Surprise!! Surprise!! There is a group of Indian Americans who support Trump. They even have a face book page with some 400 likes!!  Trump stirs the Indian Americans pot in strange ways. Let us look at how some of these micro segments in the Indian diaspora are responding to Trump.

Trump for one has been able to bring out the dichotomy (hypocrisy might be the better word) among the Sanghis in US. The average Trump right-winger hot head does not have enough education to discriminate against the Mexican brown or Indian brown.  Nor Hindu brown or Muslim brown or Christians browns.

The simple message that the Trumpeter simple brain goes by is that brown is not white, is an immigrant and hence can be hated. Some of the Trump inspired incidents included a Sikh man shot at Chicago, an Indian reporter heckled at a Trump rally and another Indian heckled in a football stadium in Minnesota. Many other incidents or low level insults goes un reported.

My Sanghi friends are now worried about traveling outside the cities into rural America and concerned about being in certain bars. Trump and co have educated them on what it is like to be a member of the minority population.  Sanghis now realize that leaders do not really have to explicitly ask their followers to beat up “other” people. 

However our hypocrisy is such that even while our Sanghi friends are going through this intense education sponsored by Trump, they find time to fund raise for gau raksha and other pet projects of Sanghis in India. Secular in the US and communal in India at the same time!!

Now there are these NRIs who are for Trump, which sounds a little odd. Who are these folks? In this group there are folks who are the Christian right, who love Trump’s hatred of Muslims. Then there are those pure breed of Indian racists who think that Mexicans immigrants should be deported because they are illegal immigrants… and the ones who think that their brownness gets converted to white if they embrace the “super whiteness” of Trump. For those whiteness seekers, here is a video by Russel Peter on Indians becoming Canadian overnight.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63_lFztZ0rw

But what these Indian American Trump supporters don’t realize is that in a Trump presidency, if you are brown, you can be heckled/lynched by a crazy white supremacist. You will see the various racist “senas” come out in full force.  My Sanghi friends - that applies to you too.

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