Being American in a Trumpian world

Sandeep Dikshit

Nikki Haley, for two years, was a name associated with the Donald Trump circle, her given assignment to break the cutlery at the United Nations (UN).

Of the 50 governors in the US, Haley’s name rang the loudest bell in India when she led South Carolina through two terms. For she was a Randhawa, whose well-to-do parents, for reasons not very credible, decided to chuck a six-storey house with a retinue of servants in Punjab to move to the Land of Great Opportunity for the sake of their yet-to-be-born daughters.

Born in rural South Carolina, Nikki has no recollections of the land her parents left behind. A reference to India intermittently pops up though, almost always to remind us that the Randhawas left behind a life of comfort and privilege, as if to suggest that this self-forfeiture was for a higher calling. Like all Republicans, Haley is clear that her calling as an American is to righten an upturned world.

All through the book she also reminds us that her parents came to the US through the legal route and not illegally. This vital element divides the Republicans from the Democrats. Haley, having opted to cast her lot with the Conservatives, underlines two points that allow her to enter the Republican sanctum sanctorum: that she is against need-based immigration and that it was not need that forced her family to board the plane from India. And a third — her husband is an army veteran — a vital plume in a political resume when the skin tone is not white.

The pain of being different began right from the beginning. “We were somewhere in between. I was born a brown girl in a black-and-white world.” And while her formerly-affluent-in-India parents move up the economic ladder, Haley rationalises the difference from a fatalistic and self-aggrandising viewpoint — “Yes, we were outsiders when I was growing up. But that’s not unusual …Our country gave us the opportunity to strive and succeed …it gave my mom the opportunity to open a business. And it gave me the opportunity to become governor and then UN ambassador.”

This easy acceptance of the status quo on racial status grates against the role of wrecker-in-chief at the UN where she shook up the established order and conventions. According to her, when her Sikh father was faced with stares in the early 1970s, he put a flag of America on the car bonnet. “Just like the Sikhs in US did after 2001,” she states matter-of-factly. A budding politician would have reached out to community groups to get protection for all instead of securing individual safety behind the national flag!

If race has Haley turning passive and ruminative, there are no such compunctions for throwing entire nations into the doghouse during her UN stint. Whether it was torpedoing Obama’s Iran agreement or his pact with Cuba, Haley waded in enthusiastically into each hit job. A scout’s self righteousness was exemplified in her scolding at the UN after the US lost eight times in resolutions on Cuba. Any other person would have paused to reflect for bringing about a situation where just Ukraine and Israel sided with her country and 189 voted against.

Her account sounds strained and eager-to-justify as she ran amuck in the UN china shop. Haley had a hard act to follow. Her predecessor Samantha Powell was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist-turned-Harvard Don with a documentary made on her for contributions to prevent genocide. But Haley got a better deal for herself. She also got a seat on the Trump Cabinet and the National Security Council. The triple hat would have proved extremely useful in policy coordination with the White House.

At 48, Haley carried out a brilliant political pirouette. She quit her UN job before she became another Trump appointee who exited in less-than-ideal circumstances. Her ties with Trump remained intact as do her contacts from the Republican woodwork. One such, Mike Pence, now the Vice President, may have been instrumentally in throwing her the UN lifeline.

Haley will be around for some time, who knows as a Cabinet Minister in the next Trump administration. She may have not been revelatory about her Indian roots but there is a definite soft spot for the country, even if it is as per the party line. With due respect, Haley turns out to be a conformist who playacts a rebel.