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Indian Americans: A saga of
success
By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - With Bobby Jindal one step shy of
becoming the first American governor of Indian origin,
in Louisiana, the focus is once again on the rising
influence of the almost 2 million-strong Indian American
community in the United States.
From corporate
bigwigs to technology whizkids to Hollywood impresarios,
American Indians have leapfrogged into mainstream
America, with Jindal the latest admission.
The
money-power of the community speaks for itself. The US
Census Bureau has pegged the Indian American median
family annual income at $60,000 as against the national
average of $38,885. Despite the recession, the dotcom
bubble burst and the tech meltdown, the estimated annual
buying power of Indian Americans stands at $20 billion.
This high average comes as no surprise. American
Indians are running Fortune 500 companies and regularly
featured in top business magazines across the world.
Rono Dutta, president of United Airlines; Rakesh
Gangwal, president and CEO of US Airways; Kolkata-born
Rajat Gupta, managing director of consulting giant
McKinsey & Co.
The number of New Economy
millionaires is in the thousands, though many have been
bitten by the meltdown. Some successes are well known,
such as Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems;
Sabeer Bhatia sold Hotmail to Microsoft for $400
million; Massachusetts' Gururaj Deshpande, co-founder of
a number of network-technology companies, was at one
time worth between $4 billion and $6 billion.
These are the top names, but there are many more
who make an elite mass. Until recently, more than
300,000 Indian Americans worked in technology firms in
California's Silicon Valley, with their average income
estimated at $125,000 a year. About one-third of the
engineers in Silicon Valley are of Indian descent, while
over 7 percent of valley's high-tech firms are led by
Indian CEOs.
It is no surprise that among the
tasks spelt out for new governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
in California is the Asian element of his constituency,
as well as the vexed issues of outsourcing and a cap on
H1-B and L-1 visas that regulate the number of
foreigners working in the country.
Technology of
course is the known area of Indian expertise. The story
has moved further. Prominent Indians who have become
symbols of success for the Indian community are the late
Kalpana Chawla, who became the first Indian American to
fly in a US space shuttle; Walt Disney paid Manoj Night
Shyamalan $2.5 million for the screenplay of the movie
The Sixth Sense. Amartya Sen won the Noble prize
in economics in 1998, joining laureates Har Gobind
Khurana of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
S Chandrashekhar in medicine and physics.
As
with any other culture, the ingenuity of Indian
Americans is not limited only to the positive aspects of
society. Indian white-collar criminals have also
surfaced in the process, leaving a trail of fraud and
dubious records. Surinder Singh Panshi, an Indian
American doctor, has been sentenced to 16 years in jail
by a California court for running a fraud ring that
bilked the state's health program of $20 million. A Los
Angeles-based lady doctor, Lakshmi Nadgir, has pleaded
guilty of defrauding Medicare of $5.5 million. Across
the Atlantic, 26-year-old computer clerk Sunil Mahatani
has earned the notoriety of being Britain's biggest
credit card fraudster. With his dotcom wealth, Naveen
Jain bought two mansions, yachts and a piece of an NBA
team; a US federal court has asked him to fork out $247
million for insider trading.
The negative,
however, has been more than balanced out by the
positives. In the arena of politics, feisty faces, apart
from Jindal, have emerged. It is no easy matter for
Jindal to be top contender, despite Louisiana being as
conservative as an American state can get.
Perhaps the highest profile effort to play a
direct role in politics, until Jindal arrived, is by
Kumar Barve, a US-born Indian American, a delegate for
several terms in the Maryland assembly. Upendra
Chivukula is a member of the New Jersey assembly;
Satveer Chaudhary at 33 is the youngest member of the
Minnesota state Senate while Swati Dandekar is the first
Indian woman to be elected representative in the US in
Iowa. Several Indian-Americans have held the position of
mayor - Bala K Srinivas in Hollywood Park, Texas, John
Abraham in Teaneck, New Jersey, and Arun Jhaveri in
Burien, Washington.
Indian-Americans have
traditionally exercised the most political influence
through campaign contributions, and have been actively
involved in fund-raising efforts for political
candidates at the federal, state and local levels.
Though the Indian American population in Louisiana is
far too small to influence Jindal's election, reports
from the US suggest that 20 percent of the nearly $2 to
$2.5 million has come from Indian Americans. It is only
in recent years that they have begun taking a more
direct role in politics, as well as continuing to help
through their financial contributions.
This was
the natural course of progression as in addition to
being achievers in the professional realm over the past
decade, Indian-Americans have become a strong voting
force in the US. According to the US Census, around 35
percent of Indian Americans have been naturalized. Along
with close to half a million US-born Indian-Americans
who are already US citizens, the Indian-American
community comprises a formidable voting bloc. More
Indian-Americans have chosen to undergo the
naturalization process, and their voting power is
growing.
Perhaps one of the biggest friends of
the Indian American community has been former US
president Bill Clinton. Clinton is closely associated
with the American India Foundation and visited India in
2001, as head of an Indian delegation to collect funds
for victims of the Gujarat earthquake. There was
considerable talk at that time that the Clinton visit
was a well-orchestrated plan to cultivate the Indian
American community to prepare for Hillary Clinton as
president of the US.
From powerless, to
power-brokers to powers-in-themselves, Indian Americans
have truly arrived.
Siddharth
Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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