by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
Donald Trump is undoubtedly a complex personality, too complex to paint him, as the so-called liberal media in the West is doing, as an unredeemable rogue. On the other hand, it is too difficult to see the logic, if there’s any, in the statement of Shalabh Kumar, the Indian American Trump acolyte and founding chairman of Republican Hindu Coalition: “Mr. Trump is all about development, development, development; prosperity, prosperity, prosperity”. How will Trump be seen by his countrymen, or the world, a few years or even a few months from now? Nobody knows.
Take for example the curious case of Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the US. It was Nixon who ended American involvement in the war in Vietnam, brought the American prisoners of war back in America and put an end to military draft. In 1973, again. it was Nixon’s secretive and stunning breakthrough in China, aided by his legendary secretary of state Henry Kissinger, that opened a new chapter in the history of the West’s engagement with the East. While China got her much-needed exposure to American technology, the US too benefited a lot as it drove the first nail in the coffin of Cold War. The USSR, the core nation of the anti-West build-up, lost its potentially most valuable ally. Nixon was also a pioneer in US-USSR peace initiatives, being the author of détente and Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He founded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), forerunner of today’s global initiatives on climate change, and he presided over the Apollo 11 moon landing, which ended the costly and ineffectual moon race.
Like the Republican Nixon, who transferred power from Washington DC to the states, Trump too promises that he’d take power out of the capital. This, according to him, is a fortress of privileges. So believed Nixon. However, it was in 1973, the first year of his repeat tenure, that America was rocked by the news that government spooks had broken in the Democratic Party headquarters at Watergate area in Washington. So massive was the backlash that Nixon had to resign. What has history remembered Nixon as? An unmitigated rogue, perhaps. But one close look will show how much driven, and imaginative, he was as President, though he’d often cut corners and shifted ethical goalpost.
Nixon was a complex man. It is early in the day to say how Trump will pan out—as a narrow-minded ultra-nationalist, or a complex personality. From the Indian perspective, however, it will be unfair to judge him on the basis of his actions till now. This is because the President seems working overtime to retract from his shrill poll rhetoric. White House is now backing away from 20 per cent Mexico tariff. Trump’s bullying of China (“currency manipulator”) is showing signs of mellowing with Ivanka, his daughter, visiting China’s embassy during celebration of the Chinese new year; her five-year-old daughter Arabella, who is learning Mandarin, accompanied her and sang in Mandarin Chinese.
Indian Americans as a community are critical of Trump. They are predominantly Hindu so Trump’s famous surliness about Muslims is only marginally likely to shape their attitude. Yet, in last autumn, only 7 per cent of them said they’d vote for Trump. It seems the Indian American attitude to the new President is moulded by the general aversion of the prosperous professional class in America that sees Trump as scourge for the very values that drew them to America. The qualities —like equality of opportunity, multiculturalism and excellence of its centres of education and research. It is likely that they are aghast at Trump’s order banning travel from some Muslim-majority (not Pakistan, curiously) countries, or ordering Homeland Security initiatives that may lead to social profiling of every immigrant, legal or illegal, documented or undocumented.
All these moves are no doubt a major departure from the established standards, including the values that won acceptance across the political spectrum in the post-Second World War decades. But Trump is far from willing to write off Indian Americans. In the past few weeks, as many as four Indians have been selected to occupy key posts in the Trump administration: Ajit Vardaraj Pai as head of the crucial Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Nikki Haley as US ambassador to UN, Seema Verma as head of medicare and Medicaid, and Preet Bharara as US attorney for the southern district of New York.
Irrespective of upward mobility of Indian Americans, the Trump administration may not deviate from its stand to thwart the flow of immigration, and that can affect the number of Indians coming to US with H1B visa. For this purpose, the minimum wage for H1B visa holders has been raised from $60,000 to $130,000. But a recent survey shows that most Indian Americans with H1B visa command a median wage of around $90,000, so keeping them back may not cost their employer a bomb. It will take time for US businesses to find out if it makes economic sense to replace available Indian workers with Americans of comparable skill. Infosys founder N.R.Narayana Murthy has advised Indian IT firms to desist from sending their employees to America and instead help them innovate in India. However, Murthy could as well remember Hollywood Mughal Samuel Goldwyn’s ‘famous’ advice: “Never make forecasts, especially about the future”.
Trump may indeed prove a Nixon in reverse, in the sense that his goof-ups may be front loaded (unlike Nixon) and his aces may prove back loaded (again unlike Nixon). History may discover the reality TV-star turned President of US as the one who might use his rapport with Russian president Vladimir Putin to found the architecture of a global process destroying all nuclear bombs—including in North Korea, Pakistan, and India. Peace will then get a chance.
