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Since Inauguration Day, the Trump government has steadily built up the most Indian-American administration yet.
Among the many strange things about America's new government, it is one of the most confounding. An anti-immigrant Trump has jam-packed his cabinet with Indian immigrants and their children. After defeating Kamala Harris (her mother born in Chennai) and threatening to do away with the H1B visa for highly skilled workers (72% of its beneficiaries are from India), Trump appointed Kash Patel to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who promptly took his oath on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Calcutta-born Stanford Professor Jay Battacharya now heads the National Institutes of Health. Usha Vance, as Second Lady, has already embarked on a high-profile (and still, for the moment, overseas) visit to Greenland.
Harmeet Dhillon heads the department of justice’s civil rights division, after offering a Sikh prayer, her head covered, at the last Republican National Convention. (Maybe more reassuringly predictable, in all this, were the online Trump supporters who decried worship of a foreign god.) Trump initially named Vivek Ramaswamy (both of whose parents emigrated from India) as joint head of the department of government efficiency alongside Elon Musk. But he dropped out after disagreements with Musk. Least shocking of all maybe is Sriram Krishnan as White House senior policy advisor for Artificial Intelligence.
Only 16% of Indian Americans voted for Trump in 2016. By 2020 this was 22%, by 2024 one in three. While 56% of Indian Americans identified as Democrats in 2020, by 2024 that dropped to 47%. It's among Indian American men under 40 where Trump had made the biggest inroads. They are a big number: 70% of current Indian immigrants to the US have come since 2000, making up the IT generation. Trump's diversity, equity, inclusion-bashing resounds with them; they believe they and their children will thrive in meritocracy and be net losers under affirmative action. The US's 4.8 million Indian Americans, after all, are both more educated and more affluent than other immigrant groups. One ground zero has been a high-profile magnet secondary school in Alexandria, Virginia: The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. A 2020 decision to adopt pro-diversity policies in the surrounding school district led Asian American enrolment to drop sharply. Parents tried, but failed, to coax the US Supreme Court into reviewing the decision in February.
Maybe it fits a similar pattern to UK Conservatives, where recent right-of-centre administrations have had the likes of Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, and former prime minister Rishi Sunak. In March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined Trump's Truth Social. As well as the same web page, they are on the same page on immigration. Rahul Gandhi protested against the Trump administration's planned deportations of undocumented Indians (of whom there are 700,000). Modi, though, declared they had been duped by human traffickers, fooled into immigration, and his government was fully prepared to bring them back.
And from all their similarities, there could be good. The India-US trade deal faltered in a Biden administration which produced no grand-scale trade deals to its credit. But Trump adores the art of the deal. The 90-day suspension of Trump tariffs is a prime moment for India to push for a quick trade deal. On April 11, Indian and US officials indeed finalised terms of reference for talks over the first part of a bilateral trade deal. Modi will need to convince Trump to think bigger. And at home, he will need to dig in: To sell lowering domestic tariffs on medical devices, agricultural, and IT, in return for stepping gingerly into China's place as electronics manufacturer of choice to the US market. From the likes of Tata Group and Infosys, there will be political cover aplenty for a broad deal that could boost bilateral trade from the $129 billion in 2024 to $500 billion a year by 2030.
