MR Rangaswami: Meet the man who lobbies for the Indian diaspora
Rangaswami wants to increase Indian representation in the American Congress. And he runs a forum to do it.
When India and the US fought in the T20 Cricket World Cup in New York, MR Rangaswami was there, cheering loudly and slightly confused. As an Indian by birth who had lived the majority of his life in the USA, he wasn’t sure who to root for. “That’s the story of my life,” he laughs.
In many ways, Rangaswami is the embodiment of an Indian immigrant in Silicon Valley. He is an investor who lives by the beach in San Francisco, heads three organisations, is techno-optimistic, starts his day at 8 am and finishes off late at night with India meetings. His LinkedIn feed is filled with photos of him attending meetings in the Middle East, Asia, East Coast or elsewhere. When he’s in town, he watches live matches of and supports his favourite sports teams: San Francisco Giants and San Francisco 40ers.
Ask anyone who is the person to talk to in the Valley, and his name crops up frequently. Perhaps it’s because he is a founder of Indiaspora, a highly influential nonprofit organisation that lobbies for the Indian diaspora’s political, social and cultural interests in the US. Or perhaps it’s because he’s a natural networker. When you ask him if he knows Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, he says yes. He has known her since she was a district attorney in San Francisco and has supported her campaign from Attorney General, senator to vice president.
I meet the 69-year-old with a self-effacing smile at a Mediterranean restaurant at Four Seasons, just off Highway 101, to talk about the upcoming US elections and all things technology.
As we order vegetarian hors d’oeuvres, he tells me how he accidentally landed in Silicon Valley with a fresh MBA in 1982, when there were a few software companies. “The Valley was about ten thousand Indians living amongst orchards,” he says. It was a time when someone called ‘Madhavan’ had to turn himself into ‘MR’ so people could pronounce his name easily. It was a time when people would stop him on the streets to ask where he came from. “Indians were well educated, well qualified, so our stereotype was overall positive,” he says. He made Sunnyvale his home, ran a startup which went bankrupt, and became VP at Oracle working with Larry Ellison.
I wonder how upper-class Indians would’ve felt — through the 1980s moving to a new continent for job opportunities — most of them high caste and privileged in India, to be slurred down as ‘brown’, to become a minority, to have to prove their worth, to survive and thrive in an environment where they did not have power, to scrape through and get to a powerful dominant position.
By the 1990s, the Indian immigrants had gained a foothold in the booming Bay Area. Rangaswami founded another startup, took a Dutch company to IPO, made his money and got married to a Greek-American. By 1995, he was one of the first Indians to become an angel investor, starting the Sand Hill Group. Within 10 years, he had built multiple communities around the Indian diaspora which now had increased exponentially.
One thing bothered him though. “The Indian diaspora was one percent of the population, paying six percent of federal taxes, but did not have much say or influence in politics or Congress at any level,” he says. Using his now extensive diaspora network, in 2012, he brought 100 people together for a weekend retreat near New York to find a roadmap to one goal: Getting 1% representation in Congress.
Together they decided to actively fund anyone with an Indian name to get elected in any election – federal, state, county, or city. This retreat – now a legend among the diaspora community – was also the start of the Indiaspora Forum, a member-based organisation that collectively lobbies for the interests of the Indian diaspora, including encouraging its members to become philanthropists and community leaders.
Three election cycles later, in 2017, they had 1% of representation. “In 2022, over 300 Indians ran for office in the USA,” he says, adding that currently there are hundreds of Indian Americans working in the Biden administration. Indiaspora meanwhile has expanded its work to other issues that bother the diaspora – lobbying for immigration, and education, strengthening US-India relations, encouraging political and social action in the community, and countering hate crimes and defamation suits.
In June earlier this year, Indiaspora released a data-driven report about the contributions of the Indian diaspora – the first of its kind. It had some surprising insights. 60% of all US hotels are owned by Indian Americans. Or that 72 unicorn startups in the Silicon Valley have an Indian migrant as a founder or co-founder. The report also highlighted how deep US-India economic relations are: A whopping $26 billion has gone from the US to India in remittances in 2022-2023 while Indian companies have invested a cumulative $40 billion in the US for job creation.
This report, for Rangaswami and his team at Indiaspora, gives them data to deal with the next challenges of representing a community as diverse as the Indian diaspora. Today, there are about 5.1 million Indian Americans in the US including those born in India and in the US. They’re all kinds here – highly educated, highly paid, superrich, working in businesses and farming, professions like doctors and engineers, founding and leading top US companies. Some are citizens while others are on H-1B visas, living impermanent lives of eternal waiting. They speak different languages and belong to different castes, religions and regions.
Then there are the poor, undocumented Indians who have entered the US illegally. According to data that Indiaspora brought out, that’s a whopping 14% of the total. Finally, there are the second and third generations of Americans with Indian roots who carry Indian genes but don’t know India beyond Bollywood, food, and rituals learnt through YouTube. Rangaswami and Indiaspora want to cater to the needs of all these people – be it introducing India to second-generation Indian Americans or helping out undocumented Indians legally.
It sounds like an impossible task, but then, Rangaswami quintessentially belongs to Silicon Valley. “It’s part of Silicon Valley’s DNA to take risks and attempt the impossible,” he shrugs, adding that people here are willing to give you money if you have a strong enough idea – for a startup or for a community.
Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science is reshaping society in the Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.
