TOI correspondent from Washington: For years, Indian-origin conservatives in the Trump orbit have been comforting themselves that race doesn’t matter, ideology does. They are now discovering a rather inconvenient footnote: in the MAGA world, you can pass the ideological exam and still fail the race test and dinner evaluation.Trump’s Chandigarh-born legal luminary Harmeet Dhillon’s effort to portray herself as all-American by posting a photo of a beef dinner has invited ridicule from MAGA trolls, as has conservative Dinesh D’Souza’s attempt to defend his daughter from racist attacks by telling MAGA exclusionists that her mother is white. Ohio-governor aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump’s former UN envoy Nikki Haley, at various points, found themselves having to demonstrate that they are American enough.Democrats and liberals have of course experienced this to an even greater degree. Washington lawmaker Pramila Jayapal, who has heard the “go back to India” call from MAGA extremists for years, has faced death threats, including reporting a man carrying a loaded Glock outside her Seattle home. Some have responded cheekily. Asked last week to “take your curry and go home” by a MAGA Republican, Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi clapped back: “I’m staying. So is the curry. America is my home. No bigot gets to decide who is American, who belongs here, or what they have for dinner. That’s the America I’ll always fight for.”Progressives are relishing the schadenfreude that comes with needling conservative Republican desis who had signed up for MAGA. “Imagine hating your brown self so much, having so little self pride or self worth, that you voluntarily and proudly tell people on the internet that your daughter’s mom is white,” liberal commentator Mehdi Hasan, himself a target of vile racist attacks from MAGA, taunted D’Souza, who has long distanced himself from his Mumbai-origins.Vivek Ramaswamy has had the longest-running version of this particular identity seminar. The Ohio Republican, self-professed Hindu son of Indian immigrants and former presidential candidate, built much of his political career attacking what he regarded as left-wing racial grievance politics. Now, running for governor of Ohio, he has encountered racial hostility from the right. His Republican primary opponent Casey Putsch has attacked him as an “Indian boy” who was merely “cosplaying an American,” invoked “blood and soil” language and questioned whether Ramaswamy was genuinely American.Ramaswamy has responded by attacking the increasingly popular notion among MAGA that “heritage Americans” have some superior claim to the country. He has also said his social-media feeds became so saturated with slurs and demands that he return to India that he quit posting personally on X and Instagram. The irony is rich: Ramaswamy once argued that race should not determine American identity. He is now explaining that principle to people who apparently believe ancestry should.Nikki Haley encountered an earlier version of the same contradiction. The former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, born in South Carolina to Sikh immigrants from Punjab, was told by conservative commentator Ann Coulter during Haley’s 2023 presidential campaign to “go back to your own country.” Coulter coupled the remark with references to India’s supposed cow and rat worship. Even Trump repeatedly mocked Haley’s birth name, Nimarata, during the 2024 Republican primary campaign.And then there is the curious case of the man married to an Indian-American woman. Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, was targeted by white-nationalist Nick Fuentes and others after Vance became Trump’s running mate in 2024. Fuentes attacked the couple’s interracial marriage and invoked “replacement” rhetoric over Usha’s Indian ancestry. Vance later responded to continuing attacks on his wife by saying critics could “eat s—.”This year, Usha has again become a racial subtext in an argument involving Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. After Vance invoked his grandfather while criticising El-Sayed’s views on Islam, El-Sayed snarkily asked whether Vance would take Usha “back in time to meet Papaw,” invoking the way grandfathers are referred to in the south.There is something almost wonderfully American about the absurdity of it all: immigrants and their children being asked to prove they belong by people whose own ancestors once had to prove they belonged. Harmeet plates beef, Dinesh wheels out the white wife, Vivek rolls out the Ohio birth certificate, and Nikki goes to church. And yet the MAGA bouncer at the door keeps asking the same question: “But are you really American?”
