Narendra Modi’s US visit elicits mixed reactions from Indian-Americans

If Indians living in the United States had been allowed to vote in this year’s Indian elections, says Bharat Barai, “Narendra Modi probably would’ve gotten an 85-to-90-percent vote — far better than he got in India.”

Barai is the chief organizer of a reception for the new prime minister, to be held at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sept. 28; the free tickets were snapped up in a matter of weeks. This will be Modi’s first visit to the United States since the U.S. Congress denied him a visa in 2005 for failing to protect religious freedom during riots in 2002 in the western Indian state of Gujarat, during which more than 1,000 Muslims were killed. The visa decision was reversed earlier this year after Modi’s political party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, swept the Indian elections in May.

Now Modi’s upcoming visit is exposing a political divide in the Indian-American community. While the Indian American Community Foundation, the organizer of the Madison Square Garden reception, is pulling out all the stops for the event — which will have upward of 20,000 attendees and live telecasts in Times Square and online — a coalition of progressive South Asian and civil-rights groups is planning a protest outside the venue. For most Indians in the United States, Modi’s ascent signifies a more powerful role for India on the world stage, especially economically. But a determined minority is keeping the memory of the riots alive and raising questions about what a divisive government means for India’s secular identity.

One of the dissenters is 22-year-old Nayi Sultana (who requested that her real name not be used for this story), whose family sought political asylum in the United States in 1997. They were fleeing anti-Muslim violence — specifically, riots in Mumbai in 1992 in which more than 1,000 people were killed over two months, most of them Muslim. A 1996 Human Rights Watch report found that a Hindu nationalist group was responsible for instigating the violence.

Sultana’s family settled in a working-class neighborhood in Richmond, California, didn’t mix much with other Indian immigrants and avoided the subject of why they left. But now that the Indian-American community is gearing up for the arrival of Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist, Sultana is finally getting involved.

Modi’s government doesn’t care about us, she says. “Which is a theme about India — the leadership doesn’t care about the minorities.”

Parminder Singh, who was leading the protest, said their anger was due to the lack of attention from the Indian government regarding the massacres. “They [Sikhs] were brutally murdered. They were burned alive. The women were raped. Property was looted,” he said. “To this day, nobody’s been convicted.”

Jagdish Tytler, a former minister from the rival Congress party, which was in power at the time, has been widely implicated in the riots, and the Indian government reopened an investigation last year, but he has yet to be held accountable.

The government’s failure to bring justice to the Sikhs after all these years shows how the Hindus always try to suppress all minorities, Singh said.

“At this point, these communities are realizing that they have the same experiences of being targeted,” says Simran Jeet Singh, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who is studying the formation of religious groups in South Asia and who is a Senior Religion Fellow at the Sikh Coalition, a community organization formed in the aftermath of 9/11. “What we see in India is sort of the opposite effect. There is this overarching narrative of India being secular, pluralistic. Because of that narrative, religious violence and nationalism isn’t really taken seriously.”

The economic promise of a Modi-led government is partly what helped soften his right-wing leanings and made him easier to accept for Indians in India as well as in the diaspora, says Vijay Prashad, author of “The Karma of Brown Folk” and “Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today.”

“In diaspora communities, there has always been a sense that if your country is strong, you in the diaspora are taken seriously,” he says. People think that “Modi is a strong man … There is a macho thing that is there.”

Anisha Gade, a master’s candidate in urban planning at the University of California at Berkeley who is studying cultural, racial and ethnic diversity in Silicon Valley, says she wouldn’t be surprised if most Indians here are pleased that he is the prime minister. “I would say that just because of the socioeconomic status of most Indians in this country, especially in this part of the country,” she says. “Most Indians are quite well-to-do. [Modi] is very interested in a kind of cosmopolitan pursuit of one’s individual liberty or one’s freedom in that way. And so in that sense, I would say most people are on board with that message. Because it’s worked for them.”

Anu Mandavilli, a first-generation immigrant who has been living in the United States for almost 15 years and is a co-founder of the Ghadar Alliance, agrees. “I would say the way we understand the Hindutva operation today, in 2014, would definitely be that it’s not just a cultural or political ideology,” she says. “There’s a particular sort of marriage of Hindutva as a political ideology with neoliberalism the economic ideology.”

But if a capitalist economy is the ideal, Sultana cautions, there are certain pitfalls. “When we talk about India, we don’t talk about the structural problems of caste and religious minorities. We think about poverty and economic development,” she says. “If you are thinking the way Modi is promoting India is following this capitalist, American model, the same things that are happening here, in Ferguson [Missouri], they’re going to be happening in India in no time … Oh, wait, they already have, because there are communal riots.”

Likening India’s Hindu majority to America’s white majority puts things in perspective.

“So it immediately runs in their ideology that Hindu culture is culture in India,” says Prashad. “Muslims can live in India … You can be Christian in India. But your culture is Hindu.”

“Can you imagine saying that in America?” he asks. “‘Your culture has to be white’?”

Correction: An earlier version of the story misstated the position of Simran Jeet Singh at the Sikh Coalition. He is Senior Religion Fellow there.