Indian-Americans lose big on Super Tuesday
Strategic Analyst
Indian-americans lost big on ‘Super Tuesday’ when 14 American states chose their delegates for the Democratic Party National Convention in July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. India gained, however, and the Modi government’s roadmap to Washington will have no speed-breakers if the presidential campaign in the US follows its present course to its logical end.
Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Senator who was considered the frontrunner to be the Democratic presidential candidate as recently as autumn, dropped out of the race on Thursday after failing to win even a single state. Had she won the nomination and gone on to the White House in the November election, Warren’s India-born son-in-law Sushil Tyagi and daughter Amelia Tyagi may have replaced Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner as influencers in a Warren presidency.
Sushil Tyagi, who once worked in Hollywood as a management consultant and helped produce documentaries on Indian history and culture, had already started giving interviews to the media, much like Trump’s son-in-law did during the 2016 presidential campaign. Warren’s Tuesday loss of her home state of Massachusetts draws the curtain on any public role which the Tyagis may have aspired for, if at all.
Sabrina Singh, an east coast-based political aspirant, is another high-flying casualty of the unexpected Super Tuesday results, which have reduced the fight for Democratic presidential nomination to a two-horse race — between former Vice-President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
On January 30, Michael Bloomberg, the three-term former mayor of New York, had announced with fanfare that Sabrina Singh would fill the crucial role of national spokesperson for his presidential run. Billionaire Bloomberg also gave up his quest for the presidency after he failed to win a single state on Super Tuesday.
When Bloomberg announced his bid for the Democratic nomination last November, it caught the imagination of political pundits and the chattering class. Like the present billionaire occupant of the White House, the super-rich Bloomberg was trying to buy the American presidency with his money and was accused of that by most other aspirants for the Democratic ticket.
For Sabrina Singh, the short-lived association with the Bloomberg campaign was her third ill-fated attempt to play a possible role in any White House. Four years ago, she was a regional communications director in Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the presidency. When New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Cory Booker launched his short-lived effort for the Democratic nomination last year, Singh became one of his senior aides.
Unlike Tyagi, whose strength is solely his family, Singh has political credentials of her own and cannot be written off altogether. She was once deputy communications director at the Democratic National Committee and had an important role in the party when Tom Perez was chairman of the committee.
She has political pedigree too. Her husband Mike Smith came into prominence as finance director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The House of Representatives, where the party is in a majority, is the biggest thorn in the side of the sitting President and it even impeached Trump, although the Senate acquitted him later. Her grandfather, JJ Singh, was head of the India League of America in the 1940s and led campaigns against racially discriminatory immigration policies of the US at that time.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Congresswoman from Hawaii, remains in the race, but only nominally. She may be there only for nationwide recognition of name since time is on her side, being one of the younger members in the US Congress. There is not a drop of Indian blood running in Gabbard’s veins, but many Indian-Americans — and Indians, too — mistakenly believe she is of Indian origin. As the first Hindu elected to the Congress, who takes oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita after each election, she remains a novelty on Capitol Hill.
Sunil Khemaney, an Indian-American, is Gabbard’s most important aide, her political sounding board and her outreach to the Indian-American community, who fund her campaigns generously. Over the years, Khemaney had become the ‘go-to’ man on Capitol Hill for Indian-Americans, many politicians and corporate leaders in India with an interest in the US and for Indian lobbyists in Washington. Gabbard’s extremely poor performance on Super Tuesday may cast a shadow on Khemaney’s influence in Washington, and to that extent, it represents a setback for the Indian-American community.
Another Indian who fell by the wayside approaching Super Tuesday was Swati Mylavarapu, a 36 year-old newbie in politics, who rose swiftly in the primaries campaign owing to her Harvard and Rhodes scholarship association with Pete Buttigieg, who was the hope of many young Democrats this year. The young former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, could not sustain his campaign, having held none of the high nationwide offices, unlike his rivals.
Mylavarapu, a former Google employee, raised an impressive $76 million for Buttigieg during the short time she was the National Investment Chairwoman for the former mayor. In a country where money talks most in elections, her political fundraising skills will not be forgotten, should Mylavarapu decide to return to any public role in future.
The only genuinely Indian origin candidate in the 2020 elections so far, California Senator Kamala Devi Harris, ended her quest for the White House three months ago, having failed to muster enough support nationwide. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a medical doctor born in Chennai.
For India — and its present government — the best bet in political America for the next four years from January 2021 is a Trump victory this November. It is most likely that Trump will have an Indian-American as his running mate, thus placing former South Carolina Governor Nikki (Namrata Randhawa) Haley a heartbeat away from the presidency if they win.
As things look now — although it may change — Biden has a good chance of getting the Democratic nomination as socialist Sanders is likely to scare away moderate Democrats during the remaining party primaries. Biden’s India connections are strong to the point where his great-great-great grandfather, George Biden, was a Captain in the English East India Company and is survived by five Bidens in Mumbai. But then, that is a story for another day.
