Firstpost

Who knows what Nikki Haley was thinking when she ticked that voter registration form, whether she even remembered Namrata Randhawa.

I don’t know if that form had an option for Indian-American or South Asian. Perhaps she was just tired of filling out Asian or Other on those voter registration forms. Perhaps she’s really colour-blind.

Perhaps she was saying that race is personal. In an America where you can remake yourself in every which way, why should she not be able to whitewash her race? After all German physiologist Johann Blumenbach created the term Caucasian for “aesthetic not biological reasons”. He thought that region south of the Caucuses produced “the most beautiful race of men”.

Perhaps our Nikki knows more about immigration history than we give her credit for. Once Punjabi immigrants were labelled as Caucasian in immigration records. It was 1923 case of United States vs Bhagat Singh Thind that finally closed that loophole. Thind argued he was Aryan and thus Caucasian. But the judge decided though he might have “purity of Asian blood”  he was not Caucasian in “the common understanding”. So he could not be considered a “white person”. Bhagat Singh Thind was stripped of his US citizenship.

One is tempted to think that Nikki Haley, herself the daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants, was striking a quiet blow for her forebear, the hapless Thind.

When Haley ran for governor there were some questions raised about how rooted she was in her community. But Indian Americans don’t like to argue with success.

As one blogger gushed:

Nikki, Namrata, Randhawa, Haley, Randhawa-Haley, whatever … to quote the poet, a rose by another name …

The point is this: This Rose is Our Rose. Nikki Haley is an Indian Rose!

… She is our girl!

Indian Americans raised money for her, anointed her Indian American person of the year, splashed her on the covers of their magazines and newspapers, ran glowing stories about her. They even willingly played second fiddle to her political ambitions.

“We need to make sure we are not out front,” said Ajay Kuntamukkala, a member of an Indian-American Republican political action committee. “We are not the face of the campaign. Nikki Haley is the face of the campaign. I am sure these candidates are proud of their heritage but in the pressures of these campaigns, they need to show they are American first and their ethnicity second.”

Translation: We will raise money for our Nikki. But we’ll keep our faces off the television screens in case it reminds the voters about her “brown” roots.

And as a governor in a state with a miniscule desi population, Nikki Haley has been true to her red-blooded conservative roots.

She’s a favourite daughter of the Tea Party, a bastion of the Angry White American. In a bitterly contested primary where she was accused of infidelity, Sarah Palin, mama Grizzly herself, gave her the big push touting her as “a pro-life, pro-Second Amendment fiscal conservative… and a board member at her family’s Methodist church, and most proudly, the loving mother of two beautiful kids.”

She converted to Christianity like her fellow conservative Indian American governor, Bobby Jindal. And thanks to marriage, she was even able to jettison that funny-sounding last name Randhawa.

The joke is really on the Indian Americans who were besides themselves with joy at seeing another brown face in high office and gave her a pass on her politics. They wrote out the checks at galas  from New Jersey to Dallas, Washington D.C. to Chicago, while she assured them that India was “close to her heart.”

Now that we know she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve, or at least on her voter registration form, here’s the million dollar question for the community. Come re-election time, will they fundraise for her again?

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