Ruckus over ad mocking Huntsman’s adopted Indian, Chinese daughters

New York: In presidential elections, family matters, and the 2012 Republican contest is getting weirdly twisted about dark horse presidential candidate Jon Huntsman’s harmless adopted daughters. There is a big fight going on about who posted an obnoxious web video called “Jon Huntsman’s Values” mocking first Huntsman’s service as US ambassador to China, then the fact that he adopted a child in China and India. Naturally, Huntsman was furious when a group that claims to support Ron Paul, called “NHLiberty4Paul” posted a provocative video involving Huntsman’s adopted daughters on YouTube. “Share our values? A man of faith?” the ad asks, as a photograph appears of Huntsman carrying an infant, Asha Bharati. A beaming father and daughter are seen with red tikkas on their foreheads. The picture was taken shortly after the Huntsmans adopted Asha, now 6, from Gujarat in 2006. [caption id=“attachment_177227” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman kisses his daughter Asha (C) as his other daughter Gracie Mei (L) looks on. Reuters”]  [/caption] Huntsman and his wife have seven children, including Gracie Mei, 12, who was abandoned at a Chinese vegetable market at two months of age, and Asha who was left to die on an Indian village dirt road the day she was born. A hands-on dad, Huntsman speaks to Mei in Chinese and is encouraging little Asha, to learn about and appreciate her Indian culture and Hinduism. The video is set to east Asian music, and describes Huntsman as “the Manchurian candidate”. In a novel of the same name, the son of a prominent US political family is brainwashed into being an assassin for China’s Communist Party. Huntsman, a former US ambassador to China, described the video as “stupid” at an event in Concord, New Hampshire, on Friday morning. “Yeah, I lived overseas four times…I speak Chinese, of course I do. If someone wants to poke fun of me for speaking Chinese, that’s okay,” said Huntsman, who is a conservative reformer pushing for a flat US tax with just three brackets. “The thing I object to is bringing forward pictures and videos of my adopted daughters and suggesting that there is some sinister motive there. I have a second daughter who was born in India in a very rural village … and left for dead the day she was born,” he said in Concord. “And luckily she was picked up before the animals got her, and she was sent to an orphanage for her safety, was raised and now she is in my family. So I have two little girls who are a daily reminder that there are a lot of kids in this world who don’t have the breaks that you do and face a very uncertain future … and now these two girls are on the presidential campaign trail. I say, how cool is that?” Sadly, it is not the first time a candidate’s adopted children have become targets in the race for the Republican candidacy. In 2000, Senator John McCain, whose adopted daughter, Bridget, is from Bangladesh, found himself facing insinuations that he had fathered a brown child outside his marriage. Hindu groups of all stripes have slammed the video which labels Huntsman as un-American for adopting girls from China and India. “Utah Governor Huntsman and his family have been wonderful to open up their home and hearts to these two little girls,” said Dr Ram Bhat, lay leader of Hinduism at the US military Bolling Air Force Base, in Washington. “Hindu Americans salute his spirit of diversity and tolerance in raising his adopted daughter as a Hindu,” added Bhat, who was part of the Chinmaya Mission West campaign that backed US Army Captain Pratima Dharm to become the US military’s first Hindu chaplain in May last year. As outrage snowballs, here lies the rub. The latest conspiracy theory is that this video wasn’t made by a Ron Paul supporter, but rather one of Huntsman’s tech-savvy older daughters. Paul supporters have accused Huntsman of using the video as a means to “play the victim” and paint himself as a cosmopolitan hero, with full media cooperation. “It is demented to suggest the Huntsman’s daughters put out the video. They are very upset about it and are dreading that Asha or Gracie might see it,” a Huntsman campaign volunteer in New Hampshire, told Firstpost.