When Singh met Sam

An illuminating account of how the Indian lobby that existed in the US between 1900 and 1946 leveraged the US system.

Sikhs, Swamis, Students and Spies
Author: Harold A. Gould
Publisher: Sage Publications
Pages: 460
Format: Paperback
Price: Rs 750

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It always helps to think of Washington DC as the capital of several nations. The most powerful interest groups of the US have resources equal to those of medium-sized countries. But the jostling among these interests — corporate, security, media and so on — gives opportunity for smaller players to influence the superpower to their advantage.

A perfect example is what historian Harold Gould has dubbed “the India lobby” that existed between 1900 and 1946. While the label brings to mind such famous overseas interest groups as the pro-Taiwanese Committee of One Million or the Israel lobby, the India lobby survived much of its half-century on a few forceful personalities, shoestrings and prayers.

One limitation was that there were barely 5,000 Indian-Americans at the time. And they were a demographic patchwork. Joked Har Dayal, one of the early Indian nationalists to operate in the US, the Indians who came to the US were “Sikhs, swamis, students and spies”. Lobbying efforts had to overcome racial hostility in the US and imperial repression from Britain — Dayal’s reference to spies was about fifth columnists who worked for British intelligence.

Yet, because they were able to mobilise the sympathies of crucial elements of American society, the India lobby succeeded in its two key goals: ensuring the US was sympathetic to the cause of Indian independence and securing full citizenship rights for South Asians in the US.

Former US President Harry Truman signs the Philippine Immigration Bill, July 2, 1946. With him are members of the 'Indian lobby'

It was no cakewalk. Gould’s account of these twin struggles begins with the attempts of Sikh farmers and labourers to get a foothold in the US and Canada in the early part of the century The barriers they faced, highlighted by the turning back of the Sikhladen ship Komagatu Maru in 1914, helped spark the political mobilisation of the small Indian community in North America.

One of the offshoots was the often-forgotten Indian nationalist Ghadr Party. Ghadr threw up some colourful personalities and equally implausible plots — including invading British India through Waziristan — before making way for activists who focused on lobbying US politicians, journalists and celebrities. They, in turn, paved the way for the Gandhian-inspired leaders who came to the US in the 1940s.

As Gould writes, “the most striking changes in personnel and modus operandi which the South Asian activists experienced occurred as their level of sophistication in dealing with the political establishment evolved through time”.

The Ghadr phase of the India lobby is particularly fascinating, as Gould traces the ups and downs of leaders like the mercurial Har Dayal and the hyperactive Taraknath Das. The tiny Indian-American activist community was also rent by faction: rustic Sikhs did not trust Bengali intellectuals, violent radicals could not see eye-to-eye with patient pragmatists. British spies like the Hindi-speaking, turban-wearing William Hopkinson infiltrated their ranks. But for all its tiny size, the India lobby was also remarkably articulate and quickly learnt how to leverage the US system. Gould spends a chapter describing the “David and Goliath” media struggle between the Indian nationalists and the British authorities in the 1930s and 1940s.

The overt racism Indians faced in the US and Canada in those days was so absurd as to be almost comical — US immigration officers used to quiz Indians about whether they believed in polygamy. At a time when only whites could emigrate to the US, courts and officials debated whether Indians were Caucasians, whether all Caucasians were white and, finally, whether the US should give up on ethnography and just declare that “only Europeans need apply”.

The Indian-Americans, piggybacking on a similar movement for Filipino migrants, won the day. Their rights to US citizenship were formalised in 1946. The granting of Indian independence a year later, notes Gould, “saw the gradual winding down of the India lobby”.

The early Indian adventure in the US was not all about changing Americans. Indians learnt a bit about themselves as well. One of the spurs to the call for independence was a realisation by many Indians that their colonisation was one of the reasons for their second-class status abroad. They learnt to form unlikely political alliances with the Irish and the Filipinos. And they learnt to become, for a while, players within the US liberal establishment.

One of the key discoveries of Gould is the identity of the US official who leaked a 1944 letter by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s special envoy to New Delhi to the media. The letter, highly critical of British colonial rule, exemplified Washington’s latent antipathy to the Raj. Despite strong British protests, the Roosevelt administration refused to distance itself from the envoy’s conclusion that the empire was in denial.

The train of events holds the reader. That is fortunate: Gould is an unnecessarily wordy writer, prone to over-using exclamation points. His version of official US views on Indian independence would have been much improved by reading Kenton Clymer’s equally well-documented book, Quest for Freedom: The US and India’s Independence. He glides over Ghadr’s vision of India which, for example, were notably more market-friendly than those of the Congress. Otherwise this book is an excellent reminder of how the US’s model minority in the 21st century had to struggle to achieve acceptance in the century before.