The US Presidential Race: Why Trump Might Be (Very Slightly) Better For India

This was mostly written before the US Democratic Party’s convention in Philadelphia, and the associated Wikileaks, which showed the utter depravity of the Democratic establishment. The 20,000 leaked emails show that the powers-that-be are solidly behind Hillary Clinton, to the extent of actively sabotaging Bernie Sanders’ campaign. This lends further weight to India’s concerns about Clinton.

I have suspected for a long time that the Democratic Party is, on average, much worse for India than the Republican Party. However, many Indian-Americans (and a lot of Indians too) believe the opposite to be true. I think this is because Democrats often engage in a lot of rhetoric about the rights of immigrants and non-whites (in the case of Indian-Americans), and there is a lot of propaganda revolving around the wonderful India-US relations under the Democrats (in the case of Indians).

In both cases, the rhetoric is much grander than the reality. As so-called liberals, Democrats speak a lot but do not do much these days for the underprivileged. It is true that Franklin Roosevelt and his social security net were indeed pro-poor policies, but the most obnoxious Southern racists in the US were also Democrats. And these days, even under a black Democrat president, the prevalence of the meme #BlackLivesMatter shows how badly blacks are treated even now.

One reason why so many in India think Democrats are wonderful is the masterful propaganda by the USIS in years past. (Nixon, a Republican, being a brute on Kissinger’s advice is also well known). But at one point, you couldn’t walk into many Kerala households without seeing on the wall a framed photo of John Kennedy and Jawaharlal Nehru walking in the Rose Garden of the White House, deep in conversation. The impression was that the young Kennedy was learning from the wise Nehru.

As a matter of fact, Kennedy despised Nehru, thinking him (not incorrectly) a vainglorious third-world ‘useful idiot’ for the Soviets and China, opposed to US Cold War interests. Jackie Kennedy, too, disliked him, and especially Indira Nehru. But that photograph remains, and so does that facile explanation of Nehru mentoring Kennedy.

Another reason for the affinity towards Democrats was the big to-do about Bill Clinton spending time in India and then quickly transiting through Pakistan, thereby apparently showing Pakistan it was not a trustworthy ally. He probably raced through Pakistan because of fears related to security. If he was so intent on sending Pakistan a message, why would he hyphenate us with them by going to Pakistan at all?

Later, Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State during the entire episode of visa-denial to then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the wake of the 2002 Godhra riots. Clinton and her hand-picked envoy, Nancy Powell, attempted to brutalise and tejo-vadham (humiliate) Modi repeatedly, despite plenty of good reasons to treat him with respect as a senior leader. In this regard, they were merely following the deep state practice, protecting their ‘assets’ deep in India’s United Progressive Alliance government.

Hillary Clinton’s principal aide is Huma Abedin, who has an Indian-origin migrant father and a Pakistani-origin mother. The parents abruptly moved to Saudi Arabia after living in the US for some years, and the mother is a founder of the Muslim Sisterhood, which I presume is a little like the Muslim Brotherhood. It is unlikely that Huma Abedin is advising Candidate Clinton to be nice to India.

Now comes the new Democratic Vice President choice, Senator Timothy Kaine of Virginia. The usual suspects in India rushed to dub him as a ‘friend of India’. NDTV dubbed him so while Wire.in gushed fulsome praise on him. Ah, such sweetness! But given my generally jaundiced view of leftist Indians, some of which are card-carrying flunkeys of the deep state, I probed further, and was rewarded with this – Senators air rights concerns about India ahead of PM’s visit – courtesy of Arvind Kumar, a policy analyst in the US, and another one from Kaine’s peer group of senators intent on attacking the PM.

So here you have Democratic big-wigs attacking India (very recently) with the same old deep state memes: ‘slavery’, ‘women’s rights’, ‘human rights’, ‘trafficking’, Dadri, ‘award wapsi’, ‘intolerance’, quasi-non-governmental organisations (example: Greenpeace and Ford Foundation) and most of all, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). That Orwellian group of Christian fundamentalists promotes evangelism and the spread of American Christian cults under the name of international religious freedoms. Thus the Democrats’ meeting of minds with the Congress Party, Aam Aadmi Party and other friends of the Ford Foundation is obvious. I am expecting any day new broadsides about ‘antibiotic resistance’, ‘open defecation’, and other typical memes.

In case we think the USCIRF bit is accidental, it turns out that Kaine was a missionary at one point of time, as published in the Washington Post. Virginia is also perhaps the most far-right state in northern US (and it was part of the slave-owning South that fought against Lincoln in the US Civil War).

Therefore, the Clinton-Kaine duo is definitely bad for India. How about Trump-Pence? Well, the point is that Hillary is so bad that anybody – absolutely anybody – would be better for both India and Indian-Americans. The latter will hurt from her cockamamie foreign relations and cavalier disregard for national security, as seen in Libyagate and emailgate.

Trump would be the more obvious candidate for Indians and Indian-Americans, despite being crass, boorish and, sometimes, a demagogue. He is simply less untrustworthy than Mrs Clinton.