Commenter Johnny asked a number of questions on the back of last week’s Friday T&A post related to Indians in America. They are mixed in with lots of other stuff, so I’ll break them down into simple chunks:

1. Why are Indians in the West (especially America) so vocally and uniformly left-wing? They vote like 80% or more Democrat, as a high-income group.
2. Are they resentful about being weak and ugly, and as such, hate White people?
3. Are Jews encouraging them so as to set Indians up to take the heat once the general collapse of the USA happens?
4. Why does it make logical sense that Hinduism and Leftism go together very well?
5. Building on the previous question, why do Indians in America support both loony-Lefitst Democrats AND the current right-wing leader of India? Isn’t this a complete self-contradiction?

I endeavour to answer all of these questions, and quite a lot more, in a Domain Query podcast, given below:

Before I continue, I need to issue a couple of corrections.

I got the extent of the British Raj wrong. The Raj DID extend into Ceylon – modern Sri Lanka. It DID NOT extend into Nepal and Bhutan, and largely stayed out of most of Afghanistan.

The article that I mention in the podcast about “the learned elders of Wye” is real – but it appeared in Ha’aretz, not The Jerusalem Post, and it took place at Wye Plantation in Maryland. It’s a minor correction but I did misattribute the source, so that’s my bad.

The book by David P. Goldman is called How Civilisations Die – I got it right the first time – and it’s worth reading, even if its latter chapters are absolutely laughable.

Johnny also requested something that he could cut and paste – with attribution, I hope – so here it is:

1. The Diaspora, Income, and Leftism

Indians in America are vocally and uniformly left-wing because they come from two primary groups.

The first of these is the professional class that left India during the Diaspora from the late 1960s to the 1980s. These were the doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, business managers, and so on – almost all of them with high-quality professional degrees from India’s top universities. And make no mistake, the graduates from those universities were, and are, extremely skilled, talented, and accomplished.

They came to the USA and made a lot of money as high-achieving professionals. That is a big part of the reason why Indians are America’s highest median-income group.

The second group is unskilled or low-skilled labour, who ended up in Western countries as taxi drivers, waiters in restaurants, and other menial jobs. Because of the uniquely rewarding features of the American system, in particular, many of these people ended up making good anyway and doing well for themselves, realising material gains in a way that they could never have achieved in India. But they never, ever forgot their backgrounds and their resentments of people above them.

These are the two strongest voting blocs for the Daemoncrats today, in general, regardless of race. The Daemoncrat Party’s distribution of voters is skewing into a weird double-peaked shape right now, among the very poor and the very rich.

I argue that a major reason why very rich people tend to vote Left is because of a sense of guilt about their wealth. They feel a need to give back, but they don’t realise that the best way to give money back is to push poor people up through business and entrepreneurship and religious charity, not by pulling the rich down through government-enforced redistribution.

Rich people love to preach to everyone else about how to fix society’s problems – they just don’t want to have to do anything about it themselves, as a general rule. To them, money doesn’t matter because they have it.

Of course, wealth and secularism also tend to go hand-in-hand, so when you have secular wealthy educated people who see their poorer brethren in dire straits, they tend to resort to the party that promises redistribution.

Thus, they are naturally inclined to vote Daemoncrat.

2. The Indian Race Troll Trope

I’ve warned Johnny before about his fixation on Indian looks. I repeat that warning here and in the podcast – seriously, dude, find another hobby-horse to flog.

Nonetheless, I do think there is some truth to the theory that Indians have a deep resentment of White people.

Admittedly, on the surface this doesn’t really make sense. Indians are very friendly indeed toward White foreigners who come to India to visit – although any White woman who has ever spent time in India is inevitably creeped out by the weirdness of Indian men and their extreme betatude.

Even so, it is entirely possible that Indians have something of an inferiority complex with Whites, precisely because they owe the existence of their nation to White people, and much of the success of their nation, as well as virtually its entire infrastructure, was built by White minds and hands.

A particular stanza of the old Kipling poem, The White Man’s Burden, is a perfect encapsulation of the way that Indians have treated the inheritance bequeathed to them by their former masters:

Take up the White Man’s burden –
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper –
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

That is the exact summation of India’s situation. India simply WOULD NOT EXIST AS A NATION were it not for the British. And at some level, even the most passionately nationalistic Indians recognise this. They don’t like it because this causes severe cognitive dissonance between their core belief that India is the greatest and the best and the most wonderful, and the hard reality that “India” as a nation did not exist before the Brits got there.

What might have been considered “India” before the Brits was in reality a series of empires, which forced multiple nations and tribes to work together under the rule of a foreign entity, up and down and sideways along the length and breadth of the subcontinent. It is not an exaggeration to state that South India is an entirely separate culture and nation from North India, and regards itself as such. It took the British to come along and glue all of those disparate pieces together.

That reality is a bitter pill for Indians in general to swallow. Many of them still hold severe resentment toward the Brits for what they did during their rule – but the reality is that without them, India wouldn’t exist. And this means that at some level, they don’t particularly like White people.

3. Indians and the JQ

Jews are a tiny percentage of India’s population – tinier by far than Christians, which amount to a bare 2% of the country and are falling in numbers every year due to violence and persecution. (India is one of the ten WORST places in the entire world to be a Christian.) Jews have virtually zero influence in India and have never had much of one in the past. Most Jews in India have already moved out to Israel. The few that remain tend to cluster around Bombay.

Jews in the US do not really look to Indians as natural partners, and Hindus regard Judaism as a foreign and largely unwelcome influence, the same as they regard the other great monotheistic faiths.

Certainly some Jews in the USA are heavily involved in the destruction of the American project – it is not coincidental that one of the two architects of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 was a Jew.

However, Indians are too few in number to accomplish the real destruction of the US empire. They amount to only about 4 million or so people. That is in start contrast to the roughly 40 million Blacks and approximately 60 million Hispanics in the USA today.

Four million people, in a nation of 330 million or so, isn’t enough to accomplish severe demographic destruction – especially given that most of those four million are centred around already highly liberal parts of the country. The USA WILL be destroyed by its own demographic failures, and soon – but that is one thing that you cannot blame on Indians, other than as accessories to the fact.

4. The Convergence of Hinduism and Leftism

It actually makes perfect logical sense that Leftism and Hindusim go together. I state my reasons for this very clearly in the podcast, and I’ll break it down here again.

Both Hinduism and Leftism share two core beliefs, though they call them different things.

The first core belief is what Hinduism calls “caste”, and Leftism calls “class privilege”. They both amount to the same thing in the end. In Hinduism, society is divided into four primary castes. These are, in descending order: the Brahmins or educated caste; the kshatriyas or warriors and kings; the vaishyas or merchants and sellers; the shudras or manual labourers; and right at the bottom, cleaning toilets and sweeping filth, the dalits or Untouchables.

You will immediately notice that this class hierarchy is absolutely identical to the standard Marxist-Leftist approach of having an enlightened educated meritocratic governing class, followed by those who guard and protect them, followed by those who engage in the menial business of selling things, followed by the lumpen proletariat, and right at the bottom of the pile, the enemies of the Revolution who deserve only shame and scorn and hatred.

The second core belief is what Hinduism calls “karma and dharma” and what Leftism calls “dialectical materialism” – a fancy word-salad nonsense term that they use to make Marxism sound “scientific”. The two are not exactly the same, but the fundamental idea behind both is identical – namely, that you are not in control of your own destiny.

With karma, Hinduism argues that people give and get that in return. With dharma, Hinduism argues that a man’s fate or destiny is inescapable.

Leftism has similar belief structures and is highly compatible with the fatalistic Hindu worldview based on reincarnation and penance for past sins in one’s current life. According to the Leftist worldview, you are not the architect of your own destiny but are instead guided by forces beyond your control – forces that keep you subjugated and enslaved.

There are other parallels as well. At least some schools of Hinduism argue that the world around us in an illusion – maya – and can be transcended through proper meditation and careful study and total detachment from reality. Leftism is completely detached from reality and argues that the world around us is an oppressive construct.

The two are much more similar than you might think, and a careful examination of the roots of both would lead one to the conclusion that they are highly compatible. In fact, if you look closely at the hold that the Indian Left has on universities, college campuses, the Indian media, and the intelligentsia, you would be forgiven for thinking that Hindu Leftists are in charge everywhere – because they effectively are.

5. Indian Americans and Modi

The key to understanding this point is to first dispense with the illusion that Narendra Modi fits in with the American understanding of “left-wing” and “right-wing”. He doesn’t.

Modi is a Hindu nationalist. That is all. He believes in Hindutva first and foremost. He is not an economic nationalist unless economic nationalism coincides with the goal of Hindutva – the primacy of the Hindu religion and the Hindu people. That is why his economic agenda is a highly self-contradictory muddled mess. That is why his foreign policy is inconsistent, at best. And that is why his domestic record is extremely patchy and has thus far focused on currency demonitisation boondoggles and hugely contentious citizenship registries.

Modi is popular in India because he panders to Hindus. That sort of demagoguery works very well in a country like India where caste and class tensions are rife for exploitation.

The first and most important thing to understand is that Hindus in America DO NOT LIKE Islam.

They aren’t nekulturniye enough to say it outright, of course – not yet. But they are NOT at all friendly toward Islam or Muslims. And with Modi, they see someone who gives them a lot of goodies and is antagonistic, at best, toward Muslims.

Make no mistake, Indians in America have benefited immensely from Modi’s policies, which are quite friendly to overseas Indians. Those policies have resulted in a confusing mix of categories defining Indians as Non-Resident Indians, Persons of Indian Origin, or Overseas Citizens of India. Each category has a number of benefits and rewards associated with it, ranging from visa-free travel to India, to the right to open up an Indian bank account and buy property in the country, to the right to live there tax-free for up to 6 months of the year, to the right to work and start a business in India itself.

(In the podcast I might have said that NRIs don’t get to vote. That is wrong. They do get a vote. If you are an Indian citizen, you get to vote in Indian elections – full stop. If I misspoke, that is my mistake and I apologise for it.)

These are not rewards to be taken lightly, and they explain a very great deal of the popularity that Modi enjoys with the Diaspora crowd, who place great value upon the ability to come back to their homeland to meet with their families – and bring them back over to the West.

People with OCI status, in particular, get charged domestic prices for tourism, airlines, hotels, and other things. This, again, is not to be sniffed at. I can tell you from personal experience that if you try to visit Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial – which is actually a really impressive monument – the entry fee for Indian citizens is Rs. 20, which amounts to very roughly US$0.26.

If you are a foreigner, on the other hand… you get charged Rs. 200. Ten times the price, for no good reason. That sort of discrimination is perfectly normal and legal in India.

Conclusions

Indians in America do tend to be liberal and vote Democrat because they tend to be wealthy and highly educated, or are born into families that have worked hard to generate wealth. They vote for exactly the kinds of policies that brought their parents and relatives into the USA, or the West in general. They are brainwashed in their American and Western schools into believing the nonsense of multiculturalism and the absurd idiocy of “strength in diversity”.

Furthermore, because of the internal contradictions and issues with Hinduism, which has some good ideas within it but plenty of really terrible ones, the mindset of Hindus within the West naturally gravitates toward Leftism.

The result is a wealthy elite population within America that skews heavily Daemoncrat, yet is quite happy to jump into bed with Hindu nationalists as well.

It’s a confused, and confusing, mess. But then, so are Indians, as a general rule.

By the way, I referenced one of those Indians who have American passports in my podcast. His name is Anand Giridharadas.

You could not find a more perfect example of a Left-liberal Indian in America if you tried. He’s a good guy in real life, from what I know of him, but he’s also a direct product of all of the institutions that he and his family have passed through.

His dad went to one of the Indian Institutes of Technology for an engineering degree and then to the Xavier Labour Relations Institute for his MBA. He then went to the USA and did another MBA at Harvard (yeah, seriously). He spent decades at McKinsey & Co. and became a partner there – so did at least one of his brothers.

Anand followed a similar trajectory – educated at elite institutions, attended U Mich at Ann Arbor studying politics and history, ended up in India working for McKinsey, then became a journalist working eventually for the NYFT, eventually attending Harvard for his PhD.

It goes without saying that his politics are universally very much of the Left – and so are those of his family, and so are those of most Indians in the USA that have similar backgrounds: