gentleman in 1965, who said, “politics in this country, it depends on three A’s: accent, ancestry, appearance”.
Gobbledygook? Not for MAGA Pastor Hank Kunneman.
(Akshobh Giridharadas is a Washington DC-based public policy professional, and visiting fellow, Observer Research Foundation.)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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